the condemned were returned to Newgate, some to await the deadly summons
to be taken on the 3 -mile journey to Tyburn,^101 the reprieved with every expect-
ation that at some point in the months ahead they would be pardoned and then
released from gaol entirely or transported to America or made to undergo some
alternative punishment. As we have seen, those condemned to await the execu-
tioner’s call, could petition the king for a pardon, and gather what support they
could from their relatives and friends, from those who had known them in their
communities, or, even more advantageously, from those with influence at court.
Those petitions would normally be sent to the recorder, and his recommenda-
tion or that of the chief justice of the court of King’s Bench, appears to have
been generally influential in the decision to pardon or not to pardon made by
the king and the secretaries of state and others who acted in his name.
Given the degree of discretion available to the juries and the judges, it is not
surprising that the men and women who were in the end hanged for property
crimes in London were either judged to be habitual offenders or they had com-
mitted offences that were thought to be particularly heinous, because, like bur-
glary, housebreaking, and robbery, they threatened physical harm to victims.
The language of the pardon correspondence and pardon warrants, of the trials
and the Ordinary’s Accounts,makes it clear that the character of the offender and
of the offence were the major considerations in the decision to grant or withhold
mercy. Pardons were most readily extended to those who appeared to offer less
of a threat to the community because of their age and previous record, or be-
cause they had not committed an offence that threatened violence—an attitude
summed up in the condition attached to a pardon granted to a horse-thief in
1663 : he was to be pardoned so long as he had not been previously convicted of
murder, burglary, or highway robbery; and, in another order that distinguished
among eight men condemned to death at the summer assizes at Norwich, and
specified that only those convicted of burglary were to be executed.^102 In the
exercise of the pardoning power the combination of persistent offending and
the nature of the offence were the crucial determinants—considerations that al-
most certainly explain why a smaller proportion of women charged with nom-
inally capital offences were executed than of men so charged. They were not
treated more leniently; they had committed fewer threatening offences.
In our Sample of City of London cases in the late seventeenth century,
298 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^101) Or, as occasionally happened in the late seventeenth century, to some other place in the metrop-
olis, for executions were still then occasionally carried out at sites around the City to drive home a lesson
and enlarge the terror of the hanging for a particular population. That was said of the hanging of two
men in Fleet Street in 1676 near the spot where they had murdered a gentlemen (Sir Richard Sandford).
The execution was carried out there at the king’s express command, for ‘the exemplarity of the thing and
the terror’ of their accomplices (CSPD 1675 – 6 , p. 352 ). Two years later a man was hanged for murder
at the spot of the killing in Covent Garden ‘as a particular mark of the King’s justice on so foul a fact and
as a terror to others’. Also in 1678 a soldier was hanged for desertion on Hounslow Heath for the same
reason (CSPD 1678 , pp. 182, 279).
(^102) CSPD 1661 – 2 , pp. 461 – 2 ; CSPD 1663 – 4 , p. 77.