In the Shadow of the Noose: Mad Earl Ferrers: The Last English Nobleman Hanged for Murder
Authors: Dan Alexander Randall
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
THE TRIAL, DAY ONE – THE PROSECUTION
THE TRIAL, DAY TWO – THE DEFENCE
THE TRIAL, DAY THREE – THE SENTENCE
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.