provided an opportunity for the resurrection of these ideas, but applied now to
the more minor forms of property crime subject to clergy. A campaign was
launched in parliament, led by the City members, to replace branding on the
cheek for clergied defendants with a work-based punishment for the reasons
that were to make the penitentiary such a promising instrument of social order
at the end of the eighteenth century. Such a punishment, it was said in 1706 in
correspondence between the lord mayor and Sir Charles Hedges, the secretary
of state, would be ‘a proper meanes to breake [offenders] of their idle and
wicked Course of life. As also by the Example thereof to deterr others from the
like Courses and ill practices.’^44 There is evidence that the grand jury present-
ment of December 1704 and the subsequent petition had been inspired by Sir
Robert Clayton; before the petition had been presented he reported its exist-
ence and its contents to the governors of the London workhouse at their
meeting of 13 December 1704.^45
The London petition to parliament signed by the ‘Grand Jury, Citizens, and
Shopkeepers’ was followed by the introduction of a bill by Sir Gilbert Heath-
cote, a whig member for London, who was not only an alderman but the serv-
ing lord mayor. This bill, which sought to establish the punishment of hard
labour for clergied offenders, got no further than second reading for reasons
that are unclear, though it is not inconceivable that some members of parlia-
ment objected in principle to such a fundamental shift in penal policy and that
others with magisterial experience foresaw the problems that long-term incar-
ceration might produce for the county benches.^46 Another bill to the same effect
was introduced in the House ofLords early in 1706 , and again was turned back,
only to be passed at the third attempt in the 1706 – 7 session, having again been
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 333they divided about’ (David Hayton (ed.), The Parliamentary Diary of Richard Cocks, 1698 – 1702 (Oxford,
1996 ), 243 ).
(^44) These revealing intentions or hopes were expressed in the course of an exchange of correspondence
about the difficulties being experienced in 1706 in transporting a group of women who had been par-
doned from capital sentences on condition they be sent to the colonies, but who remained in Newgate
because no colony would agree to receive them and no merchant would take them. Early in 1706 Hedges
proposed that the mayor and aldermen find an alternative, and particularly that they consider sending
these women to houses of correction to be kept at hard labour. The city authorities, particularly the whig
aldermen, were only too willing, since they had for some time been pressing parliament to enact a hard
labour bill, not just for women pardoned from hanging but for clergied felons. Their suggestion was that
London women who were pardoned should be sent to Bridewell, and women from Middlesex to the
county house of correction. It was in the course of this correspondence that their intentions in pressing
for hard labour in the house of correction as a sanction for convicted felons was revealed (Rep 110 ,
fos. 68 – 9 , 75 – 6 ). It is thus possible that the Hard Labour Act was eventually passed in 1706 because the
administration gave it some support. The Act was not passed only with women in mind, but it is clear
that the large number of women convicted of property offences in this period continued to raise
serious problems for the London authorities and ultimately for the government. We will examine the
problems surrounding transportation in the reigns of William and Anne in the following section of this
chapter.
(^45) CLRO: Minutes of the Court of the President and Governors for the Poor of London, 1702 – 5 ,
fo. 179.
(^46) JHC, 14 ( 1702 – 4 ), pp. 463 , 487 – 8 , 526 , 992.