RSS

Contact us

Tuesday 2 December 2008

The Duel: Castlereagh, Canning and the Deadly Cabinet Rivalry

Pistols at dawn

Raymond Carr on the latest book from Giles Hunt

Castlereagh’s behaviour was that of a victim of paranoia, who saw himself surrounded by enemies. He could not have wished to kill Canning; he would have been guilty of murder. But it was a near run thing; he shot Canning through the fleshy part of the thigh, a few inches from his femoral artery, which, if hit, would have killed him. It is still a mystery to me why he should have fired this second shot with the clear intention to wound. In 1812 Lord Liverpool, Canning’s friend from their Eton days, in a ministry that was to last for a record 15 years, was prepared to appoint Canning to the Foreign Office, Castelreagh generously offering to accept a minor office. But Canning insisted that Castlereagh should also give up the leadership of the House of Commons. The deal collapsed and Canning’s career was in the doldrums for four years. It was, as he was to confess to his wife, the most disastrous decision of his political career; to Castlereagh’s biographer an action ‘compounded of false pride, ambition and jealousy’. Why had he so overplayed his hand? Hunt suggests that he was unwilling to serve with, or as he thought, under, a man who three years earlier had tried to kill him on Putney Heath.

In August 1822 Castlereagh committed suicide by cutting his throat, having bought a small knife and inquired of a doctor the exact position of the jugular vein. If he had been of sound mind he would have been denied a burial in Westminster Cathedral; the coroner no doubt pressed for a verdict of madness, but all the evidence of the inquest points to the fact that he was profoundly disturbed, believing that he would be exposed as a homosexual. In an interview with the King, now George IV, he rambled on about a bishop caught with his trousers down in a male brothel. Wellington told the Chief Whip that he was ‘in a state of mental delusion’. It is clear that the paranoia which he had exhibited during the duel had assumed an extreme form: Hunt argues that at Cambridge he had caught some form of veneral disease — there is sound evidence for this — and that his paranoia ‘would be consistent with the tertiary stage of neurosyphilis’. His friends argued that he had been worn out by the burden of office as Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House. True, he had a host of political enemies, Irish patriots and British radicals, including Byron, who wrote:

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved