A Representation of the Execution of Lord Lovat.
- The scaffold.
- Lord Lovat’s head on ye Block.
- Cloth to receive the Head.
- The Executioner with ye Axe.
- The Coffin.
- The House from which he came on the Scaffold.
Execution of Lord Lovat 1746
Lord Cromarty was pardoned, owing to the exertions of his wife, who petitioned every member of the Privy Council, and had fallen in a swoon at the feet of George II. at Kensington, in the very act of presenting him with a petition for mercy. Her prayer was more graciously received by that sovereign than Lady Nithsdale’s petition had been by his father. It is said that a son born to Lady Cromarty about this time had the mark of an axe upon its neck.
The block, now in the Armoury of the Tower, is undoubtedly the one upon which Lovat was beheaded, and is declared to have originally been made for his execution. The axe which stands beside it was used to behead him, as well as the other Jacobite lords who suffered death in 1746, but whether it was used previous to these executions cannot be ascertained with any certainty.
Although Lord Lovat was the last person beheaded in England, a peer was hanged at Tyburn after being imprisoned in the Tower in the last year of the reign of George II. This was Lawrence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, who had murdered his steward, Johnson, in cold blood. Probably if this crime had been committed in these days Lord Ferrers would have benefited by a more merciful dispensation. That he had been insane on several occasions is certain, and he had been wilder and more reckless in his manner of life than could be accounted for by anything short of madness, his fits of wild rage clearly pointing to a disordered brain. He had married a harmless and amiable woman, the daughter of Sir V. Meredith, and she, unable to live with such a brutal husband as Ferrers proved himself to be, had obtained a judicial separation. Ferrers was wildly extravagant, and it was owing to his debts that the unfortunate lawyer, Johnson, who had been appointed by a special Act of Parliament to manage the Shirley estates, was made the steward of the property. Ferrers had repeatedly sworn that he would rid himself of this agent and steward, and having enticed him to his house, deliberately shot the poor man as he knelt begging for his life. Ferrers was arrested, and brought to the Tower under a guard of constables. A stranger procession than that of Lord Ferrers to his prison can scarcely be imagined. He was in his own carriage, a landau drawn by six horses, and was dressed in “a riding frock, wearing boots, and a jockey cap.” In this costume he appeared before the House of Lords in February 1760. He was imprisoned in the Middle Tower, two warders being in an adjoining room, whilst two sentries kept guard at the foot of the Tower stairs. There he remained for the two months which elapsed before his trial. On the 5th of May he was hanged at Tyburn, with all the pomp and circumstance that in those days clung to the death of a criminal if he were a nobleman. Being an Earl, Lord Ferrers was allowed to be strangled out of existence by a silken instead of a hempen rope, and although the sentence of his execution included the order that his body was to be dissected, the order was dispensed with.
Lord Ferrers was taken from the Tower in his own carriage, drawn by six horses, to the gallows. He wore a superb dress, a pale-coloured silk coat edged with silver lace, and was accompanied by grenadiers, and horse and foot guards, his carriage being followed by some of the coaches of members of his family, and his hearse, which was also drawn by six horses. The streets were so crowded to see this unusual sight, that it took the procession three hours to reach Tyburn from the Tower. Lord Ferrers went out of the world in a far more becoming manner than he had lived in it. He regretted, he said, not to have been allowed to be executed on Tower Hill, where his ancestor, the Earl of Essex, had been beheaded. If he actually made this remark, he could not have been aware that his ancestor had not been beheaded on Tower Hill, but within the Tower walls, on the Green. To judge by his portrait, painted by the French portrait painter, Andran, Lord Ferrers had a bullet-shaped head, and must have closely resembled the ordinary type of jockey when he appeared in his riding-boots and jockey cap before his peers at his trial.
Waggons going into the Tower with treasure taken from the Spaniards (temp. George II.)