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

by Randall, Dan Alexander

  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 unfor
tunate 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, j
ust 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.