Lord Castlereagh

J.W. Derry, the historian and biographer of Castlereagh, has justly claimed that Castlereagh’s career was ‘remarkable in that he outgrew his background in Ulster politics and became an advocate of the Union between Britain and Ireland, a capable War Secretary, and finally a distinguished Foreign Secretary, whose comprehension of the craft of diplomacy had a depth and subtlety exceeding that of most of his contemporaries’.

Of Ulster-Scots and Presbyterian stock, Castlereagh was born in Dublin on 18 June 1769, was educated at the Royal School, Armagh, and at St John’s College, Cambridge.  John Stewart, an ancestor, was granted a small landed property called Ballylawn in Co. Donegal as part of the Plantation of Ulster.

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