Лорд Кастлерей: Британ мемлекет қайраткерінің өмірі мен қызметі

British statesman (1769–1822)

Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, (18 June 1769 – 12 August 1822), usually known as Lord Castlereagh, derived from the courtesy title Viscount Castlereagh (/UK/'/k//ɑː//s//əl//r//eɪ/ KAHsəlray) by which he was styled from 1796 to 1821, was a British statesman and politician. As secretary to the Viceroy in Ireland, he worked to suppress the Rebellion of 1798 and to secure passage in 1800 of the Irish Act of Union. As the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 1812, he was central to the management of the coalition that defeated Napoleon, and was British plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. In the post war government of Lord Liverpool, Castlereagh was seen to support harsh measures against agitation for reform, and he ended his life an isolated and unpopular figure. Early in his career in Ireland, and following a visit to revolutionary France, Castlereagh recoiled from the democratic politics of his Presbyterian constituents in Ulster. Crossing the floor of the Irish Commons in support of the government, he took a leading role in detaining members of the republican conspiracy, the United Irishmen, his former political associates among them. After the 1798 Rebellion, as Chief Secretary for Ireland he pushed the Act of Union through the Irish Parliament. But it was without the Catholic Emancipation that both he and British Prime Minister William Pitt believed should have accompanied the creation of a United Kingdom. From 1805 Castlereagh served under Pitt and then the Duke of Portland as Secretary of State for War. In 1809 he was obliged to resign after fighting a duel with the Foreign Secretary, George Canning. In 1812 Castlereagh returned to government serving Lord Liverpool as Foreign Secretary and as Leader of the House of Commons. Castlereagh organised and financed the alliance that defeated Napoleon, bringing the powers together at the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814. After Napoleon's second abdication in 1815, Castlereagh worked with the European courts represented at the Congress of Vienna to frame the territorial, and broadly conservative, continental order that was to hold until mid century. He blocked harsh terms against France believing that a treaty based on vengeance and retaliation would upset a necessary balance of powers. France restored the Bourbons kings and her frontiers were restored to 1791 lines. Her British occupied colonies were returned. In 1820 Castlereagh enunciated a policy of non intervention, proposing that Britain hold herself aloof from continental affairs. After 1815, at home, Castlereagh supported repressive measures that linked him in public opinion to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Widely reviled in both Ireland and Great Britain, overworked, and personally distressed, Castlereagh committed suicide in 1822.

Robert was born on 18 June 1769 in 28 Henry Street, in Dublin's Northside. He was the second and only surviving child of Robert Stewart (the elder) and his wife Sarah Frances Seymour Conway. His parents married in 1766.

The Stewarts had been a Scottish family settled in Donegal whose fortunes had been transformed by the marriage of Castlereagh's grandfather Alexander Stewart to an East India Company heiress. The legacy from Robert Cowan, the former Governor of Bombay, allowed for the purchase of extensive properties in north Down including the future family demesne, Mount Stewart, on the shores of Strangford Lough. As a Presbyterian (a "Dissenter"), rather than a member of the established Anglican Communion (the Church of Ireland), Castlereagh's father, Robert Stewart, had an easy reputation as a friend of reform. In 1771, and again in 1776, he was elected from County Down to the Irish House of Commons. In 1778 he joined the Irish Volunteer movement, raising an armed and drilled company from his estates. In parliament and among the Volunteers, he was a friend and supporter of Lord Charlemont and his policy. This favoured Volunteer agitation for the independence of Ireland's Ascendancy parliament, but not for its reform and not for Catholic emancipation. In 1798, the elder Robert Stewart was created Baron Londonderry in 1789, Viscount Castlereagh in 1795, and Earl of Londonderry in 1796 by King George III, enabling him from the Act of Union of 1800 onwards to sit at Westminster in the House of Lords as an Irish representative peer. In 1816 he was elevated to Marquess of Londonderry

