country and, in addition, decisions about whether to pardon men and women
condemned in London had to be made regularly since the court sat roughly
every six weeks. It was also easier for ministers to deal with London cases than
those tried on the provincial assizes because the recorder could be called to
meetings at short notice and could speak authoritatively about the cases tried in
the capital. Most of the trials were probably heard by one of the high court
judges, the remainder by the recorder himself, or, occasionally, the lord mayor
or one of the London magistrates present. But the recorder pronounced all the
sentences at the conclusion of the session. It is possible that this duty meant that
the recorder was in fact present on the bench for most of the trials; at the least it
meant that he had some knowledge of the capital cases, however that knowledge
had been acquired.
The availability of a key official like the recorder helps to explain the ease
with which the new system could be organized in the 1690 s. But the usefulness
of this scrutiny of the work of the Old Bailey, and the king’s and his ministers’
interest in doing so at a time when London crime was thought to be a serious so-
cial problem, surely explains why the cabinet came to play a permanent and
crucial role in the administration of the criminal law. It is no doubt important
that such domestic issues did not command the king’s attention as did those high
matters of state—war, finance, and foreign policy—about which he preferred to
deal with individual ministers. But the way the system of cabinet management
of the death penalty in London took root in the 1690 s suggests that it was some-
thing more than an accidental by-product ofWilliam’s preoccupations and gov-
erning style. However reluctantly, he did meet the cabinet council and the larger
Privy Council weekly when he was in England,^69 and his decision to consult his
ministers about pardons and to leave pardoning decisions in their hands when
he was out of the country (though in both cases without relinquishing his ultim-
ate control) elevated the problem of crime in London as a serious issue for the
national government and was by implication a recognition that the pardon pro-
cedure had been slack and ineffective in the reigns of his two predecessors.
William, or his advisers, must have known, for example, that in the decade
before the Revolution a very large number of men and women had been allowed
absolute pardons and had been discharged without suffering any punishment at
all. The new system, under which the fate of the convicts at the Old Bailey be-
came an item of cabinet business several times a year, also had the effect of
putting the government more in touch with the state of crime in London.
There is no suggestion that this alteration in the pardon process represented
a limitation on the royal prerogative of pardon, an unspoken addition to the Bill
of Rights.^70 It brought the cabinet into the decision-making process without
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 349(^69) Baxter, William III, 273.
(^70) While the king’s power of pardon was related in a broad sense to Charles II’s and James II’s much-
disputed claim to be able to suspend particular statutes and to dispense individuals from the require-
ments of the law, the distinction between these forms of royal power was none the less clear: pardons