the structure of its policing networks, were the twenty-six wards. Each elected
an alderman who was its nominal administrative leader and who sat on the
Court of Aldermen, the City’s executive council and the centre of its adminis-
trative and political authority.^24 The aldermen met weekly to deal with every as-
pect of the City’s governance—setting out policy on major subjects, issuing
regulations, appointing some of the City’s most influential officers, and control-
ling the property and finances of the Corporation. The court was led by the lord
mayor, one of the alderman being elected to that post every year to serve for the
coming twelve months.^25 The Court of Aldermen also provided one of the two
sheriffs who served an annual term for the City and for the county of Middlesex.
The Court of Aldermen, whose members were elected for life, was a tight oli-
garchy drawn from a narrow band of the richest and most powerful men in the
City, an outcome guaranteed by the weight of decision being in the hands of the
aldermen themselves and the requirement that a candidate be in possession of
a considerable estate.^26 In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the vast
majority were merchants or financiers.^27 Inevitably, not all of the richest men in
the City and those most influential in its business life took part in civic affairs.
There may indeed have been some increasing reluctance to do so on the part of
the greatest plutocrats as the eighteenth century advanced.^28 But the aldermen
who served were all none the less drawn from the social and economic élite of
the City, and many of them were among the richest and most successful men in
the mercantile and financial world. In William III’s and Anne’s reigns, they in-
cluded, for example, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, a West Indies and Baltic merchant,
who has been described as ‘the greatest City magnate of the early eighteenth
century’; Sir Robert Clayton, ‘the City’s pre-eminent private banker’; and those
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 87(^24) For the constitution and government of the City, see Webb and Webb, Manor and Borough, ch. 10 ;
[Philip E. Jones,] The Corporation of London: Its Origins, Constitution, Powers and Duties( 1950 ); Valerie Pearl,
‘Change and Stability in Seventeenth-Century London’, London Journal, 5 ( 1979 ), 3 – 34.
(^25) Two candidates were nominated for the post by the 8,000or more liverymen of the City, but the
Court of Aldermen made the final choice. The liverymen were the freemen members of the most im-
portant City guilds who met in the institution known as Common Hall. They also exercised the parlia-
mentary franchise and elected the City’s four members.
(^26) De Krey, A Fractured Society, 10 ; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Money, Land and Lineage: The Big Bourgeoisie
of Hanoverian London’, Social History, 4 ( 1979 ), 437 – 54 ; Donna Andrew, ‘Aldermen and Big Bourgeoisie
of London Reconsidered’, Social History, 6 ( 1981 ), 359 – 64 ; Henry Horwitz, ‘ “The Mess of the Middle
Class” Revisited: The Case of the “Big Bourgeoisie” of Augustan London’, Continuity and Change, 2 ( 1987 ),
263 – 96. No specific property qualification had been established, but without significant resources an al-
derman would not have been able to sustain the style of life the post required, and would certainly not
have been able to accept the offices of sheriff and lord mayor which most aldermen would have expected
to occupy at some point in their careers. The level of wealth required is suggested by the rule established
by act of Common Council in 1710 that a nominee could decline the office without penalty upon swear-
ing that he was not worth £ 15 , 000 (Webb and Webb, Manor and Borough, 656 – 7 , n. 3 ).
(^27) For the identity and social character of aldermen in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies, see in particular De Krey, A Fractured Society, 10 , 124 – 5 , and chs 3 – 4 ; Rogers, ‘Money, Land and
Lineage’, 439 – 42 ; Andrew, ‘Aldermen and Big Bourgeoisie’, 359 – 64 ; Horwitz, ‘Middle Class Revisited’,
263 – 96 ; and Rogers, Whigs and Cities, 18 – 22.
(^28) Rogers, Whigs and Cities, 16 – 17.