On 11 May 1812, at about 5:15 pm, Spencer Perceval, the prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a Liverpool merchant with a grievance against the government.

Despite initial fears that the assassination might be linked to a general uprising, it transpired that Bellingham had acted alone, protesting against the government's failure to compensate him for his treatment a few years previously when he had been imprisoned in Russia for a trading debt.

Bellingham's lack of remorse, and apparent certainty that his action was justified, raised questions about his sanity, but at his trial he was judged to be legally responsible for his actions.After Perceval's death, Parliament made generous provision to his widow and children and approved the erection of monuments.

[1] Under the rule of primogeniture, Perceval had no realistic prospect of a family inheritance and needed to earn his living; on leaving Cambridge in 1783, he entered Lincoln's Inn to train as a lawyer.

In 1796, having refused the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland,[5] Perceval was elected to Parliament as the Tory member for Northampton, and won acclaim in 1798 with a speech defending William Pitt's government against attacks by the radicals Charles James Fox and Francis Burdett.

With both warring powers employing similar strategies, world trade shrank, leading to widespread hardship and dissatisfaction in key British industries, particularly textiles and cotton.

Petitions from key industrial regions, including Yorkshire, Lancashire, Birmingham, and the Staffordshire Potteries, were supported by testimonies from over one hundred witnesses who detailed the economic devastation, poverty, and widespread distress caused by the restrictions on trade.

[21] At home, Perceval upheld his earlier reputation as scourge of radicals, imprisoning Burdett and William Cobbett, the latter of whom continued to attack the government from his prison cell.

The family were then provided for by William Daw, Elizabeth's brother-in-law, a prosperous lawyer who arranged Bellingham's appointment as an officer cadet on board the East India Company's ship Hartwell.

Bellingham denied any responsibility for the debt; his detention, he thought, was an act of revenge by powerful Russian merchants who—erroneously—thought that he had frustrated an insurance claim relating to a lost ship.

[50] Bellingham's presence in the House of Commons lobby on 11 May caused no particular suspicion; he had made several recent visits, sometimes asking journalists to confirm specific ministers' identities.

[54][55] In the House, as the session began at 4:30 pm, the Whig MP Henry Brougham, a leading opponent of the 1807 Orders, drew attention to Perceval's absence and remarked that he ought to be there.

Smith only realised that the victim was Perceval when he turned the body face upwards,[57][58] having initially thought it was his friend William Wilberforce, an MP for Yorkshire, who had been shot.

[67] The pamphleteer William Cobbett, at the time imprisoned for seditious libel, understood their feelings; the shooting, he wrote, had "ridded them of one whom they looked upon as the leader among those whom they thought totally bent on the destruction of their liberties".

[68] The scenes outside the Palace of Westminster as Bellingham was taken out for transfer to Newgate were consistent with this mood; Samuel Romilly, the law reformer and MP for Wareham,[69] heard from the assembled crowd "the most savage expressions of joy and exultation ... accompanied with regret that others, and particularly the attorney general, had not shared the same fate".

[74] The regard in which Perceval was held by his peers was made evident in an anonymous 1812 poem, "Universal Sympathy, or, The Martyr'd Statesman":[75] Such was his private, such his public life, That all who differ'd in polemic strife, Or varied in opinion with his plan, Agreed with one accord to love the man.

[77] Armed with this verdict the Attorney General, Sir Vicary Gibbs, requested the Lord Chief Justice to arrange the earliest possible trial date.

[80] While awaiting their reports he learned from an informant that Bellingham's father had died insane;[81] he also heard evidence of his supposed derangement from Ann Billett, the prisoner's cousin, who had known him from childhood.

[82] On 14 May, a grand jury met in the Sessions House, Clerkenwell, and after hearing evidence from the eyewitnesses, found "a true Bill against John Bellingham for the murder of Spencer Perceval".

[84] When Bellingham received news of his forthcoming trial he asked Harmer to arrange for him to be represented in court by Brougham and Peter Alley, the latter an Irish lawyer with a reputation for flamboyance.

In his view the principal blame lay not with "that truly amiable and highly lamented individual, Mr Perceval", but with Leveson-Gower, the ambassador in St Petersburg who he felt had originally denied him justice, and who he said deserved the shot rather than the eventual victim.

[99] Mansfield then began his summing up, during the course of which he clarified the law: "The single question is whether at the time this act was committed, he possessed a sufficient degree of understanding to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong".

[106] The day before, he was visited by the Revd Daniel Wilson, curate at St John's Chapel, Bedford Row, a future Bishop of Calcutta who hoped that Bellingham would show true repentance for his act.

[108] Late on Sunday, Bellingham wrote a last letter to his wife, in which he appeared confident of his soul's destination: "Nine hours more will waft me to those happy shores where bliss is without alloy".

[119] Linklater cites Perceval's greatest achievement as his insistence on keeping Wellington's army in the field, a policy which helped to turn the tide in the Napoleonic Wars decisively in Britain's favour.

[120] Despite this, with the passage of time Perceval's reputation faded; Charles Dickens considered him "a third-rate politician scarcely fit to carry Lord Chatham's crutch".

[126] Bellingham's claim to have acted alone was accepted in court; Linklater's 2012 study posits that he could have been an agent of other interests—perhaps Liverpool merchants, who bore the main brunt of Perceval's economic policies and had much to gain by his demise.

[129] In 1828, The Times reported that Cornish industrialist landowner John Williams the Third (1753–1841) received a dream warning of Perceval's assassination on 2 or 3 May 1812, nearly ten days before the event, "correct in every detail".

[132][133] When he temporarily lost his seat in 1997—he regained it in 2001—his narrow defeat was widely regarded as arising from the intervention of Roger Percival, the candidate for the Referendum Party whose votes largely came from disgruntled Conservatives.

Despite the different spelling, media accounts asserted Percival's descent from the assassinated prime minister's family, and reported the defeat as a belated form of revenge.