In the Shadow of the Noose: Mad Earl Ferrers: The Last English Nobleman Hanged for Murder (3 page)

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 reconciliation 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 characteristic 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.

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.