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Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die - The Assassination of a British Prime Minister (Hardcover)
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Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die - The Assassination of a British Prime Minister (Hardcover)
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List price R370
Loot Price R296
Discovery Miles 2 960
You Save R74 (20%)
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On 11 May 1812 Spencer Perceval, the British Prime Minister, was
fatally shot at close range in the lobby of the House of Commons.
In the confused aftermath, his assailant, John Bellingham, made no
effort to escape. A week later, before his motives could be
examined, he was tried and hanged. Here, for the first time, the
historian Andro Linklater looks past the conventional image of
Bellingham as a 'deranged businessman' and portrays him as an
individual, driven by the anxieties of his family life, by his
yearning for respectability and by the raw emotions that convulsed
his home town of Liverpool. But as the evidence accumulates, a
wider, darker picture emerges. The wildly unpopular Perceval
dominated political life as both Prime Minister and Chancellor of
the Exchequer. He, above all, was responsible for oppressing
Luddite protestors, for Britain's naval blockade of Napoleonic
France, for risking war with the United States. And, almost
single-handedly, he was crushing Liverpool's illegal slave-trade.
John Bellingham was not alone in hating the prime minister. But did
he act alone when he shot Spencer Perceval? And if not, who aided
him? Two hundred years later, Andro Linklater examines Bellingham's
personal records, his wife's letters and the reports of the Bow
Street Runners, London's first detective agency, uncovering strange
payments made to the murderer and an untouched historical trail.
Catching the threads of conspiracy amid the fevered tone of an age
of intense debate over slavery, security of the state and personal
liberty, Linklater brilliantly deconstructs the assassination of
Spencer Perceval - the only British Prime Minister ever to have
suffered that fate - to offer a fresh perspective on Britain and
the Western world at a critical moment in history.
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