This summer was distinguished by another trial still more remarkable. Laurence earl Ferrers, a nobleman of a violent spirit, who had committed many outrages, and, in the opinion of all who knew him, given manifold proofs of insanity, at length perpetrated a murder, which subjected him to the cognizance of justice. His deportment to his lady was so brutal, that application had been made to the house of peers, and a separation effected by act of parliament. Trustees were nominated; and one Mr. Johnson, who had, during the best part of his life, been employed in the family, was now appointed receiver of the estates, at the earl’s own request. The conduct of this man, in the course of his stewardship, gave umbrage to lord Ferrers, whose disposition was equally jealous and vindictive. He imagined all his own family had conspired against his interest, and that Johnson was one of their accomplices; that he had been instrumental in obtaining the act of parliament, which his lordship considered as a grievous hardship; that he had disappointed him in regard to a certain contract about coal-mines; in a word, that there was a collusion between Johnson and the earl’s adversaries. Fired with these suppositions, he first expressed his resentment, by giving Johnson notice to quit the farm which he possessed on the estate; but finding the trustees had confirmed the lease, he determined to gratify his revenge by assassination, and laid his plan accordingly. On Sunday, the thirteenth day of January, he appointed this unhappy man to come to his house on the Friday following, in order to peruse papers, or settle accounts; and Johnson went thither without the least suspicion of what was prepared for his reception; for although he was no stranger to his lordship’s dangerous disposition, and knew he had some time before incurred his displeasure, yet he imagined his resentment had entirely subsided, as the earl had of late behaved to him with remarkable complacency. He therefore, at the time appointed, repaired to his lordship’s house at Stanton, in Leicestershire, at the distance of a short mile from his own habitation, and was admitted by a maid-servant. The earl had dismissed every person in the house, upon various pretences, except three women who were left in the kitchen. Johnson, advancing to the door of his apartment, was received by his lordship, who desired him to walk into another room, where he joined him in a few minutes, and then the door was locked on the inside. After a great deal of warm expostulation, the earl insisted upon his subscribing a paper, acknowledging himself a villain; and on his refusing to comply with this demand, declared he would put him to death. In vain the unfortunate man remonstrated against this cruel injustice, and deprecated the indignation of this furious nobleman. He remained deaf to all his entreaties, drew forth a pistol, which he had loaded for the purpose, and commanding him to implore heaven’s mercy on his knees, shot him through the body while he remained in that supplicating attitude. The consequence of this violence was not immediate death; but his lordship, seeing the wretched victim still alive and sensible, though agonized with pain, felt a momentary motion of pity. He ordered his servants to convey Mr. Johnson up stairs to a bed, to send for a surgeon, and give immediate notice of the accident to the wounded man’s family. When Mr. Johnson’s daughter came to the house, she was met by the earl, who told her he had shot her father on purpose, and with deliberation. The same declaration he made to the surgeon on his arrival. He stood by him while he examined the wound, described the manner in which the ball had penetrated, and seemed surprised that it should be lodged within the body. When he demanded the surgeon’s opinion of the wound, the operator thought proper to temporize for his own safety, as well as for the sake of the public, lest the earl should take some other desperate step, or endeavour to escape. He therefore amused him with hopes of Johnson’s recovery, about which he now seemed extremely anxious. He supported his spirits by immoderate drinking, after having retired to another apartment with the surgeon, whom he desired to take all possible care of his patient. He declared, however, that he did not repent of what he had done; that Johnson was a villain who deserved to die; that, in case of his death, he (the earl) would surrender himself to the house of peers and take his trial. He said he could justify the action to his own conscience, and owned his intention was to have killed Johnson outright; but as he still survived, and was in pain, he desired that all possible means might be used for his recovery. Nor did he seem altogether neglectful of his own safety: he endeavoured to tamper with the surgeon, and suggest what evidence he should give when called before a court of justice. He continued to drink himself into a state of intoxication, and all the cruelty of his hate seemed to return. He would not allow the wounded man to be removed to his own house; saying he would keep him under his own roof that he might plague the villain. He returned to the chamber where Johnson lay, insulted him with the most opprobrious language, threatened to shoot him through the head, and could hardly be restrained from committing further acts of violence on the poor man, who was already in extremity. After he retired to bed, the surgeon procured a sufficient number of assistants, who conveyed Mr. Johnson in an easy chair to his own house, where he expired that same morning in great agonies. The same surgeon assembled a number of armed men to seize the murderer, who at first threatened resistance, but was soon apprehended, endeavouring to make his escape, and committed to the county prison. From thence he was conveyed to London by the gaoler of Leicester, and conducted by the usher of the black rod and his deputy into the house of lords, where the coroner’s inquest, and the affidavits touching the murder, being read, the gaoler delivered up his prisoner to the care of the black rod, and he was immediately committed to the Tower. He appeared very calm, composed, and unconcerned, from the time of his being apprehended; conversed coolly on the subject of his imprisonment; made very pertinent remarks upon the nature of the habeas-corpus act of parliament, of which he hoped to avail himself; and when they withdrew from the house of peers, desired he might not be visited by any of his relations or acquaintances. His understanding, which was naturally good, had been well cultivated; his arguments were rational, but his conduct was frantic.
