N0 name grates more harshly on Irish ears than Castlereagh, the tool of William Pitt, Prime Minister of England, the master of Lord Cornwallis, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the one-time democrat and Radical and pretended United Irishman, who deceived and betrayed all and everything belonging to his youth, lived a life of callous cruelty, of cynical inhumanity, of cold, studied brutality, and, finally, cut his throat, and went to a dishonoured grave, execrated by the people of that London whose rulers he had served so well. “The apostate of Down,” he was called by those who had known him in his youth when, as Robert Stewart, he had espoused, or pretended to espouse, the cause of reform and patriotism. Very soon, when he saw where personal advancement and wealth and power lay, he turned over a new leaf, became a rabid imperialist, arrested and tortured the friends and neighbours of his youth, and began the career that led him through a life of cruelty and corruption to a suicide’s death and the hatred of all decent, honest men. As England’s Chief Secretary in Ireland, he planned and promoted, paid for and praised the horrors of 1798; iticited men to become betrayers of their friends, informers, spies, and murderers; bought support for the Union as deliberately as a dealer would buy cattle in a market; and stooped so low in his efforts to suborn and seduce men for political reasons that those who came after him destroyed most of his secret correspondence lest it. fall into the hands of historians and add still further to the British Empire’s shame. He it was who coached and encouraged Armstrong to spy upon and betray the brothers John and Henry Sheares; who connived with the notorious Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, to hang a young United Irishman, John Clinch, under the window of the cell at Newgate where Lord Edward Fitzgerald was dying of his wounds; who sent the paid tout and- spy, Sir George Hill, to spot and betray Wolfe Tone after the battle of Loch- Swilly; who stood behind the three ruffians, Sirr and Swan and Sandys, and supported them in all their abominable atrocities; who was the evil genius, the devil’s deputy of all that terrible time when the land that had the misfortune to give him birth was being scourged and crucified with a ferocity that must have ended the existence of any other people on earth. No wonder that a moderate, too moderate historian, an admirer of the British Empire and Constitution, wrote of this monster that his very name had the smell of hot human blood clinging to it.

On August 12, 1822, at his grand country residence in Kent, England, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Marquis of Londonderry, deliberately ended his terrible life by cutting his throat. And then those who up to that very day when, standing at a window in his own house, he committed suicide, had allowed him to retain the important position of Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the British Government, coolly explained that he had been mad for months; and a complacent coroner’s jury brought in a verdict to suit the wishes of those in power. Writes a well-known historian:—” The funeral of Castlereagh was marked by an extraordinary demonstration of popular hostility. It was a time of general discontent on account of heavy taxation and repressive social laws, for both of which Castlereagh was held to be mainly responsible. As the coffin was being conveyed from the hearse to the Abbey howls of execration were raised by the crowds; and groaning and yelling raged outside during the whole of the funeral service.” Just twenty years before, in 1802, the funeral of his brother in infamy, Lord Clare, was marked by just such scenes as it wended its way from Ely Place to the cemetery.

Two famous English poets wrote verses about Castlereagh, verses expressive of the feeling of all men of spirit regarding the monster who did his best to degrade and murder the Republic of Ireland. Shelley wrote of him:

“I met Murder on the way,

He had a mask like Castlereagh;

Very smooth he looked, yet grim,

Seven bloodhounds followed him

All were fat, and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew,

Which from his wide cloak he drew.”

And when the news of Castlereagh’s suicide reached Byron, he wrote

“So he has cut his throat at last ! He! Who?

The man. who cut his country’s long ago.

So Castlereagh has cut his throat! The worst

Of this is—that his own was not the first !“

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