Men and women with complaints or charges to make were able to find magis-
trates easily enough in the 1690 s, when the business of conducting preliminary
hearings was being widely shared among the qualified aldermen. As many as a
dozen men carried out some of the tasks associated with this stage of the crim-
inal process, though some, inevitably, were busier than others. But that was to
change in a significant way in the early decades of the eighteenth century, when
the City magistrates withdrew in such numbers from various aspects of magis-
terial work that the system of preliminary hearing into criminal charges had to
be entirely reorganized and recast.
The withdrawal of the aldermen in general and the magistrates in particular
from engagement in the City’s day-to-day business can be seen in several areas
in the generation after the Revolution of 1689. The magistrates seem to have be-
come increasingly reluctant, for example, to attend court sessions in sufficient
numbers to guarantee a quorum. Even in the 1690 s, when they were apparently
still willing to act as committing magistrates, there were complaints that the
business of the sessions was frequently delayed ‘for want of a competent number
of justices’. If there was reluctance, the reason may have been political—an un-
willingness to associate together at the sessions.^50 That would not have been
surprising, given the partisan conflict that had developed in the 1670 s and 1680 s
between the tory supporters of the court of Charles II, on the one hand, and the
more radical, whig and dissenter, elements in the City, on the other. These con-
flicts had come to a head in the Exclusion Crisis over the whig attempts to pre-
vent the Catholic heir to the throne, James, Duke of York, from succeeding his
brother, Charles. The challenge to the court had devastating consequences for
the City when the threat to public order that the whigs seemed to encourage led
Charles II to revoke the Charter and to take direct control of the City’s affairs—
appointing the aldermen, for example, and eliminating Common Council, on
which the whigs had had a majority.^51 Even after James II restored the Charter
in 1688 , recriminations between whigs and tories over the loss of the Charter
were hardly dispelled, and indeed partisan divisions were to harden further in
the 1690 s, in part as a consequence of the aggressive foreign policy that followed
the Revolution of 1689 and the succession to the throne of William and Mary.^52
Political hostility among the magistrates may explain why the aldermen
asked William III in 1692 to authorize the next six aldermen in seniority below
the chair to act as magistrates,^53 and why they thought it necessary to draw up
98 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^50) For the influence of partisan politics on the composition of rural benches and the behaviour of
magistrates, see Landau, Justices of the Peace, 147 – 54 , 304 – 12.
(^51) For a summary of political conflicts in the City between 1680 and the Revolution of 1689 , see Henry
Horwitz, ‘Party in a Civic Context: London from the Exclusion Crisis to the Fall of Walpole’, in Britain
in the First Age of Party, 1680 – 1750 : Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes( 1987 ), 177 – 82 ; and De Krey, A Fractured
Society, ch. 1 ; see also Jennifer Levin, The Charter Controversy in the City of London, 1660 – 1688 , and its Conse-
quences( 1969 ).
(^52) Horwitz, ‘Party in a Civic Context’, 180 – 6 ; De Krey, A Fractured Society, chs 5 – 6.
(^53) Rep 96 , pp. 283 , 286 , 317.