by Mark Zuehlke
Despite his having held nearly every senior cabinet post and demonstrated ability and efficiency in them all, even Liverpool’s friends did not believe him marked with “genius or even brilliance.”15 Wellington wrote from Iberia, “You have undertaken a most gigantic task and I don’t know how you will get through it.”16
The Tories were desperately short of talent sufficient to build a solid government and could easily fall to a non-confidence motion if the Whigs and independents voted together. Liverpool drew in a few old Tories, including the 3rd Earl of Bathurst, Henry Bathurst, who became secretary for war and the colonies. But with Canning and other veterans remaining on the sidelines, Liverpool was forced to rely on junior colleagues. With his usual careful consideration, he chose them well. Lord Palmerston, Robert Peel, and Frederick Robinson—future prime ministers all—numbered among the recruits.
“I have no recourse but to bring forward the most promising of the young men … I should be happy to see another Pitt amongst them. I would willingly resign the government into his hands for I am fully aware of the importance of the minister being if possible in the House of Commons.”17 This was his most ardent hope, to serve only so long as it took to find or train some yet to be determined brilliant successor. Liverpool’s administration seemed a caretaker government that would survive only so long as it took the Whigs and a suitable number of independents to agree upon how to divide the spoils after bringing the government down.
Yet despite all the meetings carried out behind closed doors, such agreement was not to be found. A June 11 non-confidence motion fell short by 125 votes. There would not be time for another such motion before the summer recess, and Liverpool had promised an election for September, so his government was assured survival until the voters went to the polls.
Compromises would be necessary. Accordingly, on June 18, Castlereagh rose in the House and haltingly, obviously stinging with embarrassment and biting back personal anger at having to make the concession, announced that the government would repeal the orders-in-council insofar as they affected the United States. The repeal would go into effect on August 1 to allow time for instructions to be distributed throughout the Royal Navy. This revocation, he stressed, was conditional on America agreeing to remove all restrictions on British ships entering American ports.18
Formal repeal of the orders-in-council was ratified by both houses on June 23, and word was immediately dispatched by ship to Minister to America Augustus Foster, still believed to be in Washington. Confident that once Madison and Congress knew of the repeal they would abandon war, Castlereagh had not given the Americans further thought until learning on July 30 of the declaration of June 18—coincidentally his forty-third birthday.
Born to a prominent Anglo-Irish Dublin family, Robert Stewart had attained the courtesy title of Viscount Castlereagh when his father became an earl in 1796. Educated at Cambridge, he was just shy of his twenty-first birthday when he won election to the Irish Parliament in 1790, sitting as an independent representing County Down. Coming to London in early 1794 to attend upon a dying grandfather he deeply admired, Castlereagh was soon smitten by the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the Earl of Buckinghamshire. Grey-eyed and fair-haired, Lady Amelia Hobart, commonly known as Lady Emily, was slim, gay, and vivacious, but she also had a reputation for eccentricity that revealed itself through a predilection to be “petulant, capricious, and indiscreet.”19Castlereagh saw only her beauty and a playful, spirited personality. After a brief courtship the two engaged to marry that June. In April, Castlereagh’s grandfather passed away. Grief stricken, he turned to Lady Emily for comfort. “Your heart,” he wrote, “is too much alive not to feel for me at this moment; you have left me, as far as I am myself concerned, nothing to wish for: you have given repose to all my disquietude and opened prospects of happiness which give me a new interest in life … for God’s sake, dearest Lady Emily, continue to love me, and let me some day or other have gratification to think that since you knew me your happiness has not diminished.”20
Castlereagh’s devotion to his wife only grew stronger with each passing year. In a society where nobles often strayed and kept mistresses or dallied with prostitutes, particularly when a marriage proved childless as did this one, there was never a rumour that Castlereagh even considered unfaithfulness. When away from home, his letters were regular, and occasionally he sent plaited strands of his hair to go inside a locket he had given her. The locket contained a portrait of Castlereagh at twenty-five as painted by the Regency’s leading miniaturist, Richard Cosway.21
Such depth of attachment was typical of the man. Intensely loyal to friends, he expected loyalty in return. Once resolved on a course of action, Castlereagh unflinchingly committed to its implementation. This was what had made repeal of the orders-in-council so personally galling.
