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. CHAPTER V A GHOSTLY VISITANT There is scarcely a chapter in the story of the British Peerage more tragic and mysterious than that which chronicles the closing days of Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, whose dissolute life had its fitting climax of horror at the exact moment foretold to him by a ghostly visitor. Various and somewhat conflicting accounts are given of this singular tragedy; but in them all the chief incidents stand out so clear and unassailable that even such a hard-headed sceptic as Dr Johnson declared, "I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world that I am willing to believe it." Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, son of the first Baron, the distinguished poet and historian, was the degenerate descendant of five centuries of Lyttelton ancestors, who had held their heads among the highest in the county of Worcester since the days of the third Henry. Unlike his clean-living forefathers, he was famous as a debauchee in a dissolute age. "Of his morals," Sir Bernard Burke says, "we may judge by the fact of his having died the victim of the coarsest debauchery, and leaving behind him a diary more disgustingly licentious than the pages of Aratine himself." William Coombe, who had been at Eton with Lyttelton, is said to have had his old schoolfellow in mind when he dedicated his _Diaboliad_ "to the worst man in His Majesty's Dominions," and when he penned those terrible lines:-- "Have I not tasted every villain's part? Have I not broke a noble parent's heart? Do I not daily boast how I betrayed The tender widow and the virtuous maid?"