Springthrope imagined he was feeling for a pistol, and stopped short, being probably intimidated.  He thus suffered the Earl to escape back into the house, where he fastened the doors and stood on his defence.

“The crowd of people who had come to apprehend him beset the house, and their number increased very fast.  In about two hours Lord Ferrers appeared at the garret window, and called out:  ‘How is Johnson?’ Springthorpe answered:  ’He is dead,’ upon which his lordship insulted him, and called him a liar, and swore he would not believe anybody but the surgeon, Kirkland.  Upon being again assured that he was dead, he desired that the people might be dispersed, saying that he would surrender; yet, almost in the same breath, he desired that the people might be let in, and have some victuals and drink; but the issue was that he went away again from the window, swearing that he would not be taken.

“The people, however, still continued near the house, and two hours later he was seen on the bowling-green by one, Curtis, a collier.  ‘My lord’ was then armed with a blunderbuss and a dagger and two or three pistols; but Curtis, so far from being intimidated, marched boldly up to him, and his lordship was so struck with the determinate resolution shown by this brave fellow, that he suffered him to seize him without making any resistance.  Yet the moment that he was in custody he declared that he had killed a villain, and that he gloried in the deed.”

The tragedy is now hastening to its close.  The assassin was kept in custody at Ashby until a coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of “Wilful Murder” against him, when he was transferred to Leicester, and a fortnight later to London, making the journey in his own splendid equipage with six horses, and “dressed like a jockey, in a close riding-frock, jockey boots and cap, and a plain shirt.”  He was lodged in the Round Tower of the Tower of London, where, with a couple of warders at his elbow night and day, with sentries posted outside his door, and another on the drawbridge, he passed the last weeks of his doomed life.

In mid-April he was duly tried by his Peers at the Bar of the House of Lords; and, although he tried with marvellous skill and ingenuity to prove that he was insane when he committed the murder, he was, without a dissentient voice, pronounced “Guilty,” and sentenced to be “hanged by the neck until he was dead,” when his body should be handed over to the surgeons for dissection.  One concession he claimed—­pitiful salve to his pride—­that he should be hanged by a cord of silk, the privilege due to his rank as a Peer of the realm; and this was granted as a matter of course.

One day in early May the scaffold was reared at Tyburn, where so many other malefactors had looked their last on the world; and at nine o’clock in the morning Lord Ferrers started on his last journey—­the most splendid and most tragic of his chequered life.  He was allowed, as a last favour, to travel to his death, not in the common hangman’s cart as an ordinary criminal, but in his own landau, drawn by ’six beautiful horses; and thus he made his stately progress to Tyburn.