In the Shadow of the Noose: Mad Earl Ferrers: The Last English Nobleman Hanged for Murder (7 page)

Taking each defence witness in turn, he highlighted their inability to prove that the Earl was mad and stated that Ferrers had murdered an old and faithful servant ‘in cold blood’ and in a ‘most deliberate and wilful manner.’

At the end of the Solicitor-General’s summing-up, the Lord High Steward ordered that Lord Ferrers be returned to the Tower – a journey of three miles – and the Lords were invited to leave the Hall.

Indeed, Ferrers was in the Tower when the Lords traipsed back into court, and was no doubt pacing up and down, concerned for his fate, when they delivered their verdicts
in absentia
.

The youngest baron, George Lord Lyttleton, stood up, removed his wig and was asked, ‘What says your Lordship? Is Laurence, Earl Ferrers, guilty of the felony and murder whereof he stands indicted, or not guilty?’

The most junior member of the House of Lords put his right hand on his breast, bowed his head and said, ‘Guilty, upon my honour.’

Each of the further 35 Lords, five Viscounts, 55 Earls, the Marquis of Rockingham, 15 Dukes, and the Lord Privy Seal, were asked the same question and gave the same reply.

The last to give his verdict was the Lord High Steward, who declared, ‘My Lords, I am of the opinion that Laurence Earl Ferrers is guilty of the felony and murder whereof he stands indicted, upon my honour.’

The verdict was unanimous and it was ordered that Lord Ferrers be returned to Westminster Hall to hear the outcome.

The news was delivered swiftly, the Earl was taken back to the Tower and court was adjourned till the following day.

Chapter 7

THE TRIAL, DAY THREE – THE SENTENCE

LORD FERRERS’ REACTION to the shameful news that his peers believed him a murderer is not recorded – no doubt, the aristocratic stiff upper lip prevented him from showing his feelings – but he was returned to court at 11am on April 18, 1760, to plead for his life.

There was no doubt that he had failed to live up to the Ferrers family motto:
Honor Virtutis Praemium
(Honour is the reward of virtue), and now faced the consequences.

Several members of the royal family, including the King’s 21-year-old grandson Prince Edward, were at Westminster Hall to watch proceedings.

Blaming his family for persuading him to attempt a defence of insanity, the disgraced nobleman admitted that his only hope now was to avoid the death penalty. He thanked those gathered for ‘the fair and candid trial your Lordships have indulged me with’, and apologised for troubling the peers with ‘a defence I was much averse to… but was prevailed upon by my family to attempt.’

Ironically, by far the highest hurdle for Ferrers during the trial had been his own conduct during the case.

Horace Walpole, who had been in court each day, later described its ‘pomp and awfulness’ in a letter to his friend, the MP George Montagu. ‘In general he behaved rationally and coolly,’ wrote Walpole, ‘though it was a strange contradiction to see a man trying by his own sense to prove himself out of his senses. It was more shocking to see his two brothers brought to prove the lunacy in their own blood, in order to save their brother's life. Both are almost as ill-looking men as the Earl.’

In a heartfelt address to the Lords, in which Earl Ferrers stated that he was suffering from ‘agony of mind’, he said, ‘I hope your Lordships will, in compassion to my infirmities, be kind enough to recommend me to His Majesty’s clemency.’

A ripple of chatter ran through the courtroom, which was ended with a proclamation for silence. Then, the Lord High Steward, Robert, Lord Henley, addressed the prisoner in his usual verbose, pompous fashion. It is recorded in full below only to show how Henley was swaggering and ostentatiously enjoying the occasion.

‘Laurence Earl Ferrers; His Majesty, from his royal and equal regard to justice, and his steady attention to our constitution, hath commanded this inquiry to be made, upon the blood of a very ordinary subject, against your Lordship, a peer of this realm: your Lordship hath been arraigned; hath pleaded, and put yourself on your peers; and they have unanimously found your Lordship guilty of the felony and murder charged in the indictment.

