insufficient evidence to allow me to take this subject very far. It is likely that even
the most violent political opponents among the aldermen were in broad agree-
ment about the scourge of property crime and about most matters concerning
the law and its administration. But there was scope in the seventeenth century
for disagreement about the effectiveness of various forms of punishment, and
there is evidence that in the generation after the Revolution whig aldermen,
particularly those sympathetic towards nonconformity, were more inclined to
favour penal measures that sought to reform and train petty offenders than the
committed tories on the aldermanic bench. A number of whigs certainly came
to favour the kinds of proposals that had been floated in the 1640 s and 1650 s,
and very occasionally in the intervening years, that saw in hard labour a more
effective sanction in the case of some offences than either capital punishment or
the branding of clergy.
It is difficult to discover how widespread such views were in the City, but there
was clearly support in London in the post-Revolution years for a greater use of
hard labour in some form or other. Had transportation become established,
that in itself might have been satisfactory. In the wake of its failure, there were
men in the City willing to innovate more freely by pressing for penal practices
that had long been familiar in Europe and that had been suggested earlier in
England: hard labour as a punishment at least for clergyable felonies. Men of
whig and nonconformist temperament promoted punishments that departed
from established practices, and that sought to inculcate attitudes and behav-
iours that might keep the labouring poor at work and out of the way of tempta-
tion. Two aldermen and members of parliament, Sir William Ashhurst and
Sir Robert Clayton, for example, made several efforts early in Anne’s reign to
introduce some form of hard labour as a punishment for felonies—failing on
one occasion to establish transportation, succeeding on another in getting legisla-
tion that gave judges the right to sentence convicted felons to a term of hard
labour.^27 Whether, on the other hand, tories in the City and in parliament
were more likely to defend the established penal mechanisms, I cannot say with
326 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^27) Sir William Ashhurst ( 1647 – 1720 ): alderman from 1687 ; lord mayor, 1693 – 4 ; MP for London
1695 – 1702 , 1705 – 10. A wealthy Turkey merchant, son of a Presbyterian woollen draper, a whig, sympa-
thetic towards dissenters, and with ‘a reputation for radicalism’ (De Krey, A Fractured Society, 52 , 89 – 90 ).
Sir Robert Clayton ( 1629 – 1707 ): alderman, 1670 – 83 , 1688 – 1707 ; lord mayor, 1679 – 80. An exclusionist
MP and ‘the City’s pre-eminent private banker’ who in the 1690 s ‘moved in free-thinking circles and was
a friend and patron of the political and religious radical John Toland’ (De Krey, ibid., 52 ). Clayton was
a leader among reform-minded whigs in the City, particularly with respect to poor relief. He successfully
led the campaign to resurrect the London Corporation of the Poor in 1698 and to found the Bishopsgate
Street workhouse in which children were given vocational training and adults committed for their fail-
ure to work were put to hard labour. For Ashhurst and Clayton, see Stephen M. Macfarlane, ‘Studies in
Poverty and Poor Relief in London at the end of the Seventeenth Century’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford Uni-
versity, 1982 ), chs 6 – 7 ; idem, ‘Social Policy and the Poor in the Later Seventeenth Century’, in A. L. Beier
and Roger Finlay (eds.), London, 1500 – 1700 : The Making of the Metropolis( 1986 ), 263 – 70 ; and, generally, De
Krey, A Fractured Society. For the London Corporation of the Poor, see Slack, From Reformation to Improve-
ment, 103, 106, 108, 112– 13. On Clayton’s importance in the history of banking, see Frank Melton,
Sir Robert Clayton and the Origins of English Deposit Banking, 1658 – 1685 (Cambridge, 1986 ).