History Today Vol. 2 - April 1952 - British Prime Ministers : VIII

By ROGER FULFORD - A Monthly Magazine Published From 72 Coleman Street London E.C. 2 -

SPENCER PERCEVAL

		AT THE CLOSE of the obsequies in Westminster Abbey for Mr. Bonar Law, Prime Minister for 209 days, Mr. Asquith was said to have observed that "it is not inappropriate that the Unknown Warrior and the Unknown Prime Minister should be close together." Indeed, some might argue that Bonar Law was the least conspicuous Prime Minister since the days of Perceval or "Goody" Goderich. And of all the dim Prime Ministers of the past century and a half perhaps the dimmest is Spencer Perceval - though just for a moment, as we recall the pistol pressed to his breast in the House of Commons, he stands out vividly in our minds. Though he became Prime Minister while still under 50, his career was solid rather than spectacular or even remarkable. He was a younger son of that Lord Egmont who was prominent in the eighteenth-century Tory party and who was supposed never to have laughed, although he did once smile when playing chess. The present holder of the title, who received much publicity in the press some years ago as " the Rancher Earl," is descended from the Prime Minister. He was one of the English Prime Ministers who, escaping the enervating vapours of Eton, have found strength, through life, from their boyhood days spent amidst the brisker air of Harrow. He passed through Trinity, Cambridge, without especial distinction, although he was able, in after-life, to shower a bishopric, a lucrative rectory and the mastership of Trinity upon his tutor - the worthy and witty Mansel.
Spencer Perceval

On coming down from Cambridge he was called to the Bar. In spite of powerful connections, Perceval's fortune was meagre and he was grateful to accept an agreeable little sinecure at the Mint known as "The Surveyorship of the Meltship and Clerkship of the Irons." Here he succeeded George Selwyn - a prop of White's Club in its more halcyon days and a true wit.  

Perceval's talents were certainly not dazzling ones - but he had that blend of sense and steadiness which is calculated to appeal to the conservative mind. He was clear and forthright, employing a style both in writing and speaking which was pure, simple and Anglicized as one of his political opponents was quick to notice. His gifts and opinions brought him, while still in his twenties, to the favourable notice of Pitt, and it was found possible to divert in his direction highly-marked briefs to appear for the Crown in the prosecutions of Paine and Horne Tooke - the latter one of the most discreditable and hysterical trials in English history. In the course of it a witness made an interesting refinement on the definition of a fellow-traveller; he said that Tooke might travel in the same coach to Windsor with potential regicides, but would be certain to step off at Hounslow.

These harsh legal activities did not make Perceval an acceptable figure in the eyes of the Whig Opposition when he entered the House of Commons for Northampton in 1796. But his competence brought him at once to the front rank in Parliament, while he was able to continue a very lucrative practice at the Bar. Becoming Solicitor-General under Addington in 1801, he was successfully able to resist the knighthood, which is obligatory for holders of that office, on the ground that he was the son of a nobleman. Later he was appointed Attorney-General and while holding this office he appeared for the Crown in the prosecution of Cobbett for libelling the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Hardwicke, whose head (according to Cobbett) was constructed of timber. Unpalatable as were these and other legal activities of Perceval to the Opposition, they had to recognize that in debate he was the only support of the Addington Ministry. Brougham - his oldest friend but staunchest political enemy - was amazed at the way in which he stood up to the combined attacks of Pitt and Fox. He continued as Attorney-General under Pitt but resigned on his old chief's death and took no place in the" Government of All The Talents." On the fall of that Government over the Roman Catholic issue, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Duke of Portland in an administration pledged to obstruct any step away from political or religious darkness. The Duke of Portland was an interesting Prime Minister: in the closing months of his premiership he could transact no business, read nothing and endure no conversation. When he was not in severe pain, he was fast asleep. With such a chief, the opportunities for his lieutenants were ample, and Perceval gained great authority. He was, indeed, the obvious successor, and became Prime Minister in the autumn of 1809.

His Cabinet was miserably weak. Both Canning and Castlereagh, who had each some claims to the leadership, resigned and such strength as the Government had lay in the Lords. Yet Spencer Perceval survived. He carried through with a high hand (though he was then still Chancellor of the Exchequer) the disgraceful proceedings in the House of Commons over Mrs. Clarke and the Duke of York, he supported the war in the Peninsula, he strangled the Frenchman's trade with Orders in Council, and all the time his Government was poised on the trembling balance of King George III's sanity. But when that sovereign became finally insane, Perceval was, after all, retained in office by the Regent. Students of the Diary of that eager placeman, Creevy, will remember his horror when, strolling past Perceval's house, he sniffed the preparations for a vast banquet, realized that the Regent was to be a guest and knew that the Whig hopes of office were dashed for years. The complicated and long-drawn-out negotiations between the Prince and the Whig leaders, which belong to the history of the Regent rather than to that of Perceval, need not be discussed here; but the Prince undoubtedly felt that Perceval was not an altogether unworthy choice, and that a change of government would possibly have been disastrous to the prosecution of the war.