Throughout his political career, he had demonstrated this characteristic. Appointed chief secretary of Ireland by his relative and then lord lieutenant of Ireland Earl Camden in 1798, Castlereagh was at the forefront in quelling the revolt of that same year. The severe measures taken to crush the rebellion were not his work alone, but they were to place a lifelong stain on Castlereagh’s reputation. Yet overlooked by his critics was the fact that once the rebellion was suppressed he called for a general amnesty for all but those who had incited the uprising. “It would be unwise,” he wrote, “to drive the wretched people, who are mere instruments in the hands of the more wicked, to despair.”22
The rebellion, which could easily have brought the excesses of a French-style revolution to Ireland, convinced Castlereagh that only formal union with Britain could avert an eventual slide into anarchy. Almost single-handedly he rammed passage of the Union Act through the Irish Parliament despite bitter Protestant resistance to a related bill that would emancipate Roman Catholics, who constituted 80 percent of Ireland’s population. When the Union vote passed on June 7, 1800, Castlereagh claimed a personal triumph that left him proud to feel less Irish than English.
Despite his support for Catholic emancipation and a tendency to favour comparatively liberal economic and financial policies in relation to other leading Tories, Castlereagh’s role in the rebellion dogged him. He was often derided as a man with “limited understanding and no knowledge,” who demonstrated “a cold-blooded contempt of every honest public principle.”23 His manner in the House only served to accentuate the perception that he was a hard man. Lacking oratorical skill, Castlereagh came at opponents ruthlessly, ferreting out their weaknesses. His style was that of the plodding pugilist who won by bludgeoning an opponent while shrugging off the effects of every punch thrown his way, no matter how well delivered. There was a brutish quality about Castlereagh that stood at odds with the polite posturing and delicate mannerisms of the British upper classes.
“He had a natural slowness of constitution of which he was quite aware,” Lady Harriet Arbuthnot—the wife of Tory MP Charles Arbuthnot, a confidant of Wellington, and a woman who revelled in careful observation of the men at the centre of power in London—confided to her journal. He “has often told me he required the goading and violence of the House of Commons to rouse him, and that he was determined never to go into the House of Lords as they were too quiet and sleepy for him. The consequences of this temperament, and of his not having a classical education, which rendered his language involved and often incorrect, were that, when he had to make a statement or an opening speech, he was generally flat and dull and scarcely commanded the attention of the House.” Although she thought him clumsy, Lady Arbuthnot also believed he was so “gentlemanlike and so high minded” that he was one of the nation’s finest leaders.24
NINE
The Demons of War Unchained
AUGUST 1812
Parliament had recessed when the American declaration of war became known in London, and Castlereagh was dividing his time between the city and a forty-acre farm in Kent he had leased in 1810. Fourteen miles from Westminster Bridge, the farm had a small, secluded far
mhouse with extensive grounds cut through by a trout stream. Following in King George III’s footsteps, Castlereagh had purchased a herd of Spanish merino sheep that he bred according to the best scientific principles of the day. Lady Emily, meanwhile, established an exotic zoo to amuse her friends. A zebra was the centrepiece of a curious collection of wildlife imported from distant parts of the empire.1
Once Castlereagh turned to farming he could remember his duties in London only with difficulty. Whenever he reluctantly returned to the city another crisis in Liverpool’s continuing attempts to consolidate a strong cabinet always needed attention. So it was not until August 24 that he made time to receive Jonathan Russell, who came seeking an armistice. The forty-one-year-old diplomat from Rhode Island had trained as a lawyer but never practised, instead entering into a European trade venture soon after his graduation in 1791. His business often took him to Europe, and this background had prompted Madison to appoint him chargé d’affaires to Paris in 1810 and then to London the following year. The London posting had been one of frustration for Russell, instilling a deep distrust of the British, whom he believed capable of the most nefarious stratagems.
