same place when the Pretender’s ‘Declaration’ was burned in public following
the exposure of the Jacobite plot in 1722.^47
Large public demonstrations that turned violent could easily become too dif-
ficult for the limited City constabulary to control. Constables were not well
equipped to contain large gatherings or to manage crowds that got out of
hand—not only large-scale political, religious, or economic protests but also the
large crowds that gathered to watch punishments being inflicted on convicted
prisoners. City constables were not routinely on duty at Tyburn before the
middle of the eighteenth century, when several were given extra pay to stand on
guard there.^48 On the other hand, constables were heavily involved in public
punishments carried out in the City itself, both public whippings and the pun-
ishment of the pillory. The pillory could mean difficult and even dangerous
work for constables, depending on the crowd’s attitude towards the prisoner
being displayed and chastised. The constables could easily find themselves con-
fronted by hostile crowds, sometimes because friends of the prisoners attempted
to rescue them, more often because large numbers of people came with the in-
tention of imposing their own form of rough justice on the pinioned offender.
The constables on duty did not always succeed in protecting prisoners from the
hostility of such crowds, even if they wanted to, which it is clear was not always
the case.^49 The pillorying ofJohn Middleton in 1723 at Charing Cross revealed
either the difficulty of crowd control for untrained constables or, perhaps on this
occasion, the problems that arose when the constables shared the crowd’s an-
tipathy towards the wretch put on public display. Middleton, an informer, was
no sooner set on the pillory than he was attacked by men who got inside the ring
formed by the constables around the platform and so badly pelted him with dirt
and filth that had apparently been laid in heaps ahead of time that he was killed,
either by suffocation or by strangulation as he vainly tried to twist away from his
attackers.^50 It was perhaps cases like this, and that ofJohn Waller, who was killed
a few years later as he stood on the pillory at Seven Dials for falsely prosecuting
innocent men for the sake of rewards,^51 that explains why the number of
Constables and Other Officers 129increasing since the Restoration because of the diminishing effectiveness of the Trained Bands and the
absence of an alternative civil force. The Trained Bands were only rarely called out and were virtually
defunct after 1720 (ex infNicholas Rogers).
(^47) CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box S, no. CXLVI/ 17. (^48) See below, pp. 155 – 6.
(^49) When constables were not present, there was an obvious sense among those attempting to hold the
crowd at bay that the authority of the constable’s staff provided a certain amount of protection. Eight
officers of the sheriffs’ prisons, the compters, remarked on the absence of constables when they carried
out the pillorying in Aldgate in 1717 of a man convicted of seditious words; they wanted constables to be
present when they thought the crowd might attempt to rescue the prisoner, having been stirred up by a
‘vile lewd woman’ against the injustice of the sentence (SP 35 / 12 / 99 ).
(^50) The government clearly thought that the constables were complicit and ordered an investigation
carried out by Charles Delafaye, the under-secretary of state (SP 35 / 44 / 249 – 74 ).
(^51) Gentleman’s Magazine, 2 ( 1732 ), 774 , 823. And see John H. Langbein, ‘The Prosecutorial Origins of
Defence Counsel in the Eighteenth Century: The Appearance of Solicitors’, Cambridge Law Journal, 58
( 1999 ), 353.