PERCEVAL, Spencer (1795-1859), of Elm Grove, Ealing, Mdx.

Perceval had displayed precocious oratorical talent at Harrow, where his preparations for speech day in May 1812 were interrupted by news of the assassination of his father, the prime minister. In the wave of sympathy that followed, he obtained an exchequer tellership worth £2,700 a year, an annuity of £1,000 and a reversionary interest in his mother’s allowance, becoming, as he later admitted to the House, 14 Feb. 1831, ‘the very child and creature of the nation’s bounty’. ‘Pessy’, as he was known by his family, had survived a life-threatening bowel disorder in early infancy to grow into ‘a hearty child’, and at his father’s death he promised his mother ‘as far as in me lies to imitate him’. Though there was little immediate evidence of this, he ultimately did more than enough to fulfil a paternal injunction to be ‘a champion of true religion in a careless world’. Ibid. ff. 7-8, 37; 52 Geo. III, c. 67; D. Gray, Spencer Perceval. The Evangelical Prime Minister, 12, 45, 429-31, 456, 461, 463. His interest in Scripture is first evident in his surviving correspondence from 1821, and between 1825 and 1830 he attended the annual multi-denominational conferences held at the Albury residence of his distant kinsman Henry Drummond†, where he met Edward Irving, the Scottish divine, under whose fanatical influence he eventually fell. Add. 49191, ff. 101-9; R. A. Davenport, Albury Apostles, 21, 25, 32, 36; A.L. Drummond, Edward Irving and his Circle, 126, 133-5. Yet for a while his interests were wide. He corresponded on the subject of free will with George Combe, the Scottish phrenologist, and was evidently impressed with his advocacy of the fashionable pseudo-science. Add. 49191, f. 122; B. Hilton, Age of Atonement, 189-202. In June 1828, John Croker*, the admiralty secretary, described a ‘dull enough’ dinner party at Lord Farnborough’s, at which Perceval was ‘preaching craniology’ and ‘took my head in hand’, and by feeling the ‘bumps ... found that I was a lover of ghost stories, the only stories, if I know myself, which I do not care about!’. Croker Pprs. i. 425. Politically, Perceval showed liberal leanings in his support for Canning’s ministry, repeal of the Test Acts and Catholic emancipation, but with the millenarian convictions that took hold of him after 1830 came increasing conservatism. His later parliamentary performances resembled that of a seventeenth century sectarian and after 1832 he found a fresh vocation as a leader of the proto-fundamentalist Catholic Apostolic Church.

Perceval, who did not stand at the 1820 general election, had exhibited an independent streak in the 1818 Parliament and his reputation with ministers was not enhanced during the trial of Queen Caroline in October 1820, when he was said to have been the supplier of a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost which was used to effect by Henry Brougham*. In May 1821 Croker suggested him as a candidate for an under-secretaryship at the home office, but noted that it was ‘without any expectation that he could be seriously thought of yet; his late unsteady conduct is not forgotten’ and ‘a place at one of the boards would suit him better’. Ibid. i. 187; Greville Mems. i. 133. That July he married ‘Nancy’ MacLeod, the daughter of a Highland clan chief and the subject of a love poem he had written in 1809, to ‘the lovely nymph who scarcely yet has seen/Revolving years to make her age thirteen’. Add. 49191, f. 1. In October 1822 he announced his candidacy for a vacancy for Cambridge University, an ambition he had apparently cherished for some time. Cambridge Chron. 1 Nov. 1822; Suff. RO (Bury St. Edmunds) 1641/13; Hervey mss 941/11a, Ryder to Bristol, 25 Oct. 1822. Given his family background and earlier vote against Catholic relief, there was surprise when he was portrayed as a supporter of Catholic claims, while a less credible rumour circulated that he was also favourable to parliamentary reform. The duke of Bedford remarked acidly that ‘the Whig interest must be at a low ebb ... if they cannot find a better candidate’, and Perceval soon withdrew from a crowded field with the intention of coming forward at a future time. Harewood mss, C. Williams Wynn to Canning, 2 Nov.; Add. 49191, f. 118; 51567, Bedford to Lady Holland [1 Nov. 1822]. This never transpired, though a letter from his brother-in-law John Norman MacLeod* implies that he may have vainly sought another seat at the 1826 general election. Macleod of Macleod mss 1061/5.

