A History of Political Scandals

Andy K. Hughes

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781844680894
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473831582
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

A must-have guide to the scandalous behavior of politicians around the world.
 
Andy Hughes's fascinating book guides us through centuries of political abuse—and just plain stupidity. This pocket guide exposes the secret side of politics, including politicians who risked or ruined their own careers for personal gain.
 
Stories include the MP who liked to party hard and be whipped even harder; the prime minister and his hookers; expenses claims for manure; and the US president who called for all gay men to be castrated. Politicians have mixed scandal with eggs, adult movies, helicopters, drugs, shoes, beef burgers, public toilets, mobile phones, rape, turkeys, orgies, and even ice cream. And it's not just today's politicians who are embroiled with scandal. This explosive book reveals the questionable behavior of politicians of yesteryear from around the world.
 

Chapter One

United Kingdom

John Wilkes MP – bribery and libel

English politician John Wilkes (b.1725 d.1797) led an eventful life, both privately and professionally. He was the son of a successful malt distiller and was educated at an academy in Hertford, and then privately tutored. In 1747, he married Mary Meade, who was heiress of the Manor of Aylesbury. This union brought him a comfortable fortune and respectable status among the gentry of the county of Buckinghamshire. Wilkes was profligate by nature and was a member of the Hellfire Club, which indulged in debauchery. Wilkes bribed voters so he could win an election to sit in the House of Commons in 1757.

His time in Parliament was rather chequered, including him unwisely attacking the government in his journal The North Briton in 1763. He was continually prosecuted for libel, expelled and re-elected. He was the original comeback kid and survived all the scandal. He was generally regarded as a victim of persecution and a champion of liberty. Wilkes was a very popular man and enjoyed much support.

After winning a seat in the 1768 election, Wilkes was arrested and taken to King’s Bench Prison for writing libellous material against the king and government. A large crowd of supporters gathered at St George’s Field, near the prison. Around 15,000 people arrived outside the prison and chanted in support of Wilkes and against the king and the government. The authorities were worried that the crowd would try to rescue Wilkes, so the troops opened fire and killed seven people. There was widespread anger at the Massacre of St George’s Field, as it came to be known, and this led to a number of disturbances all over London.

George Canning MP – from Downing Street to pistols at dawn

Canning (b.1770 d.1827) only served 119 days as British prime minister, one of the shortest on record. However, rewind two decades and Canning was at war with a fellow cabinet minister, Viscount Castlereagh. The man known for his opposition to parliamentary reform and for his big speeches outside Parliament resigned from his earlier post as Foreign Secretary in the Duke of Portland’s government over his scandalously acrimonious working relationship with the War Minister, Castlereagh. The pair did not see eye to eye, especially over certain military matters. In fact, the two men had become arch-enemies.

In September 1809, Castlereagh discovered that Canning had plotted to have him removed from the Cabinet. Tempers flared and eventually Castlereagh challenged Canning to a duel. On 21 September 1809, they fought their duel, both battling for their honour. It was a complete disaster involving two respectable gentlemen. Canning had never fired a pistol in his life and completely missed. Castlereagh shot Canning in the leg. The childish and scandalous behaviour resulted in both men resigning their government posts.

Canning lost out to Spencer Perceval in his bid to become prime minister. This may have been twisted good luck, as Perceval became the first PM to be assassinated during his time in office. A man called John Bellingham shot Perceval in the lobby of the House of Commons on 11 May 1812, having a personal grievance relating to compensation for his time in jail abroad. Canning later replaced Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary in Lord Liverpool’s government after his old rival killed himself in 1822. Canning went on to replace Liverpool as PM on 10 April 1827. A few months later on 8 August 1827, he died from pneumonia.

Canning has since come to be seen by many as a ‘lost leader’, with a lot of speculation about what he might have achieved if he had lived.

Assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval

At the time of writing this book, only one British prime minister has been assassinated – Spencer Perceval (b.1762 d.1812), although the IRA has come close to increasing that number on two occasions; once in 1984 during the Conservative Party conference in Brighton, and again in 1991 when it fired missiles that landed in the garden of No. 10 Downing Street. The Brighton bombing is discussed in later pages. Obviously it is scandalous enough that a prime minister is assassinated at all but I also want to address some additional scandals surrounding the Perceval assassination.

John Bellingham was a Liverpool trader of mixed success who had traded with and visited Russia as part of his work. There was a business dispute in Russia and he was imprisoned over an alleged debt. He sought help from the British ambassador in St Petersburg, as well as from other officials. Little help was given and it was more than five years before Bellingham was freed and he returned home. Once home with his wife and family he started to seek compensation from the British Government for his time served in jail. He did not get very far and was brushed aside, despite his determined and polite efforts. Even his wife told him to give up his crusade. Bellingham was rather bitter so he travelled to London, where he visited the House of Commons to make sure he knew who the leading politicians were. He then had a special pocket sewn into his jacket to conceal a gun, planning to attack the very heart of the government. Bellingham was not part of a religious or political group; he was a lone man upset with the hand dealt to him by the government. So after one official told him to ‘do his worst’, that is exactly what he did. At 5.15 pm on 11 May, as the Tory prime minister, the Rt Hon. Spencer Perceval entered the Commons’ lobby on his way to a debate over trade restrictions, John Bellingham shot him at close range in front of a lobby full of people. He was immediately apprehended. The prime minister said, ‘I am murdered’, and fell face-down on the floor. Just minutes later, a local surgeon declared him dead as he examined him in a nearby room.

John Bellingham assassinates Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in the House of Commons entrance lobby. (Illustration by Bea Fox)

Bellingham was arrested, locked up, tried and hanged within a week. At his trial he blamed the government for not freeing him from his imprisonment and compensating him. He apologised to Mrs Perceval and her children. Previously he had said that he had shot the politician, not the man. The scandal of a prime minister being assassinated was followed by a scandal of improper justice. The government had panicked; it had been a knee-jerk reaction. To understand the situation one must be able to put events into historical perspective and see them through the eyes of the people in 1812 rather than in the eyes of people today. There had been huge political and industrial unrest in the country and many feared, without any evidence, that the assassination was a signal for riot or revolution. Was the rush for justice the reason why there had not been enough time to certify whether or not Bellingham was insane or why he was not given enough time to organise a proper defence? Despite the nature of his crime it was certainly a scandal that the court demanded that Bellingham enter a plea before any consideration was given to his defence team being allowed more time to prepare a case. In fact, papers needed for his defence had been taken off him. In addition, his legal team had only had a few days’ notice to prepare for the hearing. And as John Bellingham himself pointed out, he was in the unusual position that his prosecutors were also the witnesses against him. His legal team wanted to make a case for his insanity but they would have needed more time to investigate. The Attorney General made flippant remarks in court as to why Bellingham was not insane. Mollie Gillen, in Assassination of the Prime Minister: The Shocking Death of Spencer Perceval, said that regardless of innocence or guilt, Bellingham’s trial was a complete travesty, and to quote Lord Brougham, at the time, it was ‘the greatest disgrace to English justice’. The jury took only fourteen minutes to decide the guilt of John Bellingham. The whole hearing and verdict had been rushed.

According to the Old Bailey records, the recorder, Mr Shelton, said to the prisoner, John Bellingham, that he stood convicted of the wilful murder of Spencer Perceval and asked him why the court should not give him the ultimate punishment of death, which it could do so according to the law. When Bellingham refused to comment the sentence was pronounced. The recorder told Bellingham: ‘Prisoner at the bar, you have been convicted by an attentive and merciful jury.’ He went on to describe the crime (the assassination) as malicious and atrocious. To a silent courtroom he then announced that he would pass the most dreadful sentence (i.e. the death sentence). He told Bellingham: ‘You shall be hanged by the neck until you be dead; your body to be dissected and anatomised.’

