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facilitate a peace treaty that did not take all that Britain could have demanded, thereby leaving the United States with both pride and flexibility for a future and deeper peace with Britain. Negotiations had gone badly at Ghent; anger and stalemate ruled. Then, on his way to Vienna, Castlereagh stopped for two days in Ghent, where, in secret meetings with his negotiators, he advocated conciliation and helped to break the deadlock.
    5. We must thank the fortunate tides of history that Castlereagh, rather than his counterpart and rival, the hawkish and uncompromising George Canning, was presiding over Britain’s foreign affairs in 1814. (And so you see, dear reader, we are finally getting to Mr. Canning’s rear end, as promised in the title.) The vagaries of a key incident in 1809 led to this favorable outcome. Canning, then foreign secretary, had been pushing for Castlereagh’s ouster as secretary of war. Castlereagh had sent a British expedition against Napoleon’s naval base at Antwerp, but nature had intervened (through no fault of Castlereagh’s), and the troops were boxed in on the island of Walcheren, dying in droves of typhoid fever. Canning used this disaster to press his advantage.
    Meanwhile (this does get complicated), the prime minister, the duke of Portland, suffered a paralytic stroke and eventually had to resign. In the various reshufflings and explanations that follow such an event, Perceval, the new prime minister, showed Castlereagh some of Canning’s incriminating letters. Castlereagh did not challenge Canning’s right to lobby for his removal, but he exploded in fury at Canning’s apparent secrecy in machination. Canning, for his part (and not without justice), replied that he had urged open confrontation of the issue, but that higher-ups (including the king) had imposed secrecy, hoping to paper over the affair and somehow preserve the obvious talents of both men in government.
    Castlereagh, to say the least, was not satisfied and, in the happily abandoned custom of his age, insisted upon a duel. The two men and their seconds met on Putney Heath at 6 A.M. on September 21. They fired a first round to no effect, but Castlereagh insisted on a second, of much greater import. Castlereagh was spared the fate of Alexander Hamilton by inches, as Canning’s bullet removed a button from his coat but missed his person. Canning was not so fortunate; though more embarrassed than seriously injured, he took Castlereagh’s second bullet in his left buttock. (Historians have tended to euphemism at this point. The latest biography of Castlereagh holds that Canning got it “through the fleshy part of the thigh,” but I have it on good authority that Canning was shot in the ass.) In any case, both men subsequently resigned.
    As the world turns and passions cool, both Canning and Castlereagh eventually returned to power. Canning achieved his burning ambition (cause of his machinations against Castlereagh) to become prime minister, if only briefly, in 1827. Castlereagh came back in Canning’s old job of foreign secretary, where he assured the Treaty of Ghent and presided for Britain at the Congress of Vienna.
    6. Suppose Canning had fired more accurately and killed Castlereagh on the spot? Canning, or another of his hawkish persuasion, might have imposed stiffer terms upon the United States and deprived Andy Jackson of his hero’s role. More important for our tale, Castlereagh would have been denied the opportunity to die as he actually did, by his own hand, in 1822. Castlereagh had suffered all his life from periods of acute and debilitating “melancholy” and would, today, almost surely be diagnosed as a severe manic depressive. Attacked by the likes of Lord Byron, Shelley, and Thomas Moore for his foreign policies, and suffering from both overwork and parliamentary reverses, Castlereagh became unreasonably suspicious and downright paranoid. He thought that he was being blackmailed for supposed acts of