TRIED BY THE HOUSE OF PEERS.
The circumstances of the assassination appeared so cruel and deliberate, that the people cried aloud for vengeance; and the government gave up the offender to the justice of his country. The lord-keeper Henley was appointed lord high-steward for the trial of earl Ferrers, and sat in state with all the peers and judges in Westminster-hall, which was for this purpose converted into a very august tribunal. On the sixteenth day of April the delinquent was brought from the Tower in a coach, attended by the major of the Tower, the gentleman-gaoler, the warders, and a detachment of the foot-guards. He was brought into court about ten; and the lord-steward with the peers taking their places, he was arraigned aloud in the midst of an infinite concourse of people, including many foreigners, who seemed wonderfully struck with the magnificence and solemnity of the tribunal. The murder was fully proved by unquestionable evidence; but the earl pleaded insanity of mind; and, in order to establish this plea, called many witnesses to attest his lunacy in a variety of instances, which seemed too plainly to indicate a disordered imagination: unfounded jealousy of plots and conspiracies, unconnected ravings, fits of musing, incoherent ejaculations, sudden starts of fury, denunciations of unprovoked revenge, frantic gesticulations, and a strange caprice of temper, were proved to have distinguished his conduct and deportment. It appeared that lunacy had been a family taint, and affected divers of his lordship’s relations; that a solicitor of reputation had renounced his business on the full persuasion of his being disordered in his brain; that long before this unhappy event, his nearest relations had deliberated upon the expediency of taking out a commission of lunacy against him, and were prevented by no other reason than the apprehension of being convicted of scandalum magnatum, should the jury find his lordship compos mentis: a circumstance which, in all probability, would have happened, inasmuch as the earl’s madness did not appear in his conversation, but in his conduct. A physician of eminence, whose practice was confined to persons labouring under this infirmity, declared that the particulars of the earl’s deportment and personal behaviour seemed to indicate lunacy. Indeed all his neighbours and acquaintances had long considered him as a madman; and a certain noble lord declared in the house of peers, when the bill of separation was on the carpet, that he looked upon him in the light of a maniac, and that if some effectual step was not taken to divest him of the power of doing mischief, he did not doubt but that one day they should have occasion to try him for murder. The lawyers, who managed the prosecution in behalf of the crown, endeavoured to invalidate the proofs of his lunacy, by observing that his lordship was never so much deprived of his reason but that he could distinguish between good and evil; that the murder he had committed was the effect of revenge for a conceived injury of some standing; that the malice was deliberate, and the plan artfully conducted; that immediately after the deed was perpetrated, the earl’s conversation and reasoning were cool and consistent, until he drank himself into a state of intoxication; that in the opinion of the greatest lawyers, no criminal can avail himself of the plea of lunacy, provided the crime was committed during a lucid interval; but his lordship, far from exhibiting any marks of insanity, had in the course of this trial displayed uncommon understanding and sagacity in examining the witnesses, and making many shrewd and pertinent observations on the evidence which was given. These sentiments were conformable to the opinion of the peers, who unanimously declared him guilty.—After all, in examining the vicious actions of a man who has betrayed manifest and manifold symptoms of insanity, it is not easy to distinguish those which are committed during the lucid interval. The suggestions of madness are often momentary and transient: the determinations of a lunatic, though generally rash and instantaneous, are sometimes the result of artful contrivance; but there is always an absurdity which is the criterion of the disease, either in the premises or conclusion. The earl, it is true, had formed a deliberate plan for the perpetration of the murder; but he had taken no precautions for his own safety or escape; and this neglect will the more plainly appear to have been the criterion of insanity, if we reflect that he justified what he had done as a meritorious action; and declared he would, upon Mr. Johnson’s death, surrender himself to the house of lords. Had he been impelled to this violence by a sudden gust of passion, it could not be expected that he should have taken any measure for his own preservation; but as it was the execution of a deliberate scheme, and his lordship was by no means defective in point of ingenuity, he might easily have contrived means for concealing the murder until he should have accomplished his escape; and, in our opinion, any other than a madman would either have taken some such measures, or formed some plan for the concealment of his own guilt. The design itself seems to have been rather an intended sacrifice to justice than a gratification of revenge. Neither do we think that the sanity of his mind was ascertained by the accuracy and deliberation with which he made his remarks, and examined the evidence at his trial. The influence of his frenzy might be past; though it was no sign of sound reason to supply the prosecutor with such an argument to his prejudice. Had his judgment