Bellingham was waiting for Perceval, armed – as he had been throughout the afternoon – with two primed-and-cocked pistols. He had not wanted it to come to this, but what choice did he have? Eight years earlier, he had sailed from Liverpool to Archangel in Russia on a mercantile venture, but things had soon gone terribly wrong, and he found himself in prison for a debt that he insisted he did not owe. Confused and increasingly angry, he appealed to the British authorities for help, but they repeatedly informed him that his case was under the jurisdiction of the Russian government alone. After five dreadful years trying to prove his innocence, he was finally released in October 1809, and two months later he was back in England, where he immediately began to lobby the authorities for redress. His pleas, including one to the Prince Regent and one to Perceval, again fell on deaf ears.

Bitter and by now obsessed, he decided to take matters into his own hands. In his early forties, with his wife and three children living in Liverpool, he relocated to London. After two months he fell behind in his rent to Mrs. Robarts, though she found him a kind and polite lodger and especially appreciated his willingness to escort her to church services. On about 21 April, Bellingham spent four guineas on a brace of seven-inch steel pistols that he bought from the celebrated London gunsmith William Beckwith. Over the next few days he took them to Hampstead Heath, where he practiced firing at trees. Shortly thereafter he hired a tailor to alter one of his coats by sewing into it a nine-inch-deep inside pocket on the left-hand side that could hold one of the pistols and that he could access conveniently with his right hand. Bellingham also began during these weeks to attend Parliament regularly, sitting in the Strangers’ Gallery and peering down through the gloom at the government benches, while frequently asking those seated around him about the identity of different ministers. Soon he put the name “Spencer Perceval” to the face, and Bellingham’s rage honed in on him as the leader of an oppressive and brutally indifferent government.²

Tall and large-boned, with a thin face, aquiline nose, sunken eyes, and sallow complexion, Bellingham was intensely aware of the pistol concealed in his dark brown coat, while the backup gun protruded awkwardly in the pocket of his nankeen trousers. Perceval, a much smaller man, with a pale face and wide eyes, now entered the lobby, wearing a blue coat, white waistcoat, and charcoal breeches. Bellingham knew him instantly, walked calmly and directly up to him with pistol drawn, and fired at point-blank range. The large bullet tore into the prime minister’s chest, creating a wound at least three inches deep as it passed over the fourth rib on the left-hand side and then downward toward the heart. “I am murdered!” Perceval screamed as he reeled backward against the door and then, staggering forward, collapsed facedown on the floor. It was only when two horrified bystanders turned him over that they recognized who had been shot, and the enormity of what had just happened broke upon the people in the lobby, before spreading quickly into the rooms beyond. Several men assisted in picking up the prime minister and carrying him into the Speaker’s apartments. Blood leaked from the corners of his mouth and seeped from his chest into his shirt and waistcoat. Gently the men seated him upright on a table, but he did not speak again, and within a few minutes he was dead, the first and only British prime minister to be assassinated. Bellingham made no attempt to flee. When he was seized by lobby onlookers, there were large beads of sweat running down his face, and his body heaved as if a “billiard-ball . . . were choking him.” In the chaos, witnesses demanded to know why he had done such a thing. “I have been denied the redress of my grievances by Government,” he replied; “I have been ill-treated.” ³

Reaction to the murder was swift, and – more than any other single incident – it exposed the bitter class divisions within Regency society. Many people, both within the government and far beyond, deeply admired Perceval, not only for the virtuousness of his private life but for his political stance, which was anti-French, anti-Catholic, anti-slavery, and fiercely anti-reform. The House met the following day to pay tribute to their fallen colleague, and several members – from political allies like Lord Castlereagh, through rivals like George Canning, to opponents such as Samuel Whitbread – were overcome with emotion. “Mr. Perceval . . . I am singular enough to regard as the best and wisest minister of this reign,” wrote the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.⁴

Outside the House, however, the mood could hardly have been more different. An immense crowd of “from fifty to a hundred thousand persons” gathered in the hours following the murder, and – surprisingly, even shockingly – they were jubilant. What for Bellingham had been a personal vendetta became in the public mind a political assassination in which, on behalf of the angry, the impoverished, and the reviled, someone had finally hit back with lethal force. An anxious Coleridge heard exultant agitators toasting the event with “more of these damned Scoundrels must go the same way,” while the diarist and socialite Frances Calvert reported that “there were printed placards put on the House of Commons . . . stating that Mr. Perceval’s ribs were only fit to broil the Regent’s heart on. How horrible!” The poet William Wordsworth, in London at the time, came across a woman who was selling “the life of Bellingham” and who was glorying in the “good deed he did.” “Nothing can be more deplorably ferocious and savage than the lowest orders in London,” he reported, “and I am sorry to say that tens of thousands of the Middle class and even respectable Shop-keepers rejoice in this detestable murther.” Meanwhile, celebrations spread north to the manufacturing towns, where people rang bells, lit bonfires, and showed “the most savage joy.” From Kegworth in Leicestershire, the Irish poet Thomas Moore declared, “You cannot imagine what a combustible state this country is in – all the common people’s heads are full of revolution.” ⁵