‘It is usual, my Lord, for courts of justice, before they pronounce the dreadful sentence pronounced by the law, to open to the prisoner the nature of the crime of which he is convicted; not in order to aggravate or afflict, but to awaken the mind to a due attention to, and consideration of, the unhappy situation into which he hath brought himself. My Lord, the crime of which your Lordship is found guilty, murder, is incapable of aggravation; and it is impossible, but that, during your Lordship’s long confinement, you must have reflected upon it, represented to your mind in the deepest shades, and with all its train of dismal and detestable consequences.

‘As your Lordship hath received no benefit, so you can derive no consolation from that refuge you seemed almost ashamed to take, under a pretended insanity; since it hath appeared to us all, from your cross-examination of the King’s witnesses, that you recollected the minutest circumstances of facts and conversations, to which you and the witnesses only could be privy, with the exactness of a memory more than ordinary sound; it is therefore as unnecessary as it would be painful to me, to dwell longer on a subject so black and dreadful.

‘It is with much more satisfaction, that I can remind your Lordship, that though, from the present tribunal, before which you now stand, you can receive nothing but strict and equal justice; yet you are soon to appear before an Almighty Judge, whose unfathomable wisdom is able, by means incomprehensible to our narrow capacities, to reconcile justice with mercy; but your Lordship’s education must have informed you, and you are now to remember, such beneficence is only to be obtained by deep contrition, sound, unfeigned, and substantial repentance.

‘Confined strictly, as your Lordship must be, for the very short remainder of your life, you will be still, if you please, entitled to converse and communicate with the ablest divines of the Protestant church, to whose pious care and consolation, in fervent prayer and devotion, I most cordially recommend your Lordship.

‘Nothing remains for me, but to pronounce the dreadful sentence of the law; and the judgment of the law is, and this high court doth award, that you, Laurence Earl Ferrers, return to the prison of the Tower, from whence you came; from thence you must be led to the place of execution, on Monday next, being the 21st day of this instant April; and when you come there, you must be hanged by the neck till you are dead, and your body must be dissected and anatomized.

‘And God Almighty be merciful to your soul.’

At that, the chamber erupted in a babble of noise and chatter, and Earl Ferrers was led away.

Chapter 8

EXECUTION OF AN ARISTOCRAT

IN THE EVENT, the execution was delayed, at Ferrers’ request.

He was hoping for a pardon from the king, but this never came. He then requested to be beheaded at the Tower of London, the fate a century and a half earlier of his ancestor Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and one which he thought his noble rank deserved. The king denied him this, too, and ordered him to be hanged like a common criminal in front of the masses at Tyburn.

‘He has done the deed of the bad man,’ said King George, ‘and he shall die the death of the bad man.’

And so it was that the noble Earl found himself in his landau, with a funeral hearse behind him carrying his own coffin, on that slow journey to his doom.

In her book,
Passages From the Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys
, the author describes how she watched the carriage take the Earl to his execution: ‘I think I never shall forget a procession so moving; to know a man an hour before in perfect health, then a lifeless corpse.’

As the procession headed to the top of Tyburn Road – modern-day Oxford Street – they could see the spectator seating which had been erected in the open field, at what is now Marble Arch, for the occasion. Rows and rows of London’s finest ladies and gentlemen, dressed in their finest silks, jostled for the clearest view in the best seats, craning their necks for the arrival of the unfortunate Earl. Below them, the common multitude – apprentices given the day off, respectable businessmen, and mothers with babies in arms – was, likewise, all elbows and tiptoes.

They were all gathered around a new-fangled gallows, which stood on a scaffold draped in black baize and dressed with black cushions.

In the centre of the stage was a box upon which the condemned man was to stand, the noose around his neck; upon his giving the signal, a lever would be pulled and the box would open. The victim would then drop into the void, and make his way to eternity.

Ferrers was to enjoy the dubious distinction of becoming the first man to try out this contraption. It was some advance on the old method of hanging – you stood in a cart which was then driven away from underneath you – but a far cry from later methods, where the ‘drop’ was greater and the convict died quickly, from a broken neck, as opposed to slowly, from strangulation.

Waiting at the side of the stage was the hangman, Thomas Turlis – a determined man of sharp features and strong hands, then in the eighth of a 19-year career as the London executioner.

Ferrers climbed down from the landau to a deafening roar, and climbed up onto the platform. He was calmness itself: as Walpole – who watched the execution – later wrote, ‘his courage rose when it was most likely to fail.’