been really unimpaired, he might have assumed the mask of lunacy for his own preservation. The trial was continued for two days; and on the third the lord-steward, after having made a short speech touching the heinous nature of the offence, pronounced the same sentence of death upon the earl which malefactors of the lowest class undergo: that from the Tower, in which he was imprisoned, he should, on the Monday following, be led to the common place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck, and his body be afterwards dissected and anatomized. This last part of the sentence seemed to shock the criminal extremely; he changed colour, his jaw quivered, and he appeared to be in great agitation; but during the remaining part of his life he behaved with surprising composure, and even unconcern. After he had received sentence, the lords, his judges, by virtue of a power vested in them, respited his execution for one month, that he might have time to settle his temporal and spiritual concerns. Before sentence was passed, the earl read a paper, in which he begged pardon of their lordships for the trouble he had given, as well as for having, against his own inclination, pleaded lunacy at the request of his friends. He thanked them for the candid trial with which he had been indulged, and entreated their lordships to recommend him to the king for mercy. He afterwards sent a letter to his majesty, remonstrating, that he was the representative of a very ancient and honourable family, which had been allied to the crown; and requesting that, if he could not be favoured with the species of death which in cases of treason distinguishes the nobleman from the plebeian, he might at least, out of consideration for his family, be allowed to suffer in the Tower, rather than at the common place of execution; but this indulgence was refused. From his return to the Tower to the day of his execution, he betrayed no mark of apprehension or impatience, but regulated his affairs with precision, and conversed without concern or restraint.
EARL FERRERS EXECUTED.
On the fifth day of May, his body being demanded by the sheriffs at the Tower-gate, in consequence of a writ under the great seal of England, directed to the lieutenant of the Tower, his lordship desired permission to go in his own landau; and appeared gaily dressed in a light coloured suit of clothes, embroidered with silver. He was attended in the landau by one of the sheriffs, and the chaplain of the Tower, followed by the chariots of the sheriffs, a mourning coach and six, filled with his friends, and a hearse for the conveyance of his body. He was guarded by a posse of constables, and a party of horse grenadiers, and a detachment of infantry; and in this manner the procession moved from the Tower, through an infinite concourse of people, to Tyburn, where the gallows, and the scaffold erected under it, appeared covered with black baize. The earl behaved with great composure to Mr. sheriff Vaillant, who attended him in the landau: he observed that the gaiety of his apparel might seem odd on such an occasion, but that he had particular reasons for wearing that suit of clothes; he took notice of the vast multitude which crowded round him, brought thither, he supposed, by curiosity to see a nobleman hanged: he told the sheriff he had applied to the king by letter, that he might be permitted to die in the Tower, where the earl of Essex, one of his ancestors, had been beheaded in the reign of queen Elizabeth; an application which, he said, he had made with the more confidence, as he had the honour to quarter part of his majesty’s arms. He expressed some displeasure at being executed as a common felon, exposed to the eyes of such a multitude. The chaplain who had never been admitted to him before, hinting that some account of his lordship’s sentiments on religion would be expected by the public, he made answer that he did not think himself accountable to the public for his private sentiments; that he had always adored one God, the creator of the universe; and with respect to any particular opinions of his own, he had never propagated them, or endeavoured to make proselytes, because he thought it was criminal to disturb the established religion of his country, as lord Bolingbroke had done by the publication of his writings. He added, that the great number of sects, and the multiplication of religious disputes, had almost banished morality. With regard to the crime for which he suffered, he declared that he had no malice against Mr. Johnson; and that the murder was owing to a perturbation of mind, occasioned by a variety of crosses and vexations. When he approached the place of execution, he expressed an earnest desire to see and take leave of a certain person who waited in the coach, a person for whom he entertained the most sincere regard and affection; but the sheriff prudently observing that such an interview might shock him, at a time when he had occasion for all his fortitude and recollection, he acquiesced in the justness of the remark, and delivered to him a pocket-book, a ring, and a purse, desiring they might be given to that person, whom he now declined seeing. On his arrival at Tyburn he came out of the landau, and ascended the scaffold with a firm step and undaunted countenance. He refused to join the chaplain in his devotions; but kneeling with him on black cushions, he repeated the Lord’s Prayer, which he said he had always admired; and added, with great energy, “O Lord, forgive me all my errors, pardon all my sins.” After this exercise, he presented his watch to Mr. sheriff Vaillant; thanked him and the other