Robert Stewart, better known by his title Lord Castlereagh, was a major Irish statesman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of interest to Sydneysiders particularly because he belonged to that generation of rulers from the time of the colony's first settlement, and one of our major city streets, at least one suburb, a highway and a river are named after him.
Like Pitt, he preferred the company of young men and had a strange and somewhat mysterious psychology and private life. He once told Walter Scott of a dream he had at an army barracks where a shining naked young man advanced on him through a wall.
At his funeral procession people jeered and threw things at his hearse. Byron wrote:
Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
Listen to the full lesson with Richard Glover.
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