Canning and the Napoleonic Wars
Although Canning resigned in 1809, writes Cedric Collyer, the fruits of his foreign policy, and the confirmation of the principles on which it rested, were already apparent by 1812 in the changing face and prospects of the war.
When Castlereagh’s suicide in 1822 restored George Canning to the Foreign Office, after a long absence from the front rank of British and European politics, he looked back across the intervening years since the European settlement of 1815 to the time when he might have had the office that went to his rival: “Ten years have made a world of difference, and a very different sort of world to bustle in than that which I should have found in 1812.”
But Canning’s outlook on the post-war world, and the dominant impression he made upon its problems in the era of South American and Greek independence, have their origins well across the divide, back in the days of his youth. The qualities that Canning brought to the making and execution of policy, like the ambition that fired them, were of early maturity and had been elements in his character before they were shaped by experience. The strongest of them was ambition, allied to a range of talents as orator, poet, and statesman that made him, in Byron’s words, almost a universal genius.
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