The Honourable William Henry Percy (24 March 1788 – 5 October 1855) was a British Royal Navy officer and politician.
[citation needed] He was made post captain on 21 March 1812, but his next command (of the 20 gun HMS Hermes during 1814, operating on the North American coast) came to grief when he lost 50 of his crew wounded or killed in an unsuccessful attack on Fort Bowyer, Mobile and then had to set fire to his own ship to keep her out of enemy hands.
Still, this was his last naval service, though he did carry back to England despatches announcing the British defeat at the Battle of New Orleans.
[1] For a while during his retirement he was a commissioner of excise and - thanks to the influence of his maternal aunt's stepson, the second Marquess of Exeter - he sat as Tory MP for Stamford, Lincolnshire from 1818 to 1826.
[citation needed] Percy died unmarried in October 1855, aged 67, at 8 Portman Square, London, his eldest brother's home.