THE STAIN ON THE SHIRLEY 'SCUTCHEON
The Shirleys have been men of high honour and fair repute ever since the
far-away days when the conqueror found their ancestor, Sewallis, firmly
seated on his broad Warwickshire lands at Eatington; but their proud
'scutcheon, otherwise unsullied, bears one black, or rather red, stain,
and it was Laurence Shirley, fourth earl of his line, who put it there.
Horace Walpole calls this degenerate Shirley "a low wretch, a mad
assassin, and a wild beast." He was, as my story will show, all this. He
was indeed an incarnate fiend. But was he to blame? He was possessed by
devils; but they were devils of insanity. The taint of madness was in
his blood before he uttered his first cry in the cradle. His uncle,
whose coronet he was to wear, was an incurable madman. His aunt, the
Lady Barbara Shirley, spent years of her life shut up in an asylum. And
this hereditary taint shadowed Laurence Shirley's life from his infancy,
and ended it in tragedy.
As a boy, he was subject to violent attacks of rage, when it was not
safe to approach him; and his madness grew with his years. Strange tales
are told of him as a young man. We are told that he would spend hours
pacing like a wild animal up and down his room, gnashing his teeth,
clenching his fists, grinning diabolically, and uttering strange
incoherent cries. He would stand before a mirror, making horrible
grimaces at his reflection, and spitting upon it; he walked about armed
with pistols and dagger, ready at a moment to use both on any one who
annoyed or opposed him; and in his disordered brain he nursed suspicion
and hatred of all around him.
When he was little more than thirty, and some years after he had come
into his earldom, he wooed and won the pretty daughter of Sir William
Meredith; but before the honeymoon was ended he had begun to treat her
with such gross brutality that, before she had long been a wife, she
petitioned Parliament for a divorce, which set her free. And as he was
obviously quite unfit to administer his estates, it became necessary to
appoint some one to receive his rents and control his revenue.
Such was the pitiful plight to which insanity had reduced Laurence, Earl
Ferrers, while still little over the threshold of manhood; and these
calamities only, and perhaps naturally, accentuated his madness. He
became more and more the terror of the neighbourhood in which he lived,
and few had the courage to meet him when he took his solitary walks.
"I still retain," writes a Mr Cradock in his "Memoirs,"
"a strong impression of the unfortunate Earl Ferrers,
who, with the Ladies Shirley, his sisters, frequented
Leicester races, and visited at my father's house. During
the early part of the day his lordship preserved the
character of a polite scholar and a courteous nobleman,
but in the evening he became the terror of the
inhabitants; and I distinctly remember running upstairs
to hide myself when an alarm was given that Lord Ferrers
was coming armed, with a great mob after him. He had
behaved well at the ordinary; the races were then in the
afternoon, and the ladies regularly attended the balls.
My father's house was situated midway between Lord
Ferrers's lodgings and the Town Hall, where the race
assemblies were then held. He had, as was supposed,
obtained liquor privately, and then became outrageous;
for, from our house he suddenly escaped and proceeded to
the Town Hall, and, after many violent acts, threw a
silver tankard of scalding negus among the ladies. He was
then secured for that evening. This was the last time of
his appearing at Leicester, till brought from
Ashby-de-la-Zouche to prison there.
"It has been much regretted by his friends that, as Lady
Ferrers and some of his property had been taken from him,
no greater precaution had been used with respect to his
own safety as well as that of all around him. Whilst
sober, my father, who had a real regard for him, always
urged that he was quite manageable; and when his sisters
ventured to come with him to the races, they had an
absolute reliance on his good intentions and promises."
Once he disappeared for a time, and made his way to London, where he
lodged obscurely in the neighbourhood of Muswell Hill. Here he
surrounded himself with grooms and ostlers, and other low company of
both sexes, abandoning himself to orgies of debauchery. Among his milder
eccentricities he would, we are told, mix mud with his beer, and drain
tankard after tankard of the nauseating mixture. He drank his coffee
from the spout of the coffee-pot, and wandered about, a grotesque
figure, with one side of his face clean-shaven.
But even then he had sane moments, when the raving madman of yesterday
became the courteous, polite, shrewd man of to-day, charming all by his
wit and high-bred geniality. It was, of course, inevitable that a career
such as this, marked by a madness which grew daily, should lead sooner
or later to tragedy. And tragedy was coming swiftly. It came early in
the year 1760, before Lord Ferrers had reached his fortieth birthday.
And this is how it came.