Following the formation of Canning’s ministry in 1827 Perceval was appointed as an under-secretary to William Sturges Bourne at the home office. On 7 May he chastised Robert Peel for failing to distance himself from Tory attacks on the fledgling administration, whose patchwork composition was ‘the result of your own secession’, and opined that

considerable advantage may be derived from an admission of the more moderate Whigs into office, to cast down that barrier which has hitherto appeared to forbid the hopes of their ever coming into power ... to take out of their mouths the language of opposition; to snatch their children from the education of opposition. These are things of no mean importance, and if effected without too great a sacrifice must tend to the benefit and support of our most valuable establishments. Add. 49191, f. 125.

On Canning’s personal recommendation, Perceval was returned on a vacancy for Newport, Isle of Wight at the end of May. Canning’s Ministry, 336. On 1 June he introduced a bill for the consolidation of Irish parishes and laid before the House details of convictions under the game laws. He voted against the bill to disfranchise the corrupt borough of Penryn, 7 June, and in favour of a grant for Canadian waterways, 12 June. He presented a report from the commission of inquiry into the state of education in Ireland, 18 June. The Times, 19 June 1827. Writing next day to his sister Fanny, he warned her against forcing her antipathy to Canning’s administration on their brother Dudley and questioned her rigid notions of political ideology, noting, by way of illustration, the difference between the principles of Pitt and those of the clubs which bore his name. Recalling his own defiance of Lord Castlereagh* over the seditious meetings bill in 1819, he observed, ‘I was called a radical, cut by his lordship and his wife; the shoulders of my own kith and kin shrugged at my name. I had forsaken my father’s principles! Beastly, senseless, cruel, cant’. Add. 40191, f. 124. When Sturges Bourne surrendered the seals of the home office to the Whig Lord Lansdowne in July 1827, Perceval too lost his place.

He voted for repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb. 1828, but two days later supported Peel’s call for an adjournment as evidence of the Wellington ministry’s willingness to entertain the proposal. He was in the minority against charging a witness before the East Retford election committee with perjury, 7 Mar., and spoke against the Battersea enclosure bill, 31 Mar. In April he assisted in the Sudbury by-election campaign of his brother-in-law, who ungratefully remarked that ‘except for his name he was of no great use’. Macleod of Macleod mss 1062/13. MacLeod was a rabid opponent of Catholic relief, but in line with his previously rumoured alteration in his views, Perceval voted in favour of the measure, 12 May, when he explained that he had given a hostile vote in 1819 in spite of a growing conviction of its practical necessity, but nonetheless sought to rescue diehard anti-Catholics from the imputation of bigotry and denounced the Catholic faith as ‘a foul pollution of the word of God’. For this ‘peculiarly piquant and useful’ speech, Lord Seaford reported that there was ‘much praise’. TNA 30/29/9/5/65. Perceval presented a constituency petition against restrictions on the circulation of £1 notes, 3 June, and voted against ordnance reductions, 4 July 1828. He had been listed by Lord Palmerston* among the Canningite liberal rump that June and his appointment as a clerk of ordnance in August raised eyebrows. Lord Ellenborough, the lord privy seal, considered it a ‘doubtful’ decision, and the duke of Rutland uncharitably speculated that as ‘a Saint, and the worst species of Catholic supporter’, Perceval had secured office only ‘because he is a rat from the other side’. Bulwer, Palmerston, i. 278-9; Ellenborough Diary, i. 204; Aberdeen Univ. Lib. Arbuthnot mss, Rutland to Mrs. Arbuthnot, 21 Sept. 1828. The duke of Wellington, however, commended Perceval to the king as ‘likely to distinguish himself in the House’. Wellington mss WP1/945/19. Defending the ordnance estimates for the first time, 2 Mar. 1829, he referred all detailed enquiries to Sir Henry Hardinge, the war secretary, and dismissed Hume’s suggestions for economies out of hand. Presumably from the resonance of his name, he was chosen by the ministry to act as a teller for resuming the debate on Catholic claims, which passed by 206-73, 6 Mar., and he voted for the third reading of their emancipation bill, 30 Mar. Yet he swallowed the grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth only ‘on the understanding that we are never again to be called upon to grant money for this purpose’, 22 May. He sponsored the Hampstead Heath enclosure bill on behalf of his cousin Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson and answered objections, 3, 12 June, but eventually bowed to pressure to withdraw it, 19 June. He defended the introduction of admission charges to the Tower of London armoury, 22 June 1829.

