seat in the cabinet, and kissed hands on 17 July.
From this time he ceased to be specially concerned with Irish affairs, and became chiefly engrossed in foreign concerns. His position in the Addington cabinet was the more important, in that his intimacy with Pitt made him in some degree Pitt's mouthpiece. Within a few months he was almost the leading member of the cabinet on questions of foreign policy, though officially still only connected with India. He was strongly for the retention of Malta after the peace of Amiens, in spite of the pledges given for its evacuation, and his minute stating the grounds for renewing the war was adopted by the ministry as its collective justification of its policy. He formed also a strong friendship and admiration for Lord Wellesley, supported him against the court of directors, and obtained their reluctant sanction for his annexation in the Carnatic and Oudh. He had to mediate between the cabinet, which desired to reduce the Indian army, and the governor-general, whose policy urgently demanded its increase, to obtain fresh supplies of silver for the Indian treasury, and at the same time to check the growth of its debt; but he performed his difficult task with skill. Less resolution on his part might have crippled the empire in India, and only his unfailing courtesy and temper could have conciliated so many conflicting powers. He had charge also of the negotiations, then of considerable importance, with the court of Persia. When Pitt succeeded Addington in May 1804, he felt Castlereagh to be too valuable to India to be removed from the board of control, and accordingly, without laying down his other office, Castlereagh in July 1805 succeeded Lord Camden as secretary of state for the war and colonial department. It was on seeking re-election for co. Down that he was defeated, and compelled for several years to sit for an English seat.
As secretary of war he showed himself something of an amateur strategist, and plunged eagerly into the plans for setting fire to the Boulogne flotilla by means of fireships called catamarans, but they did not succeed. He was responsible for the organisation and despatch of the force sent to the Elbe in October 1805, and must bear a large share of the blame for its too tardy arrival. The battle of Austerlitz compelled its return almost as soon as it had landed. Taught, however, by experience, he now grasped the fact that the British army, if it was to lend effective assistance to the continent at all, must be employed in force, and for large and definite objects, and not in scattered and desultory expeditions. He prepared minutes showing that, without endangering home defences, sixty thousand British troops could take the offensive, and, thanks to the command of the sea, could choose their own sphere of operations. Nothing, however, could be done with these objects before Pitt died in January 1806. During Grenville's government which followed Castlereagh was active in opposition, taking foreign affairs as his department, while Perceval attacked the ministry on home questions. When Grenville's ministry fell in March 1807, Castlereagh returned to his former place of secretary at war in the Duke of Portland's ministry, and a more active co-operation with the continental powers at once began. Money and stores were promptly despatched; treaties were entered into for the assistance of Prussia; but again, before anything could be done, the battle of Friedland (14 June 1807) and the treaty of Tilsit detached Russia and left Great Britain isolated. The Copenhagen expedition followed, and the Danish fleet having been secured, Castlereagh transferred the troops which had been employed in Denmark to Gothenburg in Sweden, and prevented the Swedish fleet from falling into the hands of Napoleon. The Russian fleet was thus shut in at Cronstadt; the Baltic remained under the control of Great Britain, and the naval combination which Napoleon had prepared by the secret articles of the treaty of Tilsit was frustrated as far as the north of Europe was concerned. Castlereagh now directed the attention of the ministry to the same objects in southern Europe. The maritime strength of Spain was derived from her connection with her Eastern and American colonies, and, though broken at Trafalgar, might now, unless the attempt were forestalled, be revived by Napoleon. Castlereagh had been in communication with Sir Arthur Wellesley on this subject since November 1806. Canning and Castlereagh anticipated Napoleon's design for seizing the naval force of Portugal by bringing about the prince regent's withdrawal with it and the royal family to Brazil on 27 Nov. 1807.
The recruiting for the army proving now very insufficient to maintain the forces at the height of the establishment authorised by parliament, Castlereagh next devoted himself to a new organisation of the army, by which the regular army was to be fed by volunteering from the militia as well as by recruiting, and kept up to a level of over two hundred thousand men. This plan was adopted by the cabinet and acted on till the end of the war. At the outbreak of the
