Spencer Perceval

Spencer Perceval served as the United Kingdom’s prime minister from October 1809 until he was killed in May 1812. He remains the only British prime minister ever assassinated. Perceval was a political ally of William Pitt the Younger, though he preferred to call himself a “friend of Mr. Pitt” rather than a Tory. He stood against Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, backed the war with Napoleon, and supported ending the Atlantic slave trade.

Born on 1 November 1762 in Audley Square, Mayfair, London, Perceval was the seventh son of the 2nd Earl of Egmont and the second son from the earl’s second marriage. His mother, Catherine Compton, Baroness Arden, was a great-granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Northampton. The name Spencer came from her family; her great-uncle Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington, had also been prime minister. Perceval’s father served briefly as First Lord of the Admiralty and was a political adviser to Frederick, Prince of Wales and King George III. When Perceval was eight, his father died. He attended Harrow School, where he was disciplined and hardworking, developed an interest in evangelical Anglicanism, and formed a lasting friendship with Dudley Ryder. After five years at Harrow, he followed his older brother Charles to Trinity College, Cambridge, won the English declamation prize, and graduated in 1782.

As the second son of a second marriage, Perceval received only £200 a year and had no inheritance to rely on. He chose law, studied at Lincoln’s Inn, and was called to the bar in 1786. His mother had died in 1783. He and his brother Charles, now Lord Arden, rented a house in Charlton, where they fell in love with two sisters living in the Percevals’ old childhood home. The sisters’ father, Sir Thomas Spencer Wilson, approved of the match between his eldest daughter Margaretta and the wealthy Lord Arden, but told Perceval—then a struggling barrister on the Midland Circuit—to wait until the younger daughter, Jane, turned 21. When Jane reached that age in 1790, Perceval’s career was still not thriving, and Sir Thomas still opposed the marriage. The couple eloped and married by special licence in East Grinstead, settling in lodgings above a carpet shop in Bedford Row before moving to Lindsey House, Linc