Just Finished Reading: The Assassination of the Prime Minister – John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval by David C Hanrahan (FP: 2012) [215pp]

The Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Spencer Percival, was late for the debate. As he walked across the lobby in the Houses of Parliament on the evening of Monday 11^th May 1812 he greeted friends and political opponents alike with nods and a smile. Shortly after 5.15pm a man who had been patiently waiting, seated on a nearby bench, rose up, walked towards the Prime Minister as if to greet him in kind. Calmly he pulled out a loaded pistol, pointed it at the Prime Minister’s chest and pulled the trigger. Within a few moments the Prime Minister was dead and John Bellingham was in custody. Within two days Bellingham would stand trial for the murder which, he explained, was to ‘gain his day in court’ to have grievances addressed which he had tried for many months to have the government look into. Shuffled from department to department with no prospect of restitution of his perceived losses from business dealings in Russia he felt that he had no alternative but to shoot, and quite possibly kill, a major government figure to get the attention he believed he deserved. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister he was the first major figure Bellingham saw that evening. Four days later, only six days after the assassination John Billingham was hanged for his crime but was justice served? Was Bellingham in his correct mind during the attack? Why was the trial and execution so swift that witnesses from Liverpool, who arrived only hours after the short trial had finished, not allowed to speak in his defence?

This was a rather strange little book. I was aware that a Prime Minister had indeed been assassinated in the 19^th century but wasn’t entirely sure who or when. As part of my PM reading quest (or at least sort of as I’m supposedly concentrating on 20^th century Prime Ministers initially!) I thought this book was too good to miss. It is a rather bizarre tale – reasonably if sometimes annoyingly told. Bellingham had no direct issue with the PM. He just wanted to create the situation where the authorities HAD to question his motives and therefore, he assumed, resolve his outstanding case in his favour. The actual death of the Prime Minister was incidental to the whole affair. Unfortunately for Bellingham the defence of ‘guilty but insane’ had yet to appear on the statue books and so legal insanity was not a defence he could have offered. Indeed although his lawyers tried to argue this defence Bellingham himself refuted it. Was he insane? Possibly. His action in assassinating the Prime Minister had no direct linkage with his outstanding disagreement with the government and, it seemed for several years preceding the attack, he had been badgering various departments by letter or by arranging meeting with various officials. It seems that Bellingham developed an idee fixe that totally dominated his world. The only way to discharge it was at the pull of a trigger.

This short work was essentially in two halves. The first was a potted biography of Spencer Perceval and his political career as well as the foundations of Bellingham’s apparent case against the British government. The second half consisted largely of transcripts of the trial, the execution and aftermath. The problem I had here is that much of the evidence Bellingham presented – in those days in British courts the lawyers advised the defendant (who essentially presented his own case to the judge) without addressing the court directly – had already been covered in part one so seemed to be rather redundant. Overall an interesting read regarding a unique event in British political history.