Portrait of Lady Jane Perceval, née Wilson (1769-1844), half-length, in a black dress with lace sleeves

The writer Charles Macfarlane described Lady Jane Perceval, née Wilson, as ‘a most benevolent, tender-hearted, charitable person, an exemplary woman in all essentials and in every respect.’ (C. Macfarlane, Reminiscences of a literary life, New York, 1917, p. 159). The daughter of Jane Weller and Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Spencer Wilson, she married Spencer Perceval, son of the Earl of Egmont, in 1790; despite her parents’ disapproval at the match, the couple eloped on her twenty-first birthday. With Perceval’s legal career on the rise, their financial circumstances changed, and her family later accepted the marriage, which produced twelve surviving children.

Following appointments as Solicitor General and Attorney General, Spencer Perceval became an MP and his political career prospered, culminating in his nomination as Prime Minister in 1809. Three years later, Perceval entered the Houses of Parliament and was shot dead in the lobby by John Bellingham, a merchant with a grievance against the government. The day after Perceval’s murder, the Commons approved a £50,000 grant for his family, a pension of £2,000 a year for his wife and a monument to him in Westminster Abbey. After her husband’s death, Lady Perceval continued to live in the family home at Elm Grove, Ealing, where she met, and later married the son of the local vicar, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry William Carr. Wounded during his service in the Peninsula War, Carr died from his injuries aged 44, in 1821. Jane died aged 74 in 1844 and was buried alongside her first husband in the family vault at St Luke’s, Charlton, Kent.

A pastel portrait of the sitter by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, dated 1804, was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, on 30 January 2019.