Perceval voted against the transfer of East Retford’s seats to Birmingham, 11 Feb., parliamentary reform, 18 Feb., and the enfranchisement of Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester, 23 Feb. 1830. He defended government expenditure on arms manufacture, 25 Mar, and, with reference to the financial committee audit, the ordnance estimates as a whole, 29 Mar. Sir James Graham, who moved for a reduction, nevertheless congratulated him on his efforts to simplify the accounts. Perceval explained that the lack of significant economies in his departmental budget was due to a growth in its responsibilities, 2 Apr., when he again ridiculed Hume’s proposed retrenchments, but acceded to his demand to discuss the salary grant under separate headings. That day he argued that the manufacture of musket barrels should remain in government hands for reasons of economy. He denied the existence of an overproduction of gunpowder, 5 Apr. On 30 Apr. he defended regimental grants and would have refused Hume’s request to vote on the extraordinary estimates in sections, but for the intervention of Goulburn, the chancellor of the exchequer. He argued that the Commons should remain a Christian assembly and was a minority teller against the introduction of a bill for Jewish emancipation, 5 Apr., and voted against its second reading, 17 May, when his attempt to explain further was drowned out by an impatient House. He was in minorities against the Galway franchise bill, 24, 25 May. He voted for the grant for South American missions, 7 June, and was a government teller for an address to the king on arrangements for the dissolution, 30 June. In July 1830 he was offered a seat on the admiralty board, but opted to remain at the ordnance. Ibid. WP1/1125/37; 1130/53.

At the 1830 general election Perceval was re-elected for Newport at the behest of ministers. He was, of course, listed among their ‘friends’ and he voted with them in the crucial division on the civil list, 15 Nov. The fall of the ministry deprived him of office and appears to have triggered his descent into political and moral panic. Ellenborough recorded how at a ‘dinner at the duke’s’, 15 Dec. 1830, Perceval had given ‘a frightful account of the atheism he had heard applauded in the morning at the Rotunda, where [Robert] Owen ... spoke’. Three Diaries, 35. On 4 Feb. 1831 Perceval reminded the House of the importance of the oath of abjuration to the preservation of the Protestant ascendancy. Three days later he clashed with Hunt over his own proposal for a general fast. Privately, he advised John Hobhouse* that he ‘believed such a supplication might bring down a special interposition of Providence in our favour, just as Nineveh was saved of old’. Hobhouse, conscious of ‘how much we English are indebted to fanaticism for our liberties ... did not smile at this’, but came to the conclusion that on such matters, Perceval was ‘not of sound mind, although on all others perfectly rational’. Broughton, Recollections, iv. 79. He presented petitions for ‘a day of fasting, public humiliation and prayer’, 8, 10 Feb. Introducing his motion for an address to the crown on the subject, 14 Feb., he warned that

the whole country is in a complete state of disorganisation; all the elements of society appear to be loose and disjointed; there is no attachment on the part of the people to their rulers ... The ancient and venerable institutions of the country ... which were once the proud boast of every Englishman, are now viewed with disregard ... My conviction is ... that a scourge is going forth over all lands ... that great troubles, tumults, convulsions and struggles are about to take place all over the world, and that they are inevitable.

