In the Shadow of the Noose: Mad Earl Ferrers: The Last English Nobleman Hanged for Murder (6 page)

Mr Goostrey said that, from that time onwards, he had avoided seeing the nobleman, although he did say that he had visited him during his incarceration in the Tower of London. The Solicitor-General asked whether Mr Goostrey believed that Earl Ferrers was mad when he wanted to challenge Sir Thomas, or merely had a violent temper.

‘I did then think it insanity,’ he replied. Getting into his stride, he went on to say that because Earl Ferrers was unpredictable he ‘made it a rule never to contradict him’, and later, when asked why he had never – as the Earl’s lawyer – asked a doctor to declare him insane, added, ‘I look upon it that he was insane only at times, and in particular instances.’

Various Lords continued to ask Mr Goostrey questions about Ferrer’s mental state. The last question of the day came from Earl Moreton: ‘Did you ever see him in such a condition that he was incapable of judging between a moral and an immoral act?’

To which Mr Goostrey replied, ‘I cannot say I ever did.’

Proceedings were adjourned, and it was ruled that Laurence Earl Ferrers be remanded as a prisoner in the Tower of London until 10am the following day.

Chapter 6

THE TRIAL, DAY TWO – THE DEFENCE

‘OYEZ, OYEZ, OYEZ! Lieutenant of the Tower, bring forth your prisoner, Laurence Earl Ferrers, to the bar, pursuant to the order of the House of Lords.’

As on the first day of the trial, the noble prisoner was brought into Westminster Hall, which was again packed to the rafters, to kneel before his peers. He was ordered to rise and continue with his defence.

To help prove that insanity was a family trait, he asked his first witness, Thomas Huxley, about his uncle Henry, the previous Earl Ferrers, whom the witness had known for 14 years before his death.

‘What was the matter with him?’

‘He was a lunatic.’

He then confirmed that two other female members of the family had been diagnosed as being insane.

His next witness, Wilhelmina Deborah Cotes, confirmed that she had known the Earl’s aunt Lady Barbara Shirley and said, ‘she was always looked upon as a lunatic.’

Reverend Walter Shirley, the Earl’s younger brother – a rather more sensitive man, who wrote poetry and hymns as a pastime – did his best to help his sibling, stating that he believed him to be a lunatic, despite not having seen him for two years while away preaching in Ireland.

‘I have seen him talking to himself, clenching his fists, grinning and having several gestures of a madman, without any seeming cause leading thereto,’ he said. ‘I have likewise very frequently known him extremely suspicious of plots and contrivances against him from his own family, and when he was desired to give some account what the plots were that he meant, he could not make any direct answer. Another reason I have for thinking him so is his falling into violent passions without any adequate cause.’

When asked whether the family had ever thought of having his brother committed to an asylum, the Rev Shirley replied that they had, but ‘were afraid to go through with it’ in case the doctors failed to find him insane. That would leave the way clear for Earl Ferrers to sue them for ‘scandalum magnatum’ – the criminal offence, and civil tort, of the defamation of a peer of the realm.

He agreed that members of the family were not on the best of terms with the current Earl; on one occasion, after a hunt, he had been berated by his brother for no good reason. ‘As I chose to avoid the bottle, I went up stairs to the ladies,’ he said. ‘Lady Ferrers at that time lived with him; and, without any previous quarrel, my Lord came upstairs into the room; and after standing for some time with his back to the fire, he broke out into the grossest abuse of me, insulting me and swearing at me. I cannot to this day or hour conceive any reason for it.’

The Rev Shirley was allowed to step down and was replaced by one of Earl Ferrers’ tenants, Richard Phillips, who had known the prisoner for 18 years. He told the Lords that the Earl had told him that insanity was in his family and that the dead servant, Mr Johnson thought the Earl mad. The Attorney-General dismissed this evidence as hearsay, and moved on to the next witness, Gold Clarges, a relation on Laurence Shirley’s mother’s side (her maiden name had been Clarges). Clarges said, ‘I have looked upon your Lordship as a lunatic for many years,’ and that he thought him to have a particularly ‘jealous and suspicious nature.’ He went so far as to say that he avoided his company wherever possible.

It was surprising that Earl Ferrers called the next witness, given that he must have known that the man would portray him as not only mad, but as a vicious thug.