The Court of Chancery had ordered that his lordship's rents should be
received and accounted for by a receiver, who, by way of concession to
his feelings, was to be appointed by himself. The Earl, who rarely
lacked shrewdness, looked round for the most suitable person to fill
this delicate post--for a man who should be as clay in his hands; and
such a "tool" he thought he had found in his steward, Mr John Johnson,
who had known him since boyhood, and who had never thwarted him even in
his maddest caprices. Mr Johnson was duly appointed receiver; but the
Earl's self-congratulation was short-lived. The steward proved that he
was possessed of a conscience, and that neither cajolery nor threats
could make him swerve from the straight path of honesty.
In vain the Earl coaxed and blustered and bullied. The receiver was
adamant. He had a duty to perform, and at any cost he would discharge
it. His lordship's rage at such unlooked-for recalcitrancy was
unbounded. He began to hate the too honest steward with a murderous
hatred; behind his back he loaded him with abuse, and vowed that, of all
his enemies, the steward was the most virulent and implicable. But while
the Earl was nursing this diabolical hatred, he showed little sign of it
to Johnson, who was so unsuspectingly walking to meet tragedy.
One January day, in 1760, Lord Ferrers sent a polite message to his
steward to come to Staunton Harold on an urgent matter of business. It
was on a Friday; and punctually at two o'clock, the hour appointed, Mr
Johnson made his appearance, and was ushered into his Lordship's study.
Unknown to him, Lord Ferrers had sent away his housekeeper and his
menservants on various pretexts; and, apart from the Earl and the
steward (the spider and the fly), there was no one in all the great
house but three maidservants, whose chief anxiety was to keep as far
away as possible from their mad master.
With a courteous greeting Lord Ferrers invited Mr Johnson to take a
seat; and then, placing before him a document, which proved to be a
confession of fraud and dishonesty in his office of receiver, he
commanded his steward to sign his name to it.
On reading the confession which he was ordered to sign, Mr Johnson
indignantly refused to comply with such an outrageous demand. "You
refuse to sign?" asked the Earl with ominous calmness. "I do," was the
emphatic reply. "Then," continued his lordship, producing a pistol, "I
command you to kneel." Mr Johnson, now alarmed and awake to his danger,
looked first at the stern, cold eyes bent on him, and then at the pistol
pointed at his heart, and sank on one knee. "Both knees!" insisted the
Earl. Mr Johnson subsided on the other knee, looking calmly at his
would-be murderer, though beads of perspiration were standing on his
forehead. A moment later a shot rang out in the silent room, and the
steward fell to the floor mortally wounded. Laying down the smoking
weapon, Lord Ferrers opened the door and called loudly for assistance.
The horrified servants, who had heard the report, came, huddled and
fearful, at his bidding. One he despatched for a doctor, and, with the
assistance of the other two, he carried the fast-dying man to a bedroom.
When the doctor arrived he found the Earl standing by the bedside,
trying to stop the flow of blood which was ebbing from the steward's
chest; but the victim was beyond all human aid. He had but a few hours
at the most to live. An hour later Lord Ferrers was lying dead drunk on
the floor of his bedroom, while Mr Johnson's life was ebbing out in
agony at his house, a mile away.
"As soon as it became known," to quote the account given
by an eye-witness in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, "that
Mr Johnson was really dead, the neighbours set about
seizing the murderer. A few persons, armed, set out for
Staunton, and as they entered the hall-yard they saw the
Earl going towards the stable, as they imagined, to take
horse. He appeared to be just out of bed, his stockings
being down and his garters in his hand, having probably
taken the alarm immediately on coming out of his room,
and finding that Johnson had been removed. One
Springthorpe, advancing towards his lordship, presented a
pistol, and required him to surrender; but his lordship
putting his hand to his pocket, Springthrope imagined he
was feeling for a pistol, and stopped short, being
probably intimidated. He thus suffered the Earl to escape
back into the house, where he fastened the doors and
stood on his defence.
"The crowd of people who had come to apprehend him beset
the house, and their number increased very fast. In about
two hours Lord Ferrers appeared at the garret window, and
called out: 'How is Johnson?' Springthorpe answered: 'He
is dead,' upon which his lordship insulted him, and
called him a liar, and swore he would not believe anybody
but the surgeon, Kirkland. Upon being again assured that
he was dead, he desired that the people might be
dispersed, saying that he would surrender; yet, almost in
the same breath, he desired that the people might be let
in, and have some victuals and drink; but the issue was
that he went away again from the window, swearing that he
would not be taken.
"The people, however, still continued near the house, and
two hours later he was seen on the bowling-green by one,
Curtis, a collier. 'My lord' was then armed with a
blunderbuss and a dagger and two or three pistols; but
Curtis, so far from being intimidated, marched boldly up
to him, and his lordship was so struck with the
determinate resolution shown by this brave fellow, that
he suffered him to seize him without making any
resistance. Yet the moment that he was in custody he
declared that he had killed a villain, and that he
gloried in the deed."
