Those among the condemned who had been passed over by the bench at the
conclusion of the session and ‘left to be hanged’ could petition the king for his
mercy or have friends or relatives do so on their behalf—though, the opportun-
ity to appeal to the monarch was more limited in the seventeenth century than
it was to become in the eighteenth because of the brevity of the period between
sentence and the day of execution.^76 Such petitions as arrived were generally
handled by the secretaries’ office and in London were most commonly sent to
the recorder of the City for his comment and his recommendation as to whether
the petitioning convict was a ‘suitable object of the king’s mercy’. A positive rec-
ommendation could lead to a warrant signed by the king and returned to the
recorder to authorize him to include the named convict in the next Newgate
pardon.^77 As we will see, the rather loose informality of the London pardon
process was to be changed in crucial ways after the Revolution of 1689 , and in
ways that may have brought the monarch even closer to the pardoning process
in the capital. The new procedure also enhanced the recorder’s decision-
making role and made him an even more prominent link between the metrop-
olis and the national government.^78
Convicts pardoned from the death penalty were subject to some alternative
punishment if the king chose to impose one. Or they might be pardoned ab-
solutely—given a free pardon, as it was sometimes called—and discharged from
gaol without further penalty. From the early decades of the seventeenth century,
and especially from the 1650 s, transportation to the Americas had been a
favoured pardon condition. It was a sanction that served the several purposes of
the penal regime by punishing offenders in a serious way while acting as a warn-
ing and deterrent to others. Although the transference of English labour to the
colonies did not accord with the prescriptions for national strength and security
being voiced in the seventeenth century by mercantilist economic writers,^79 the
practical usefulness of transportation as a penal device, and as a way of manag-
ing the level of execution, was too appealing to be resisted. In the 1650 s trans-
portation had assumed a significant role as the condition most commonly
imposed on pardoned felons, a role that was continued at the Restoration.^80
290 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^76) See below, pp. 460‒1.
(^77) Dozens of references to the recorder are calendered in the CSPDfor the reigns of Charles II and
James II; the recorder’s responses and recommendation are occasionally included. One of George Jef-
freys’s reports (on a bigamy case) in 1680 is noted, for example at CSPD 1679 – 80 , p. 42. The warrants are
also noted in CSPD for the reigns of Charles II and James II; for an example, see CSPD 1680 – 1 , p. 358
(warrant to Sir George Treby, recorder, and the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, for inserting in the
next general pardon for poor convicts of Newgate and for putting into the clause for transportation,
Thomas Jepson, condemned at the last Old Bailey sessions for highway robbery).
(^78) See below, pp. 346‒62.
(^79) Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England(Princeton, NJ,
1978 ), ch. 6.
(^80) I have set out the seventeenth-century origins of transportation in Beattie, Crime and the Courts,
470 – 83 , which I summarize and develop here. See also Abbott E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servi-
tude and Convict Labour in America, 1607 – 1776 ( 1947 ; reprint edn., Gloucester, Mass., 1965 ), ch. 5 ; and for a
brief and suggestive account, Joanna Innes, ‘The Role of Transportation in Seventeenth and