encouraged jurors to find more partial verdicts than they had earlier. But the
pattern of verdicts remained broadly the same: the more valuable the goods, the
more likely the defendants were to be convicted as charged; and conversely
the less likely to be granted a partial verdict. As in the earlier period, there was
doubtless a sense that a partial verdict of petty larceny that brought a sentence
of whipping was a harsher outcome for some of these men and women than
conviction on the original charge might have been. But it seems equally to have
been thought, as before 1689 , that whipping was appropriate only in the most
minor cases. And there was almost certainly a residual sense that the branding
of clergy provided something of a deterrent—though it must have become in-
creasingly clear after the Revolution that there was little chance of a second
conviction for a clergyable offence resulting in a death sentence.
How the convicted would be punished was determined by decisions made by
jurors, the judges, and the monarch, all of whom exercised discretionary powers
that were important in shaping the outcome of the trial process. The final de-
cisions about who would be hanged were, however, made in the course of the
pardon process. And as the number of offences removed from clergy increased
in this period—and continued to grow throughout the eighteenth century—
pardon decisions became more important than ever in the management of cap-
ital punishment. It was thus very significant for the public face of criminal justice
in London that the process by which pardons were decided in the case of defend-
ants sentenced to death at the Old Bailey changed in William III’s reign in a way
that put the decisions more immediately in the hands of the king’s ministers. In
this respect as in others, the Revolution of 1689 made for a decisive alteration in
the administration of the criminal law.
The cabinet and the management of death at Tyburn
Pardons had always been a crucial aspect of the royal prerogative, the means by
which a benevolent monarch could temper justice with mercy. But by the seven-
teenth century, despite the way in which the pardoning power continued to be
deployed in royalist rhetoric to reflect on the personal virtues of the reigning
king or queen, monarchs do not seem to have been personally involved in many
aspects of pardon decision-making. In the reigns of Charles II and James II the
Old Bailey judges routinely reprieved a number of offenders after condemning
them to death and sent in their names for inclusion in the next general pardon
for Newgate gaol. The king might become personally involved if those left to be
hanged petitioned for their lives, but that might equally simply have required
discussions between the attorney-general or a secretary of state and the
recorder of London.
Changes in the processes by which pardons were granted or withheld, at least
with respect to London cases, were introduced after the Revolution and had
the effect of regularizing and perhaps tightening up the ways in which pardon
346 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London