[THE MEMOIRS OF LORD CASTLEREAGH.][9]
In the absence of any real history of Ireland, the memoirs of its distinguished persons are of the first importance. They are the landmarks within which the broad and general track of historic narrative must be led. They fix character—the most necessary aid to the larger views of the historian. They disclose to us those secret springs which regulate the great social machinery; and by an especial faculty, more valuable than all, they bring us face to face with minds of acknowledged eminence, teach us the course which the known conquerors of difficulties have pursued, and exhibit the training by which the championship of nations is to be sustained. As the old lawgiver commanded that beautiful statues should be placed before the Spartan wives, to impress their infants with beauty of countenance and stateliness of form, the study of greatness has a tendency to elevate our nature; and though camps and councils may be above our course, yet the light shed from those higher spheres may guide our steps through the tangled paths of our humbler world.
The present memoir gives evidence of an additional merit in biography: it assists justice; it offers the power of clearing character, which might have been refused to the living; it brings forward means of justification, which the dignity of the injured, his contempt of calumny, or the circumstances of his time, might have locked up in his bosom. It is an appeal from the passion of the hour to the soberness of years. It has the sincerity and the sanctity of a voice from the world of the future.
The Stewarts, ancestors of the Marquis of Londonderry, came originally from Scotland, and, settling in Ireland in the reign of James I., obtained large possessions among the forfeited lands in Ulster. The family were Protestants, and distinguished themselves by Protestant loyalty in the troubled times of Ireland—a country where trouble seems to be indigenous. One of those loyalists was Colonel William Stewart, who, during the Irish war, under James II., raised a troop of horse at his own expense, and skirmished vigorously against the Popish enemy at the siege of Londonderry. For this good service he was attainted, with all the chief gentry of the kingdom, in the confiscating parliament of James. But the confiscation was not carried into effect, and the estate remained to a long line of successors.
The father of the late Marquis of Londonderry was the first of the family who was ennobled. He was an active, intelligent, and successful man. Representing his county in two parliaments, and, acting with the government, he partook of that golden shower which naturally falls from the treasury. He became in succession the possessor of office and the possessor of title—baron, viscount, earl, and marquis—and wisely allied himself with English nobility, marrying, first, a daughter of the Earl of Hertford, and, secondly, a sister of Lord Camden. The subject of this memoir was a son of the first marriage, and was born in Ireland on the 18th of June 1769. From boyhood he was remarkable for coolness and intrepidity, and was said to have exhibited both qualities in saving a young companion in the lake of Strangford. At the age of seventeen he was entered of St John's College, Cambridge, where he seems to have applied himself actively to the general studies of the place—elementary mathematics, classics, logic, and moral philosophy. This sufficiently answers the subsequent taunts at the narrowness of his education.
As his father had been a politician, his son and heir was naturally intended for political life. The first step of his ambition was a costly one. County elections in those days were formidable affairs. The Hillsborough family had formerly monopolised the county. Young Stewart was put forward, according to custom, as "the champion of independence." He gained but half the day, for the Hillsboroughs still retained one nominee. The young candidate became a member of parliament, but this step cost £60,000.
The sacrifice was enormous, and perhaps, in our day, might startle the proudest rent-roll in England: but, seventy years ago, and in Ireland, the real expenditure was probably equivalent to £100,000 in our day. And it must have been still more distressing to the family, from the circumstance, that the sum had been accumulated to build a mansion; that the expense of the election also required the sale of a fine old collection of family portraits; and that the old lord was forced to spend the remainder of his life in what the biographer states to be an old barn, with a few rooms added. But his son was now launched on public life—that stream in which so many dashing swimmers sink, but in which talent, guided by caution, seldom fails to float along, until nature or weariness finishes the effort, and the man disappears, like all who went before.
The young member, fresh from college, and flushed with triumph over "parliamentary monopoly," was, of course, a Whig. Plutarch's Lives, and the history of the classic commonwealths, make every boy at school a Whig. It is only when they emerge from the cloudy imaginations of republicanism, and the fabulous feats of Greek championship, that they acquire common sense, and act according to the realities of things. The future statesman commenced his career by the ultra-patriotism of giving a "written pledge," on the hustings, to the support of "parliamentary reform."