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Spencer Perceval, KC (1 November 1762 – 11 May 1812) was a British statesman and Prime Minister. He is the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated. He is the only Solicitor General or Attorney General, and one of very few lawyers, to have been Prime Minister. The younger son of an Irish earl, Perceval was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, practised as a barrister on the Midland Circuit and became a King’s Counsel, before entering politics at the age of 33 as a Member of Parliament for Northampton. A follower of William Pitt, Perceval always described himself as a ‘friend of Mr Pitt’ rather than a Tory. Perceval was opposed to Catholic emancipation and reform of Parliament; he supported the war against Napoleon and the abolition of the slave trade. He was opposed to hunting, gambling and adultery, did not drink as much as most Members of Parliament, gave generously to charity, and enjoyed spending time with his twelve children. After a
late entry into politics his rise to power was rapid; he was Solicitor
and then Attorney General in the Addington Ministry, Chancellor of
the Exchequer and Leader of the
House of Commons in
the Portland Ministry,
and became Prime Minister in October 1809. At the head of a weak
ministry, Perceval faced a number of crises during his term in office
including an inquiry into the disastrous Walcheren
expedition, the madness of King George III,
economic depression and Luddite riots. He survived these
crises, successfully pursued the Peninsular War in the face of opposition
defeatism, and won the support of the Prince Regent.
His position was looking stronger by the spring of 1812, when a man
with a grievance against the Government shot him dead in the lobby of
the House of Commons.
Although Perceval was a seventh son and had four older brothers who
survived to adulthood, the Earldom of
Egmont reverted to
one of his great-grandsons in the early twentieth century and remains
in the hands of his descendants. Perceval
was the seventh son of John Perceval,
2nd Earl of Egmont, the second son of the earl’s second
marriage. His mother, Catherine Compton, Baroness Arden, was a
grand-daughter of the 4th Earl of
Northampton. Spencer was a Compton family name; Catherine
Compton's great uncle Spencer
Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington, had been Prime Minister. His
father, a political advisor to Frederick,
Prince of Wales and King George III,
served briefly in the Cabinet as First Lord of
the Admiralty and
Perceval’s early childhood was spent at Charlton House, which his father had
taken to be near Woolwich docks.
Perceval’s father died when he was eight. Perceval went to Harrow,
where he was a disciplined and hard working pupil. It was at Harrow
that he developed an interest in evangelical Anglicanism and formed what was to be a
life long friendship with Dudley Ryder.
After five years at Harrow he followed his older brother Charles to Trinity College, Cambridge,
where he won the declamation prize in English and graduated in 1782. As
the second son of a second marriage, and with an allowance of only
£200 a year, Perceval faced the prospect of having to make his
own way in life. He chose the law as a profession, studied at Lincoln’s Inn,
and was called to the bar in 1786. Perceval’s mother had died in 1783,
and Perceval and his brother Charles, now Lord Arden, rented a house in
Charlton, where they fell in love with two sisters who were living in
the Percevals' old childhood home. The sisters’ father, Sir Thomas
Spencer Wilson, approved of the match between his eldest daughter
Margaretta and Lord Arden, who was wealthy and already a Member of
Parliament and a Lord of the Admiralty. Perceval, who was at that time
an impecunious barrister on the Midland Circuit, was told to wait until
younger daughter Jane came of age in three years’ time. When Jane
reached 21 in 1790 Perceval’s career was still not prospering, and Sir
Thomas still opposed the marriage. So the couple eloped and married by
special licence in East Grinstead.
They set up home together in lodgings over a carpet shop in Bedford Row, later moving to Lindsey House, Lincoln's Inn
Fields. Perceval’s
family connections obtained a number of positions for him: Deputy
Recorder of Northampton, and Commissioner of Bankrupts in 1790;
Surveyor of the Maltings and Clerk of the Irons in the Mint - a
sinecure worth £119 a year – in 1791; counsel to the Board of
Admiralty in 1794. He acted as junior counsel for the Crown in the
prosecutions of Thomas Paine in absentia for seditious libel (1792), and John Horne Tooke for
high treason (1794). Perceval joined the Light Horse Volunteers in 1794
when the country was under threat of invasion by France. Perceval
wrote anonymous pamphlets in favour of the impeachment of Warren Hastings,
and in defence of public order against sedition. These pamphlets
brought him to the attention of William Pitt and in 1795 he was offered
the appointment of Chief Secretary
for Ireland. He declined the offer. He
could earn more as a barrister and needed the money to support his
growing family. In 1796 he became a King’s Counsel and had an income of
about £1000 a year. In
1796 Perceval’s uncle, the 8th Earl of Northampton, died. Perceval’s
cousin, who was MP for Northampton, succeeded to the Earldom and took
his place in the House of Lords.
