In the Shadow of the Noose: Mad Earl Ferrers: The Last English Nobleman Hanged for Murder

by Randall, Dan Alexander

  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

  All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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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.