Peter Williams, the husband of a London publican, said, ‘I have often observed your Lordship, when I have been in your company, to be spitting in the glass and biting your lips and stamping about the room, which induced me to believe your Lordship was not in your right senses.’

He told the court that in January 1759 the Earl had sent him a horse as a present; in April of the same year, he had decided he wanted it returned, and had gone to the Williams’ home with armed servants to take it back. ‘You bid one of your servants to knock the padlock off the stable door. He did so. My wife, hearing a noise in the yard, came to know the reason, and without any ceremony your Lordship felled her to the ground with your fist. Upon my seeing this, I went into the yard and asked your Lordship what you meant by this behaviour.’

At this, Earl Ferrers interrupted the Mr Williams swiftly saying, ‘My Lords, I desire to stop this witness; I only meant to ask him a general question.’

But Mr Williams, who had known the Lord for 17 years, was undeterred, presumably because he was angry at the way his wife had been abused, and Ferrers’ request was refused.

During the rest of his evidence – which Ferrers again attempted and failed to stop – he said that he believed the Earl’s ‘insanity’ had worsened in recent years, stating firmly that he had believed it had been mad of him to come ‘on horseback with guns and other offensive weapons to take away the mare.’

Mr Williams’ wife, Elizabeth, was next on the stand. She said that she ran a public house in London, and that Earl Ferrers often visited when he was in the area and repeatedly behaved oddly. ‘He always was a-musing and talking to himself,’ she said. ‘He spit in the looking-glass, tore the pictures, swearing he would break my bureau open and would break all the glasses in my house, and would throttle me if I would not let him do it.’

She knew of no reason why he was like this but said he was ‘like a delirious man.’ ‘He frequently used to come. I made him coffee and sent up a dish. He always drank it out of the spout, which surprised me.’

She said the coffee was always hot and added, ‘He always went about the town like a madman, throttled me and threw me down in the yard one day when he took the horse away.’

When asked by Ferrers, ‘Have you ever seen me commit any other acts of outrage besides those you have mentioned?’

‘A great many more that are worse,’ she said. ‘Swearing, cursing, damning us and wishing us all at hell and himself at hell; and he threatened to break the glasses and talked to himself for hours together in bed.’

Going back to the horse incident, she said that Earl Ferrers had pistols and a hammer with him when he came to collect the mare, and had hurt her husband so badly after she had been knocked to the floor that a surgeon had to be fetched to treat him. ‘He took the mare away by force of arms and if anybody came to hinder him he said he would blow their brains out.’

The Honourable Robert Shirley was next to give evidence.

He had not seen his eldest brother for four years, he said – not since, characteristically, Ferrers had stormed into his home in Burton-on-Trent with concealed pistols and waving a ‘snick-or-snee’ – a large fighting knife – and threatened his family.

He said he believed him to be ‘rather turned in the head’, and that he was ‘transported into passions without any adequate cause.’ After that particular incident, he said, he had written to his older brother, Captain Washington Shirley, stating that he thought the Earl a lunatic, and saying that he would join with him in taking out a commission against him.

The Lords seem to have been sceptical, at best. Sir Charles Pratt, the Attorney-General, certainly was. He cross-examined Shirley on the suggestion that his brother’s insanity was proved by his having been ‘transported into passions without any adequate cause’.

‘I should be glad to know whether you deem every man that is transported with anger without an adequate cause, to be a madman?’ he said, eyebrows doubtless touching his wig. If a nobleman could not beat an errant servant all the Lords in the House would find themselves in the dock!

The star witness at the trial that afternoon was the eminent ‘mad-doctor’ Dr John Monro, an expert in insanity and physician at the notorious mental asylum Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam. He had looked after Laurence Shirley’s uncle Henry, the third Earl Ferrers, when he had become insane.

When asked to describe the usual symptoms of lunacy, the doctor said, ‘Uncommon fury, not caused by liquor, but very frequently raised by it. I do not know a stronger, a more constant, or a more unerring symptom of lunacy than jealousy, or suspicion without cause or grounds…’

Monro became increasingly uncomfortable as Ferrers ran through a list of his bizarre behaviour – including quarrelling with friends without cause, going armed where there is no danger, spitting in a mirror, talking to himself, drinking hot coffee from the spout of the pot, being seized with fits of rage. He was asked whether each such action might be considered a symptom of lunacy. The doctor replied that they might.