While waiting on Castlereagh, he had noted various alarming government responses to the declaration of war. “The government,” he wrote James Monroe on August 4, “has laid an embargo on all our vessels in port and given orders to detain & bring in such as may be encountered at sea—excepting those which have licences [from Britain]. Reinforcements in troops are likewise ordered for Canada & the West Indies and an additional squadron under the command of Sir John B Wairen”—actually Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, who was made commander-in-chief of the North American and West Indies stations—“for the American seas. These measures are professed here to be merely of a defensive & precautionary character & to enable this government to treat more advantageously for an adjustment with us. The vessels embargoed or detained will not be proceeded against for condemnation until it is certain that we persist in hostilities on our part after a knowledge of the revocation of the orders in council. I feel my situation here to be delicate & have thought it to be my duty to suspend the formal exercise of my functions but without asking for any passports to depart.”2
About the time he wrote Monroe, Russell received detailed instructions from the secretary of state proposing an armistice only if the orders were repealed, they were not replaced by any other form of blockade, impressment immediately ceased, and those sailors already pressed were returned. Russell was to “assure Britain that Congress would pass a law barring British seamen from serving aboard either the public or commercial vessels of the United States.”
That was the carrot. The stick Russell was to wield was that a protracted war would cause Britain irreversible losses in North America. Prosecution “of the War for one year, or even a few months,” Monroe wrote, “will present very serious obstacles on the part of the United States to an accommodation, which do not now exist…. Should our troops enter Canada you will perceive the effect which that measure cannot fail to have … on the public mind here, making it difficult to relinquish Territory which had been conquered.”3 The threat was implicit. Either Liverpool’s government agreed to immediate armistice or the Americans would conquer and keep Canada.
Castlereagh received the American diplomat with glacial formality and the meeting devolved into Russell presenting ultimatums that the foreign secretary roundly rejected. For a man ostensibly seeking an armistice, Russell seemed intent on making enacting one all but impossible. First, he insisted, the declaration of war nullified revocation of the orders-in-council by the House of Commons. A new revoking motion would be required. Castlereagh dismissed this notion out of hand. Letting the matter slide, Russell demanded that impressment cease. Britain would never, Castlereagh retorted, “consent to suspend the exercise of a right upon which the naval strength of the empire mainly depends.” Russell failed to understand the “great sensibility and jealousy of the people of England on this subject … no administration could expect to remain in power that should consent to renounce the right of impressment, or to suspend the practice, without the certainty of an arrangement which should obviously be calculated most unequivocally to secure its objects.”4 Castlereagh abruptly ended the meeting, asserting that the chargé d’affaires had no authority from Madison to legitimately negotiate on behalf of the American government.5
Shortly after this rebuff, Russell received fresh instructions from Monroe that softened the American position but still tied an armistice to ending impressment. He exchanged a flurry of notes with Castlereagh, who roundly rejected this link. Declaring the matter hopeless, Russell bitterly quit London in early September and sailed for America.6
Again the inability of diplomats to conduct discussions that reflected realistic appraisals of events on the other side of the Atlantic frustrated any chance of an armistice. Russell had acted on the basis of instructions written before three American armies marched sluggishly toward Canada and well before Brig. Gen. William Hull crossed from Fort Detroit and occupied Sandwich. The declaration was only days old when Monroe set his instructions to paper, and he had been confident that the summer would yield a string of victories that would only strengthen the hand of the United States at the negotiating table. Revoking the orders-in-council and ceasing impressment would be the price Britain paid to regain its chunks of Canada. And perhaps those lands would not have to be returned at all. Perhaps Canada, or at least Upper Canada, could be retained in exchange for not kicking the British right off the continent.
Such had been the heady temper in Washington in those early days of the war, but by the time Russell acted on Monroe’s instructions it was painfully evident that the summer had brought the Americans nothing but disaster on the Canadian frontier.