gentlemen for all their civilities; and signified his desire of being buried at Breden or Stanton, in Leicestershire. Finally, he gratified the executioner with a purse of money; then, the halter being adjusted to his neck, he stepped upon a little stage, erected upon springs, on the middle of the scaffold; and the cap being pulled over his eyes, the sheriff made a signal, at which the stage fell from under his feet, and he was left suspended. His body having hung an hour and five minutes, was cut down, placed in the hearse, and conveyed to the public theatre for dissection; where being opened, and lying for some days as the subject of a public lecture, at length it was carried off and privately interred. Without all doubt, this unhappy nobleman’s disposition was so dangerously mischievous, that it became necessary, for the good of society, either to confine him for life as au incorrigible lunatic, or give him up at once as a sacrifice to justice. Perhaps it might be no absurd or unreasonable regulation in the legislature, to divest all lunatics of the privilege of insanity, and, in cases of enormity, subject them to the common penalties of the law; for though, in the eye of casuistry, consciousness must enter into the constitution of guilt, the consequences of murder committed by a maniac may be as pernicious to society as those of the most criminal and deliberate assassination, and the punishment of death can be hardly deemed unjust or rigorous, when inflicted upon a mischievous being, divested of all the perceptions of reason and humanity. At any rate, as the nobility of England are raised by many illustrious distinctions above the level of plebeians, and as they are eminently distinguished from them in suffering punishment for high treason, which the law considers as the most atrocious crime that can be committed, it might not be unworthy of the notice of the legislature to deliberate whether some such pre-eminence ought not to be extended to noblemen convicted of other crimes, in order to alleviate as much as possible the disgrace of noble families which have deserved well of their country; to avoid any circumstance that may tend to diminish the lustre of the English nobility in the eyes of foreign nations; or to bring it into contempt with the common people of our own, already too licentious, and prone to abolish those distinctions which serve as the basis of decorum, order, and subordination.
ASSASSINATION OF MR. MATTHEWS.
Homicide is the reproach of England: one would imagine there is something in the climate of this country that not only disposes the natives to this inhuman outrage, but even infects foreigners who reside among them. Certain it is, high passions will break out into the most enormous violence in that country where they are least controlled by the restraint of regulation and discipline; and it is equally certain, that in no civilized country under the sun there is such a relaxation of discipline, either religious or civil, as in England. The month of August produced a remarkable instance of desperate revenge, perpetrated by one Stirn, a native of Hesse-Cassel, inflamed and exasperated by a false punctilio of honour. This unhappy young man was descended of a good family, and possessed many accomplishments both of mind and person; but his character was distinguished by such a jealous sensibility, as rendered him unhappy in himself, and disagreeable to his acquaintance. After having for some years performed the office of usher in a boarding-school, he was admitted to the house of one Mr. Matthews, a surgeon, in order to teach him the classics, and instruct his children in music, which he perfectly understood. He had not long resided in his family, when the surgeon took umbrage at some part of his conduct, taxed him roughly with fraud and ingratitude, and insisted upon his removing to another lodging. Whether he rejected this intimation, or found difficulty in procuring another apartment, the surgeon resolved to expel him by violence, called in the assistance of a peace-officer, and turned him out into the street in the night, after having loaded him with the most provoking reproaches. These injuries and disgraces operating upon a mind jealous by nature and galled by adversity, produced a kind of frenzy of resentment, and he took the desperate resolution of sacrificing Mr. Matthews to his revenge. Next day, having provided a case of pistols, and charged them for the occasion, he reinforced his rage by drinking an unusual quantity of wine, and repaired in the evening to a public house, which Mr. Matthews frequented, in the neighbourhood of Hatton-Garden. There he accordingly found the unhappy victim sitting with some of his friends; and the surgeon, instead of palliating his former conduct, began to insult him afresh with the most opprobrious invectives. Stirn, exasperated by this additional indignity, pulled his pistols from his bosom; shot the surgeon, who immediately expired; and discharged the other at his own breast, though his confusion was such that it did not take effect. He was apprehended on the spot, and conveyed to prison; where, for some days, he refused all kind of sustenance, but afterwards became more composed. At his trial he pleaded insanity of mind; but, being found guilty, he resolved to anticipate the execution of the sentence. That same evening he drank poison; and, notwithstanding all the remedies that could be administered, died in strong convulsions. His body was publicly dissected, according to the sentence of the law; and afterwards interred with those marks of indignity which are reserved for the perpetrators of suicide.