PM WHO FACED A PISTOL: 200 years on from death of 'forgotten' Spencer Perceval
A portrait of Spencer Perceval by George Francis Joseph
Published: 10 May, 2012
by GERALD ISAAMAN
HE always wore black, even when taking his 12 children, in crocodile fashion, up the hill to Hampstead Parish Church to pray on Sunday mornings.
And no doubt Spencer Perceval never considered it an omen, not even for a lawyer of repute who prosecuted Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man, and took on the task of Prime Minister during Britain’s difficult days fighting Napoleon.
Mention Perceval’s name today and scarcely anyone will give a blink of recognition. Yet he remains our only Prime Minister to be assassinated, shot at point blank range as he entered the House of Commons lobby, in a hurry for a meeting affecting our trade with Europe.
“I heard a hoarse cry of ‘murder, murder’ – and he exclaimed ‘Oh’ and fell on his face,” said solicitor Henry Burgess, who witnessed the attack.
It happened around 5.15pm exactly 200 years ago tomorrow (Friday).
Perceval’s assassin was John Bellingham, a middle-class commercial agent with a long-standing grudge about his imprisonment in the Russian port of Archangel – for an alleged debt of 4,890 roubles – and the government’s rejection of his pleas for compensation.
Bellingham had bought a pair of steel pistols and instructed his London tailor to make him a special jacket pocket in which to hide them as he sought out the Prime Minister.
“I could stand it no longer and resolved to finish the affair by an appeal to a criminal court whether government can refuse justice or no,” Bellingham, in a last desperate plea for his cause, wrote in a letter to a business partner.
He peacefully gave himself up and refused to plead insanity as his defence, despite claiming that the government had somehow sanctioned the assassination.
He was tried four days later, was found guilty of murder and on May 18 was executed at Newgate Prison, soldiers being called in as security when a crowd of protesters arrived.
In 1812 Perceval, the son of Lord Egmont and Baroness Arden, who married the daughter of Sir Thomas Wilson, Lord of the Manor of Hampstead, faced unrest.
The radical MP Sir Francis Burdett had raised concerns about corruption in high places and demanded reforms.
At the same time Luddism had spread from Nottingham: only days before Perceval’s demise a Yorkshire mill owner was murdered by followers of the mythical Ned Ludd.
The journalist William Cobbett, whose statue stands in Camden Town, witnessed Bellingham’s execution from his own cell window, declaring: “Demonstrations of joy, the most unequivocal, amongst the people in several of the most populous parts of England… At Nottingham the church bells were rung, at Leicester there was a supper and songs, at Sheffield there were sheep roasted whole.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for his part, reported men in a London pub celebrating the assassination of Perceval and toasting Burdett’s demands.
There is no Commons memorial to Perceval, who was solicitor-general, then attorney-general and finally chancellor of the exchequer before heading a weak government in 1809. Nevertheless, he displayed his own Christian beliefs in the abolition of slavery and opposed hunting, gambling and adultery.
The latter was despite his running off with Jane Wilson, the daughter of Hampstead’s Lord of the Manor, living first above a carpet shop in Holborn and then in Belsize House, Hampstead, from 1798 to 1807 (partly the site of today’s Perceval Avenue).
There is a memorial to him in the nave of Westminster Abbey, a relief by the sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott showing the dead premier lying on a mattress, allegorical figures at his head and feet representing Power, Truth and Temperance, unveiled in 1822.
In Perceval Avenue there is no sign of either a fluttering flag of respect, or of recognition, with one resident, Gabriel Moss, commenting: “He is a figure of some significance but beyond that I have no sympathetic feeling towards him for prosecuting Tom Paine”.
Gabriel’s wife Judith insisted: “I am quite sure that in the whole street there is nobody here who knows about Spencer Perceval and what happened to him or even cares about him.” A somewhat sad epitaph that reflects today’s attitudes towards politicians.