If indeed John Bellingham was insane – and historians still debate this issue – the case may have been handled differently. However, the big rush to get a conviction to avoid civil unrest was carried out at the cost of giving a fair trial. It reminded me of the US government’s attitude to a fair trial after the capture of the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, almost two centuries later, when it told the media: ‘We’ll give him a fair trial and then we’ll hang him.’ Then again, the US kept many prisoners in Guantanamo Bay without any trial at all – a scandal in itself. Well, it was a scandal that Bellingham was not allowed the luxury of a fair trial; it was both a political and a legal scandal.

Bellingham was hanged near Newgate Prison in London. When his body dropped through the hole and he was dangling by the neck, several men went below the scaffolding and tugged hard at his legs. This is what they did to men (and women) who had been hanged. Some were still alive and by pulling hard it made sure the job was finished. It was seen as a merciful thing to do. After John Bellingham was hanged a hush fell over the crowd. He had many supporters, people who hated the government, and Perceval, in particular. Spencer Perceval was buried at St Luke’s Church in Charlton, his coffin taken through the big wooden doors to its final resting place. All this was just a few yards from his former family home, Charlton House.

St Luke’s Church, Charlton, where Spencer Perceval is buried. (Kieran Hughes)

New literature on the assassination, Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die: The Assassination of a British Prime Minister, by Andro Linklater, takes a deeper look at the likelihood of a further scandal in that Bellingham had not worked alone. Linklater claims that there is a possibility that Bellingham was financed by others. Perceval certainly had his enemies; he was anti-slave trade, which Liverpool depended heavily on for its economic success. In fact, there were scenes of jubilation and celebration in some parts of the country following his assassination. In a bizarre case of history almost repeating itself, when former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died in April 2013, there were scenes of celebration by some who claimed to hate her; again, many of these were in Liverpool. The background and reasons for Perceval’s death have been covered in a number of books, including those by Mollie Gillen and David C. Hanrahan. Both historians closely examine a number of questions over the assassination, including suspicions, reactions and ramifications.

The heavy wooden doors through which his coffin was carried on his last journey. (Kieran Hughes)

St Luke’s Church. (Kieran Hughes)

St Luke’s Church tower. (Kieran Hughes)

Charlton House, the former Perceval family house and estate, now open to the public. (Kieran Hughes)

Nineteenth-century dissection and resurrectionists

The death sentence has always been the ultimate sentence for all sorts of civilisations, but occasionally it has been given an extra twist. In Tudor times, for example, you might have been almost hanged to death but then made to watch your insides being ripped out and burnt on a fire in front of you, before you took your last breath. In the case of John Bellingham, his body was handed over for medical dissection. It was meant to add to the terror of the death penalty. This particular part of the punishment continued in England and Wales until 1832, when the Anatomy Act was passed. The Act required anatomy schools to be licensed and make detailed reports to the Home Office of where each body had come from.

Once again, it is natural for us to see events of the past through modern-day eyes. We take it for granted that our doctors, surgeons and nurses know how our bodies work. But this is only the case because in the past inquisitive medical men dissected bodies to learn about how they function. In the late-sixteenth century, for example, one could study anatomy at Padua or Leiden. At Leiden, the Anatomical Theatre was established in the 1590s and it was where public dissections took place in front of large audiences. Artists like Rembrandt and Hogarth captured the dissections in their images. This led the way for the regular dissection of the executed.

The practice became common on the Continent and in Britain. According to Barry and Lesley Carruthers, in A History of Britain’s Hospitals, the Royal College of Surgeons...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 United Kingdom
• Chapter 2 United States of America
• Chapter 3 The Rest of the World
• Chapter 4 Miscellany
• Chapter 5 Great Political Quotes
• Chapter 6 Who Were the Leaders?
• Bibliography