Anglo-Irish aristocrat and politician Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, was BOTD in 1769. Born in Dublin to a wealthy Anglo-Irish landowning family, his father was elevated to the peerage in 1789. He attended Cambridge University, leaving without taking a degree (possibly due to a sexually transmitted disease) and went into politics. Elected as an independent member of the Irish Parliament in 1790, he was appointed chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1798. He took severe measures to suppress the 1798 Irish Rebellion and helped secure passage of the 1801 Act of Union, which joined Ireland to Great Britain. He resigned in 1801, after William Pitt‘s government failed to secure the political emancipation of Irish Catholics. He returned to government in 1804 as secretary of state for war, identifying Napoleon as Britain’s key political opponent. In 1808, he persuaded his government to send naval forces to Europe. The campaign, led by Admiral Arthur Wellesley, was a disaster, forcing Castlereagh’s resignation. Returning in 1812 as secretary for foreign affairs, he brought together a coalition of European military forces, who finally overthrew Napoleon. He was also a key player in the 1815 Congress of Vienna, redrawing the map of Europe, restoring the Bourbon monarchy in France and restricting the political domination of Russia and Prussia. He also promoted periodic meetings of the treaty parties, establishing the practice of international diplomacy by conference. He continually resisted forcible intervention in European countries, while supporting harsh measures against social and electoral reform at home, earning the emnity of the British working classes and the scorn of aristocrat liberals Lord Byron, Thomas Moore and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He also lost political credibility after an unsuccessful attempt to dissolve King George IV‘s marriage to Queen Caroline. Castlereagh married Amelia Hobart in 1794: their marriage was affectionate, if childless, and he pursued a number of affairs with sex workers. He killed himself in 1822, aged 53, after allegedly being blackmailed for homosexual acts. His sexuality remains a subject of debate by historians and biographers.