Perceval was invited to stand for election in his place. In the May
by-election he was elected unopposed, but weeks later had to defend his
seat in a fiercely contested general election. Northampton had an
electorate of about one thousand - every male householder not in
receipt of poor relief had a vote - and the town had a strong radical
tradition. Perceval stood for the Castle Ashby interest, Edward Bouverie for the Whigs,
and William Walcot for the corporation. After a disputed count Perceval
and Bouverie were returned. Perceval represented Northampton until his
death 16 years later, and is the only MP for Northampton to have held
the office of Prime Minister. 1796 was his first and last contested
election; in the general elections of 1802, 1806 and 1807 Perceval and
Bouverie were returned unopposed. When
Perceval took his seat in the House of Commons in September 1796 his
political views were already formed. "He was for the constitution and
Pitt; he was against Fox and France", wrote his biographer Denis Gray. During
the 1796 - 1797 session he made several speeches, always reading from
notes. His public speaking skills had been sharpened at the Crown and
Rolls debating society when he was a law student. After taking his seat
in the House of Commons, Perceval continued with his legal practice as
MPs did not receive a salary, and the House only sat for a part of the
year. During the Parliamentary recess of the summer of 1797 he was
senior counsel for the Crown in the prosecution of John Binns for
sedition. Binns, who defended by Samuel Romilly,
was found not guilty. The fees from his legal practice allowed Perceval
to take out a lease on a country house, Belsize House in Hampstead. It
was during the next session of Parliament, in January 1798, that
Perceval established his reputation as a debater - and his prospects as
a future minister - with a speech in support of the Assessed Taxes Bill
(a bill to increase the taxes on houses, windows, male servants, horses
and carriages, in order to finance the war against France). He used the
occasion to mount an attack on Charles Fox and
his demands for reform. Pitt described the speech as one of the best he
had ever heard, and later that year Perceval was given the post of
Solicitor to the Ordnance. Pitt
resigned in 1801 when the King and Cabinet opposed his bill for
Catholic emancipation. As Perceval shared the King’s views on Catholic
emancipation he did not feel obliged to follow Pitt into opposition and
his career continued to prosper during Henry Addington’s
administration. He was appointed Solicitor General in 1801 and Attorney
General the following year. Perceval did not agree with Addington's
general policies (especially on foreign policy), and confined himself
to speeches on legal issues. He kept the position of Attorney General
when Addington resigned and Pitt formed his second ministry in 1804. As
Attorney General Perceval was involved with the prosecution of radicals Edward Despard and William Cobbett,
but was also responsible for more liberal decisions on trade unions,
and for improving the conditions of convicts transported to New South Wales. Pitt
died in January 1806. Perceval was an emblem bearer at his funeral and,
although he had little money to spare (by now he had eleven children),
he contributed £1000 towards a fund to pay off Pitt’s debts. He
resigned as Attorney General, refusing to serve in Lord Grenville’s
ministry of "All the Talents" as it included Fox. Instead he became the
leader of the Pittite opposition in the House of Commons. During
his period in opposition, Perceval’s legal skills were put to use to
defend Princess
Caroline,
the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales, during the "delicate
investigation". The Princess had been accused of giving birth to an
illegitimate child and the Prince of Wales ordered an inquiry, hoping
to obtain evidence for a divorce. The Government inquiry found that the
main accusation was untrue (the child in question had been adopted by
the princess) but was critical of the behaviour of the princess. The
opposition sprang to her defence and Perceval became her advisor,
drafting a 156 page letter in her support to King George III. Known as
"The Book", it was described by Perceval’s biographer as "the last and
greatest production of his legal career". When
the King refused to let Caroline return to court, Perceval threatened
publication of the book. But Grenville’s ministry fell - again over a
difference of opinion with the King on the Catholic question - before
the book could be distributed and, as a member of the new Government,
Perceval drafted a cabinet minute acquitting Caroline on all charges
and recommending her return to court. He had a bonfire of the book at
Lindsey House and large sums of Government money were spent on buying
back stray copies, but a few remained at large and "The Book" was
published soon after his death. On
the resignation of Grenville, the Duke of Portland put together a
ministry of Pittites and asked Perceval to become Chancellor of the
Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. Perceval would have
preferred to remain Attorney General or become Home Secretary,
and pleaded ignorance of financial affairs. He agreed to take the
position when the salary (smaller than that of the Home Office) was
augmented by the Duchy of
Lancaster. Lord Hawkesbury (later
Liverpool) recommended him to the King by explaining that he came from
an old English family and shared the King’s views on the Catholic
question. Perceval’s
youngest child, Ernest Augustus,was born soon after Perceval became
Chancellor (Princess Caroline was godmother). Jane Perceval became ill
after the birth and the family moved out of the damp and draughty
Belsize House, spending a few months in Lord Teignmouth’s
house in Clapham before finding a suitable
country house in Ealing.
