reagh, and Charles Yorke, who had resigned slightly earlier for different reasons, by Lord Melville. Some other changes were made, and Perceval's power was apparently unshaken. Yet he soon met with rebuffs. He was deserted by his own party on the question of the prince's personal appointment of his friend ‘Jack’ Macmahon to the indefensible sinecure of the paymastership of widows' pensions, and later saw Banke's bill for the abolition of sinecure offices carried against him on second reading by nine votes. The fact that his brother, Lord Arden, held one of the best of the sinecure posts may perhaps account for the zeal with which Perceval opposed their extinction. His stolid resistance to all reforms was also preparing for him grave difficulties. The wisdom of the orders in council had long been in question, still more so their results. Perceval himself had never defended them in the abstract; he had openly avowed that they were forced on the government by the necessities of war. Complaints were now loud that, without injuring France, the orders were destroying English commerce. Brougham moved for an inquiry. Perceval spoke energetically, rallied his followers, and defeated the motion in March; but so numerous were the petitions against the orders from all the manufacturing districts that he had to concede the appointment of a committee in April.
There was a certain bankrupt named John Bellingham, a man of disordered brain, who had a grievance against the government originating in the refusal of the English ambassador at St. Petersburg to interfere with the regular process of Russian law under which he had been arrested. He had applied to Perceval for redress, and the inevitable refusal inflamed his crazy resentment. On Monday, 11 May, the House of Commons went into committee on the orders in council, and began to examine witnesses. Brougham complained of Perceval's absence, and he was sent for. As he passed through the lobby to reach the house, Bellingham placed a pistol to his breast and fired. Perceval was dead before a doctor could be found (see Jerdan, Autobiography, i. 23). He was buried on 16 May in Lord Egmont's family vault at Charlton. His large family was ill provided for; but the House of Commons voted him a monument in Westminster Abbey, and a grant to his family of 50,000l., and a further 2,000l. a year to his widow for life, with remainder to the eldest son, on whose succession the pension was to be increased to 3,000l.
Bellingham was tried at the Old Bailey on 15 May, and, the plea of insanity being set aside by the court, he was hanged on 18 May.
Perceval's friends had an unbounded admiration for his private character. As a friend and father he seems to have been blameless. He was pious, a student of the prophetical Scriptures, a diligent attendant at divine worship. Publicly, too, he was honest and disinterested, and his ability as a debater and administrator, and the courage and tenacity with which he fought difficult battles, are manifest. When he became prime minister he had practically no one but himself to rely on. Yet he carried on the government single-handed, prosecuted the war, defeated his opponents, and disarmed his critics. His conduct of the Peninsular war has been vehemently attacked by Colonel William Francis Patrick Napier [q. v.], who alleges that Wellington had occasion to complain of the inadequacy of the supplies sent him. The duke, however, informed Perceval's son in 1835 (see Walpole, Perceval, ii. 236) that he had made no such complaints, and had received every support the cabinet could give. He also told Charles Greville (Memoirs, 1st ser. iii. 271) that Napier was unfair to Perceval, and that although he had been short of money in the Peninsula, that was not the home government's fault. It was on other grounds that the Marquis of Wellesley resigned office in 1812 (cf. Memoir of J. C. Herries, i. 27 sqq.) The charge that Perceval during the Peninsular war was ‘afraid of throwing good money after bad,’ and that he ‘always took the money consideration first, and the moral consideration second,’ seems unfounded. A man of strong will and decisive character, he can, however, hardly be credited with possessing either ‘the information or the genius essential to an English minister at that momentous epoch.’ His word ‘became a law to his colleagues, and completely overruled the better judgment and more special experience of Lord Liverpool’ (Kebbel, History of Toryism, pp. 94–8). Many of the measures he advocated have been since discredited, and many of the evils he apprehended have proved illusory. In Alison's eyes (History of Europe, viii. 198) his great merit is that he stood forward as the champion of the protestant religion. To most students of history his conduct in that capacity is the part of his life which it best becomes his admirers to forget. His strenuous opposition to the Roman catholic claims seems now as ill-advised as his Jesuit's Bark Bill of 1807, and his fiscal policy was at best a makeshift. None the less, his dogged obstinacy was of great value to his country in the later periods of the Napoleonic struggle, and but for his