The coach was immediately driven away by its weeping driver – the Earl seems to have been popular with at least one of his servants, though it might have been the imminent loss of his job that the man was lamenting – and abandoned in a pub yard in Acton. There it stood, untouched, for the next 100 years until it fell apart with age.

It was customary, and sensible, for the condemned to pay the hangman a tip, to ensure that he ‘turned them off’ with as little pain as possible. Taking a purse containing five guineas from his pocket, the Earl mistakenly handed it to Turlis’s assistant, and there followed an unseemly tussle between the two men until Sheriff Vaillant intervened and ordered the assistant to pass the fee on to his master. Lord Ferrers than gave his gold watch to the sheriff.

Cornelius Humphries, the Chaplain of the Tower, had followed him from the coach. Now he said to the Earl, ‘Do you choose to pray?’

‘I do not,’ said Ferrers.

‘Do you not choose to join with me in the Lord’s Prayer?’

‘I do,’ said Ferrers, obviously having second thoughts. ‘I have always thought it a very fine prayer.’

The two men then knelt together on the black cushions, and prayed to the heavenly entity before whom Ferrers expected, within a few minutes, to be prostrating himself.

After they had finished, Ferrers stood and said, loudly and clearly, ‘Oh, God, forgive me all my errors – pardon all my sins!’

He then presented his watch to Sheriff Vaillant, as a token of his thanks, and requested that his body be buried at Staunton Harold. He took three steps and mounted the ‘drop’, and was guided to the centre of the raised box where his arms were tied in front of him with a black silk sash. His own neckerchief was removed and the knotted rope – not, as some reports have claimed, made of silk – was placed around his neck.

At this point, according to Walpole, he blanched, but quickly recovered his composure.

As the enormous crowd edged forward eagerly, Turlis asked him if he wished to give the signal for the trap door to be opened. He said that he did not, and it was left to Sheriff Vaillant.

Readying himself, the condemned man said his final words: ‘Am I right?’

The executioner told him that he was, and a white nightcap which the Earl had brought with him, was pulled down over his head.

Vaillant kicked the side of the platform to give the signal.

What followed was horrific.

Turlis pulled a lever which was supposed to open the floor underneath Ferrers’ feet, but it did not function. Ferrers stood there for some time, more than once lifting the nightcap from his eyes to see what was happening. Turlis kept trying, and eventually the floor opened. But it had still not functioned properly, and the hanging man’s feet were still touching the platform – he was able to support himself, just about, on tiptoe, and there he writhed, gurgling and clawing his face, for some time.

He was only dispatched when the hangman stood underneath his and pulled on his legs. Modern hanging kills instantly, the weight of the body and the length of the drop being carefully calculated so that the spinal cord is severed immediately the trap door opens: by contrast, it took Earl Ferrers four minutes to die (a total of only seven minutes had elapsed since he had alighted from his landau, said Walpole, watch-in-hand). He died at two minutes to twelve o’clock.

Lord Ferrers’ body was left turning on the rope for a little longer than the customary hour as Sheriff Vaillant – relieved that his own ordeal was over – ate lunch on the scaffold with friends.

Finally, his body was cut down and placed a coffin lined with white satin, which had accompanied him on the journey. The coffin was carried by six men and loaded into the hearse to take him to Surgeon’s Hall in the Old Bailey to be dissected and displayed to the common man – the final humiliation for this proud and haughty noble. His hat and the rope used to hang him were at the end of the coffin. A large incision was then made from the neck to the bottom of the breast, and another across the throat; the lower part of the belly was laid open and the bowels taken away. It was afterwards publicly exposed to view in a room up one pair of stairs at the Hall where scores of people jostled to see the grisly remains.

Earl Ferrer’s mother, Anne, paid eight guineas for the clothes he was executed in – at that time entrepreneurial executioners made extra money by selling macabre items belonging to those they hanged.

On the evening of Thursday, May 8
^th
, the late Earl’s body was returned to his family and buried – against his dying wish – in St. Pancras church, in a 12 feet-deep trench dug under the belfry. The simple inscription on the coffin plate read:
Laurence Earl Ferrers suffered May 5, 1760
.