decisions about Old Bailey defendants were made. In effect, the final decisions
about the punishment of men and women condemned for capital offences were
removed from the purview of the bench. The judges at the Old Bailey con-
tinued to pronounce death sentences against offenders convicted by the London
and Middlesex trial juries, but without going on to reprieve some and leaving
others to be hanged. Those decisions were turned over early in the reign of
William and Mary to a committee of the Privy Council, or, when the king was
out of the country, to the lords justices appointed to govern in his name. Soon
after the accession of the new monarchs, the recorder of London, the court’s
sentencing officer, was given the responsibility of presenting the list of men and
women condemned to death at the Old Bailey to the body that was emerging as
the cabinet, or cabinet council, at which William was invariably present when
he was not out of the country. At these meetings of ministers and other officials,
and as an item among other matters of state business, the cases of the con-
demned men and women were discussed and decisions made about who among
them would be left to be hanged and who pardoned. The results were conveyed
to Newgate by means of a document that came to be known as the ‘dead war-
rant’. From early in the reign ofWilliam and Mary, and well into the nineteenth
century, the fate of every convict condemned and sentenced to death at the Old
Bailey was decided at a meeting of ministers and other officials in the presence
of the king—a procedure that, paradoxically, may have involved monarchs
more closely in the exercise of the royal mercy in ordinary felony cases after the
Revolution than before.^64
The council’s involvement in decisions about the ultimate punishment to be
imposed on men and women convicted of non-clergyable offences at the Old
Bailey was not, as has been surmised, ‘a relic of the direct rule which the medi-
eval monarch claimed in his capital’.^65 Nor was it simply an indirect and
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 347(^64) J. M. Beattie, ‘The Cabinet and the Management of Death at Tyburn after the Revolution of
1688 – 1689 ’, in Lois G. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688 – 1689 : Changing Perspectives(Cambridge,
1992 ), 218 – 33. The body that began to deal with Old Bailey capital cases after 1689 was made up of the
king’s leading ministers, as well as household officers and other advisers, the inner group of the Privy
Council that emerged in William’s and Anne’s reigns as the Cabinet Council and that came to meet
weekly with the sovereign, following a meeting of the more formal Privy Council, to deal with a wide
range of government business. See Stephen B. Baxter, William III( 1966 ), ch. 20 ; Jennifer Carter, ‘The
Revolution and the Constitution’, in Geoffrey Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689 – 1714
( 1969 ), 49 – 52 ; and Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy, and Politics in the Reign of William III(Manchester,
1977 ), 88 – 93.
(^65) V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770 – 1868 (Oxford, 1994 ), 544 , fol-
lowing A. Aspinall, ‘The Grand Cabinet, 1800 – 1837 ’, Politica, 3 ( 1938 ), 333 – 44. The origins of the cab-
inet’s decision-making powers in Old Bailey capital cases have not been noticed by constitutional or legal
historians. Nor, in the early nineteenth century, did the men then running the pardoning process have
any knowledge of the origins of the system. When Robert Peel enquired ofhis officials in 1830 about ‘the
origins of the King’s practice of receiving personally the reports of the Recorder of London’, an under-
secretary reported that Lord Chancellor Eldon thought it ‘one of the early Privileges of the City of Lon-
don, of which the origin is lost in obscure Antiquity’ (BL, Add. MS 40400 , fos. 200 – 1 ; I am grateful to
Simon Devereaux for this reference).