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

by Randall, Dan Alexander

  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 reconc
iliation 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 characteris
tic 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.