Elm Grove was a sixteenth century house that had been the home of the
Bishop of Durham; Perceval
paid £7,500 for it in 1808 (borrowing from his brother Lord Arden
and the trustees of Jane’s dowry) and the Perceval family’s long
association with Ealing began. Meanwhile, in town, Perceval had moved
from Lindsey House into 10 Downing
Street, when the Duke of Portland moved back to Burlington House shortly after becoming
Prime Minister. One
of Perceval’s first tasks in Cabinet was to expand the Orders in
Council that had been brought in by the previous administration and
were designed to restrict the trade of neutral countries with France,
in retaliation to Napoleon’s embargo on British trade. He was also
responsible for ensuring that Wilberforce’s
Bill on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which had still not passed it
final stages in the House of Lords when Grenville’s ministry fell,
would not "fall between the two ministries" and be rejected in a snap
division. Perceval
was one of the founding members of the African Institute, which was set
up in April 1807 to safeguard the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. As
Chancellor of the Exchequer Perceval had to raise money to finance the
war against Napoleon. This he managed to do in his budgets of 1808 and
1809 without increasing taxes, by raising loans at reasonable rates and
making economies. As leader of the House of Commons he had to deal with
a strong opposition, which challenged the government over the conduct
of the war, Catholic emancipation, corruption and Parliamentary reform.
Perceval successfully defended the Commander-in-Chief of the army, the Duke of York,
against charges of corruption when the Duke’s ex-mistress Mary Anne
Clarke claimed to have sold army commissions with his knowledge.
Although Parliament voted to acquit the Duke of the main charge, his
conduct was criticised and he accepted Perceval’s advice to resign. (He
was to be re-instated in 1811). Portland’s
ministry contained three future prime ministers - Perceval, Lord
Hawkesbury and George Canning - as well as another two of
the nineteenth century’s great statesmen - Lord Eldon and Lord Castlereagh.
But Portland was not a strong leader and his health was failing. The
country was plunged into political crisis in the summer of 1809 as
Canning schemed against Castlereagh and the Duke of Portland resigned
following a stroke. Negotiations began to find a new Prime Minister:
Canning wanted to be Prime Minister or nothing, Perceval was prepared
to serve under a third person, but not Canning. The remnants of the
cabinet decided to invite Lord Grey and Lord Grenville to form "an
extended and combined administration"
in
which Perceval was hoping for the Home Secretaryship. But Grenville and
Grey refused to enter into negotiations, and the King accepted the
Cabinet’s recommendation of Perceval for his new Prime Minister.
Perceval kissed the king’s hands on 4th October and set about forming
his Cabinet, a task made more difficult by the fact that Castlereagh
and Canning had ruled themselves out of consideration by fighting a
duel (which Perceval had tried to prevent). Having received five
refusals for the office, he had to serve as his own Chancellor of the
Exchequer - characteristically declining to accept the salary. The
new ministry was not expected to last. It was especially weak in the
Commons, where Perceval had only one cabinet member - Home Secretary Richard Ryder -
and had to rely on the support of backbenchers in debate. In the first
week of the new Parliamentary session in January 1810 the Government
lost four divisions, one on a motion for an inquiry into the disastrous
Walcheren expedition (in which, the previous summer, a military force
intending to seize Antwerp had instead withdrawn after
losing many men to an epidemic on the island of Walcheren)
and three on the composition of the finance committee. The Government
survived the inquiry into the Walcheren expedition at the cost of the
resignation of the expedition’s leader Lord Chatham.
The radical MP Sir Francis
Burdett was
committed to the Tower of London for having published a
letter in William Cobbett’s Political
Register denouncing
the government’s exclusion of the press from the inquiry. It took three
days, owing to various blunders, to execute the warrant for Burdett’s
arrest. The mob took to the streets in support of Burdett, troops were
called out, and there were fatal casualties. As chancellor, Perceval
continued to find the funds to finance Wellington’s campaign in the Iberian
Peninsula, whilst contracting a lower debt than his predecessors or
successors. King
George III had celebrated his 50th jubilee in 1809; by the following
autumn he was showing signs of a return of the derangement that had led
to a Regency in 1788. The prospect of another Regency was not
attractive to Perceval, as the prince of Wales was known to favour
Whigs and disliked Perceval for the part he had played in the "delicate
investigation". Twice parliament was adjourned in November 1810, as
doctors gave optimistic reports about the King’s chances of a return to
health. In December select committees of the Lords and Commons heard
evidence from the doctors, and Perceval finally wrote to the Prince of
Wales on 19 December saying that he planned the next day to introduce a
Regency Bill. As with Pitt’s bill in 1788, there would be restrictions;
the Regent’s powers to create peers and award offices and pensions
would be restricted for 12 months, the Queen would be responsible for
the care of the King, and the King’s private property would be looked
after by trustees. The
Prince of Wales, supported by the opposition, objected to the
restrictions, but Perceval steered the bill through Parliament.
