Castlereagh: Life & Legacy

Exhibition
from 08/08/2022 to 30/12/2023
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An exhibition to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of Viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822) opened at Mount Stewart on 8 August 2022. The magnificent neo-classical Mount Stewart House and Gardens in Northern Ireland, former home of Castlereagh, is run by the National Trust.

Castlereagh: Life & Legacy
Lord Viscount Castlereagh, by Charles Turner, 1814, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, who ended his own life in 1822 at hte age of 53, was an enormously influential and divisive figure, hated in both Ireland and Britain.

A highlight of the exhibition is a silver inkstand which remained within the family until it was sold in 2019 to the National Trust. It was presented by William Pitt to Stewart in 1805 when he became Secretary of State for War and the Colonies  In this role he helped shape the future of Europe at the Congress of Vienna, the coming together of victorious leaders in 1814 after the defeat of Napoleon.

Congress of Vienna by Jean-Baptiste Isabey, final version, pen and ink with wash, Royal Collection Trust © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2015

Earlier, in Ireland, he had played an important role suppressing the 1798 Rebellion and the creation of the Act of Union in 1801. In England he supported the repressive measures of 1815 that linked him in the public mind to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 (so-named in ironic reference to Waterloo) when the cavalry charged a 60,000 crowd demanding parliamentary reform, killing 15. This event inspired Shelley’s poem, The Masque of Anarchy, in which the second stanza begins:

I met Murder on the way,
He had a mask like Castlereagh

Some time after his death Lord Byron penned these lines:

Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss

Read how the news of Castlereagh’s death was received 200 years ago.

Address

Mount Stewart

Portaferry Road,
Newtownards,
County Down, (Northern Ireland)
BT22 2AD

+44(0)2842788387
Please note Mount Stewart will be closed on Sunday 25th & Monday 26th December 2022, reopening on Tuesday 27th December.
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