The Assassination of Spencer Perceval: The Only British Prime Minister Ever Murdered
- Daniel Holland
- 5 hours ago
- 9 min read
We don't tend to go in for political assainations in the UK, it's just not cricket. But this was a time when we tried it on for size...
There are days when Westminster hums along like a well oiled clock. Then there was Monday 11 May 1812. Just after five in the afternoon Spencer Perceval walked from Downing Street to the House of Commons. It was a routine journey he had made many times. In the lobby a quiet Liverpool merchant named John Bellingham stood up from a chair near the fireplace, reached into a specially sewn pocket inside his coat, drew a pistol, and fired. Perceval staggered, gasped “I am murdered,” and fell.
Inside a heartbeat the Commons lobby turned from chatter to chaos. Members rushed to the fallen Prime Minister. William Smith, the MP for Norwich and grandfather to Florence Nightingale, was first to reach him. In the confusion Smith initially thought the victim was his friend William Wilberforce. Only when he turned the body did he realise that the man at his feet was the Prime Minister. Perceval was carried into the Speaker’s quarters, laid on a table with his feet resting on two chairs. A surgeon arrived within minutes but the faint pulse stopped. Perceval was declared dead at about 5.20 pm.
The minutes before the shot
The House had begun at 4.30 pm. Inside the chamber Henry Brougham had remarked that the Prime Minister ought to be present and a messenger was sent toward Downing Street. Perceval had already set out on foot, choosing to dispense with his carriage. Meanwhile, the unremarkable figure in the lobby had taken his place. Bellingham had been seen there on several recent days, quietly asking journalists and clerks to point out ministers by sight. Weeks earlier he had visited a gunsmith on Skinner Street and bought two large calibre pistols. He then asked a tailor to add an inside pocket to his coat so one of the pistols could sit ready to hand.
When the shot rang out Bellingham did not run. He sat back down on a bench. In the first seconds of pandemonium he might well have strolled out into the street, a witness later suggested. Instead, an official who had seen the act pointed him out. MPs and attendants seized him, disarmed him, and searched him. Bellingham remained calm. “I have been denied the redress of my grievances by government,” he said. “I have been ill treated. They all know who I am and what I am. I am a most unfortunate man and feel sufficient justification for what I have done.”
His own MP, Isaac Gascoyne of Liverpool, happened to be present and confirmed his identity. An impromptu committal hearing was held that evening in the Serjeant at Arms rooms with MPs who were magistrates. Bellingham insisted on explaining himself despite warnings about self incrimination. “I have done my worst, and I rejoice in the deed,” he said. By eight o’clock he was charged with murder and sent to Newgate to await trial.
Who were the two men
Spencer Perceval was born in 1762, educated at Harrow and Trinity College, called to the bar in 1786, and entered Parliament in 1796. A devout evangelical Anglican, he opposed Catholic emancipation but worked with William Wilberforce on the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. He became Solicitor General, then Attorney General, then Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1807 and finally Prime Minister in 1809. Colleagues thought him worthy rather than brilliant. One observed, with a sailor’s eye for metaphor, “He is not a ship of the line, but he carries many guns, is tight built, and is out in all weathers.”
His government was formed during a difficult stretch of the Napoleonic Wars. The Walcheren expedition had gone badly. King George III lapsed into permanent incapacity in 1810 and the Prince of Wales became Regent. Perceval’s greatest strategic call was to keep Wellington’s army in the field in Portugal despite cost and cabinet doubts. In the long view this proved decisive. At home, however, the war economy and his hard line policies caused distress.
The Orders in Council of 1807, a British answer to Napoleon’s Continental System, allowed the Royal Navy to detain neutral ships trading with France and its allies. American trade suffered, British exports withered, and whole industries in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Birmingham and the Potteries endured grim times. Petitions poured into Parliament. More than a hundred witnesses told committees about unemployment, poverty and hunger. Riots broke out in Manchester in April 1812. Luddite machine breaking spread and Perceval made it a capital offence, a move denounced by Lord Byron as barbarous. The atmosphere was raw.
John Bellingham was not a radical firebrand. He was a clerk turned trader who had worked in Russia. In 1804 a disputed debt led to his arrest at Archangelsk. He believed he had been falsely imprisoned for reasons tied to a soured insurance claim and the hostility of local merchants. He appealed again and again to the British Embassy without success and spent years in custody, part of it after he had already been released once. His wife Mary returned to England to support their family. Bellingham finally came home in late 1809, uncompensated and angry. He petitioned the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the Privy Council, and the Prime Minister. Polite refusals followed. He told a Treasury official that if the door of justice remained closed he would take justice into his own hands. No one took the remark as a threat. He did exactly what he said.
London reacts
News of the assassination spread through Westminster and across the city within hours. A knot of people outside the Commons cheered as the arrested man was brought to a coach. Some tried to shake his hand. Others climbed onto the carriage and had to be beaten back with whips. William Cobbett, then in prison for seditious libel, wrote that the poor rejoiced that they had been rid of a man they saw as the leader of policies that hurt their liberties. The authorities feared a wider rising. Foot Guards and mounted troops patrolled the streets. The City militia turned out and local watches were strengthened.
In Parliament the mood was stunned and sorrowful. The next day George Canning spoke of a man who had provoked no enemies beyond the political. MPs voted a grant of fifty thousand pounds and a two thousand pound annuity for Perceval’s widow Jane and their twelve children. It was a generous provision for a family that had not been wealthy.