Everyone had expected the Regent to change his ministers but,
surprisingly, he chose to retain his old enemy Perceval. The official
reason given by the Regent was that he did not wish to do anything to
aggravate his father’s illness. The King signed the Regency Bill on 5
February, the Regent took the royal oath the following day and
Parliament formally opened for the 1811 session. The session was
largely taken up with problems in Ireland, economic depression and the
bullion controversy in England (a Bill was passed to make bank notes
legal tender), and military operations in the Peninsula.
The
restrictions on the Regency expired in February 1812, the King was
still showing no signs of recovery, and the Prince Regent decided,
after an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Grey and Grenville to join
the government, to retain Perceval and his ministers. Wellesley,
after intrigues with the Prince Regent, resigned as Foreign Secretary
and was replaced by Castlereagh. The opposition meanwhile was mounting
an attack on the Orders in Council, which had caused a crisis in
relations with America and were widely blamed for depression and
unemployment in England. Rioting had broken out in the Midlands and
North, and been harshly repressed. Henry Brougham’s
motion
for a select committee was defeated in the commons, but, under
continuing pressure from manufacturers, the government agreed to
set up a committee of the whole house to consider the Orders in Council
and their impact on trade and manufacture. The committee began its
examination of witnesses in early May 1812. At
5:15 on the evening of 11 May 1812, Perceval was on his way to attend
the inquiry into the Orders in Council. As he entered the lobby of the
House of Commons, a man stepped forward, drew a pistol and shot him in
the chest. Perceval fell to the floor, after uttering something that
was variously heard as "murder" or "oh my God". They
were his last words. By the time he had been carried into an adjoining
room and propped up on a table with his feet on two chairs, he was
senseless, although there was still a faint pulse. When a surgeon
arrived a few minutes later, the pulse had stopped, and Perceval was
declared dead. At
first it was feared that the shot might signal the start of an
uprising, but it soon became apparent that the assassin – who had made
no attempt to escape – was a man with an obsessive grievance against
the Government and had acted alone. John Bellingham was
a merchant who had been unjustly imprisoned in Russia and felt he was
entitled to compensation from the Government, but all his petitions had
been rejected. Perceval’s
body was laid on a sofa in the speaker’s drawing room and removed to
Number 10 Downing Street in the early hours of 12 May. That same
morning an inquest was held at the Cat and Bagpipes public house on the
corner of Downing Street and verdict of wilful murder was returned. Perceval
left a widow and twelve children aged between twenty and three, and
there were soon rumours that he had not left them well provided for. He
had just £106 5s 1d in the bank when he died. A
few days after his death, Parliament voted to settle £50,000 on
Perceval’s children, with additional annuities for his widow and eldest
son. Jane Perceval married
Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Carr in 1815 and was widowed again six
years later. She died aged 74 in 1844. Perceval
was buried on 16 May in the Egmont vault at Charlton. At his widow's
request, it was a private funeral. Lords Eldon, Liverpool, and
Harrowby, and Richard Ryder, were pall-bearers. The previous day,
Bellingham had been tried, and, refusing to enter a plea of insanity,
was found guilty. He was hanged on 18 May. Perceval
was a small, slight, and very pale man, who usually dressed in black.
Lord Eldon called him "Little P". He
never sat for a full sized portrait; likenesses are either miniatures
or are based on a death mask by Joseph Nollekens.
He is sometimes referred to as one of Britain's forgotten prime
ministers, remembered only for the manner of his death. Although
not considered an inspirational leader, he is generally seen as a
devout, industrious, principled man who at the head of a weak
government steered the country through difficult times. A contemporary
MP Henry Grattan,
used a naval analogy to describe Perceval: "He is not a
ship-of-the-line, but he carries many guns, is tight-built and is out
in all weathers". Perceval's
modern biographer, Denis Gray, described him as "a herald of the
Victorians". The perception that Perceval
was uninspiring did not dim his personal appeal, however, as Landsman
notes: "Percival [sic]
was an exceedingly popular leader. The judge in the case literally wept
as he made his closing remarks to the jury." Public
monuments to Perceval were erected in Northampton, Lincoln's Inn and
Westminster Abbey. Four biographies about Perceval have been published:
a book on his life and administration by Charles Verulam Williams
appeared soon after his death; his grandson Spencer Walpole's biography
in 1894; Philip Treherne's short biography in 1909; Denis Gray's
500-page political biography in 1963. In addition there are two books
about his assassination, one by Mollie Gillen and one by David
Hanrahan. Perceval's assassination inspired poems such as Universal sympathy on
the martyr'd statesman (1812): In 2007
the band iLiKETRAiNS produced a single about
Perceval's assassination. |