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.