Soldiers of the State—Michael Knox Beran, page

Robert Stewart, second viscount Castlereagh, was the British foreign minister from 1812 to 1822. A member of the Irish peerage, melancholy, aloof, in many ways mysterious, he won a place in the British cabinet; there he labored, during the last decade of his life, to turn the coalition of Great Powers leagued against France into a peacetime alliance capable of establishing, and preserving, order in Europe.

To a large extent he succeeded. In 1814 the allied powers—Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia— pledged to maintain a collective-security arrangement that would survive the defeat of Bonaparte’s France. This “Concert of Europe” was ratified a short time later by the Congress of Vienna; Castlereagh dared to hope that its very existence would tend to promote the stability of Europe. In the future an aspiring conquistador, eager to emulate Bonaparte or Louis XIV, would no longer be able to rely, as those princes had, on a strategy of divide and conquer; he must consider instead that any attempt to enlarge his country’s territory would draw upon him the wrath of a united coalition.

About the Author

Michael Knox Beran

Michael Knox Beran, a lawyer and writer, is the author of WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.

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Robert Stewart, second viscount Castlereagh, was the British foreign minister from 1812 to 1822. A member of the Irish peerage, melancholy, aloof, in many ways mysterious, he won a place in the British cabinet; there he labored, during the last decade of his life, to turn the coalition of Great Powers leagued against France into a peacetime alliance capable of establishing, and preserving, order in Europe.

To a large extent he succeeded. In 1814 the allied powers—Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia— pledged to maintain a collective-security arrangement that would survive the defeat of Bonaparte’s France. This “Concert of Europe” was ratified a short time later by the Congress of Vienna; Castlereagh dared to hope that its very existence would tend to promote the stability of Europe. In the future an aspiring conquistador, eager to emulate Bonaparte or Louis XIV, would no longer be able to rely, as those princes had, on a strategy of divide and conquer; he must consider instead that any attempt to enlarge his country’s territory would draw upon him the wrath of a united coalition.