The culprit, he concluded, was ‘the very essence of liberalism which walks abroad’, and which ‘has shown itself in the late French revolution most distinctly’. Lord Althorp believed that further discussion of the motion in the Commons would be constitutionally inappropriate, and Perceval, nonplussed, withdrew it. Some marks of impatience were exhibited during the speech, though Thomas Gladstone* informed his father that ‘Perceval gained great credit for the manly manner in which he brought forward his misplaced and I think foolish motion’. St. Deiniol’s Lib. Glynne-Gladstone mss 197, T. to J. Gladstone, 15 Feb. 1831. He was an implacable opponent of the Grey ministry’s reform bill, but refuted claims that he belonged to ‘a party opposing ourselves to light, intelligence and information’, 3 Mar. On 9 Mar. he condemned the measure as ‘the greatest act of folly ever committed by any minister’ and ‘a death blow to the monarchy’, and in defence of his argument that it was ‘revolutionary’, insisted that ‘the very foundation of all society rests upon the surrender, by men, of all their natural rights to the appointed leaders of the state’. Accordingly, he regarded the abolition of close boroughs as a misbegotten product of empirical reasoning, though he was prepared to concede that representation should be granted to large industrial towns. His concluding diatribe against the ‘corrupt and unprincipled’ daily press was answered the following day by the Morning Chronicle’s ironic report of his closing words of thanks to God, who had ‘permitted him to defend the commission of bribery and corruption’. Stung by a charge that he had insulted his constituents, he later published the speech with an address to them. Speech of Spencer Perceval ... on the reform bill (1831). He supported Inglis’s complaint of a breach of privilege against The Times, 21 Mar. He voted against the second reading of the reform bill, 22 Mar., and for Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. A contemporary caricature depicted him as a rat seated on a sack bulging with money, labelled with the name of his sinecure office. M.D. George, Cat. of Pol. and Personal Satires, xi. 16612.

At the 1831 general election Perceval was returned for Tiverton by Lord Harrowby in place of his son Lord Sandon, who had supported the reform bill. The Times, 11 Aug. 1831. On discovering that his speech on the general fast had been ‘made a matter of reproach against me’, he arranged for it to be published for the edification of his new constituents. Speech delivered in the House of Commons ... by Spencer Perceval ... on moving an Address to the Crown for the appointment of a General Fast (1831). He voted against the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 6 July, and, though happy with government assurances that the ‘principle of fair discussion’ would be maintained in committee, urged them to accede to demands for an adjournment and voted accordingly, 12 July. He divided for the use of the 1831 census to determine the disfranchisement schedules, 19 July, and to postpone consideration of the inclusion of Chippenham in B, 27 July. Two days later he used the speech of Gisborne, Member for Stafford, to prove that ‘the House is not led by ministers in this wild and mischievous measure of reform, but is blindly following a popular cry’. He warned against using population as the determinant of representation, ‘rather than ... those most important interests into which a great country like this is divided’, 4 Aug., and voted against the passage of the bill, 21 Sept. He spoke and was a minority teller against the Maynooth grant, 26 Sept., when he described the amused reaction to his violent denunciation of Catholicism as ‘proof of the degeneracy of the present Protestant race’. He criticized Lord John Russell for addressing Thomas Attwood’s meeting in Birmingham following the Lords’ rejection of the reform bill, but distanced himself from the intemperate attack on ministers made by Sir Charles Wetherell, 12 Oct. He voted against the second reading of the revised reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831, and going into committee on it, 20 Jan. 1832. He suggested that body snatching might best be prevented by a two-year suspension of all dissections, 17 Jan. 1832.

