On Friday, 18 January 1760, John Johnson arrived at Stanton, the seat of Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers. For many years he had served the family. Now receiver of the earl’s estates, he came to deliver his accounts after a season of distrust. Ferrers had summoned him five days earlier, bidding him be present between three and four o’clock. Upon his arrival, the house was nearly deserted: the two manservants had been dispatched elsewhere, and Mrs. Clifford, together with the four children, had departed for her father’s residence. Only three maidservants remained upon the premises.
This solitary encounter had not arisen from any sudden quarrel of that day. Following the separation of the earl and his countess, Johnson had been proposed to manage the revenues of the estate. He had at first declined, then consented at Ferrers’s own express desire. The earl had likewise granted him a profitable farm. When he later endeavoured to resume possession of it, Johnson procured a lease from the trustees, and Ferrers was compelled to retreat. Another transaction, concerning a lease of certain coal-mines, soon fed the earl’s suspicions against his steward. Borrow does not decide between these motives; he observes merely that suspicion had turned to hatred, and that Ferrers had resolved to slay Johnson.
Ferrers had married, in 1752, the youngest daughter of Sir William Meredith. The ill treatment inflicted upon his wife drove her to seek redress in Parliament; an Act of 1758 decreed their separation and provided for the countess’s maintenance. It was in the wake of this separation that Johnson assumed the management of the family estates. His office placed him between the earl and the trustees of the estate, who possessed the power to grant leases without his concurrence. In Ferrers’s eyes, this extraneous authority became an unending source of strife; to Johnson, it was an integral part of a receiver’s duty.
Borrow’s retrospective account had already recorded several fits of violence. Following a wager at the Derbyshire races, Ferrers fancied that a captain intended to deceive him in the matter of a mare. Having returned to Stanton in the dead of night, he laid a plan to take his revenge at dinner on the morrow. The guests refused the invitation; he thereupon turned upon his servants, horsewhipping them, striking them, and hurling missiles at their heads. On another occasion, he sought to compel a servant to swear that an innkeeper or carrier had altered a barrel of oysters that had spoiled. The man refused to utter a falsehood. Ferrers stabbed him, felled him with a candlestick, and kicked him about the body.
The most alarming occurrence concerned his brother, Captain Shirley. After an altercation at Stanton, Ferrers caused two pistols to be loaded with bullets, priming them with his own hand. He ordered a servant to descend and shoot the captain. When the man hesitated, the earl pressed a pistol against his chest and pulled the trigger; the weapon misfired. His countess threw herself upon her knees to implore his mercy. Ferrers then levelled the other pistol at her, threatening her in turn. The servant contrived to slip away and warn the captain, who fled with his wife in the depth of night.
Johnson, for his part, had served the house from his youth, and bore the reputation of maintaining his accounts with scrupulous fidelity. On that January day, Ferrers had dissembled the rancour he harboured beneath an affable demeanor. When Johnson was admitted, the earl kept him waiting awhile, then called him into his private apartment and locked the door behind them. He discharged a pistol into him. Borrow does not record the words exchanged at the instant of the shot; he relates only that Johnson survived long enough to ask to see his children.
After the shot was fired, Ferrers summoned the three maidservants. He commanded them to carry Johnson up to a chamber and lay him in bed, believing that he might yet be saved. He sent for Mr. Kirkland, the surgeon, but refused to suffer the wounded man to be conveyed away from Stanton. Kirkland pronounced the wound mortal. He feigned, however, to entertain hopes of a recovery, dreading, as Borrow remarks, to provoke a similar fate should he venture to contradict the earl.
The surgeon perceived that Johnson must be removed from Stanton. He waited until Ferrers had retired to bed; then, assisted by six or seven men, he bore the wounded man out of Stanton, towards two o’clock in the morning. Johnson lingered there for several hours more, expiring at nine o’clock. He had asked for his children; yet to quit Stanton, it had been necessary to await the slumber of the man who had summoned him thither.
During those final hours, Kirkland left the dying man to assemble a band of armed men and secure Ferrers’s arrest. When they arrived, the earl had just left his bed and was making for the stables, his garters in his hand. Catching sight of the party, he fled back into the house. He was not taken until about six o'clock, whereupon he was conveyed to Leicester Gaol, and thence to the Tower of London. The cause was not submitted to an ordinary jury: Ferrers stood his trial before his peers, in Westminster Hall, from the 16th to the 18th of April. They found him guilty of murder; the date of his execution was appointed for the 5th of May.
While confined in the Tower, he appeared for the most part composed. Witnesses reported that he would occasionally start up, hastily unbutton his waistcoat, and seem profoundly troubled. A few days prior to his death, he called for his wardrobe and made choice of a white suit richly embroidered with silver. He explained that this was the suit he had worn at his nuptials, and that in this habit he was resolved to die. He requested, moreover, to be conveyed thither in his own landau rather than in a mourning coach.
On the morning of 5 May, the sheriffs came to receive him at the Tower. On the road to Tyburn, Ferrers inquired of one of them whether he had ever beheld so vast a concourse of people. The sheriff replied that he had not; the earl observed that the multitude had probably never seen a lord hanged. He had petitioned the King for the privilege of suffering within the precincts of the Tower, after the manner of his ancestor the Earl of Essex, deeming it an indignity that a peer should be executed at the common place of execution. The crowd, however, followed his landau to the very gallows.
The chaplain seized upon the journey to examine him concerning his religion, which, he observed, the public would not fail to discuss. Ferrers replied that he was not accountable to the world for his sentiments, but that he believed in one God, the Maker of all things, and had never sought to propagate his opinions. He censured Bolingbroke for having published his, and judged that the disputes among sects had almost banished morality from the world. In the course of that same journey, the nobleman who denied the public any right to judge his beliefs was passing through the streets beneath the gaze of thousands of onlookers, condemned for the murder of a servant.
Near the place of execution, his mistress sat waiting in a hackney-coach. The sheriff advised him against an interview, lest the sight of her should unman him. Ferrers assented to the counsel without hesitation, and entrusted him with a pocket-book for the woman, containing a bank-note, a ring, and a purse of guineas. He had asked for a glass of wine and water upon the road; when it was pointed out to him that a halt would draw an even greater throng of gazers, he relinquished the design.
Upon the scaffold, he declined a form of prayer proposed by the chaplain, yet consented to join with him in the Lord’s Prayer. He besought God’s forgiveness for his errors and his sins. Then, by an inadvertence, he delivered five guineas into the hand of the executioner’s assistant. The latter refused to surrender them to his master; a dispute ensued, which was instantly quelled by the sheriff. His cravat was removed, a white cap was pulled over his eyes, and his arms were secured with a black sash. The drop fell beneath him. After his death, his body was conveyed to Surgeons’ Hall to undergo the remainder of the sentence. Within the coffin lined with white satin, his hat and the halter were deposited at his feet. The plate bore his name, his title, and the date of 5 May 1760. The rank to which Ferrers had appealed throughout the journey was still inscribed upon the timber; it had not availed to change the ground of his demise.