Background
Meade was the only son of Richard Meade, 2nd Earl of Clanwilliam, and succeeded in the earldom at the age of ten.
Meade was the only son of Richard Meade, 2nd Earl of Clanwilliam, and succeeded in the earldom at the age of ten.
He was educated at Eton.
In his 1848 memoirs, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand writes of Meade that "at the head of the younger.. Lord Clanwilliam was prominent, the son, it was said, of the Duc de Richelieu. He did wonderful things: he rode his horse to Richmond, and returned to Almack"s having fallen off twice.
He had a certain trick of speaking in the manner of Alcibiades, which delighted."
Lord Clanwilliam afterwards joined the Diplomatic Service.
He attended Lord Castlereagh"s suite at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and was his private secretary from 1817-1819 in the latter"s capacity as Foreign Secretary. He was one of the first people to see Castlereagh"s widow after his suicide: she embraced him warmly, saying that Castlereagh had loved him.
lieutenant was he who was largely responsible for the decision to give Lord Castlereagh an official funeral in Westminster Abbey, for which he was criticised by those who believed that Castlereagh"s own wish was for a private family funeral. He was one of many witnesses who later testified to Castlereagh"s increasingly strange mental condition in the days before his suicide.
He became Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1822 and afterwards Envoy to Berlin from 1823 to 1827.
In 1828, he was created Baron Clanwilliam, of Clanwilliam in the County of Tipperary, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. Lord Clanwilliam married Lady Elizabeth Herbert, daughter of George Herbert, 11th Earl of Pembroke, on 5 July 1830.
