IN THE SHADOW OF THE NOOSE

Mad Earl Ferrers: The Last English Nobleman Hanged For Murder

Dan Alexander Randall

Speedy Reads

© Dan Alexander Randall 2013

The right of Dan Alexander Randall to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

A CRUEL AND WICKED HUSBAND

CHAPTER 2

MURDER MOST FOUL

CHAPTER 3

DEATH IN THE MORNING

CHAPTER 4

SEIZE THE LORD!

CHAPTER 5

THE TRIAL, DAY ONE – THE PROSECUTION

CHAPTER 6

THE TRIAL, DAY TWO – THE DEFENCE

CHAPTER 7

THE TRIAL, DAY THREE – THE SENTENCE

CHAPTER 8

EXECUTION OF AN ARISTOCRAT

EPILOGUE

SOURCES

MORE FROM MONDAY BOOKS

Laurence Shirley, the fourth Earl Ferrers.

The last nobleman to be executed in England.

He was hanged for murder in 1760.

Prologue

IT WAS A CHILLY May morning, and grey and drizzly with it, but the streets of London had been alive with chattering and excitable people since well before first light.

A huge throng was gathering outside the Tower of London, and throughout the city. At a time when the English capital contained perhaps 750,000 souls, some witnesses later suggested that the crowd ran into the hundreds of thousands.

The prisoner, a man not quite 40 years of age, with piercing, dark eyes, an aquiline nose and a head of thick, light-brown curls, could hear the laughter and shouts of some of the merrymakers through his window in the Round Tower, near the drawbridge. It blended in with the sounds of horses and carts and the sharp krak of the black ravens perched on the sill.

He had drunk jugs of his favourite porter into the small hours, played piquet with his warders – there were two of them, armed, in his quarters at all times - then he had read Hamlet before retiring to bed, where he had dozed only fitfully.

Now he had no stomach for the liquid breakfast which had been placed before him – a half-pint basin of tea, with a spoonful of brandy stirred into it. Instead, he concentrated on dressing himself in a beautiful, light cloth coat, embroidered with silver, and a white satin waistcoat also laced with silver. His black breeches were of the finest silk, as were his white stockings. On his feet were shiny black, buckled shoes. According to some, these were the clothes he had worn on his wedding day eight years earlier. Others said he had worn them on another more recent, and altogether more sinister, occasion.

At about a quarter to nine, as a weak sun tried to burn through the clouds over London, there was a knock at his door. The Sheriffs of London and Middlesex had come to demand his body from the keeper of the Tower. He was to follow his guards to a mourning coach waiting in the courtyard below.

Calmly, he asked them to pass a message to the Sheriffs, Messrs George Errington and Paul Vaillant. Instead of travelling in that coach, might he not use his own landau? It was waiting alongside, with six of his bays in harness, and his driver on his perch, and – to his mind – was an infinitely more fitting way for him to make this journey. They agreed that he could.

He handed a purse containing a considerable sum of money to the captain of his guards, thanking him with great courtesy – a courtesy, indeed, which might have surprised many of his acquaintance – for the care and respect with which he had been treated during his time in the Tower.

Then, as casually as though he were walking out for a morning ride in the rolling hills near his country home, a hundred or more miles to the north, he made his way down the winding spiral stone stairs to the waiting carriage. His hat was in his hand and he was not wearing a giant, powdered wig despite them being a status symbol among wealthy men in Georgian England. He greeted a number of friends who would be following him in the mourning coach, and then climbed aboard, taking a seat alongside Sheriff  Vaillant and Cornelius Humphries, the Chaplain of the Tower. The Huguenot Vaillant, a bookseller in the Strand by trade, and a magistrate, was carrying with him a warrant signed by King George II. As he took his seat, the Sheriff expressed the melancholy he felt at his day’s duties. ‘But I shall do everything in my power to render your situation as easy as possible,’ he said, earnestly.

The prisoner turned to him. ‘Sir, I am very much obliged to you,’ he said. ‘I take it very kindly that you are pleased to accompany me.’

Seeing that the Sheriff was eyeing his clothing, he went on, ‘You may perhaps, sir, think it strange to see me in this dress, but I have my particular reasons for it.’

The great wooden gates of the Tower swung open and the landau, its driver openly weeping, moved out into the rain-soaked street, followed by the mourners and a hearse, drawn by six horses wearing black feathers and carrying an empty, silk-lined coffin.

The procession was met and surrounded by a large number of constables – the most ever seen at such an occasion – and soldiers, among them dozens of sabre-wielding mounted men of the Horse-Grenadiers and several parties of Foot Guards, armed with pikes.

Immediately, the enormous crowds outside surged forwards, anxious to gain a glimpse of the man inside, though the blinds were drawn on his carriage.

Slowly, the soldiers and constables forcing the onlookers back, the prisoner and his entourage made its way from Tower Hill, along the Embankment by the River Thames, towards Tyburn.

It was a passage of a little more than five miles, but it would take almost three hours – such were the numbers of onlooker who lined the roads and slowed their progress. Indeed, it made a difficult journey tedious: at one point, the prisoner confided in his companions that passing through the crowd was ten times worse than death itself. Despite this, all who saw him were impressed by his calm and composed bearing: often, men making this journey were jeered and heckled by the mob, but on this occasion, most were respectful. His ‘decent deportment’ seeming to ‘affect the minds of all that beheld him’, ‘not the least affront or indignity was offered to him by anyone… on the contrary; many persons saluted him with their prayers for his salvation.’

Still, it did not do to relax. Outside an inn near Drury lane, the prisoner said to Sheriff Vaillant, ‘I am thirsty and should be glad of a glass of wine and water.’

Vaillant replied, ‘A stop for that purpose would necessarily draw a greater crowd about you, which might possibly disturb and incommode you. If you still desire it, it shall be done…’

‘That’s true,’ replied the prisoner, quickly. ‘I say no more. Let us by no means stop.’

He placed a wad of tobacco in his mouth, and on they rolled. Near the appointed place, a letter was thrown in at the window. The prisoner opened it: it was from his mistress. The swarming mob was preventing her from reaching him as she wished to. Could he instead come to her?

He leaned towards Vaillant. ‘There is a person waiting in a Hackney coach near here,’ he said, ‘for whom I have a very sincere regard, and of whom I should be glad to take my leave.’

Again, the Sheriff demurred. ‘If you insist upon it, it shall be so,’ he replied, ‘but I wish, for your own sake, that you would decline it, lest the sight of a person for whom you have such a regard should unman you, and disarm you of the fortitude you possess?’

And again, the prisoner agreed. ‘Sir, if you think I am wrong I submit.’

The Sheriff, his feelings of melancholy doubtless growing by the moment, offered faithfully to ensure that anything the prisoner desired to be delivered to this person would be so delivered.

Gratefully, the prisoner handed over a pocket book containing a bank note, a ring and a purse containing some guineas. His need for money was very nearly at its end. Sheriff Vaillant placed the items carefully in his own pocket.

The crush was greater now, and the jostling more frantic. In the surging ebb and flow of the mob, one of the escorting horses caught its leg in the wheel of his coach and threw off its rider. The prisoner looked out of his window at the fallen man, saying, ‘I hope there will be no death today but mine.’

He was to be disappointed in this wish: a nine-year-old boy was trampled to death by a horse near the old Holborn Bridge; a woman standing near the Hog in the Pond pub on Tyburn Road, ‘being surrounded on every side by the populace… her cardinal [hooded cloak] by some means or other was pulled so hard by the impetuosity of the multitude that the strings which tied it around her neck strangled her.’

‘Tell me, sir,’ said the prisoner to the Sheriff, as they approached the end of the journey. ‘Have you ever seen so great a concourse of people before?’

‘I have not,’ replied the Sheriff.

‘I suppose,’ said the prisoner, ‘it is because they never saw a Lord hanged before.’

Chapter 1

A CRUEL AND WICKED HUSBAND

THE DAY WAS the 5TH of May in the year 1760, and the prisoner was, indeed, a Lord.

To be specific, he was Laurence Shirley, the fourth Earl Ferrers, and he was on his way to Tyburn to be hanged like a common criminal (albeit on a new-fangled gallows, the first to employ the ‘drop’ method – a novel style of execution that promised a quicker and more humane death than the slow strangulation of less enlightened times). His plea that he be beheaded by sword at the Tower of London, a fate he felt more befitted his status as a nobleman, had been denied by King George II. That punishment was only applicable in instances of treason, and treason was one of the few faults Ferrers had not exhibited.

He would, at least, enjoy the dubious distinction of being the last aristocrat to be executed in England.

His crime – the cold-blooded murder of one of his own servants, a man who had shown him nothing but loyalty for 30 years – could be traced back to eight years previously, September 16, 1752.

On that day, he had married one Mary Meredith. It was by no means a marriage of equals. For one thing, while the Earl was 32 years old, his new Countess was only 15 – and had been only 14 when they had first met, at Derby races the previous summer. But the difference in their social standing was perhaps greater still. Mary was the fifth daughter of a Cheshire businessman, Amos Meredith, of Henbury. The Merediths were well-connected and respected – Mary’s brother William would inherit a baronetcy and go on to become a Member of Parliament and a Privy Councillor – and young Mary was thought to be very beautiful (the celebrated man of letters and Gothic novelist Horace Walpole was one admirer). But there was a wide social gulf between them. The titled Shirley was an Earl, the third-most senior rank of the English nobility, ranking behind only a Duke and a Marquis.

His family’s female line descended from Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite courtier, the second Earl of Essex, although she did have him executed for treason. On the male side, the family were members of England’s prosperous but obscure country gentry since the Norman invasion and had been elevated from those ranks by James I’s creation in 1611 of the Baronetcy of Staunton Harold – a settlement near Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire named for the last Saxon king of England. A century later, in 1711, Queen Anne had further raised the family by creating the Earldom of Ferrers. The first Earl, Robert, was a man of magnificent passions: he fathered 15 sons and a dozen daughters, legitimately, and more than 50 illegitimate children. The second Earl, Washington Shirley, was somewhat less productive: he died without having a son to pass the title to. The third Earl, Laurence’s uncle Henry, was locked away as a lunatic, and it was on his death, in an asylum in 1745, that Laurence Shirley, who was only 24 years old at the time, had succeeded to this peerage – and its handsome estates. These produced some £11,000 per year – around £18 million in today’s terms according to measuringworth.com – and an early indicator of the character of the man was that his brothers and sisters were forced to sue him for their own shares of the inheritance.

There was land in Staffordshire, Derbyshire, and Warwickshire, with income accruing from rents and coal mining, but the family fortune was centred on Staunton Harold. Here were three large farms and a number of cottages, and the main house – Staunton Harold Hall. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the renowned architectural historian famous for his 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England, later described its position as being ‘unsurpassed in the country – certainly as far as Englishness is concerned.’