In 1812, with the question of royal favour satisfactorily settled and with the admission of Castlereagh to the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary, Perceval seemed to have reached less-troubled waters.

But on May 12 of that year, he was killed in the lobby by Bellingham's pistol - probably the most dramatic, though not the most publicized, of parliamentary occasions. The noise of the disturbance reached the placid reaches of the House of Lords and was received in characteristic style, one peer turning to his neighbour and saying, "There's that wretched madman who thinks he's the Duke of Norfolk." When the truth became ' known, most of the peers turned a ghastly hue, overwhelmed with honor; and one, aptly recalling his Shakespeare, asked, "Look I so pale, Lord Dorset, as the rest ?"

Yet the shot and cry which rang through the lobby of the House of Commons were no prelude to revolution: they were more precisely the outcome of the inscrutable tyranny of Russia. Bellingham was an English trader with Russia, and on visiting the country he was immediately dapped into prison for two years for no accountable reason. Rather oddly, he decided that the English authorities were to blame for his treatment, and it is supposed that he really intended to kill the member of Parliament for Staffordshire, who had been ambassador at St. Petersburg. Thus, a few months before he was 50, Perceval died, and it is curious to speculate what would have been his standing in history had he lived to lead the country through the triumph of Waterloo and into the difficult years of peace beyond. As it is he must stand or fall for posterity by his achievements during the decade in which he held high office.

Spencer Perceval was a Conservative, with all the merits and all the limitations which are the requisite of sincere adherents to that cause. There is to-day a popular and respected school of historical writers - drawing much of their inspiration from that select but quarrelsome academy off the High Street at Oxford - which seeks to enlarge the merits of Conservative politicians and to magnify their private virtues into public ones. Such also was - the fashion in real life in the 1920'S and 1930'S. Of Perceval's amiability in private life there can be no doubt. He was happily married, and his wife presented him 'with six sons and six daughters. The maintenance of this hungry tribe of sturdy children is the explanation of one of the difficulties by which he was encumbered. He was earning £5,000 a year at the Bar, and it was essential for him to have lucrative posts in the Government when he had to give up practice at the Bar. In order to feed the ravenous Percevals it was seriously proposed in Parliament that he should be appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for life. Even the easy-going temper of the pre-Reformed House of Commons could not approve of this, and it was agreed that he should hold it " during pleasure." But there was something in the reason which made Perceval want money that strongly appealed to an Englishman's sense of respectability. The country felt safe in the hands of this paterfamilias in much the same way that it felt safe a century later with a Prime Minister who enjoyed scratching the backs of his pigs in Worcestershire.

Yet this is perhaps the greatest humbug of politics and it was clearly revealed in all its absurdity in one of Peter Plymley's Letters written by Sydney Smith: "I say, I fear he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interest of his country: and then you tell me he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals. These are, undoubtedly, the first qualifications to be looked to in a time of the most serious public danger; but somehow or another (if public and private virtues must always be incompatible) I should prefer that he destroyed the domestic happiness of Wood and Cockell [a pair of reactionary lawyers ], owed for the veal of the preceding years, whipped his boys and saved his country."

One other of Spencer Perceval's private virtues certainly deserves to be stressed. He was a devout and faithful son of the Church of England and having regard to the crumpled appearance of many a modern Cabinet, viewed in this particular light, we should be wrong not to pay respect to Perceval's opinions. He was not only a regular worshipper in church, but a careful student of the prophetical books of the Old Testament - almost a species of British Israelite who attempted to interpret the character of Bonaparte in the light of some of the more obscure passages in the Book of Daniel. It was yet customary in those happy times for the House of Commons to attend church on January 30 - as a sign of contrition for the execution of King Charles I. On leaving one of these memorial services Perceval was heard to observe that " the attendance is discreditably thin." His churchmanship encouraged him, as chancellor of the Exchequer, to introduce a Curates' Salary Bill - an effort to level some of the anomalies between beneficed and un-beneficed clergy. Although Sydney Smith dismissed the bill as an effort to make curates "convex and rosy" and to give them "a pseudo-rectorial appearance," the measure was certainly designed to remedy a serious abuse in the Church. Holding those views, Perceval's hostility to any concession to the Roman Church (which naturally endeared him to King George III) becomes an understandable and even respectable point of view. It was on this issue of concessions to the Roman Catholics that the Ministry of All the Talents fell, and it is an interesting reminder of the way in which the King could still be used in party politics that in his address to his constituents in Northampton, Perceval wrote:

"Though it is a peculiarly sacred duty in His Majesty to defend the established religion of his kingdom from all approach of danger, yet it must, I am persuaded, be felt by you to be the common duty and interest of us all."

