To the contrary, their research showed that what actually led to the settlement was far more complicated-including the overlooked but critical fact that the British security services had so disabled the militants by arrests, penetrations, and assassinations that there was no alternative left for the IRA but to give up its armed struggle. Previously, in Talking to Terrorists (2009), Bew and his coauthors challenged the conventional view that the Troubles in Northern Ireland were resolved only when London decided to sit down with the IRA with no preconditions and broker a final agreement. Instead, Bew cast him as a figure attached to Enlightenment ideals but whose career was largely defined by the thankless task of dealing with foreign and domestic threats to British rule and (to Castlereagh’s mind) the rule that made attainment of those ideals possible. Rapidly received as the definitive account of the British minister to date, it overturned the orthodox portrayal of the Tory statesman as a one-dimensional counterrevolutionary diplomat and politician. In 2012 Bew published Castlereagh: A Life.
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