Grade 1 listed Staunton Harold Hall, in Leicestershire

Originally Jacobean, by the mid-1700s the Hall was a perfectly proportioned mansion of some 25,000 square feet which sat in its own secluded valley, in beautiful parkland and formal gardens, criss-crossed by canals. To the south east stood an exquisite chapel, the building of which had been begun in 1653 by Sir Robert Shirley, during the years of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. An ardent Royalist, Shirley ignored the Puritan Cromwell’s animus against the Church of England, and it cost him dear. He never saw his chapel completed, dying in the Tower of London from smallpox two years later, having been arrested on Cromwell’s orders.

Upon their marriage in Cheshire, Laurence and Mary returned to their splendid estate in Leicestershire. The age gap between the newlyweds, and the disparity in their social standing, might not have been insurmountable obstacles to a happy marriage had they been similar in their tastes and behaviour. But they were not.

Mary Meredith was said by those who knew her to be amiable, shy, and quiet; her new husband was anything but, and later explained their unlikely match by saying that she had ‘trepanned him into marriage while he was in a state of drunkenness.’ (A picture of her by an unknown artist is in the National Portrait Gallery and can be viewed here.)

Laurence Shirley was born in 1720, and some reports of his early character speak of him as a pleasing and well-mannered youth, though there appears to have been a latent and wilful unpleasantness hidden not far beneath the surface. The Victorian Edward Walford, author of the 19th century book Tales of our Great Families, wrote of him, ‘The fact was that his hereditary tendency to insanity had been fostered and cherished by a fond and foolish mamma, who had allowed the dear boy to have his own way in everything when a child, and would not permit his father to correct him.’

This dormant nastiness soon showed itself in dramatically unwelcome ways. He matriculated at Christ Church at Oxford in April 1737, but left the University without taking his degree. At the age of 20, like most young men of his position, he made the Grand Tour – setting sail at Dover for the Continent, where he travelled through the great cities and nations of Europe. The idea was to broaden the minds and experience of the young rake, and to expose him to the artistic and cultural treasures which lay across the English Channel. In Paris, he might polish his French, and his fencing skills, and mingle with the aristocracy; in Switzerland he would visit Geneva and the cradle of the Protestant Reformation. He would cross the Alps into Italy, his luggage carried by the retinue of servants who accompanied him, to enjoy the medieval magnificence of Florence, the leaning tower at Pisa, the canals of Venice, and the ancient ruins of Rome. On his way back north, the cool beauty of Vienna, Berlin and Dresden awaited, with a final journey through the art galleries and squares of Holland before a return to English shores.

Of course, many of these young travellers returned with their eyes opened to far more than the beauty of Renaissance painting, the ornate music of the late baroque period, and the polite manners of French high society. Those great cities were full of taverns, brothels, and gambling houses run by men keen to relieve the young Englishman of his silver and gold, and to educate them in the ways of the night. By his own account, Laurence Shirley spent his Grand Tour drinking, whoring, and fighting.

On his arrival back in England, he lost no time in engaging in the habits of licentiousness, drunkenness and brutality that he had acquired on the continent. He frequented the brothels of London, and cut a swath through the young women of Leicestershire. Eventually, in around 1740, he took up as a mistress an attractive and willing young woman called Margaret Clifford, whose father, Richard Clifford, was one of his uncle’s tenant farmers, at Breedon, three miles from Staunton Harold. Theirs was a passionate affair, and she was the one true love of his life: they could never be married, hers being a more lowly position than even Mary’s, but she bore him four illegitimate children – daughters Margaret, Anna Maria, Elizabeth and Mary – between 1744 and 1749, and was the woman waiting faithfully in the Hackney carriage, hoping to see him on the day of his execution.

He was regularly drunk, and liked to treat the landlords of taverns near his family estate in an imperious and high-handed way. Meanness being another of his characteristics, he would often have his man wait outside an inn while he drank himself senseless inside; once he had had his fill, he would stagger out to his carriage and be driven away without settling his account.

In his twenties, Ferrers was already showing signs of eccentricity, shading into the insanity which he would later attempt to use as a defence in his trial for murder. Servants and even his own family described his odd habits, which included talking to himself and alternately clenching his fists and grinning as he strode purposefully – but to no real purpose – about a room. He would stare at himself in a mirror, contorting his face into the strangest expressions and spitting at his own reflection. He would also talk to himself incoherently long into the night after he had gone to bed, and was thoroughly paranoiac, conceiving baseless suspicions of his friends and family, and going about constantly armed with hidden daggers and a brace of pistols secreted about his person.

His temper was notable, and was such that it was said that it was not safe to approach him – armed as he was with his pistols – when it was roused. With his servants, he was not quite a Jekyll and Hyde character – he was more Hyde, and Hyder, with the unpleasant aspects of his nature much magnified if he was in drink. Enraged at the slightest error, he would horsewhip and kick them, or simply hurl whatever came to hand at their heads. Many quit his employ in terror, not even staying to collect the wages they were owed.

They were wise to do so. One day, some oysters had arrived from London in a poor condition. Furious, Ferrers ordered one of his servants to swear that the courier had changed them. The man refused to take such an oath, and the Earl flew at him, stabbing him in the chest, smashing a candlestick over his head and kicking him in the groin with such force that the servant was rendered incontinent.

On another evening, his brother Washington Shirley was at Staunton Harold with his wife and the two brothers argued over nothing. Ferrers ordered a servant to fetch two loaded pistols in order that he could kill Washington. The servant fetched the weapons, but refused to prime them. The Earl primed them himself and then pointed one at the man and pulled the trigger. But for the fact that the pistol misfired, his murder charge might have come some years earlier. In the meantime, as the Countess begged on her knees for Ferrers to put away his guns, Washington and his wife had fled from the Hall, despite the fact that it was by now two o’clock in the morning.

Family aside, Ferrers was generally more careful about his behaviour with others of his own class – at least, when he was sober. But when wine or spirits were taken, he was every bit as violent and unpredictable with society ladies as he was with farm labourers. In the first of four volumes of his collected writings, Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs, Joseph Cradock – a contemporary and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and David Garrick – wrote of seeing ‘the unfortunate Earl Ferrers’ with his sisters at Leicester races and then, that evening, at a ball at his [Cradock’s] father’s house.

‘During the early part of the day,’ he says, ‘his Lordship preserved the character of a polite scholar and a courteous nobleman, but in the evening he became the terror of the inhabitants. I distinctly remember running up stairs to hide myself, when an alarm was given that Lord Ferrers was coming armed, with a great mob after him…’

The nobleman arrived, drunk – he had ‘obtained liquor privately’ – and the evening ended with him in prison. After ‘many most violent acts’ he had thrown ‘a large silver tankard of scalding negus [mulled wine] amongst the ladies.’

It might have been hoped that his behaviour would become calmer with his marriage. If so, this proved a vain hope.

Within two months, according to the American Professor Randolph Trumbach, an expert on the history of 18th century England, he was irrationally jealous, suspecting that his wife was unfaithful, and was turning into a domineering monster. He regularly accused the teenaged Countess of having designs on other men, and called her a ‘bitch’ and a ‘damned whore’ in front of others, both friends and strangers.

He kicked and beat her with impunity, for the merest trifles. A member of the household staff, William Hodgson, later referred to the Earl as a ‘madman’, and said that he would strike his wife if a chair was out of place, or supper was a few minutes late. On one occasion, it was because her brother, the Wigan MP Sir William Meredith, was proving tardy on a piece of business the two men were conducting; on another, during a game of cards with her sister, Ann Meredith, he snatched her cards away and threw them into the fire and was only prevented from striking her by the intervention of her sister; on yet another, it was because she accidentally brushed the hand of a 70-year-old male servant.

One evening, when they were entertaining her brother and others at dinner, Lady Ferrers entered the room in clothing which was not to the Earl’s liking. He looked at her in scorn. ‘A woman dressed like you looks like a whore that some fellow had picked up at the Shakespeare [Inn], lain with all night, and turned reeking out of bed at Haddock’s Bagnio [a well-known brothel in Charing Cross] at eleven o’clock the next morning,’ he said.

Lady Ferrers’ reply gives a clue to her decency, fortitude, and long suffering. ‘For all I know, your comparison may be very just,’ she said, ‘but I have never seen such a creature and hope I never shall.’

His obsession with his young wife’s non-existent infidelity was doubtless fuelled by his own behaviour. When he wasn’t sleeping with his mistress, or with prostitutes and barmaids at his rough lodgings in Muswell Hill, he was chasing his own staff. Lusting after one pretty young housemaid, he ordered the Countess and her sister off to the races in order that he could seduce the girl. He pounced as she was placing a warming pan in his bed, and she only escaped by leaping from his bedroom window.

He threatened to kill Lady Ferrers with almost monotonous regularity. ‘I pray God of his infinite mercy,’ he spat at her one evening, in an eccentric reading of the biblical commandment, ‘to damn me to all eternity if I don’t murder you tonight.’

He attempted to strangle her at least once, and swore that he would shoot or burn her in her bed (an unfortunate foretelling of her eventual death, many years later). After several years of this, her family, worried for her safety, engineered her escape from Staunton Harold. But he chased her down, pistols in hand, with a posse of servants, including a loyal old retainer called John Johnson. Flinging threats at all and sundry, he dragged his wife back to the marital home, where she was kept as a virtual prisoner.

Desperate to save his sister from her torment, Sir William Meredith turned to the law. In 1757, doubtless at enormous expense, a writ of habeas corpus was issued against Ferrers, and then – divorce being unthinkable – a suit of separation was filed by the Countess before the London Consistory Court, the Church of England tribunal which exercised jurisdiction over matrimonial matters. Its standing was viewed with the utmost lack of seriousness by the errant aristocrat, who refused to have anything to do with the proceedings; as a result of this ‘contempt’, he was excommunicated from the Church.

By now, Lady Ferrers had been allowed to leave Staunton Harold, and was being accommodated by the Duke of Westmoreland at his family seat, Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire. Earl Ferrers’ behaviour not having improved greatly during this process, he had been at some point taken into custody, and only released, bound over to keep the peace, on the enormous surety of £10,000 – the equivalent of around £16 million today. It would have surprised few people when he turned up at Apethorpe in January 1758, brandishing his pistols as usual, and threatening everyone he clapped eyes on. After breaking into the house and assaulting his wife, he was overpowered and, once more, placed in custody. At this point, the despairing Countess – assisted by her brother – brought a Private Members Bill before Parliament seeking a legal separation.

Witness after witness testified that she was a submissive and obedient wife who was every day in fear of her life, and although there was resistance – doubtless, some parliamentarians of the day believed that this was exactly how wives should live – in June 1758 it received the Royal Assent.

Despite all of this, House of Lords journals show that Ferrers still held out hopes of a reconciliation with his wife; four Lords went on his behalf to see the Countess to tell her that her husband would ‘receive her with great kindness and tenderness’ if she went back to the marital home.