Young Robert's mother died in childbirth when he was a year old. Lady Sarah Frances Seymour Conway had been the daughter of Francis Seymour Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford and Isabella Fitzroy. Lord Hertford was a former British Ambassador to France (1764–65) and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1765–66). Isabella Fitzroy was a daughter of Charles FitzRoy, 2nd Duke of Grafton. Five years later his father married Lady Frances Pratt, the independent minded daughter of Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden (1714–94), But he then withdrew, pleading an illness that he admitted to Camden was something "which cannot be directly acknowledged before women", i. e. something sexually transmitted. Stewart was not convinced of Burke's contention that the revolution would produce a French Cromwell, although he recognised that outside Paris the principles of liberty were not as entrenched. As the revolutionary factions, the Jacobins and Girondins, struggled for supremacy in the capital, it was "the nation at large" that would "ultimately decide between them." While calling for the removal of their remaining civil disabilities, Stewart stopped short of endorsing extension to Catholics of the right to vote on the same forty shilling freehold terms as Protestants that was provided in the bill. However, his loyalty to Pitt now seemed unconditional.

In 1794, Stewart married Amelia (Emily) Hobart, a daughter of John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, a former British Ambassador to Russia (1762–65) and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1776–80). Her mother, Caroline Conolly, was the granddaughter of William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons in the early 18th century and one of the wealthiest landowners in Ireland. Caroline's brother, Thomas Conolly, was married to Louisa Lennox, sister of Emily FitzGerald, Duchess of Leinster, whose son and Emily's cousin by marriage, Lord Edward FitzGerald was a leader of the United Irishmen and one of their martyrs in the early stages of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Emily Stewart was well known as a hostess for her husband in both Ireland and London and during some of his most important diplomatic missions. In later years she was a leader of Regency London high society as one of the Lady Patronesses of Almack's. She is noted in contemporary accounts for her attractiveness, volubility and eccentricities.

In 1795, Pitt replaced William Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Fitzwilliam, along with Stewart's uncle, the 2nd Earl Camden, had urged that the emancipation of Catholics be completed with their admission to parliament. Camden's arrival in Dublin was greeted with riots, and that year Stewart crossed the floor of the Irish House of Commons to join the supporters of the government, the Dublin Castle executive. Stewart became an essential adviser to the inexperienced and unpopular Lord Lieutenant, who was Stewart's senior by only ten years. In August 1796 Stewart's father was elevated to the title Earl of Londonderry. As his son, Stewart was henceforth styled Viscount Castlereagh. In September, acting upon evidence of communication with the French, Castlereagh personally led troops in a series of raids in Belfast and its environs (the "Siege of Belfast") that netted leading members of the United Irishmen. Among them were men who had supported him in the election of 1790. In December 1796, a large French expedition to Ireland failed to effect a landing at Bantry Bay, but due only to contrary winds. As an officer in the militia, Castlereagh was well apprised of the lack of preparedness to meet a combination of professional French soldiery and the countrywide insurgency it would likely trigger. In February 1797, Castlereagh was at last appointed to the Dublin Castle administration as Keeper of the King's Signet for Ireland. Following a declaration of martial law he was made both a Lord of the Treasury and a Member of the Privy Council of Ireland (1797–1800). At the urging of Camden, Castlereagh assumed many of the onerous duties of the often absent Chief Secretary for Ireland, who was responsible for day to day administration and for asserting the influence of Dublin Castle in the House of Commons. In this capacity, and after March 1798 as Acting Chief Secretary, Castlereagh played a key role in crushing the United Irish rising when it came in May and June 1798. In November 1798, Castlereagh was formally appointed to the office of Chief Secretary by Camden's successor, Lord Cornwallis.

Castlereagh's general policy was to offer immediate clemency to the rebel rank and file, many of whom were then inducted into the yeomanry, while still focusing on the politically committed leadership. But already before the rebellion, he had begun to earn the sobriquet "Bloody Castlereagh". In October 1797 his stepmother, Lady Frances, had petitioned Camden for the life of William Orr. After the rebellion, during which Mount Stewart was briefly occupied, Castlrereagh was content that leading United Irishmen in the Presbyterian north be allowed American exile. An exception was made in the case of James Porter, executed, again despite the entreaties of Lady Frances, following a court martial before Castlereagh's father, Lord Londonderry. Porter, who had been his family's Presbyterian minister and, in 1790, his election agent, had become a household name in Ulster as the author of a satire of the county gentry, Billy Bluff, in which Londonderry was serially lampooned as an inarticulate tyrant.

