This coroneted brute, who was remarkable for his taste in dress, was at once fond and faithless. He kept his Countess in continual fear of her life, beating her by day and threatening to shoot her at night. They were separated; and it was because Johnson, his steward, advanced her some portion of her allowance without the knowledge of the Earl, that the latter shot him at three o’clock in the afternoon, and continued tormenting him till one in the morning, rejoicing to kill him slowly!
After being sentenced by a unanimous vote of the House of Lords, he passed his time in the Tower in playing picquet with the warders; and, like Jerome Cardan, he would not play for pastime, but for money. He drank as much wine as he could get, and then took to beer, for want of something better.
In the procession, which moved from the Tower to Tyburn, this doomed man, in his wedding clothes, was the only person who did not appear affected. His coachman blubbered and the officials looked grave, but the indifferent Lord made comments on the crowd, alluded now and then to the purpose in hand, and had the condescension to acknowledge that he did believe in a God.
As connected with fashion, it may be noticed that the Earl was the first man who suffered by the “new drop.” To travel to the other world by the “Ferrers’ Stage,” of course had its popular and peculiar signification. Let me add, that while he was hanging in white, the sheriffs, in mourning and robes of office, were coolly standing on the scaffold, eating and drinking, and helping up their friends to drink with them. The executioners fought for the rope, and he who lost it cried; “but,” says Walpole, who was not there to see, “the universal crowd behaved with great decency and admiration.”
There is another act to this tragedy. Lady Ferrers subsequently married Lord Frederick Campbell, brother of the Duke of Argyle, at whose seat, Combe Bank, Kent, she was unfortunately burnt to death.
There was about this time another celebrated personage remarkable for her style of dress. We have all heard of “Sappho’s diamonds on her dirty smock,” and Pope’s line does not seem overcharged. “I have seen Lady Mary Wortley Montague,” writes Walpole in 1762; “I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity are all increased. Her dress, like her languages, is a galimatias of several countries; the ground-work rags, and the embroidery nastiness. She needs no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes. An old black-lace hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman’s coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last. When I was at Florence, and she was expected there, we drew Sortes Virgilianas for her; we literally drew
‘Insanam vatem aspicies.’
It would have been a stronger prophecy now even than it was then.”
I think it was said of Lady Mary, that, on being once at the French Opera, some one remarked to her, “Mon dieu, Miladi, que vous avez les mains sales!” “Ah!” exclaimed the dirty lady with a conscious pride, “si vous voyiez mes pieds!” This story however is something apocryphal.
The worst feature in Lady Mary was that she was not only dirty as an elderly woman, but had been so as a young one. Two-and-twenty years before Walpole wrote the above account of her, he thus photographed the nymph whom Pope had transiently adored. Walpole met her at Florence in 1740, and there, he says, she was “laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side, with the remains of a ⸺ partly covered with a plaister, and partly with white paint, which, for cheapness, she has bought so coarse, that you would not use it to wash a chimney.”