But it was not to be. After nearly six years of marriage, Lady Ferrers was free of her ogrish husband and his lunatic behaviour. Under the terms of the Act, she was also very well taken care of, with a significant income to be provided by the Earl. Insultingly, to him, the revenues of the Ferrers estate were ordered to be vested in trustees, in order that she might receive this handsome allowance free from his interference.

He was, however, allowed to appoint his receiver of the rents.

Fatefully, he chose John Johnson – for decades an employee of his family, formerly a steward, and now farming at nearby Lount, and the man who had loyally accompanied him on the search for the missing Countess a year or so before. He had known Johnson since boyhood. Surely he would be malleable? A man, according to one report, ‘who should be as clay in his hands’? Surely he could be prevailed upon to understate the estate’s rents? That would be a way of keeping some of his wealth from the prying eyes of the trustees, and out of Mary’s grasping hands.

Chapter 2

MURDER MOST FOUL

FOR SOME TIME, Ferrers appeared to the outside world to have put this unfortunate episode – his marriage, that is – behind him. Not a man to worry overmuch about the feelings or morals of others, he moved Margaret Clifford and their four illegitimate daughters into Staunton Harold Hall. Nominally, Margaret was there as his housekeeper, but in fact they began living together, scandalously, as man and wife. The knowledge of such things has a habit of seeping out; within a few weeks, gossip and outrage ran wild, locally and further afield, and the Earl was shunned and lampooned, far and wide, as a poltroon and a cad. He shook this off as easily as the ornamental ducks on his lakes shed raindrops.

But in the privacy of his rooms, his situation nagging away at him, he was stewing in his own, toxic juices, washed down with strong spirits and jugs of porter.

He, a nobleman and master of Staunton Harold, had been bested by his commoner wife and her interfering brother. True, his great estates remained in his ownership, but he was no longer in full control of them: the trustees oversaw his stewardship, always ready to step in, always with their eye to the well-being of the Countess. He was not short of money, by any means, but the mere fact of having to send regular funds to his estranged wife – to keep her in the style to which she had only become accustomed through her marriage to him – was a terrible insult to his pride.

Over the Christmas of 1759, he broached with his man, Johnson, the idea that some of the funds might be diverted to him. To his irritation – and then his fury – Johnson refused to have anything to do with it.

Unfortunately for the scheming Earl, Johnson – a father of four, whose wife, Anne, had died three years earlier – was loyal not only to him but also to his former mistress. A man of the utmost honesty, he refused all commands – and requests, and pleading entreaties, and screaming threats – to carry out his duties in anything other than a thoroughly conscientious manner. What was even worse, Ferrers discovered that Johnson had contrived to pay his estranged wife an additional £50 at some point – with the knowledge of the trustees, but without his own.

Furious, he sought revenge. First, he tried to have Johnson thrown off farm at Lount, an excellent piece of land that had been granted to him on a lease. Johnson produced the deeds, showing he had an inalienable right to remain in situ, and that scheme was frustrated.

On Sunday, 18th January, 1760, the Earl visited Johnson at the farm. He was on his best behaviour, and appeared to be trying to put the recent ill-feeling behind him – he had ‘a suavity of manner which he knew well how to assume when it pleased him’, writes Muriel Nelson d’Auvergne in her famous history of wrongdoing in the aristocracy, Tarnished Coronets. He asked the steward to attend the manor house, with the accounts, at three o'clock the following Friday afternoon. It was simply a routine inspection of the books, he assured Johnson.

In fact, it was anything but. On the Friday morning, the household’s two male servants – an old man, and a youth – were sent on distant errands. Mrs Clifford was dispatched on a visit to her father, with her daughters and instructions not to return before five o'clock. The three house maids were too terrified of their master to pose any obstacle to him.

Johnson arrived, unsuspecting and punctual to the hour, and was received by one of the maids, Lizzie Burgeland, and directed to join the Earl in his parlour. As soon as both men, were inside Ferrers turned the key in the lock.

Johnson lived long enough to tell the tale of what happened next.

After some discussion, his Lordship produced a document, which he ordered the steward to sign. It showed him confessing to being a rogue and a rascal who had betrayed his master, and would allow for his instant dismissal, and incarceration.

Indignant, Johnson said he would do no such thing.

‘You refuse to sign?’ said Ferrers.

‘I do,’ replied Johnson.

There are few things calculated more to enrage a calculating and bitter man than the rectitude and righteousness of another, particularly when that other is beneath him: it only marks up the dishonesty and wickedness of the first. Thus infuriated, the Earl whipped out one of his two-shilling pistols, cocked it, and levelled it at Johnson. ‘Then,’ he spat, ‘I command you to kneel.’

Johnson, well aware of his Lordship’s capacity for violence, was suddenly alive to the terrible danger in which he found himself. He knelt on one knee.

‘Both knees!’ shouted Ferrers, loud enough for at least one of the maids, Elizabeth Saxon, to hear in the kitchen a dozen yards and several thick walls away. ‘Make your peace with heaven, for your last hour has come.’

Johnson broke down and begged to be spared. ‘I have grown grey in your Lordship’s family,’ he said. ‘I have rendered services that merit a better reward!’

This only served to incense Lord Ferrers further: he continued to sneer and swear at the terrified man, shouting at him ever more loudly to say his final prayers. Then, in a voice loud enough to be heard by the maid-servants cowering outside, he shouted, ‘Your time is come… you must die!’

So saying, he pulled the trigger of the pistol. It was a powerful weapon, and the heavy lead ball entered the steward’s abdomen, on his left side just under the lowest rib, and knocked him backwards. Johnson staggered to his feet, holding his bleeding gut, and the two men looked at each other.

As their eyes met, the consequences of his actions – namely, that he might go to the gallows if Johnson died – entered Ferrers’ mind, and he underwent a belated change of heart.

Unlocking the door, he rang the bell to summon the maids. The young women – Burgeland, Saxon and Lizzie Dolman – had run away at the pistol shot, and were hiding in the bleaching-yard. He strode from the room, through the house and then outside, all the time shouting for them at the top of his voice. Eventually, the bravest of the trio, Burgeland, showed herself, and was ordered by the Earl to go inside to Johnson’s aid. Another of the maids was told to find Harry Wales, the Staunton Harold footman; he, in turn, was dispatched on the estate’s fleetest horse to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, two miles away, for medical aid. On the way, he stopped at Lount, to alert Johnson’s youngest daughter, Sarah, who still lived with him.

In the meantime, the wounded man – who could still walk – was helped to a bedroom and laid on a bed by Ferrers and Burgeland. Asked how he was, Johnson replied that he was dying, and asked to see his children. The Earl busied himself with trying to staunch the bleeding.

The surgeon from Ashby, Thomas Kirkland, took some two hours to arrive, having himself called in at Lount, and when he arrived he was met by one of the maids. She warned him that his Lordship had been charging his pistols and guns, which put Kirkland on his guard. His apprehension was only increased when he was shown in to meet the Earl, who approached him with a characteristic mix of threats and wheedling.

First, Ferrers told him, menacingly, that anyone who attempted to seize him for the shooting would be themselves shot. But then he made an immediate confession.

‘Kirkland,’ he said. ‘I believe Johnson is more frightened than hurt. My intention was to have shot him dead. Finding that he did not fall at the first shot, I intended to have shot him again, but the pain he complained of made me forbear; there nature did take place, in opposition to the resolution I had formed. I desire you will take care of him; for it would be cruel not to give him ease, now I have spared his life.

‘When you speak of this afterwards, do not say, though I desire he may be eased of his pain, that I repented of what I have done: I am not sorry for it; it was not done without consideration; I own it was premeditated; I had, some time before, charged a pistol for the purpose, being determined to kill him, for he is a villain, and deserves death; but, as he is not dead, I desire you will not suffer my being seized; for, if he dies, I will go and surrender myself to the House of Lords. I have enough to justify the action; they will not excuse me, but it will satisfy my own conscience: but be sure you don’t go in the morning without letting me see you, that I may know if he is likely to recover or not; I will get up at any time; at four o'clock in the morning, or at any time that you call.’

He was also insistent that the injured man not be allowed out of the house. Keeping him at Staunton Harold made it easier to control the situation, and keep it quiet. His chief concern, indeed, was that he should not be arrested. He pressed Kirkland to assure him that Johnson would recover: doubtless, he was imagining he would be able to pay his victim off if he survived. If he died, the matter was far more serious.

The first thing Kirkland did was to comply – on the face of it – with Earl Ferrers’ demands that the matter be kept quiet, and that Johnson would not be moved from the house. He also assured the Earl that he would not be seized, and that the wounded man would recover. He did all of this only out of a sensible desire for self-preservation, and because he wanted to get on with helping the shot man however he could. At the best, he reasoned to himself, if he were to excite Ferrers further by arguing with him on this point, it would not improve Johnson’s position; at the worst, it could end with a ball in his own heart.

‘What will you say if you are called upon?’

‘I will say, that though Johnson is shot, that there is a great probability of his recovering and that there is no necessity of seizing your Lordship.’

‘Will you make oath of that before a justice of the peace, if called upon?’

‘Yes. He will be sound and well within four-and-twenty hours,’ he added, knowing full well that this was not the case.

Chapter 3

DEATH IN THE MORNING

THOMAS KIRKLAND WAS an excellent surgeon. In 1774, he would also go on, unusually, to qualify as a doctor – the two professions being distinct and separate, with mere surgeons being regarded at the time as being beneath physicians. Indeed, the profession of surgeon had only been properly recognised some 15 years earlier, with the establishment by George II in 1745 of the London College of Surgeons. Prior to that, most of the hacking, sawing and stitching had been done as a sideline by barbers and butchers. Kirkland was a prominent and respected member of the new breed, not just locally, but nationally: his writings, of which there are many, show a man ahead of his time, who saved the lives of many with serious injuries who would certainly have died.

With the groaning John Johnson, however, even he was helpless.

He lifted the shirt and examined the entry wound. It had been covered by someone in the house with a pledget, a small protective press, dipped in arquebusade water. Arquebusade was merely distilled water infused with a variety of aromatic plants, such as rosemary and millefoil. Still, it was the treatment of the day for gunshot wounds. He removed the press and poked his little finger into the wound, causing his patient to cry out. It being almost a hundred years before the germ theory of disease was properly advanced, it is unlikely that his hands were particularly sterile, though it didn’t much matter: Johnson was not going to have time to die of sepsis. Kirkland then used a director – a type of instrument – to probe further, and eventually found the lead ball. It was lodged in Johnson’s body at a depth of four inches.