The inquest and a very swift trial
On Tuesday 12 May an inquest at the Rose and Crown in Downing Street returned a verdict of wilful murder. The Attorney General pushed for the earliest possible trial. On Friday 15 May, four days after the shooting, the case opened at the Old Bailey before Sir James Mansfield. The law at the time limited the role of defence counsel in capital cases. The Attorney General William Garrow assisted the prosecution. Henry Brougham declined to appear for the defence. Peter Alley acted instead, with Henry Revell Reynolds.
The prosecution laid out Bellingham’s past and his preparations. The gunsmith confirmed the sale of two pistols on 20 April. The tailor described the hidden pocket he had sewn. Numerous eyewitnesses described the shot and the calm that followed. Alley asked for a postponement to seek witnesses for an insanity defence. Mansfield refused. The trial continued.
When Bellingham spoke he thanked the Attorney General for discarding insanity. “I think it is far more fortunate that such a plea should have been unfounded, than it should have existed in fact.” He read his petition to the Prince Regent and argued that the British mission in St Petersburg had denied him justice years earlier. He said that if anyone had truly deserved the shot it was the former ambassador Lord Granville Leveson Gower rather than “that truly amiable and highly lamented individual, Mr Perceval.”
The judge directed the jury to the test then used for criminal insanity. The single question, he said, was whether at the time of the act the prisoner had a sufficient degree of understanding to distinguish right from wrong. The jury retired. They returned in about fifteen minutes with a verdict of guilty.
The sentence was delivered in the solemn tones of early nineteenth century justice. Bellingham was to be hanged by the neck until dead, his body then dissected and anatomised. He was executed at Newgate at eight in the morning on Monday 18 May. A large crowd gathered. Soldiers stood ready after rumours of a rescue. Bellingham climbed the steps quickly and without tremor. After the drop his body was taken to St Bartholomew’s Hospital for dissection by Sir William Clift, who meticulously recorded his findings so that to this day we know what he and the audience observed during the procedure.
The stomach contained a small quantity of fluid, "which seemed to be wine"
The bladder was empty and contracted
The brain was found to be "firm and sound throughout"
Reports noted that his clothes were later sold off to the curious at high prices. On the day before he died he wrote to his wife, “Nine hours more will waft me to those happy shores where bliss is without alloy.”
The wider story around 1812
The Orders in Council that had helped to create the sour public mood were repealed on 23 June 1812. The move came too late to ease relations with the United States. Within weeks came the declaration that began the War of 1812. At home the new administration of Lord Liverpool slowly moved away from some of Perceval’s hard line positions. Press freedoms widened. Campaigns for Catholic relief and parliamentary reform gathered pace. Enforcement against the illegal slave trade grew lax in these years despite Perceval’s earlier moral stance.
Yet Perceval’s insistence on keeping Wellington in the Peninsula mattered. That army would push north into Spain and toward the Pyrenees as the tide of the war turned. In that sense history gave some weight to his judgement. Still, his reputation faded. Charles Dickens later sniffed that he was a third rate politician scarcely fit to carry Lord Chatham’s crutch. What endured in the public mind was not policy but the shocking manner of his death.
Grief, memory, and debate
Perceval was buried at St Luke’s Church in Charlton and memorialised in Westminster Abbey, Lincoln’s Inn and Northampton. In July 2014 a brass plaque was installed in St Stephen’s Hall at the Palace of Westminster near the spot where he fell, replacing a cluster of patterned floor tiles that had once served as an unofficial marker. His family received the parliamentary grant and annuity that kept them from hardship.
Questions about the fairness of the trial arose quickly. Henry Brougham called the proceedings a disgrace to English justice. Later scholars have argued that the court rushed the case in the heat of public feeling, that an adjournment to gather evidence on Bellingham’s sanity should have been allowed, and that Mansfield’s summing up showed bias. A study in 2012 even floated the idea that Bellingham may have been encouraged or quietly supported by certain Liverpool mercantile interests who had suffered under Perceval’s economic policies. There is no firm evidence for a conspiracy and most historians do not accept the theory, but it continues to surface whenever the case is revisited.
There are also the smaller human threads. In the week before he died Perceval is said to have spoken of uneasy dreams and was urged to miss the sitting. He refused to be turned aside by a mere dream. The detail may be apocryphal, but it has clung to the story for two centuries because it feels so very British. We queue, we tut, we carry on. Even our only political assassination arrived without a mob, without a plot, with a single crack of a pistol in a marbled lobby and an assassin who politely waited to be arrested.
What remains
Spencer Perceval holds a singular place in British political history. He is the only Prime Minister to be murdered in office. His killer was not a revolutionary but a middle class merchant who decided that a closed door of justice justified a bullet. The country gasped, then resumed its business. The war went on. The Orders were repealed. A new ministry took shape. Monuments went up. A family grieved and was supported. And each May, those who know their history can still point to the corner of St Stephen’s Hall and picture a quiet Monday when Westminster lost a Prime Minister to a single shot.
Sources
Hansard Parliamentary Archives. Debates and reports, 11 to 12 May 1812.
Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Trial of John Bellingham, 15 May 1812.
The National Archives UK. Home Office and inquest papers on the assassination of Spencer Perceval.
British Library Newspapers. Contemporary coverage, May 1812.
BBC History. The assassination of Spencer Perceval; Orders in Council context.
Garnett, R. Spencer Perceval: The Prime Minister Who Was Murdered. London, 2012.
Goddard, Kathleen S. “The Trial of John Bellingham.” Analysis of procedure and insanity plea, 2004.
Linklater, Andro. Study of the commercial context and Liverpool reaction, 2012.
Westminster and Parliamentary Estates Directorate. St Stephen’s Hall memorial plaque notes, 2014.
Cobbett, William. Commentary from prison on public reaction to Perceval’s government, 1812.