The government sent troops into the streets, awarded Perceval’s widow Jane an annuity of £2,000 (about £150,000 today), supplemented by a still more lavish grant of £50,000 (about £3,800,000 today) for the support of her children. Then it set its sights on making an example of Bellingham, who was formally charged with murder and dispatched to Newgate Prison amid throngs of supporters. “What were the people to do who were starving?” demanded one commentator. “Not murder people,” snapped Wordsworth, “unless they mean to eat their hearts.” Bellingham was tried at the Old Bailey on 15 May and contended throughout the day that he was perfectly justified in killing Perceval. “What he had done was a mite to a mountain, compared with what Government had done to him.” The trial lasted eight hours, after which the jury withdrew for fifteen minutes and returned with a verdict of guilty. On Monday, 18 May 1812, one week after he had assassinated the prime minister, Bellingham emerged from New-gate into an early morning rain, calm and dignified, and ascended the gallows as “a score of persons in the mob set up a loud and reiterated cry of ‘God bless you! God bless you!’ ” Lord Byron looked on from a rented window. As the clock tolled eight, he and thousands of others watched as Bellingham was “launched into eternity.” ⁶

The radical William Cobbett was a prisoner in Newgate at the time, and he too witnessed the execution. The people’s enthusiasm for Bellingham, he concluded, did not mean that they were bloodthirsty. “Their conduct upon this occasion only shows, and it does show in the most striking light, the deep discontent that they felt at the terrible laws that had been passed . . . to abridge their liberties.” For some, it was possible to accept these disadvantages and restrictions, which extended from tight controls on the price and content of newspapers, through legislative measures that kept the price of food artificially high, to brutal laws that punished even minor transgressions. But many others simply could no longer tolerate a system in which power was consolidated in the hands of a privileged few, while consigning the vast majority to lives of want and despair. Driven variously by hunger, greed, boredom, and anger, tens of thousands of people turned – like Bellingham – to crime, which had a tighter grip on London in the Regency than in any previous or subsequent period, as criminals exulted in one last lawless spree before the government finally responded in the 1820s to repeated calls for legal, penal, and police reform. More broadly, throughout Britain the laboring classes assembled in unprecedented numbers to demand political reforms such as universal suffrage and annual parliaments. In response, the government enacted ferocious crackdowns, including the infamous Peterloo Massacre at Manchester, when British soldiers armed with axes and swords charged into a crowd of peaceful protesters, killing eleven and wounding hundreds. Above all, the Regency’s most important radical, Percy Bysshe Shelley, looked directly at contemporary suffering and responded by championing not only political but also, and more urgently, moral and spiritual reform. In his finest writings, Shelley imagines a dramatic transformation in which humankind’s creative spirit is unbound, and “Love, hope and self-esteem” heal the divisions both within and between us.⁷

The most notorious rookeries lay just outside the affluent square mile of the City, enabling thieves to plunder its centers of wealth and commerce and then go to ground only a street or two beyond its boundaries. Just across London Bridge in the borough of Southwark ran Tooley Street, its gin shops and proximity to the Thames long making it a favorite haunt of river pirates. To the northeast, in the Spitalfields–Whitechapel area, lay the seedy environs of Petticoat Lane. In Clerkenwell to the north was the slum located between “Whitecross-street, Golden-lane, the upper end of Bunhill-row, and the north end of Grub-street.” “Do you conceive that a number of the public houses in Whitecross-street and the parts adjacent are supported by notorious thieves, prostitutes and other bad characters?” the 1817 Parliamentary Select Committee on the State of the Police asked the magistrate Samuel Mills. “I am afraid they are,” he replied frankly.⁹ Worst of all, to the west was the lair of St. Giles (known as the “Holy Land”), its inhabitants crammed together in filth and despair, and at its heart, the Rats’ Castle, an infamous pub where criminals met, boasted, drank, and planned.

“Flash” language originated in the London rookeries, a mysterious and often humorous argot that reached the peak of its popularity in the Regency. A kind of “anti-language,” it was spoken by everyone from the criminal and sporting classes all the way up to chic aristos and the Regent himself. “To speak good flash is to be well versed in cant terms,” James Hardy Vaux explained in his Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1819), while Pierce Egan reported in his Life in London (1820–21) that “a kind of cant phraseology is current from one end of the Metropolis to the other.” The Old Bailey judge John Silvester got so tired of the accused women and men in his courtroom speaking to and of one another in flash code that, in 1816, he drew up his own “list of cant words with their meaning” in order to decipher what was being said. Several terms from the flash lexicon have proven remarkably enduring, including “pig” for “a police officer.” ¹⁰

Joseph Merceron was the Regency’s most powerful gangland boss and, like many of the London thugs who followed in his footsteps, he was based in the East End at Bethnal Green, an impoverished parish run by an elected vestry, with drinking dens behind every fifth or sixth door. Merceron began life as a clerk in a lottery office, but through fraud, intimidation, political cunning, and shrewd investments, he rose to become the owner of eleven pubs, the treasurer of the parish funds, and a justice of the peace. With this kind of grip on local affairs, he was able to renew pub licenses for friends and criminal associates (no matter how noxious th...