Authors: Dan Alexander Randall
In the Shadow of the Noose: Mad Earl Ferrers: The Last English Nobleman Hanged for Murder (8 page)
Twenty two years later, it was removed to Staunton Harold to be re-interred in the family vault, as he had wished.
Epilogue
TWO WEEKS AFTER the hanging, Laurence Shirley’s brother, Washington Shirley, a naval officer and keen amateur astronomer, took his seat in the House of Lords as the fifth Earl Ferrers.
During his time in the Tower, the fourth Earl had made a will requesting that £6,000 be raised from the estate and placed in trust for the family of the murdered John Johnson. (To place this in context, using average earnings, £1,000 then is worth more than £1.5 million today.) A further £4,000 in East India Company bonds was allocated to his mistress, Margaret Clifford, and their children. The will was not strictly legal, because it was drawn up after he had been convicted of murder, but it was allowed to stand, and the families were well provided for.
The legacy left to John Johnson’s family enabled them to have a grand headstone made to mark his burial spot in the churchyard of St Mary and St Hardulph, Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, which ironically also contains the tombs of 16
th
and 17
th
century members of the Shirley clan.
John Johnson’s Headstone
Unfortunately, having stood in all weathers for more than 250 years the headstone has deteriorated at the bottom and the last line of the inscription cannot be deciphered, but the rest reads:
Released from the Evils of this frail World
In pious expectation of the reward of his Virtues
JOHN JOHNSON
Departed this Life, Jan: XLXMDCCLX Aged L
He was many years
The esteemed and faithful Servant
of
The Honorable Laurence Shirley Esq.
With unshaken Integrity
He continued in the office of Steward
to
The late Rt Honorable Laurence Earl Ferrers
Till near the fateful period of his Life
Uncorrupted by any views of self interest
No hopes, no fears
Could divert him from the steady pursuit of that path
His duty to God and Man pointed out
He was a worthy example of
The tender Father, the affectionate Husband
The firm and valuable Friend
The sincere and humble Christian
His many excellent Qualities
Rendered him highly Respected
According to
Cracroft’s Peerage: The Complete Guide to the British Peerage and Baronetage
, Laurence Shirley may have a lasting and more virtuous legacy in the form of a famous scientist as a great-grandson.
On April 2, 1777, Anna Maria, one of Earl Ferrer’s illegitimate daughters by his mistress Margaret Clifford, married John Lewis Pasteur, a Derbyshire hosier nine years her junior. It has since been claimed that a direct descendent of this union was Louis Pasteur, the famous French scientist and founder of the germ theory of disease. If this is true, although he was the son of a poor tanner Pasteur’s grandmother was Anna Maria – meaning he had aristocratic English blood in his veins. Anna Maria died in 1819, aged 73, just three years before Pasteur was born.
Earl Ferrer’s former wife, the Countess, meanwhile, remarried in 1769, to Lord Frederick Campbell, a prominent politician who could not have been more different to the bullying, thuggish Earl.
The following description of him, from
Posthumous Memoirs of his Own Time,
by N W Wraxhall, describes Lord Campbell when he was in his fifties: ‘His manners, noble, yet soft, dignified, yet devoid of any pride or affectation, conciliated all who approached him.’
The marriage was evidently a happy one, although they had no children. It is said they met when the countess turned to the law to rid herself of the Earl, and Campbell had been her counsel.
Lady Campbell died, aged 70, at her country seat, Combe Bank, in Kent, on July 25
th
1807 – as her late first husband had once threatened, she was burned alive in her bed when a reading lamp fell over and set her nightclothes ablaze.
Sources
Sex and the Gender Revolution
, Volume 1, Randolph Trumbach
Tales of Our Great Families
, Edward Walford
Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs
, Joseph Cradock
Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century
, Jonathan Andrews, Andrew T. Scull
A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings ..., Volume 19
, Thomas Bayly Howell
Cracroft’s Peerage: The Complete Guide to British Peerage and Baronetage
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The Newgate Calendar
Passages From the Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys of Hardwick House, Oxen
, Caroline Girle Powys
Tarnished Coronets
, Muriel Nelson d’Auvergne
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