In 1799, in furtherance of both his own political vision and Pitt's policies, Castlereagh began lobbying in the Irish and British Parliaments for a union that would incorporate Ireland with Great Britain in a United Kingdom. In addition to security against the French, Castlereagh saw the principal merit of bringing Ireland directly under the Crown in the Westminster Parliament as a resolution of what ultimately was the key issue for the governance of the country, the Catholic question. During the campaign for the Act of Union, both Castlereagh and Cornwallis had, in good faith, forwarded informal assurances they had received from Pitt's Cabinet to the Irish Catholics that they would be allowed to sit in the new United Kingdom Parliament. However, opposition in England, and not least from the King, George III, obliged Castlereagh to defy what he saw as "the very logic of the Union." Pitt had tried to follow through on his commitment, but when it came to light that the King had approached Henry Addington, an opponent of Catholic emancipation, about becoming Prime Minister to replace him, both Castlereagh and Pitt resigned. Castlereagh would long be held personally responsible by many Catholics in Ireland for the breach of promise and the British Government's failure to remove their remaining political disabilities. More than this, he won cabinet approval for schemes to ensure that the Established Church was not alone in preaching loyalty to the Crown. To counter "the democratic party in the [Presbyterian] synod, most of whom, if not engaged in the Rebellion, were deeply infected with its principles", His efforts to extend a similar scheme to the Catholic clergy met with stiffer resistance: priests would not accept support from the Crown while it continued to deny their communicants political equality. (In 1810, with Castlereagh out of office, Drennan and his friends secured a government grant for the education of Presbyterian ministers in their new, distinctly liberal, Belfast Academical Institution). Despite the prestige of a new cabinet position in London, Castlereagh was defeated in a campaign marked by repeated aspersions on his failure to father a child, and by the taunts of those who, otherwise no friends of the Downshires, reminded him of the principles on which he had stood in 1790. In August 1807, he concurred with Foreign Secretary George Canning in authorising a British bombardment of the neutral Danish capital, Copenhagen. They sought to pre emptively capture or destroy the Dano Norwegian fleet fearing that it would fall into French hands. The incident precipitated both the Anglo Russian War of 1807 and Denmark's adherence to the Continental System and alliance with France. In 1808 Castlereagh had been warned by Dumouriez that the best policy England could adopt with respect to colonies in Spanish America was to relinquish all ideas of military conquest by Arthur Wellesley and instead support the emancipation of the territories. Furthermore, Dumouriez suggested that once emancipation was achieved, a constitutional monarchy should be established with the exiled Duke of Orleans as King. In 1809, with the Dowager Marchioness of Downshire now manoeuvring against him in London, the debacle of the Walcheren Expedition subjected Castlereagh to particularly hostile scrutiny. Canning missed but Castlereagh wounded his opponent in the thigh. There was much outrage that two cabinet ministers had sought to settle their differences in such a manner, and they both felt compelled to resign. Six months later, Canning published a full account of his actions in the affair, but many who had initially rallied to him became convinced Castlereagh had been betrayed by his cabinet colleague.

Three years later, in 1812, Castlereagh returned to the government, this time as Foreign Secretary, a role in which he served for the next ten years. He also became leader of the House of Commons in the wake of Spencer Perceval's assassination in 1812.

Castlereagh Street in Sydney was named after him in 1810 by Governor Macquarie. The Sydney suburb locality of Castlereagh was also named after him by Macquarie in 1810. The Castlereagh River in north western New South Wales was dedicated to him in 1818 by George Evans and explored by John Oxley. The New South Wales electoral seat of Castlereagh also carried his name from 1904 until 1991.