The surgeon excused himself to prepare some dressings in the kitchen; when he returned, Sarah Johnson was with her father. The Earl’s behaviour was growing ever more erratic. He wandered around his enormous house, railing and cursing and swigging porter. One moment he would return to the room where Johnson lay, ‘and pull him by the wig, call him a villain, and threaten to shoot him through the head’; the next, he would be ‘dissolved in tears, promising reparation to his steward’s children, protesting his innocence of all thought of murder’. Then he would switch back, tearing the dressings from Johnson’s wounds, and the covers from the bed, as Thomas Kirkland and Sarah Johnson attempted to protect the injured man.

At one point, after Ferrers had staggered from the room, the elderly man, gritting his teeth against the pain, said to the surgeon, ‘What a villain this is!’

But otherwise, he said little.

When it became apparent that he had done all he could to make Johnson comfortable – which was not a great deal – Kirkland accepted the Earl’s invitation to dine with him. Refusing such a man in his heightened state would have been unwise. Mrs Clifford, returned from the visit to her father, brought them a bottle of wine, and they began to eat.

Over supper, Ferrers expressed great surprise that the ball had not passed through his victim. He had, he told Kirkland, test-fired the pistol only a few days earlier, and it had shot clean through a plank of wood an inch-and-a-half thick and damaged the bricks in the wall beyond. Emboldened by drink and the surgeon’s reassurances that his victim would live, he also repeated his earlier admission, that he had shot Johnson on purpose and had wanted to kill him.

After they had finished eating, Margaret Clifford entered the room and tried to convince her lover to allow Johnson to be taken to his own home. But he replied, ‘He shall not be removed; I will keep him here, to plague the villain.’

Turning to the surgeon, he again warned him that Johnson was not to be taken from the Hall: in the morning, he said – clearly thinking that he would be able to bluster his way out of responsibility for the shooting – he would ‘set the affair in such a light as to prevent [his own] being seized’.

He further instructed Kirkland himself not to leave. Having little choice in the matter, the man from Ashby again agreed.

They returned to Johnson after eating, and found him in more pain, and restless with it. He was complaining of strangury – the need to urinate, with an inability to do so – and this alarmed Ferrers.

‘What would be the consequence,’ he said, ‘in case the guts are shot through?’

Kirkland reassured him that this was not a serious matter – and this revived the spirits of the Earl, who seems to have wanted to believe that which he must have known, had he reflected on it, was nonsense. The two men left again, and this time Ferrers called for a bottle of port, which they drank together – the surgeon with a good deal less gusto than his host.

Again, the nobleman bragged that he had acted deliberately, stressing that he had no remorse, and this time he explained his motive. This airing of his old concoction of paranoia, anger and hurt pride roused his temper, and when they returned once more to Johnson the Earl was vicious with him.

He demanded of the stricken man that he acknowledge before all those present – including his weeping daughter – that he was a villain. He made to drag him on to the floor, and would have done so had not Kirkland signalled to Johnson with a wink to agree to the outrageous demand.

‘I do confess I am a villain, my Lord,’ said Johnson.

That seemed to satisfy the drunken Earl – his maid, Lizzie Burgeland later said he was ‘fuddled’ – who strode over to the fireplace to warm himself. Turning to Sarah Johnson, he said, ‘Though he has been a villain to me, I promise you before Kirkland, who I desire to be a witness, that I will take care of your family if you do not prosecute.’

By now, it was around midnight, so he made at last for his bed.

Before he went, he addressed Kirkland, earnestly. ‘May I rely upon you?’ he said. ‘Are you sure there is no danger? Will he recover? May I go to bed in safety?’

‘Yes,’ said the surgeon. ‘Your Lordship may.’

As soon as they heard his footsteps on the stairs, Johnson begged to be taken home. Kirkland was only too glad to agree. Quite apart from it being in the patient’s own interests, he knew that, if he stayed, he was himself in the utmost peril. Ferrers had confessed all to him, and when Johnson died – as Kirkland knew he would – the Earl would surely seek to silence him.

There was a momentary panic when Ferrers opened a door upstairs, but he was merely calling his favourite pointer up to bed. As soon as the door closed again, Kirkland seized his chance. With the tyrant lying in a stupor, he hurried out into the cold night air, and fought his way through a blizzard to Lount. There he roused seven or eight local men to act as a guard, and they returned en masse to Staunton Harold. They fashioned a sedan out of some poles and an easy chair, and then carried the moaning Johnson, wrapped in blankets, from the Hall and out into the thick snow. It was past two o’clock in the morning before he was back at his farmhouse, and sentries were immediately posted on the doors in case Ferrers should awake and come looking for him.

Chapter 4

SEIZE THE LORD!

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK, the surgeon, Thomas Kirkland, having done all he could, left for home. By nine o’clock, his unfortunate patient had bled to death.

But word had already got out of what had gone on the day before, and an outraged posse of local people – no doubt heartily sick of the despicable behaviour of their Lord – armed themselves and set out for Staunton Harold Hall, led by a man called Richard Springthorpe, a friend of Johnson’s.

Ferrers heard them coming from his bedroom, where he was lying, groggy with hangover, and made a shambolic attempt to escape. The neighbours strode into the hall-yard and saw him hurrying towards the stables, as though to fetch a horse, which he had had ready-saddled. He was hardly dressed for a January morning’s riding: he appeared to be just out of bed, his stockings by his ankles and the garters in his hand. Springthorpe advanced towards, pistol in hand.

Lord Ferrers stopped, and said, ‘What do you want?’

‘It is you I want,’ said Springthorpe, ‘and I will have you.’

Ferrers put a hand in his pocket, leading Springthorpe to assume he was going for his own pistol. At this, he hesitated – one did not lightly shoot dead a peer of the realm – and Ferrers took advantage of this brief hiatus to scurry back into his house and to lock and bolt the door behind him.

An eye-witness was quoted in The Gentleman’s Magazine – a periodical founded in 1731, which counted Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift among its contributors – as saying that the size of the vengeful crowd outside the Hall grew quickly. ‘In about two hours Lord Ferrers appeared at the garret window, and called out: ‘How is Johnson?’ Springthorpe answered: ‘He is dead’, upon which his Lordship insulted him, and called him a liar… Upon being again assured that he was dead, he desired that the people might be dispersed, saying that he would surrender…’

But the crowd did not disperse; after a couple of hours of this stand-off, the desperate nobleman made a run for it, only to be spotted running across his bowling green by a collier called Curtis. The eyewitness report continues, ‘My Lord was then armed with a blunderbuss and a dagger and two or three pistols; but Curtis, so far from being intimidated, marched boldly up to him, and his Lordship was so struck with the determinate resolution shown by this brave fellow, that he suffered him to seize him without making any resistance. Yet the moment that he was in custody he declared that he had killed a villain, and that he gloried in the deed.’

After a brief discussion, the hapless Ferrers was bundled into a coach and driven to Ashby, where he was detained in a room at an inn kept by Francis Kinsey.

That was on Saturday morning. On Monday, a coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of wilful murder against him, and he was committed to the custody of the keeper of the jail at Leicester. There he languished for a fortnight, after which – since he could not be tried by a jury of commoners – he was transferred by coach to the Tower of London, where he was committed to the care of Black Rod, confined in the Round Tower, to await a hearing before his peers in the House of Lords.

Chapter 5

THE TRIAL, DAY ONE – THE PROSECUTION

DURING THE WEEKS that followed, Ferrers impressed those who saw him with his calmness and propriety. He was regularly visited by his cousin, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon; she was a prominent Methodist, and attempted, with little success, to get the Earl to make his peace with God. He was forbidden from seeing the one woman he wanted to see: his lover, Margaret Clifford. She had travelled with him from Leicestershire, and was in a lodging house in Tower Street, but she was refused permission to visit him. However, his four daughters, the youngest was aged 11 and the eldest 16, were allowed to spend time with their father, and he and Mrs Clifford exchanged notes every day, via a servant.

The trial began in Westminster Hall at 11am on April 16, just under three months after the murder. Although brief – it lasted only three days – R. v Ferrers was perhaps the trial of the century.

As was often the case in the great court cases, tickets were sold; the lucky few were inundated with offers of between five and 20 guineas for their seats; others tried to sneak in without tickets, and the House’s stewards were repeatedly required to eject gawpers who had gained entry unlawfully. By 8am the public galleries were packed solid. Most of those in attendance were the cream of London society, dressed in its finery. Lord Ferrers, being a peer of the realm, demanded the eight tickets to which he was entitled; what he did with them, having few friends or supporters, is not recorded.

Westminster Hall: the venue of Earl Ferrers’ trial for murder.

It was an ostentatious affair, with all the pomp and ceremony associated with the early British judicial system. One onlooker said it was ‘an assembly, which no man could have viewed without the most exquisitely pleasing sensations, had not the mournful occasion damped every impulse of joy.’

Westminster Hall was an historic building and the venue for not only the most notable state trials – King Charles I was tried there, as was Guy Fawkes and his fellow gunpowder plotters – but also coronation banquets and significant political meetings.

The Lords who were to sit in judgment processed majestically into the Hall. According to the Derby Mercury, ‘The magnificence must have made an impression upon the minds of the spectators, which no distance of time can erase.’

At one end of the Hall a throne was placed under ‘a canopy of crimson velvet’ for the king. On his right was a tent with red silk curtains for other members of the royal family; on his left another for the chief officers of the crown. More than 100 members of the House of Lords, dressed in their finest ceremonial robes and grandest wigs, formed a semi-circle on seats adorned with red velvet.

The Sergeant at Arms called for quiet: ‘Oyez, oyez, oyez! Our sovereign Lord the King strictly charges and commands all manner of persons to keep silence, upon pain of imprisonment!’

And, craning their necks, and edging forwards in their seats, the massed ranks of the great, the good and the fortunate watched as the once-haughty Earl was brought in to the chamber by a gaoler holding an axe above his head, the blade turned to the side to signify that his guilt had not yet been established, nor sentence passed.

One can only imagine how he was feeling; condemned to appear as a common criminal in the very place where the rank of his birth should have placed him as a judge. It was claimed that he had fainted in his carriage on the journey from the Tower to the Hall, which gives some indication of his state of mind.

Lord Ferrers knelt before his judges until Robert Henley, the first Earl of Northington and newly-appointed Lord High Steward, said, ‘Your Lordship may rise.’

Getting to his feet, Ferrers bowed to the scores of gathered peers. They returned the compliment.

‘Laurence Earl Ferrers, you are brought to this bar to receive your trial upon a charge of the murder of John Johnson,’ continued Baron Henley, ‘an accusation, with respect to the crime, and the persons who make it, of the most solemn and serious nature.’

Onlookers leaned forward, hoping to see the expression on the Earl’s face.

‘It is a happiness resulting from your Lordship’s birth, and the constitution of this country, that your Lordship is now to be tried by your peers in full parliament. What greater consolation can be suggested to a person in your unhappy circumstances, than to be reminded that you are to be tried by a set of judges, whose sagacity and penetration no material circumstances in evidence can escape, and whose justice nothing can influence or pervert?’