By August, Hull had frittered away the initiative that had been his for the taking. Realizing the superior American force in Sandwich was not—after sitting still for almost a month—likely to march on Fort Malden, Col. Henry Procter, the garrison commander, launched offensive operations against the American side of the Detroit River. From native scouts, he knew that a relief column was carrying badly needed supplies from Urbana to Hull and that the American general had dispatched 150 Ohio militia and a few cavalrymen to help secure it from Indian attack. Procter sent 100 regulars from the 41st Regiment of Foot, a handful of Canadian militia, and two dozen warriors led by Tecumseh across to intercept Hull’s men. On August 5, as the Ohio horsemen forded Brownstown Creek, Tecumseh ordered his warriors to open fire. The cavalry broke and fled back to Detroit, leaving the infantry to their fate. Scattering into the woods, most of the terrified militiamen managed to escape. But seventeen were killed. Another two were captured and tomahawked by Tecumseh’s men in revenge for the death of one of their braves—the only casualty suffered by the British force.
This drubbing was the last straw for Hull. On the morning of August 8 he ordered Sandwich abandoned and withdrew his entire army behind the walls of Fort Detroit. The supply column commander, Capt. Henry Brush, meanwhile, had gone to ground about thirty-five miles from Detroit on the banks of the Raisin River and sent word that he could not get past the British at Brownstown without support. Brush had three hundred cattle and seventy packhorses each carrying two hundred pounds of flour, but too few men to both control these animals and fight through to Detroit.7
Convinced that the woods between Detroit and the Raisin River thronged with Indians and British soldiers, on August 9 Hull ordered Lt. Col. James Miller to take six hundred men—almost half of his effective troops—and break through to Brush. Miller’s men blundered noisily into the woods, with no scouts probing ahead of their advance, and were quickly detected by Indian patrols who reported their presence to Procter at Fort Malden. Procter sent 150 regulars and militia supported by a small group of warriors led by Tecumseh to ambush the Americans. On the way to the ambush site, the force gathered in an evergrowing number of warriors, so that the British commander, Capt. A
dam Muir, had no idea how many were with him. Marching in the British ranks was a sixteen-year-old Canadian volunteer from Amherstburg, John Richardson.
“No other sound than the measured step of the troops interrupted the solitude of the scene,” he later wrote, “rendered more imposing by the wild appearance of the warriors, whose bodies, stained and painted in the most frightful manner for the occasion, glided by us with almost noiseless velocity … some painted white, some black, others half black, half red; half black, half white; all with their hair plastered in such a way as to resemble the bristling quills of the porcupine, with no other covering than a cloth around their loins, yet armed to the teeth with rifles, tomahawks, war-clubs, spears, bows, arrows and scalping knives. Uttering no sound, intent only on reaching the enemy unperceived, they might have passed for the spectres of those wilds, the ruthless demons which war had unchained for the punishment and oppression of man.”8
Sixteen miles from Detroit, Muir’s force took cover behind a low rise facing a narrow river and hid until the Americans came within range. Then the British rose to form a fighting line that the militia attempted to mimic while Tecumseh’s warriors sallied forth on either flank of Miller’s advancing troops. Having never fought alongside Indians, Muir and the redcoats had no idea how to use their numbers to advantage. The battle quickly degenerated into chaos, with the Americans, British regulars, and militia exchanging volleys at point-blank range while the Indians poured fire in from behind the cover of trees. When one party of warriors was pushed back by an American charge, the British mistook them for enemy and ripped off a fusillade of musketry. Tecumseh’s men replied in kind. The Americans meanwhile had broken out into a battle line and were able to use their superior numbers to bull across the river. Muir, who had taken a ball in the shoulder and another in the leg, ordered a retreat. The British were spared the deadly consequence of a full-scale rout, however, when Miller failed to attempt a pursuit. The British took to their boats and paddled to safety. Muir counted 6 dead and 21 wounded with another 2 lost as prisoners. Tecumseh’s losses were uncertain because, rather than returning to Fort Malden, many warriors scattered into the woods. The Americans claimed about one hundred Indians had been killed, but this was more than the number of warriors the British believed Tecumseh had brought to the field. Miller’s losses were 18 killed and 64 wounded.
