at St. Petersburg, the resident ambassador
having been applied to in vain. The general had
recommended him to memorialise the Premier.

A great fear fell on the cabinet ministers
that night when the news of the desperate and
at first unaccountable assassination reached
them. The Prince Regent, amid the vulgar
and meretricious splendour of his pseudo-Oriental
palace at Brighton, shook like a jelly. A
massacre of ministers was apprehended; there
were the wildest rumours current of Luddite
outrages and revolutionary conspiracies. Mr.
Percival had, no doubt, been the first victim.
Whose turn was to be next? Where could the
sword be best aimed to reach the necks of the
assassins? All was fear, gloom, and doubt? The
people of England were known to be
discontented; it might be necessary to use grape-shot
and sabres to keep down their foolish and
dangerous impatience for reform; besides, what
was the correction of any abuse but an incipient
revolution? "Scrape one barnacle from the
vessel of state, as well stave and sink her at
once in the Red Sea of Jacobinism," screamed
the political Chinese.

Many of those grave and eminent men who came
with hushed step into the Speaker's drawing-room,
where the Premier lay dead, must, as they
looked at the pale calm face, and, as the events
of the life of the murdered man passed swiftly
through their minds, have remembered the
peroration of his speech as Attorney-General at the
trial of Peltier, the French editor, in London for
his libel against Napoleon: it seemed now
almost like a presentiment of his own fate.

Replying to Mackintosh, Mr. Percival had
then said (1802): "There is something so base
and disgraceful— there is something so contrary
to everything that belongs to the character of an
Englishman— there is something so immoral in
the idea of assassination, that the exhortation
to assassinate this or any other chief magistrate
would be a crime against the honourable feelings
of the English law."

The biography of Mr. Percival is brief. He
was the second son of the Earl of Egmont, and
was born in 1762. Educated at Harrow and
Cambridge, he went to the Bar in 1786, in
of great shyness, soon became leader of
the Midland Circuit, and in 1796 won his silk
gown, became member for Northampton, and a
protégé of Pitt. When that minister fought Mr.
Tierney, he kindly declared Mr. Percival competent
to be his successor, and even to cope with
Fox.

Percival supported Pitt in all his measures,
especially in the mischievous and unnecessary
war with France. Under Addington, the busy
satellite became Attorney-General. He was legal
adviser of the unhappy Princess of Wales, and,
under the Duke of Portland, was made
Chancellor of the Exchequer, demanding 2000l. a
year, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster,
for surrendering his business at the bar.
Parliament growing indignant, he reluctantly
relinquished the appointment, and his friends
trumpeted forth his patriotic disinterestedness.

On the death of the Duke of Portland, in
1807, he became Premier.

Palpably a third-rate professional politician –
scarcely fit to carry Lord Chatham's crutch,
Percival was glorified by the suddenness of his melancholy
death: his smooth ready talk was called
eloquence; his quickness at figures, genius for
finance; his obstinate and narrow-minded
persecution of his Roman Catholic fellow-subjects,
intrepidity and energy. Modern historians of his
own party still idolise his memory as "a champion
of the Protestant faith." It must be allowed
that he was a good man; sincere, honest, and of
unimpeachable integrity. Like Pitt, he died
poor, though hundreds of millions had passed
through his hands.

On the 15th of May, Bellingham was tried at
the Old Bailey, before Sir James Mansfield,
Baron Graham, and Mr. Justice Grose. Most
of the aldermen were present, besides many
noblemen and members of parliament. Mr.
Alley (prisoner's counsel) objected to the
prisoner being called upon to plead, and applied
for postponement of trial, on ground that he had
affidavits to prove prisoner insane. The court
deciding that this application should not be
granted, the prisoner pleaded Not guilty.

The witnesses for prosecution having been
examined, Bellingham proposed to leave his
defence to his counsel, but was informed
that prisoners' counsel were not allowed to
address the court in defence. He then
addressed the jury in a speech of above an
hour's length, interspersed with the reading
of several documents. He had, he said, no
personal malice against Mr. Percival. "The
unfortunate lot had fallen upon him" as the leading
member of the administration, which had
repeatedly refused any address for the injuries he
(the prisoner) had sustained in Russia. He had
been engaged in business at Liverpool; in 1804
he went to Russia. His business being finished,
he was about to leave Archangel for England,
when a ship called the Soleure, insured at
Lloyd's, was lost in the White Sea. Lloyd's
refusing to pay the insurance, Bellingham was
suspected of having something to do with their
refusal (though he had not), and, in consequence,
he was seized in his carriage while passing the
Russian frontier by order of the governor at
Archangel, and imprisoned. He applied to the
British ambassador, Lord Leveson Gower, who,
having learnt from the military governor at
Archangel that he was detained for a legal
cause, and had conducted himself in a most
indecorous manner, refused to interfere. His
young wife, with an infant in arms, was
obliged to make the journey to England
alone. He himself, after suffering unheard-of
hardships, kept in a miserable condition, and
bandied from prison to prison, in 1809 received
at midnight, his discharge from prison, and an
order to quit the Russian dominions, with a
pass; which was, in fact, an acknowledgment of
the justice of his cause. Since his return to
England, he had applied to the most influential
men in the government, had been sent from