He continued in this wordy vein for some time, and it may well have been that Henley, a lawyer by trade, was revelling in the limelight. He had been made a Baron only a few days previously, for the sole purpose of taking on the position of Lord High Steward at Lord Ferrer’s trial, and not everyone approved of his conduct. The politician and writer Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford, thought he behaved badly at the trial. ‘He neither had dignity, nor affected any,’ wrote Walpole. There may have been a hint of sniffiness, and even snobbery, in these words. Those born to the title perhaps did not enjoy the sight of this recent commoner sitting above them on his red velvet chair, just one step below the king’s throne.

Following the Lord High Steward’s address – full of talk of justice, candour and impartiality – the time came for the charge to be put to the nobleman by the clerk of the court. ‘How say you, Laurence, Earl Ferrers,’ he said, in ringing tones. ‘Are you guilty of the felony and murder whereof you stand indicted, or not guilty?’

‘Not guilty, my Lords.’

‘Culprit, how will your Lordship be tried?’ asked the clerk.

‘By God and my peers,’ replied the Earl.

The Attorney-General, Sir Charles Pratt – a ‘small, well-made man with a reputation for physical laziness and gluttony’ according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) – gave the opening address, stating: ‘The noble prisoner stands here arraigned before your Lordships for that odious offence, malicious and deliberate murder. There cannot be a crime in human society that deserves more to be punished, or more strictly to be enquired after.’

He then outlined the facts; stating that Mr Johnson had been a long-serving, valued and trusted employee of the Ferrers family until that friendship ‘converted into hatred.’ Lord Ferrers accused Johnson of ‘having colluded secretly with his adversaries, with being in the interest of those he was pleased to call his enemies,’ he said, adding, ‘His Lordship, who best knew the malice of his own heart, has confessed that he harboured these suspicions.’

Sir Charles continued, ‘These notions, though void of truth, had so poisoned his Lordship’s mind, that he was determined at last to gratify his revenge by murder.’

The events of the fateful evening were unfolded as the bewigged Lords, dressed in the finest silks and brocades of the day, were told about the shooting.

Charles Yorke, the Solicitor-General and counsel for the crown, called the first witness, Elizabeth Burgeland, one of the Earl’s maids, who described being frightened by the gunshot.

‘When I heard the pistol go,’ she said, ‘I run into the yard, and the other maid-servant with me.’

‘What happened afterwards?’

‘We stayed in the yard a while, a few minutes, and came back to the wash-house. My Lord came when we were in the wash-house, and called. He hooped and hallooed, “Where are you all?” I went out and said, “We are here, my Lord!” He ordered that we should walk down to the house.’

The maid said she helped the injured Mr Johnson. ‘I took him up to bed by the arm, by his Lordship’s order.’

Elizabeth Saxon, another maid, was the next witness. Her evidence included an admission that she had heard her employer shouting at Mr Johnson.

‘I heard them very loud,’ she said. ‘I heard my Lord say, “Down on your other knee and declare that you have acted against Lord Ferrers!”, and then the pistol went off, and I and the other maid were frightened and run away.’

The third maid, Elizabeth Dolman, who had worked for Earl Ferrers for two months at the time of the murder, was sworn in. She told the Lords how she witnessed her master pull Mr Johnson by the wig and threaten him following the shooting.

‘He said he would shoot him through the head,’ she said.

George Perrott, a further lawyer for the prosecution, then had the opportunity of questioning the dead man’s daughter, Sarah Johnson.

Composed and articulate, Miss Johnson told the Lords she was summoned to Staunton Harold at between 4pm and 5pm on January 18th, the message being relayed by a servant.

‘I asked what he wanted me for,’ she said, ‘and he said my father was taken very ill.’

She described being taken to Earl Ferrers, asking after her father and being shown upstairs by a maid. She said she was followed by the Earl who told her that he thought he had not shot her father.

‘Sometime after that, Lord Ferrers came up again and he turned the clothes down and he said he saw he had shot him and throwed (sic) something out of a bottle; I don’t know what it was; he poured something upon it out of a bottle.’

Mr Perrott asked, ‘Did he tell you how the accident happened?’

‘He did not say anything about that.’

‘Did he at any time?’

‘He said he had shot him. He said it was what he designed.’

She agreed that the Earl had settled to look after her family if her father died, and went on to describe how he had demonstrated to Dr Kirkland the angle which he had held the pistol at the time of the shooting.

Earl Ferrers was ‘very angry,’ Miss Johnson said, and kept attempting to pull the bedclothes off her father.

After giving evidence about how Earl Ferrers had tried to evict her father from his farm, Miss Johnson was allowed to step down.

She was replaced by Thomas Kirkland, who told the court that he had known the Earl for ‘many years’ and been his physician for nine.

Dr Kirkland described the scene when he went into the bedroom where Mr Johnson lay. ‘Upon seeing Mr Johnson and that he had lost no blood, I bled him,’ he said. ‘He complained of a violent pain in his bowels.’

He said he examined the entry hole, which was on the left hand side and below the ribs, and decided that the shot could not be removed, and so simply dressed the wound.

Damning evidence that the Earl had planned the killing followed. ‘He [Earl Ferrers] was not sorry for it,’ said Kirkland. ‘He owned it was premeditated; that he intended to shoot him, for he said he was a villain and deserved death.’

He then related how Lord Ferrers was drunk, but not incoherent, and how he refused to allow his mortally-wounded steward to be moved to his own home, ordering that ‘he shall not be moved till he be either better or dead’, and adding that he was glad Mr Johnson was at the Hall so that he could, ‘plague the rascal.’ Dr Kirkland said he went against the aristocrat’s instructions and arranged for Mr Johnson to be taken to his own home after the Earl had gone to bed.

As he was accused of murder, Earl Ferrers was not entitled to legal representation and had to defend himself in court, doing the best that he could without a lawyer. It was for this reason that he then cross-examined Kirkland himself. Having little to work with, he attempted to impute some underhand motives to the surgeon. ‘At the time that we were talking this over a bottle of wine,’ he said, ‘did you talk with me as a friend; or did you intent to betray me?’

But Kirkland, a straightforward and honest man, did not fall into this trap. ‘I do own, my Lord, that I intended to deceive you,’ he said. ‘And I thought it absolutely necessary.’

Richard Springthorpe, one of the men who captured Earl Ferrers on the morning that Mr Johnson died, was the sixth witness for the prosecution. When asked to describe the events of the day, he said he found out that his friend Mr Johnson had died and went straight to Staunton Harold. ‘When I came to the hall-yard,’ he said, ‘my Lord in a few minutes came. He seemed to be going to the stable, with his stockings down and his garters in his hands. His Lordship, seeing me, demanded to know what I wanted.

‘I presented my pistol to his Lordship and I said it was he I wanted, and I would have him. He put his hands, whether he was going to put his garters into his pocket or to pull out a pistol I cannot say, but he suddenly ran into the house.

‘I never saw more of him for two hours. In about two hours he came to the garret window… he said “How is Johnson?” I said he was dead. He said, “You are a lying scoundrel, God damn you.”’

Once Mr Springthorpe had convinced the nobleman that he had killed his steward, the Earl told him to bring the large and increasingly agitated crowd into his home for food and drink.

Mr Springthorpe said, ‘I told him I did not come for victuals, but for him – and I would have him. He went away from the window swearing he would not be taken.’

He told the gathered Lords that it was another two hours before the Earl was seized on the bowling green. ‘Two colliers had hold of his Lordship. I said I would take care no-body should hurt him.’

Mr Springthorpe explained that he took weapons from two men to prevent them from using them against the Earl.

‘I heard my Lord say he had shot a villain and a scoundrel and, clapping his hand upon his bosom, he said, “I glory in his death!” That is all I know of the matter.’

The last witness for the prosecution was Francis Kinsey, who ran the pub in Ashby-de-la-Zouch where Earl Ferrers was taken after he was apprehended. He was there from Saturday until Monday and according to Mr Kinsey was very well-behaved – although he asked the landlord many times whether Mr Johnson was dead, and said that he would not believe it until he had heard it from the coroner.

Following Mr Kinsey’s evidence the Attorney-General said, ‘My Lords, we rest it here for the crown.’

Earl Ferrers was invited to offer evidence in his defence. He requested more time to prepare as ‘the law will not allow me the assistance of counsel in this case, in which, of all others, I should think most wanted.’

His plea was refused and Elizabeth Burgeland was recalled for cross-examination.

She was asked about her employer’s drinking habits. ‘He drank some brandy in his tea in the morning,’ she said and added that some time after the shooting, ‘he was quite fuddled.’

Earl Ferrrers, getting more frantic, interrupted the proceedings. ‘My Lords, by the kind of defence recommended to me, it will be impossible to go on at present. There are several witnesses to be examined, and really, my Lords, I am quite unprepared.’

The Lord High Steward – who was notoriously bad-tempered due to gout caused by a fondness of port – slapped him down. ‘My Lord Ferrers,’ he said, ‘it is required that you should open the nature of your defence. My Lords will be able to judge from that, whether it will be proper to give your Lordship time to make your defence, agreeable to your request.’

‘My Lords,’ continued the Earl, ‘I can hardly express myself, the very circumstance shocks me so much; but I am informed, from several circumstances, of an indisposition of mind.’

The peers trailed out of Westminster Hall to decide on what would happen next. After some time they returned, and the Lord High Steward told Ferrers, ‘You are to proceed to your defence.’

Again Earl Ferrers prevaricated, stating that he did not know how to proceed but that he intended to defend himself on the ground that he was mad. ‘The defence I mean is occasional insanity of mind,’ he said. ‘I am convinced, from recollecting within myself, that, at the time of this action, I could not know what I was about.’

On this, the first afternoon of his trial, he was forced to continue as best he could and called a further two witnesses; John Bennefold, a wig-maker, clerk and magistrate who had known the Earl for twenty years, and Thomas Goostrey, a business adviser.

Questioning the witnesses in a chaotic manner, Earl Ferrers asked Mr Bennefold what he thought of his state of mind. ‘His Lordship has always behaved in a very strange manner,’ said Bennefold. ‘Very flighty, very much like a man out of his mind – more particularly so within these two years past – such as being in liquor, and swearing and cursing and the like, and talking to himself, very much like a man disordered in his senses… and then he has behaved himself as well as any other gentleman at times.’

He confirmed that he knew Lord Ferrers’ uncle Henry, who had died in a lunatic asylum, and that he had heard that another family member, his aunt, Lady Barbara Shirley, had also suffered from mental illness. The Attorney-General asked the witness, ‘Did Mrs Shirley [the countess] ever treat him as an insane person, or talk of sending for a physician to him?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Did any other person think my Lord so insane as to want that?’

‘I cannot recollect any person in particular,’ came the reply.