This use of King and Church as a political rallying cry caused great offence to the opponents of the Tories, and Sydney Smith expressed their general feeling when he said that the evil consequences of the strong religious principles of the English was that "any villain who will bawl out 'The Church is in danger !' may get a place and a good pension : and any administration who will do the same thing may bring a set of men into power who, at a moment of stationary and passive piety, would be hooted by the very boys in the street."

To Spencer Perceval's reputation posterity has not been kind. The gravest charge made against him is that he was half-hearted in his support of Wellington in the Peninsula - a charge brought with great force in that striking book (to which many of us refer but which few of us have read), Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula. The curious should certainly look at Napier 's strictures on Perceval and at the reply by the statesman's son Dudley Montagu Perceval. The typically generous judgment of Wellington, in old age, to the Diarist Greville hardly disposes of the matter.

With characteristic tartness Disraeli summed up in Sybil the politics of England after the death of Pitt as " a history of great events and little men." He was, of course, partly influenced to this point of view by the fact that Perceval excluded Canning for whom Disraeli had that kind of heady affection which has inspired many academic historians in our own day. Of Perceval, Canning wrote to an intimate, "his conduct has been such as appears to my mind irreconcilable with any principle of good faith, public or private." And politicians who, whether by fair means or foul (as political history in the past 30 years has shown) occupy high place at the expense of men of genius and brilliance are bound to be severely handled by posterity. A celebrated Victorian ambassador wrote," Mr. Perceval's mediocrity, indeed, was repulsive to men of comprehensive views ; but, on the other hand, it was peculiarly attractive to men of narrow-minded prejudices." And Landor had the same point in mind when he made Perceval say in one of the Imaginary Conversations, "Whenever we doubt whether a thing may be done, let us resolve that it may not."

Against these and countless other unfavourable judgments at the hands of his contemporaries must be placed his competence and imperturbability as leader of the House of Commons. An intimate friend of his said that if he had not been bred a lawyer he would probably have risen to the character of a great man. It is curious how strong were the prejudices against the law ; Lord Aberdeen, the nineteenth-century Foreign Secretary, remarks that he was not sure of Perceval's honesty for he had been a lawyer. But if his training caused uncertainty about his intentions, it was an enormous help to him as a manager of the House of Commons and as a debater. Grattan summed him up when he said, "He is not a ship-of-the-line, but he carries many guns, is tight built, and is out in all weathers." It would be impossible to argue, however, that Perceval was a great leader. He was rather spokesman in the House of Commons for the somewhat incoherent Tory majority and for the weighty reactionary noblemen who ruled their respective spheres of Government as equals with him. Mr. Gladstone expressed this very clearly in a conversation he had with Peel just after the latter fell from power; he said to Peel, meaning that he had controlled all the departments of his Government, "You have been prime minister in a sense in which no other man has been it since Mr. Pitt's time," and he added, "Mr. Perceval, Lord Liverpool and Lord Melbourne were not prime ministers in this sense." Certainly Perceval was not.

And when all is said and done, the reputation of any politician must stand or fall by the measures which he sponsors. Whether Perceval was full-blooded or faint-hearted over the Peninsular war is of far less consequence than the Orders in Council for which he was certainly responsible. These orders caused measureless suffering among the industrial population of England and were of doubtful efficacy as a weapon against Napoleon. In commenting on this policy while he was still a member of the House of Commons, Lord Grey compared Perceval with the monkey who, in return for the stones which Sindbad threw at them, pelted him with the coco-nuts which he wanted but could not reach. Dispassionately surveying Perceval's rigid policy and recalling the exultation with which the news of his death was received in the North of England, some would feel that his murder was not unmerciful. There are massive crimes against humanity, which are not covered up by cheering majorities or by competence in debate. With these Perceval can fairly be charged and they justify the comment on his death made by the most magnanimous and broadminded of his opponents - Lord Holland - " Nothing but a dread that my words may be distorted into an attempt to palliate an atrocious crime makes me hesitate in pronouncing his death (as in my conscience I think it) a very fortunate event for the glory, happiness and independence of my country."