‘Is it common to have such a disorder in families in the blood?’ asked Ferrers.

‘Unfortunately, too common,’ came the reply.

Some may have believed that the Lord was suffering from some sort of mania in court that day as he called witness after witness with the sole intention of proving his own insanity, revelling in their repeated confirmations of that lunacy – and ignorant or careless of the obvious anguish and consternation this was causing his noble family.

‘Was I generally reputed to be a madman, or a man in his senses?’ he asked the next witness, one Roger Griffiths, a man he knew in London.

‘Generally reputed a lunatic,’ said Griffiths. ‘Some said cracked in his head.’

He recalled Mr Goostrey to the stand to ask him if he thought him ‘remarkably jealous and suspicious.’

‘Very remarkably so.’

Eventually, the Lords decided that the Earl had made his case – such as it was – and prevented his from recalling any more witnesses.

‘My Lords,’ he said, ‘I have done with my evidence. But it is impossible for me to sum up, and what I have to offer to your Lordships I have reduced into writing, and desire the clerk may read it.’

In his wordy letter, he tried further to prove his insanity, claiming to have ‘an unhappy disorder of mind, which I am grieved to be under the necessity of exposing.’ Towards the end of the letter he showed his lack of remorse for what he had done, saying, ‘My life is in your hands, and I have everything to hope, as my conscience does not condemn me of the crime I stand accused of; for I had no preconceived malice and was hurried into the perpetration of this fatal deed by the fury of a disordered imagination.’

*

CHARLES YORKE, the corpulent Solicitor-General, then had his moment, summing up the evidence for the Lords sitting in judgment. He said Shirley did not deny killing Johnson but claimed that he was ‘incapable, knowingly, of doing what he did’ and therefore, ‘insists upon an incapacity of and insanity of mind in his defence.’

The Lords then sat through long and doubtless tedious legal definitions of insanity (both partial insanity of mind, where the sufferer is ‘competent as to some matters, and not so as to others’, a judge and jury deciding whether the perpetrator was mad at the time the crime was committed, and total insanity, which is ‘perfect madness’ and will absolve the perpetrator of all guilt). Lunacy while drunk was no defence in law, said the lawyer, because it is a ‘voluntary contracted madness’ and ‘shall have the same judgment as if he were in his right senses.’

He asked the Lords, ‘Is the noble prisoner at the bar to be acquitted from the guilt of murder on account of insanity… could he, did he, at that time, distinguish between good and evil?’

Mr Yorke’s bias was exposed somewhat, as he described Lord Ferrer’s animosity towards his servant and his vengeful nature – citing the fact that he tried to drive Johnson out of his farm, with the intention of allowing his mistress’s father to rent the land instead – and stating, ‘It was plain, his Lordship gradually wrought himself up to a resolution of destroying Mr Johnson.’

He claimed that the act of murder was clearly premeditated. On the Sunday before the shooting, the Earl had invited Johnson to visit him at 3pm on Friday. He had locked the door of the room they were in. He had produced a paper for Johnson to sign admitting that he had betrayed his master. He had tested the gun before the shooting. And, after he had shot Johnson and failed to kill him, he had told Dr Kirkland that he intended to shoot him again.

‘The evidence shows that his conduct was not absurd, but rational and consistent,’ said Mr Yorke. ‘The same crime has been committed in all ages, upon grounds as slight, by men who never thought of setting up the defence of lunacy.’

As to the question of whether Earl Ferrers knew that what he had done was wrong, the Solicitor-General waxed lyrical about how he had sent for a surgeon and immediately asked him whether he thought the servant would live; how he had told Johnson’s daughter that he feared prosecution, and had said that if she did not press charges he would look after her family; how he had insisted that Mr Johnson not be moved for fear that word would get out and he would be seized.

Obviously enjoying his time in the limelight, Mr Yorke said, ‘This is the substance of the evidence which has been offered for the King; and it not only proves the fact, but proves it to be murder. What is the evidence produced by the noble Lord to weaken the force of it? In the first place, there is none which applies to the time of committing the act… no general evidence has been offered which proves his lunacy or insanity at any time.’