Mr Goostrey, a reputed lawyer and acquaintance of the Earl’s for a decade, was initially not the best defence witness. Far from giving examples of the aristocrat’s eccentricities and lunacy he told the court he found him to be of ‘a very remarkable disposition’ and ‘extremely sensible’ and capable of being lucid in his business dealings. After much questioning, he reluctantly pointed to some odd business decisions and his stubbornness as proof of his insanity. ‘I have frequently had directions from him to do things that in my opinion were either fruitless, or opposite to his interest, and upon those occasions I have always found it in vain to endeavour to dissuade his Lordship from it,’ he said. ‘I have never been capable of accounting for his behaviour otherwise than by apprehending that he has been at times out of his mind.’

By way of an example of this ‘madness’, Goostrey cited a visit to one Sir Thomas Stapleton. Sir Thomas had offended his Lordship so he visited the lawyer ‘to draw an advertisement to be inserted in all the papers intending to challenge Sir Thomas Stapleton [to a duel], and to post him for a coward if he did not give him satisfaction. I was extremely uneasy and with difficulty did dissuade him from it.’

Mr Goostrey said that, from that time onwards, he had avoided seeing the nobleman, although he did say that he had visited him during his incarceration in the Tower of London. The Solicitor-General asked whether Mr Goostrey believed that Earl Ferrers was mad when he wanted to challenge Sir Thomas, or merely had a violent temper.

‘I did then think it insanity,’ he replied. Getting into his stride, he went on to say that because Earl Ferrers was unpredictable he ‘made it a rule never to contradict him’, and later, when asked why he had never – as the Earl’s lawyer – asked a doctor to declare him insane, added, ‘I look upon it that he was insane only at times, and in particular instances.’

Various Lords continued to ask Mr Goostrey questions about Ferrer’s mental state. The last question of the day came from Earl Moreton: ‘Did you ever see him in such a condition that he was incapable of judging between a moral and an immoral act?’

To which Mr Goostrey replied, ‘I cannot say I ever did.’

Proceedings were adjourned, and it was ruled that Laurence Earl Ferrers be remanded as a prisoner in the Tower of London until 10am the following day.

Chapter 6

THE TRIAL, DAY TWO – THE DEFENCE

‘OYEZ, OYEZ, OYEZ! Lieutenant of the Tower, bring forth your prisoner, Laurence Earl Ferrers, to the bar, pursuant to the order of the House of Lords.’

As on the first day of the trial, the noble prisoner was brought into Westminster Hall, which was again packed to the rafters, to kneel before his peers. He was ordered to rise and continue with his defence.

To help prove that insanity was a family trait, he asked his first witness, Thomas Huxley, about his uncle Henry, the previous Earl Ferrers, whom the witness had known for 14 years before his death.

‘What was the matter with him?’

‘He was a lunatic.’

He then confirmed that two other female members of the family had been diagnosed as being insane.

His next witness, Wilhelmina Deborah Cotes, confirmed that she had known the Earl’s aunt Lady Barbara Shirley and said, ‘she was always looked upon as a lunatic.’

Reverend Walter Shirley, the Earl’s younger brother – a rather more sensitive man, who wrote poetry and hymns as a pastime – did his best to help his sibling, stating that he believed him to be a lunatic, despite not having seen him for two years while away preaching in Ireland.

‘I have seen him talking to himself, clenching his fists, grinning and having several gestures of a madman, without any seeming cause leading thereto,’ he said. ‘I have likewise very frequently known him extremely suspicious of plots and contrivances against him from his own family, and when he was desired to give some account what the plots were that he meant, he could not make any direct answer. Another reason I have for thinking him so is his falling into violent passions without any adequate cause.’

When asked whether the family had ever thought of having his brother committed to an asylum, the Rev Shirley replied that they had, but ‘were afraid to go through with it’ in case the doctors failed to find him insane. That would leave the way clear for Earl Ferrers to sue them for ‘scandalum magnatum’ – the criminal offence, and civil tort, of the defamation of a peer of the realm.

He agreed that members of the family were not on the best of terms with the current Earl; on one occasion, after a hunt, he had been berated by his brother for no good reason. ‘As I chose to avoid the bottle, I went up stairs to the ladies,’ he said. ‘Lady Ferrers at that time lived with him; and, without any previous quarrel, my Lord came upstairs into the room; and after standing for some time with his back to the fire, he broke out into the grossest abuse of me, insulting me and swearing at me. I cannot to this day or hour conceive any reason for it.’

The Rev Shirley was allowed to step down and was replaced by one of Earl Ferrers’ tenants, Richard Phillips, who had known the prisoner for 18 years. He told the Lords that the Earl had told him that insanity was in his family and that the dead servant, Mr Johnson thought the Earl mad. The Attorney-General dismissed this evidence as hearsay, and moved on to the next witness, Gold Clarges, a relation on Laurence Shirley’s mother’s side (her maiden name had been Clarges). Clarges said, ‘I have looked upon your Lordship as a lunatic for many years,’ and that he thought him to have a particularly ‘jealous and suspicious nature.’ He went so far as to say that he avoided his company wherever possible.

It was surprising that Earl Ferrers called the next witness, given that he must have known that the man would portray him as not only mad, but as a vicious thug.

Peter Williams, the husband of a London publican, said, ‘I have often observed your Lordship, when I have been in your company, to be spitting in the glass and biting your lips and stamping about the room, which induced me to believe your Lordship was not in your right senses.’

He told the court that in January 1759 the Earl had sent him a horse as a present; in April of the same year, he had decided he wanted it returned, and had gone to the Williams’ home with armed servants to take it back. ‘You bid one of your servants to knock the padlock off the stable door. He did so. My wife, hearing a noise in the yard, came to know the reason, and without any ceremony your Lordship felled her to the ground with your fist. Upon my seeing this, I went into the yard and asked your Lordship what you meant by this behaviour.’

At this, Earl Ferrers interrupted the Mr Williams swiftly saying, ‘My Lords, I desire to stop this witness; I only meant to ask him a general question.’

But Mr Williams, who had known the Lord for 17 years, was undeterred, presumably because he was angry at the way his wife had been abused, and Ferrers’ request was refused.

During the rest of his evidence – which Ferrers again attempted and failed to stop – he said that he believed the Earl’s ‘insanity’ had worsened in recent years, stating firmly that he had believed it had been mad of him to come ‘on horseback with guns and other offensive weapons to take away the mare.’

Mr Williams’ wife, Elizabeth, was next on the stand. She said that she ran a public house in London, and that Earl Ferrers often visited when he was in the area and repeatedly behaved oddly. ‘He always was a-musing and talking to himself,’ she said. ‘He spit in the looking-glass, tore the pictures, swearing he would break my bureau open and would break all the glasses in my house, and would throttle me if I would not let him do it.’

She knew of no reason why he was like this but said he was ‘like a delirious man.’ ‘He frequently used to come. I made him coffee and sent up a dish. He always drank it out of the spout, which surprised me.’

She said the coffee was always hot and added, ‘He always went about the town like a madman, throttled me and threw me down in the yard one day when he took the horse away.’

When asked by Ferrers, ‘Have you ever seen me commit any other acts of outrage besides those you have mentioned?’

‘A great many more that are worse,’ she said. ‘Swearing, cursing, damning us and wishing us all at hell and himself at hell; and he threatened to break the glasses and talked to himself for hours together in bed.’

Going back to the horse incident, she said that Earl Ferrers had pistols and a hammer with him when he came to collect the mare, and had hurt her husband so badly after she had been knocked to the floor that a surgeon had to be fetched to treat him. ‘He took the mare away by force of arms and if anybody came to hinder him he said he would blow their brains out.’

The Honourable Robert Shirley was next to give evidence.

He had not seen his eldest brother for four years, he said – not since, characteristically, Ferrers had stormed into his home in Burton-on-Trent with concealed pistols and waving a ‘snick-or-snee’ – a large fighting knife – and threatened his family.

He said he believed him to be ‘rather turned in the head’, and that he was ‘transported into passions without any adequate cause.’ After that particular incident, he said, he had written to his older brother, Captain Washington Shirley, stating that he thought the Earl a lunatic, and saying that he would join with him in taking out a commission against him.

The Lords seem to have been sceptical, at best. Sir Charles Pratt, the Attorney-General, certainly was. He cross-examined Shirley on the suggestion that his brother’s insanity was proved by his having been ‘transported into passions without any adequate cause’.

‘I should be glad to know whether you deem every man that is transported with anger without an adequate cause, to be a madman?’ he said, eyebrows doubtless touching his wig. If a nobleman could not beat an errant servant all the Lords in the House would find themselves in the dock!

The star witness at the trial that afternoon was the eminent ‘mad-doctor’ Dr John Monro, an expert in insanity and physician at the notorious mental asylum Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam. He had looked after Laurence Shirley’s uncle Henry, the third Earl Ferrers, when he had become insane.

When asked to describe the usual symptoms of lunacy, the doctor said, ‘Uncommon fury, not caused by liquor, but very frequently raised by it. I do not know a stronger, a more constant, or a more unerring symptom of lunacy than jealousy, or suspicion without cause or grounds…’

Monro became increasingly uncomfortable as Ferrers ran through a list of his bizarre behaviour – including quarrelling with friends without cause, going armed where there is no danger, spitting in a mirror, talking to himself, drinking hot coffee from the spout of the pot, being seized with fits of rage. He was asked whether each such action might be considered a symptom of lunacy. The doctor replied that they might.

‘Is it common to have such a disorder in families in the blood?’ asked Ferrers.

‘Unfortunately, too common,’ came the reply.

Some may have believed that the Lord was suffering from some sort of mania in court that day as he called witness after witness with the sole intention of proving his own insanity, revelling in their repeated confirmations of that lunacy – and ignorant or careless of the obvious anguish and consternation this was causing his noble family.

‘Was I generally reputed to be a madman, or a man in his senses?’ he asked the next witness, one Roger Griffiths, a man he knew in London.

‘Generally reputed a lunatic,’ said Griffiths. ‘Some said cracked in his head.’

He recalled Mr Goostrey to the stand to ask him if he thought him ‘remarkably jealous and suspicious.’

‘Very remarkably so.’

Eventually, the Lords decided that the Earl had made his case – such as it was – and prevented his from recalling any more witnesses.

‘My Lords,’ he said, ‘I have done with my evidence. But it is impossible for me to sum up, and what I have to offer to your Lordships I have reduced into writing, and desire the clerk may read it.’

In his wordy letter, he tried further to prove his insanity, claiming to have ‘an unhappy disorder of mind, which I am grieved to be under the necessity of exposing.’ Towards the end of the letter he showed his lack of remorse for what he had done, saying, ‘My life is in your hands, and I have everything to hope, as my conscience does not condemn me of the crime I stand accused of; for I had no preconceived malice and was hurried into the perpetration of this fatal deed by the fury of a disordered imagination.’

*

CHARLES YORKE, the corpulent Solicitor-General, then had his moment, summing up the evidence for the Lords sitting in judgment. He said Shirley did not deny killing Johnson but claimed that he was ‘incapable, knowingly, of doing what he did’ and therefore, ‘insists upon an incapacity of and insanity of mind in his defence.’

