one to another; last of all to Mr. Percival, who
obstinately refused to sanction his claims in
parliament. If he had met Lord Gower after his
resolution was taken, he (Lord G.) should have
received the ball, and not Mr. Percival. He
concluded his defence by justifying the murder, on
account of the injuries he had received from the
government. He disclaimed the plea of insanity.

The case was desperate, for the prisoner had
stoutly denied his own insanity, and pleaded
justification for his crime. Mr. Alley had only
the one excuse to press forward— insanity.
That is, not that the prisoner did not mean to
shoot Mr. Percival, but that he did so with a
disordered mind.

The swearing was very hard. A lady from
Southampton, who had known Bellingham from
a child, declared that she believed him deranged,
so far as related to his sufferings in Russia.
She had never known him to be under restraint,
but his father had died mad. A servant at a
house in New Milman-street, where Bellingham
had lodged for four months, had thought the
prisoner deranged for some time past, particularly
just before the murder.

The trial lasted eight hours. Lord Mansfield
having summed up, the jury retired for ten
minutes, and then returned a verdict of guilty.
The Recorder passed sentence of death, directing
that the prisoner's body should, after execution,
be dissected and anatomised.

During the early part of the trial, which lasted
eight hours, Bellingham trifled with the flowers
placed on the front of the dock. He read his
defence in a fervid but calm manner, but
occasionally shed tears. At the conclusion he
requested a glass of water, as any speaker on
indifferent subjects might have done. He listened to
his sentence, however, with the most intense awe,
and was led out of court overcome with grief.

Bellingham's antecedents were not very creditable,
if the contemporaneous reports can be
implicitly trusted. He seems to have been a turbulent,
untoward, rather unprincipled adventurer,
of a subtle, dangerous, rankling disposition,
inflamed almost to madness by a long series of
misfortunes. He was a native of St. Neot's, in
Huntingdonshire, and was born in 1771. When
he was only a year old, his father, a
land-surveyor, betraying symptoms of mental
derangement, was sent to St. Luke's, but at the
end of a year was discharged as incurable, and
died soon after. At the age of fourteen, John
Bellingham was apprenticed to a jeweller; but
ran away from his master. His mother then
appealing to a Mr. Daw, her brother-in-law, to do
something for her son, Daw fitted Bellingham
out as a subaltern in an East India regiment.
This was a social advance, and the lad's fortune
seemed now secured; but ill fortune followed
him. The Hartwell, the transport in which he
sailed, was wrecked, and he returned to England,
abandoning his profession, for some unrecorded
reason. Mr. Daw again came forward, and
probably seeing a predisposition to commerce in the
ex-soldier, advanced him money to purchase the
business of a tinplate worker. But the
unlucky man's house took fire soon afterwards,
not without some suspicion (as usual in
advantageous fires) falling upon the proprietor, and
in 1794, Bellingham, the young tradesman,
became bankrupt.

Bellingham then commenced business at
Liverpool without any capital, as an insurance
broker, and married an Irish girl named Neville,
by whom he had one child. They lived very
unhappily, and she eventually supported herself
as a milliner.

He then entered a merchant's office at Liverpool,
his commercial expertness gaining him
the confidence of some of the leading houses
engaged in the Russian trade. He was sent
out to Archangel as their commission agent,
living at that great emporium of the Siberian
trade in the White Sea to purchase furs, tea,
hardware, tallow, flax, pitch, and timber for
the English market. Here Bellingham was still
very unfortunate or very dishonest, or
perhaps both.

He drew bills on his principals to the amount
of ten thousand pounds, squandered the money,
and made no shipments of the tea, tallow, or
furs so purchased. Returning to England, and
failing to fulfil a contract entered into with some
merchants of Hull, Bellingham was thrown into
prison. He then a second time visited
Archangel, but was again unlucky, and was about
to return to England, finding the country getting
too hot for him, some disagreeable thing having
occurred about the insurance of a vessel, when
he was arrested for private debts. He accused
the Russian authorities loudly of corruption
and injustice, claiming the protection of the
English ambassador, Lord Leveson Gower, and
also of Sir L. Sharp; but they, finding his arrest
to be legal, and the matter not within their
province, declined to interfere, and left him to the
Russian tribunals.

Only those who know the profound corruption
of Russian officials can imagine the misery of a
provincial Russian prison. Filth, starvation,
cruelty, and a hopeless delay of justice, are
the smallest of the evils a prisoner so friendless
would have had to encounter.

Five years of such slavery in such a climate,
far from wife and children, in the middle of a life
that had yet to be retrieved, was enough to
have maddened better men than the future
assassin of Percival.

Released at last, without trial and without
redress, the very abruptness of the release
going far to prove his innocence, to what,
happiness and welcome did this unhappy man
return? To beg, to sue, to supplicate to the
insolent door-porters of the Marquis of Wellesley,
the Earl of Uxbridge, Lord L. Gower,
Mr. A. Paget, Sir F. Burdett, and Mr.
Percival. Day by day he must have found the
faces of the men he importuned grow harder
and colder. Day by day hope must have
lessened, and hatred struck a deeper root. Day
by day his heart must have sunk within him
as he passed up the old street to receive the
same rebuffs.