adherents were rewarded with minor appointments, his cousin, Charles
Wynn, became president of the board of control, in succession to
Bragge-Bathurst, who had himself succeeded Canning in the previous year,
and his nephew, the Marquis of Buckingham, obtained a dukedom. Such
recruits added little strength to the Liverpool government, and Holland
well said that "all articles are now to be had at low prices, except
Grenvilles".

[Pageheading: _THE DEATH OF CASTLEREAGH._]

But Liverpool gained far more powerful coadjutors in the Marquis
Wellesley, Peel, and Canning. In December, 1821, Wellesley undertook the
lord-lieutenancy of Ireland, which had relapsed into so disturbed a
state that it had been proposed to make Wellington both viceroy and
commander-in-chief. The significance of this selection was increased by
the appointment of Plunket as attorney-general. Sidmouth, while
retaining his seat in the cabinet, retired, by his own wish, from the
office of home secretary, with a sense of having pacified the country,
and was succeeded by Peel. Castlereagh, now Marquis of Londonderry,
remained foreign secretary, but on August 12, 1822, as he was on the
point of setting out for the congress of Verona, he died, like Whitbread
and Romilly, by his own hand. His suicidal act was clearly due to a
morbid fit of depression, under the stress of anxieties protracted over
more than twenty years; and the disordered state of his mind had been
observed, not only by Wellington, but also by the king. His successor
was Canning, who also became leader of the house of commons.

The characters and political aims of these rival statesmen have often
been contrasted by historians of a later age, who have seldom done
justice to Castlereagh. It is remembered that he was the author of the
Walcheren expedition; it is forgotten that he was the advocate of
sending a powerful force to the Baltic coast at the critical moment
between Jena and Eylau, that he was not altogether responsible for the
delays which rendered the Walcheren expedition abortive or for the
choice of its incompetent commander, that his prime object was to strike
a crushing blow at Napoleon's naval power, and that, if his
instructions had been obeyed, this would have been effected by a rapid
advance upon Antwerp when nearly all the French troops had been
withdrawn from the Netherlands. It is remembered that he was at the war
office when the operations of Wellington in the Peninsula were c