As promised, 6 Dec. 1831, Perceval revived his motion for a general fast, 26 Jan. 1832, in what Edward Littleton* described as a ‘conscientious but crazy speech’ lasting almost two hours. The public gallery was cleared for the first time in some 18 years at his behest, and with Bible in hand, he warned the Members present (who were few in number on his own side of the House) that the cholera epidemic was a ‘pestilence’ and that the day of judgement was at hand. Hatherton diary, 26 Jan. 1832; Le Marchant, Althorp, 388-9. His performance was a gift to cartoonists, and despite the absence of reporters was widely published in newspapers, ‘with the object of throwing ridicule’, as he protested, 31 Jan. (After Hume and Warburton had admitted to providing transcriptions, he took the matter no further.) George, xi. 16943, 17021, 17155, 17197. A fast day was duly appointed by the government for 21 Mar., though Perceval called in vain for it to be brought forward ‘now that the pestilential disease has reached London’, 16 Feb. He was listed as a founder member of the Carlton Club in early March, but he had clearly lost faith in political opposition to the march of liberalism, and with the reform bill poised to obtain its third reading, unleashed his most alarming performance yet on a bemused Commons, 20 Mar. Ignoring Althorp’s invitation to move an adjournment, he raged against the godlessness of the House and the ‘mockery’ made of the approaching fast day:

Will ye not listen for a few moments to one who speaketh in the name of the Lord? I stand here to warn you of the righteous judgement of God which is coming on you, and which is now near at hand ... Twice have ye, the Commoners of England, refused to humble yourselves before your God. Mark! mark! how your God hath caused ye to show your contempt of him! Ye have in the midst of you a scourge of pestilence, which hath crossed the world to reach ye. Ye brought a bill into the House to retard its approaches, and ye refused in that bill to insert a recognition of your God. Ye would not make an acknowledgement of His providence, and yet ye cast His name out of your book. I told ministers it was not God they worshipped. The people is the God before whom they bow down in absurd and degraded worship.

At this juncture several colleagues urged Perceval to desist, and government and opposition managers conspired to arrange a mass exodus. After he had descanted on the imminence of the apocalypse and condemned the established church as corrupt (‘She hath played the harlot with the stranger; and she has leant on the arm of flesh for her support’), he finally ran out of steam, and an adjournment was secured after the gallery was cleared. Not surprisingly, the speech drew much comment. Littleton described it as ‘a dreadful exhibition of fanaticism’, adding that Perceval was ‘clearly labouring under temporary derangement’, which he blamed squarely on the malign influence of Irving. Hatherton diary, 21 Mar. 1832. Robert Throckmorton* reported similar views and noted that ‘he is looking quite thin and worn like a madman’. Warws. RO, Throckmorton mss CR 1998/Tribune/folder 16/51 [22 Mar. 1832]. A different view was taken by John Heywood Hawkins*, who had conjectured that Perceval was ‘rapidly progressing towards the occupation of a straight waistcoat’ after his performance in January, but now conceded that there was ‘method in his madness - he took good care to make just so frequent allusions to the reform bill as were sufficient to prevent the Speaker from calling him to order for deviating from the subject’. Cornw. RO, Hawkins mss 10/2179, 2189. At all events, he succeeded in delaying its third reading, against which he voted, 22 Mar. It was with a prescience not suggestive of mental illness that he identified the rock on which the ministry would eventually split on 30 Apr., when in response to his probing, Smith Stanley, the Irish secretary, expressed his personal opposition to the appropriation of Irish church revenues for lay purposes, but declined to speak for the government when pressed. He was in minorities against the second reading of the Irish reform bill, 25 May, the Russian-Dutch loan, 12 July, and the Irish education grant, 23 July. In his last known speech he branded Hume’s petitioning efforts on behalf of convicted blasphemers as ‘disgraceful’ and emptied the House in the process, 15 Aug. 1832.

