Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

The Duel: Castlereagh, Canning and the Deadly Cabinet Rivalry

Pistols at dawn

Giles Hunt
I. B. Tauris, 214pp, £20,

Raymond Carr

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Raymond Carr on the latest book from Giles Hunt

So He has cut his throat at last — He! Who?

The man who cut his country’s long ago.

As his coffin made its way to Westminster Abbey, it was hissed by sections of the crowd.

Hunt’s fine and engaging portrait of Canning and Castlereagh’s rivalry ends with Castlereagh’s death. Canning succeeded him as Foreign Secretary from 1822 till 1827. He did not alter the course of British foreign policy, but as a politician conscious of the importance of public opinion, as Castlereagh was not, he gave it a new, liberal look. To recognise the Latin American states which had thrown off the rule of the absolutist Spanish monarchy was to call a ‘New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old’. When Canning became prime minister in the spring of 1827 on Liverpool’s death, he was a dying man. He remained popular with the London mob, as Castlereagh had never been. As his coffin passed on its way to Westminster Abbey, respectful crowds filled the streets, quiet and orderly, in sharp contrast to the overt glee some had shown at his rival’s funeral some five years earlier.

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

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

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

The power of the evasive word

Michael Howard

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.