The tragedy is now hastening to its close. The assassin was kept in
custody at Ashby until a coroner's jury brought in a verdict of "Wilful
Murder" against him, when he was transferred to Leicester, and a
fortnight later to London, making the journey in his own splendid
equipage with six horses, and "dressed like a jockey, in a close
riding-frock, jockey boots and cap, and a plain shirt." He was lodged in
the Round Tower of the Tower of London, where, with a couple of warders
at his elbow night and day, with sentries posted outside his door, and
another on the drawbridge, he passed the last weeks of his doomed life.
In mid-April he was duly tried by his Peers at the Bar of the House of
Lords; and, although he tried with marvellous skill and ingenuity to
prove that he was insane when he committed the murder, he was, without a
dissentient voice, pronounced "Guilty," and sentenced to be "hanged by
the neck until he was dead," when his body should be handed over to the
surgeons for dissection. One concession he claimed--pitiful salve to his
pride--that he should be hanged by a cord of silk, the privilege due to
his rank as a Peer of the realm; and this was granted as a matter of
course.
One day in early May the scaffold was reared at Tyburn, where so many
other malefactors had looked their last on the world; and at nine
o'clock in the morning Lord Ferrers started on his last journey--the
most splendid and most tragic of his chequered life. He was allowed, as
a last favour, to travel to his death, not in the common hangman's cart
as an ordinary criminal, but in his own landau, drawn by 'six beautiful
horses; and thus he made his stately progress to Tyburn.
Probably no man ever journeyed to the scaffold under such circumstances
of pomp and splendour. It might well, indeed, have been the bridal
procession of a great nobleman that the black avenues of curious
spectators in London's streets had come to see, and not the last grim
journey of a malefactor to the hangman's rope. His very dress was that
of a bridegroom, consisting, as it did, to quote again from the
_Gentleman's Magazine_,
"of a suit of light-coloured clothes, embroidered with
silver, said to have been his wedding-suit; and soon
after the Sheriff entered the landau, he said, 'You may,
perhaps, sir, think it strange to see me in this dress,
but I have my particular reasons for it.' The procession
then began in the following order: A very large body of
constables of the county of Middlesex, preceded by one of
the high constables; a party of horse grenadiers, and a
party of foot; Mr Sheriff Errington, in his chariot,
accompanied by his under-Sheriff, Mr Jackson; the landau
escorted by two other parties of horse grenadiers and
foot; Mr Sheriff Vaillant's chariot, in which was
Under-Sheriff Mr Nichols; a mourning-coach and six, with
some of his lordship's friends; and, lastly, a hearse and
six, provided for the conveyance of his lordship's corpse
from the place of execution to Surgeons' Hall.
"The procession moved so slowly that Lord Ferrers was two
hours and three-quarters in his landau but during the
whole time he appeared perfectly easy and composed,
though he often expressed his desire to have it over,
saying that the apparatus of death and the passing
through such crowds of people was ten times worse than
death itself. He told the Sheriff that he had written to
the King, begging that he might suffer where his
ancestor, the Earl of Essex, had suffered--namely, on
Tower Hill; that 'he had been in the greater hope of
obtaining this favour as he had the honour of quartering
part of the same arms and of being allied to his Majesty;
and that he thought it hard that he should have to die at
the place appointed for the execution of common felons.'
As to his crime, he declared that he did it 'under
particular circumstances, having met with so many crosses
and vexations that he scarcely knew what he did."
At the top of Drury Lane he paused to drink his last glass of wine,
handing a guinea to the man who presented it. On the scaffold not a
muscle moved as he surveyed the black crowd of onlookers with a calm and
amused eye. To the chaplain he confessed his belief in God; and he
exchanged a few pleasant words with the executioner as he placed a gold
coin in his hand.
Thus, cold, calm, without rancour or regret, perished Laurence, Earl
Ferrers, not even a struggle marking the moment when life left him.
After hanging for an hour, his body was taken down and removed to
Surgeons' Hall, where it was dissected; and, thus mutilated, it was
exposed to public derision and malediction before it found a final
resting-place, fourteen feet deep under the belfry of old St Pancras
Church.
Such is the stain which burns red on the Shirley shield, and such was
the man who placed it there. But, as we have seen, Laurence Shirley was
mad beyond all doubt, and "knew not what he did"; and in the eyes of all
charitable and right-thinking men the 'scutcheon of the Ferrers Earldom
remains as virtually unsullied to-day as when it was virginally fresh
two centuries ago.