The Lords then sat through long and doubtless tedious legal definitions of insanity (both partial insanity of mind, where the sufferer is ‘competent as to some matters, and not so as to others’, a judge and jury deciding whether the perpetrator was mad at the time the crime was committed, and total insanity, which is ‘perfect madness’ and will absolve the perpetrator of all guilt). Lunacy while drunk was no defence in law, said the lawyer, because it is a ‘voluntary contracted madness’ and ‘shall have the same judgment as if he were in his right senses.’

He asked the Lords, ‘Is the noble prisoner at the bar to be acquitted from the guilt of murder on account of insanity… could he, did he, at that time, distinguish between good and evil?’

Mr Yorke’s bias was exposed somewhat, as he described Lord Ferrer’s animosity towards his servant and his vengeful nature – citing the fact that he tried to drive Johnson out of his farm, with the intention of allowing his mistress’s father to rent the land instead – and stating, ‘It was plain, his Lordship gradually wrought himself up to a resolution of destroying Mr Johnson.’

He claimed that the act of murder was clearly premeditated. On the Sunday before the shooting, the Earl had invited Johnson to visit him at 3pm on Friday. He had locked the door of the room they were in. He had produced a paper for Johnson to sign admitting that he had betrayed his master. He had tested the gun before the shooting. And, after he had shot Johnson and failed to kill him, he had told Dr Kirkland that he intended to shoot him again.

‘The evidence shows that his conduct was not absurd, but rational and consistent,’ said Mr Yorke. ‘The same crime has been committed in all ages, upon grounds as slight, by men who never thought of setting up the defence of lunacy.’

As to the question of whether Earl Ferrers knew that what he had done was wrong, the Solicitor-General waxed lyrical about how he had sent for a surgeon and immediately asked him whether he thought the servant would live; how he had told Johnson’s daughter that he feared prosecution, and had said that if she did not press charges he would look after her family; how he had insisted that Mr Johnson not be moved for fear that word would get out and he would be seized.

Obviously enjoying his time in the limelight, Mr Yorke said, ‘This is the substance of the evidence which has been offered for the King; and it not only proves the fact, but proves it to be murder. What is the evidence produced by the noble Lord to weaken the force of it? In the first place, there is none which applies to the time of committing the act… no general evidence has been offered which proves his lunacy or insanity at any time.’

Taking each defence witness in turn, he highlighted their inability to prove that the Earl was mad and stated that Ferrers had murdered an old and faithful servant ‘in cold blood’ and in a ‘most deliberate and wilful manner.’

At the end of the Solicitor-General’s summing-up, the Lord High Steward ordered that Lord Ferrers be returned to the Tower – a journey of three miles – and the Lords were invited to leave the Hall.

Indeed, Ferrers was in the Tower when the Lords traipsed back into court, and was no doubt pacing up and down, concerned for his fate, when they delivered their verdicts in absentia.

The youngest baron, George Lord Lyttleton, stood up, removed his wig and was asked, ‘What says your Lordship? Is Laurence, Earl Ferrers, guilty of the felony and murder whereof he stands indicted, or not guilty?’

The most junior member of the House of Lords put his right hand on his breast, bowed his head and said, ‘Guilty, upon my honour.’

Each of the further 35 Lords, five Viscounts, 55 Earls, the Marquis of Rockingham, 15 Dukes, and the Lord Privy Seal, were asked the same question and gave the same reply.

The last to give his verdict was the Lord High Steward, who declared, ‘My Lords, I am of the opinion that Laurence Earl Ferrers is guilty of the felony and murder whereof he stands indicted, upon my honour.’

The verdict was unanimous and it was ordered that Lord Ferrers be returned to Westminster Hall to hear the outcome.

The news was delivered swiftly, the Earl was taken back to the Tower and court was adjourned till the following day.

Chapter 7

THE TRIAL, DAY THREE – THE SENTENCE

LORD FERRERS’ REACTION to the shameful news that his peers believed him a murderer is not recorded – no doubt, the aristocratic stiff upper lip prevented him from showing his feelings – but he was returned to court at 11am on April 18, 1760, to plead for his life.

There was no doubt that he had failed to live up to the Ferrers family motto: Honor Virtutis Praemium (Honour is the reward of virtue), and now faced the consequences.

Several members of the royal family, including the King’s 21-year-old grandson Prince Edward, were at Westminster Hall to watch proceedings.

Blaming his family for persuading him to attempt a defence of insanity, the disgraced nobleman admitted that his only hope now was to avoid the death penalty. He thanked those gathered for ‘the fair and candid trial your Lordships have indulged me with’, and apologised for troubling the peers with ‘a defence I was much averse to… but was prevailed upon by my family to attempt.’

Ironically, by far the highest hurdle for Ferrers during the trial had been his own conduct during the case.

Horace Walpole, who had been in court each day, later described its ‘pomp and awfulness’ in a letter to his friend, the MP George Montagu. ‘In general he behaved rationally and coolly,’ wrote Walpole, ‘though it was a strange contradiction to see a man trying by his own sense to prove himself out of his senses. It was more shocking to see his two brothers brought to prove the lunacy in their own blood, in order to save their brother's life. Both are almost as ill-looking men as the Earl.’

In a heartfelt address to the Lords, in which Earl Ferrers stated that he was suffering from ‘agony of mind’, he said, ‘I hope your Lordships will, in compassion to my infirmities, be kind enough to recommend me to His Majesty’s clemency.’

A ripple of chatter ran through the courtroom, which was ended with a proclamation for silence. Then, the Lord High Steward, Robert, Lord Henley, addressed the prisoner in his usual verbose, pompous fashion. It is recorded in full below only to show how Henley was swaggering and ostentatiously enjoying the occasion.

‘Laurence Earl Ferrers; His Majesty, from his royal and equal regard to justice, and his steady attention to our constitution, hath commanded this inquiry to be made, upon the blood of a very ordinary subject, against your Lordship, a peer of this realm: your Lordship hath been arraigned; hath pleaded, and put yourself on your peers; and they have unanimously found your Lordship guilty of the felony and murder charged in the indictment.

‘It is usual, my Lord, for courts of justice, before they pronounce the dreadful sentence pronounced by the law, to open to the prisoner the nature of the crime of which he is convicted; not in order to aggravate or afflict, but to awaken the mind to a due attention to, and consideration of, the unhappy situation into which he hath brought himself. My Lord, the crime of which your Lordship is found guilty, murder, is incapable of aggravation; and it is impossible, but that, during your Lordship’s long confinement, you must have reflected upon it, represented to your mind in the deepest shades, and with all its train of dismal and detestable consequences.

‘As your Lordship hath received no benefit, so you can derive no consolation from that refuge you seemed almost ashamed to take, under a pretended insanity; since it hath appeared to us all, from your cross-examination of the King’s witnesses, that you recollected the minutest circumstances of facts and conversations, to which you and the witnesses only could be privy, with the exactness of a memory more than ordinary sound; it is therefore as unnecessary as it would be painful to me, to dwell longer on a subject so black and dreadful.

‘It is with much more satisfaction, that I can remind your Lordship, that though, from the present tribunal, before which you now stand, you can receive nothing but strict and equal justice; yet you are soon to appear before an Almighty Judge, whose unfathomable wisdom is able, by means incomprehensible to our narrow capacities, to reconcile justice with mercy; but your Lordship’s education must have informed you, and you are now to remember, such beneficence is only to be obtained by deep contrition, sound, unfeigned, and substantial repentance.

‘Confined strictly, as your Lordship must be, for the very short remainder of your life, you will be still, if you please, entitled to converse and communicate with the ablest divines of the Protestant church, to whose pious care and consolation, in fervent prayer and devotion, I most cordially recommend your Lordship.

‘Nothing remains for me, but to pronounce the dreadful sentence of the law; and the judgment of the law is, and this high court doth award, that you, Laurence Earl Ferrers, return to the prison of the Tower, from whence you came; from thence you must be led to the place of execution, on Monday next, being the 21st day of this instant April; and when you come there, you must be hanged by the neck till you are dead, and your body must be dissected and anatomized.

‘And God Almighty be merciful to your soul.’

At that, the chamber erupted in a babble of noise and chatter, and Earl Ferrers was led away.

Chapter 8

EXECUTION OF AN ARISTOCRAT

IN THE EVENT, the execution was delayed, at Ferrers’ request.

He was hoping for a pardon from the king, but this never came. He then requested to be beheaded at the Tower of London, the fate a century and a half earlier of his ancestor Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and one which he thought his noble rank deserved. The king denied him this, too, and ordered him to be hanged like a common criminal in front of the masses at Tyburn.

‘He has done the deed of the bad man,’ said King George, ‘and he shall die the death of the bad man.’

And so it was that the noble Earl found himself in his landau, with a funeral hearse behind him carrying his own coffin, on that slow journey to his doom.

In her book, Passages From the Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys, the author describes how she watched the carriage take the Earl to his execution: ‘I think I never shall forget a procession so moving; to know a man an hour before in perfect health, then a lifeless corpse.’

As the procession headed to the top of Tyburn Road – modern-day Oxford Street – they could see the spectator seating which had been erected in the open field, at what is now Marble Arch, for the occasion. Rows and rows of London’s finest ladies and gentlemen, dressed in their finest silks, jostled for the clearest view in the best seats, craning their necks for the arrival of the unfortunate Earl. Below them, the common multitude – apprentices given the day off, respectable businessmen, and mothers with babies in arms – was, likewise, all elbows and tiptoes.

They were all gathered around a new-fangled gallows, which stood on a scaffold draped in black baize and dressed with black cushions.

In the centre of the stage was a box upon which the condemned man was to stand, the noose around his neck; upon his giving the signal, a lever would be pulled and the box would open. The victim would then drop into the void, and make his way to eternity.

Ferrers was to enjoy the dubious distinction of becoming the first man to try out this contraption. It was some advance on the old method of hanging – you stood in a cart which was then driven away from underneath you – but a far cry from later methods, where the ‘drop’ was greater and the convict died quickly, from a broken neck, as opposed to slowly, from strangulation.

Waiting at the side of the stage was the hangman, Thomas Turlis – a determined man of sharp features and strong hands, then in the eighth of a 19-year career as the London executioner.

Ferrers climbed down from the landau to a deafening roar, and climbed up onto the platform. He was calmness itself: as Walpole – who watched the execution – later wrote, ‘his courage rose when it was most likely to fail.’

The coach was immediately driven away by its weeping driver – the Earl seems to have been popular with at least one of his servants, though it might have been the imminent loss of his job that the man was lamenting – and abandoned in a pub yard in Acton. There it stood, untouched, for the next 100 years until it fell apart with age.