Perceval evidently made no attempt to re-enter the Commons after 1832. On 14 Dec. 1833 he was called as an ‘apostle’ of the nascent Catholic Apostolic Church, which adopted the primitive Christian model in both its hierarchy and its charismatic forms of worship. G.C. Standring, Albury and the Catholic Apostolic Church, 11; Drummond, 134-5. Greville, who heard Perceval preach at Irving’s church in Regent’s Square around this time, was impressed with his delivery, but disappointed that at the point when ‘he appeared about to touch on politics’, he was interrupted by two women speaking in tongues and enjoined the congregation ‘to hear the voice of the Lord’. Greville Mems. ii. 425. Miss Hall, the governess of his children, was another who ‘sang in the spirit’, but though she later admitted to faking her utterances, her master’s ardour was undimmed. In August 1834 he offered Greville a homily on the ills of the ‘backsliding’ established church and subsequently risked arrest by sermonizing in the street. Ibid. iii. 73, 79; P.E. Shaw, Catholic Apostolic Church, 80; Drummond, 215. Following the formal secession of the Church in 1836, Perceval presented to the king and various privy councillors its ‘lesser testimony’, which was essentially a litany of abuse against almost every piece of progressive legislation passed or considered in the previous decade. The Reform Act, it asserted, had ‘laid the foundations of the present order of things in wrong and robbery’ and in conjunction with repeal of the Test Acts and Catholic emancipation (both of which Perceval had supported), had ‘revealed and consummated the sin of departing from God’. The French Revolution was the first act of Armageddon: ‘Oh! England, thy judgement cometh upon thee like a whirlwind, and there is no escape’. H. Miller, Hist. and Doctrines of Irvingism, ii. 361-71. All this bore the unmistakable marks of Perceval’s authorship, though as he told Lord Lansdowne, he was merely the instrument of Providence: ‘I am aware that it is not well written; the composition is not perfect, but I was not permitted to alter it; I was obliged to write it as I received it’. The response of the privy councillors ranged from the polite interest of Lord Howick*, and the combative arguments of Lord Melbourne, to the more basic reaction of Smith Stanley, who simply ‘turned him out at once’. Lady Holland was sufficiently concerned to station two servants at the door during the interview with her husband, with instructions to rush in if he was heard to scream. Greville Mems. iii. 273-4, 276-7. In July 1838 Perceval and Drummond delivered the Apostolics’ ‘greater testimony’ to the Pope, via Cardinal Acton. Davenport, 135-6. In the division of Christendom among the ‘restored apostolate’, Perceval was allotted the tribe of Manasseh, and given the thankless task, in which he failed by some distance, of recruiting 12,000 to the flock in the unpromising territory of Italy. Miller, i. 285-6. Little else is known of his contribution to the shrouded proceedings of the sect and one of its historians notes that he ‘does not appear to have been a man of outstanding personality, but was sincere and earnest, and no doubt played his part adequately in the apostolic counsels’. Davenport, 111.

In October 1834 Perceval complained that the compensation for his abolished exchequer tellership, which amounted to the full annual salary for life, took no account of the loss of patronage, which had enabled him to provide for his brother Dudley, among others. Add. 40409, f. 130. Evidently he had fully regained his outward composure by October 1839, when Eleanor Fazakerley incorrectly reported that he had ‘quite recovered from his Irvingite delusions’ and assumed, equally wrongly, that his plan to reside in Italy was for ‘economy and education’. Add. 52011, Eleanor Fazakerley to H. E. Fox, 23 Oct. 1839. More perceptive was the observation of Lady Granville, who encountered him in Rome in December 1842 and found him ‘very agreeable and gay, but ... still as odd as ever in opinion’. She noted that in addition to his Italian mission, he was the ‘angel’ (pastor in charge) of a church in Southampton ‘and goes over whenever Henry Drummond says he is wanted there’. Countess Granville Letters, ii. 343. Perceval died at Melcombe Regis, Dorset in September 1859 ‘after a few hours illness, having joined his family on the previous day apparently in good health’. Gent. Mag. (1859), ii. 653-4. Letters of administration were granted on 11 Oct. 1859 to his wife, the universal legatee under the terms of his will, dated 16 Oct. 1844, after Spencer Horatio Walpole, his brother-in-law and sole executor, had renounced probate. Denis Le Marchant† remembered him as ‘a gentleman highly esteemed in private life, and of abilities that might have raised him to distinction, but for his religious fanaticism’. Le Marchant, 388.