In the Shadow of the Noose: Mad Earl Ferrers: The Last English Nobleman Hanged for Murder (2 page)

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 19
^th
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.