It was customary, and sensible, for the condemned to pay the hangman a tip, to ensure that he ‘turned them off’ with as little pain as possible. Taking a purse containing five guineas from his pocket, the Earl mistakenly handed it to Turlis’s assistant, and there followed an unseemly tussle between the two men until Sheriff Vaillant intervened and ordered the assistant to pass the fee on to his master. Lord Ferrers than gave his gold watch to the sheriff.

Cornelius Humphries, the Chaplain of the Tower, had followed him from the coach. Now he said to the Earl, ‘Do you choose to pray?’

‘I do not,’ said Ferrers.

‘Do you not choose to join with me in the Lord’s Prayer?’

‘I do,’ said Ferrers, obviously having second thoughts. ‘I have always thought it a very fine prayer.’

The two men then knelt together on the black cushions, and prayed to the heavenly entity before whom Ferrers expected, within a few minutes, to be prostrating himself.

After they had finished, Ferrers stood and said, loudly and clearly, ‘Oh, God, forgive me all my errors – pardon all my sins!’

He then presented his watch to Sheriff Vaillant, as a token of his thanks, and requested that his body be buried at Staunton Harold. He took three steps and mounted the ‘drop’, and was guided to the centre of the raised box where his arms were tied in front of him with a black silk sash. His own neckerchief was removed and the knotted rope – not, as some reports have claimed, made of silk – was placed around his neck.

At this point, according to Walpole, he blanched, but quickly recovered his composure.

As the enormous crowd edged forward eagerly, Turlis asked him if he wished to give the signal for the trap door to be opened. He said that he did not, and it was left to Sheriff Vaillant.

Readying himself, the condemned man said his final words: ‘Am I right?’

The executioner told him that he was, and a white nightcap which the Earl had brought with him, was pulled down over his head.

Vaillant kicked the side of the platform to give the signal.

What followed was horrific.

Turlis pulled a lever which was supposed to open the floor underneath Ferrers’ feet, but it did not function. Ferrers stood there for some time, more than once lifting the nightcap from his eyes to see what was happening. Turlis kept trying, and eventually the floor opened. But it had still not functioned properly, and the hanging man’s feet were still touching the platform – he was able to support himself, just about, on tiptoe, and there he writhed, gurgling and clawing his face, for some time.

He was only dispatched when the hangman stood underneath his and pulled on his legs. Modern hanging kills instantly, the weight of the body and the length of the drop being carefully calculated so that the spinal cord is severed immediately the trap door opens: by contrast, it took Earl Ferrers four minutes to die (a total of only seven minutes had elapsed since he had alighted from his landau, said Walpole, watch-in-hand). He died at two minutes to twelve o’clock.

Lord Ferrers’ body was left turning on the rope for a little longer than the customary hour as Sheriff Vaillant – relieved that his own ordeal was over – ate lunch on the scaffold with friends.

Finally, his body was cut down and placed a coffin lined with white satin, which had accompanied him on the journey. The coffin was carried by six men and loaded into the hearse to take him to Surgeon’s Hall in the Old Bailey to be dissected and displayed to the common man – the final humiliation for this proud and haughty noble. His hat and the rope used to hang him were at the end of the coffin. A large incision was then made from the neck to the bottom of the breast, and another across the throat; the lower part of the belly was laid open and the bowels taken away. It was afterwards publicly exposed to view in a room up one pair of stairs at the Hall where scores of people jostled to see the grisly remains.

Earl Ferrer’s mother, Anne, paid eight guineas for the clothes he was executed in – at that time entrepreneurial executioners made extra money by selling macabre items belonging to those they hanged.

On the evening of Thursday, May 8th, the late Earl’s body was returned to his family and buried – against his dying wish – in St. Pancras church, in a 12 feet-deep trench dug under the belfry. The simple inscription on the coffin plate read: Laurence Earl Ferrers suffered May 5, 1760.

Twenty two years later, it was removed to Staunton Harold to be re-interred in the family vault, as he had wished.

Epilogue

TWO WEEKS AFTER the hanging, Laurence Shirley’s brother, Washington Shirley, a naval officer and keen amateur astronomer, took his seat in the House of Lords as the fifth Earl Ferrers.

During his time in the Tower, the fourth Earl had made a will requesting that £6,000 be raised from the estate and placed in trust for the family of the murdered John Johnson. (To place this in context, using average earnings, £1,000 then is worth more than £1.5 million today.) A further £4,000 in East India Company bonds was allocated to his mistress, Margaret Clifford, and their children. The will was not strictly legal, because it was drawn up after he had been convicted of murder, but it was allowed to stand, and the families were well provided for.

The legacy left to John Johnson’s family enabled them to have a grand headstone made to mark his burial spot in the churchyard of St Mary and St Hardulph, Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, which ironically also contains the tombs of 16th and 17th century members of the Shirley clan.

John Johnson’s Headstone

Unfortunately, having stood in all weathers for more than 250 years the headstone has deteriorated at the bottom and the last line of the inscription cannot be deciphered, but the rest reads:

Released from the Evils of this frail World

In pious expectation of the reward of his Virtues

JOHN JOHNSON

Departed this Life, Jan: XLXMDCCLX Aged L

He was many years

The esteemed and faithful Servant

of

The Honorable Laurence Shirley Esq.

With unshaken Integrity

He continued in the office of Steward

to

The late Rt Honorable Laurence Earl Ferrers

Till near the fateful period of his Life

Uncorrupted by any views of self interest

No hopes, no fears

Could divert him from the steady pursuit of that path

His duty to God and Man pointed out

He was a worthy example of

The tender Father, the affectionate Husband

The firm and valuable Friend

The sincere and humble Christian

His many excellent Qualities

Rendered him highly Respected

According to Cracroft’s Peerage: The Complete Guide to the British Peerage and Baronetage, Laurence Shirley may have a lasting and more virtuous legacy in the form of a famous scientist as a great-grandson.

On April 2, 1777, Anna Maria, one of Earl Ferrer’s illegitimate daughters by his mistress Margaret Clifford, married John Lewis Pasteur, a Derbyshire hosier nine years her junior. It has since been claimed that a direct descendent of this union was Louis Pasteur, the famous French scientist and founder of the germ theory of disease. If this is true, although he was the son of a poor tanner Pasteur’s grandmother was Anna Maria – meaning he had aristocratic English blood in his veins. Anna Maria died in 1819, aged 73, just three years before Pasteur was born.

Earl Ferrer’s former wife, the Countess, meanwhile, remarried in 1769, to Lord Frederick Campbell, a prominent politician who could not have been more different to the bullying, thuggish Earl.

The following description of him, from Posthumous Memoirs of his Own Time, by N W Wraxhall, describes Lord Campbell when he was in his fifties: ‘His manners, noble, yet soft, dignified, yet devoid of any pride or affectation, conciliated all who approached him.’

The marriage was evidently a happy one, although they had no children. It is said they met when the countess turned to the law to rid herself of the Earl, and Campbell had been her counsel.

Lady Campbell died, aged 70, at her country seat, Combe Bank, in Kent, on July 25th 1807 – as her late first husband had once threatened, she was burned alive in her bed when a reading lamp fell over and set her nightclothes ablaze.

Sources

Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume 1, Randolph Trumbach

Tales of Our Great Families, Edward Walford

Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs, Joseph Cradock

Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century, Jonathan Andrews, Andrew T. Scull

A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings ..., Volume 19, Thomas Bayly Howell

Cracroft’s Peerage: The Complete Guide to British Peerage and Baronetage

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The Newgate Calendar

Passages From the Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys of Hardwick House, Oxen, Caroline Girle Powys

Tarnished Coronets, Muriel Nelson d’Auvergne

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‘This may surprise you,’ I say, ‘but you can be arrested even if you aren’t listening.’

‘No, you can’t. Not if you’re inside a house. I know the law.’

If there is one thing I like more than a gobby teenager, it is a gobby teenager who knows the law.

‘Shimona, you are going to have to take my word for the fact that you were brought here under arrest and you are still under arrest now. Let’s move on.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Belle de Jour meets The Bill … sarky sarges, missing panda cars and wayward MOPS (members of the public).’ - The Guardian

‘Part Orwell, part Kafka and part Trisha’ - The Mail on Sunday

SICK NOTES

True Stories from the GP’s Surgery

'We wanted to thank you for all you did for mum over the last 14 years,' said Mrs Cobham.

Excitedly, I peered into the plastic bag. Inside was one small loaf of sliced bread.

'Er...' I stammered. 'Well, that's lovely.'

She nodded and smiled. 'It was the least we could do, doctor,' she said.

Welcome to the bizarre world of Tony Copperfield, family doctor. He spends his days fending off anxious mums, elderly sex maniacs and hopeless hypochondriacs.

The rest of his time is taken up sparring with colleagues, battling bureaucrats and banging his head against the brick wall of the NHS.

If you've ever wondered what your GP is really thinking - and what's going on behind the scenes at your surgery - Sick Notes is for you.

'A wonderful book, funny and insightful in equal measure.' - Dr Phil Hammond, Private Eye’s MD

'Copperfield is simply fantastic, unbelievably funny and improbably wise’ - British Medical Journal.

'A mix of the hilarious, the mundane and the poignant. Dr Copperfield reveals what goes on behind those surgery doors.' - The Daily Mail

Table of Contents

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1 A CRUEL AND WICKED HUSBAND

Chapter 2 MURDER MOST FOUL

Chapter 3 DEATH IN THE MORNING

Chapter 4 SEIZE THE LORD!

Chapter 5 THE TRIAL, DAY ONE – THE PROSECUTION

Chapter 6 THE TRIAL, DAY TWO – THE DEFENCE

Chapter 7 THE TRIAL, DAY THREE – THE SENTENCE

Chapter 8 EXECUTION OF AN ARISTOCRAT

Epilogue

Sources

More from Monday Books

Table of Contents

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1 A CRUEL AND WICKED HUSBAND

Chapter 2 MURDER MOST FOUL

Chapter 3 DEATH IN THE MORNING

Chapter 4 SEIZE THE LORD!

Chapter 5 THE TRIAL, DAY ONE – THE PROSECUTION

Chapter 6 THE TRIAL, DAY TWO – THE DEFENCE

Chapter 7 THE TRIAL, DAY THREE – THE SENTENCE

Chapter 8 EXECUTION OF AN ARISTOCRAT

Epilogue

Sources

More from Monday Books

Table of Contents

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1 A CRUEL AND WICKED HUSBAND

Chapter 2 MURDER MOST FOUL

Chapter 3 DEATH IN THE MORNING

Chapter 4 SEIZE THE LORD!

Chapter 5 THE TRIAL, DAY ONE – THE PROSECUTION

Chapter 6 THE TRIAL, DAY TWO – THE DEFENCE

Chapter 7 THE TRIAL, DAY THREE – THE SENTENCE

Chapter 8 EXECUTION OF AN ARISTOCRAT

Epilogue

Sources

More from Monday Books