had been denied clergy and her death sentence was initially confirmed by the
cabinet. But someone evidently thought better of it, and her case was ordered to
be looked into further: almost certainly what was meant was that her character
and record would be investigated. Stephen Swift was in a similar position, hav-
ing been denied clergy following his trial. His punishment was shaped, on the
one hand, by the recorder’s report that he was ‘a notorious housebreaker’, but
on the other, that he was ‘young’—by which he almost certainly meant he was
in his teenage years. He was pardoned for transportation, as was Anne Allen,
another of the women shoplifters, who was also saved from hanging even
though she was the accomplice of one of the women selected to be hanged,
presumably because she was not a known ‘old offender’.
I know of no evidence that would enable us to reconstruct the atmosphere in
which these decisions were made—or to discover whether in this period the
queen and her ministers were as careless of life as Gatrell portrays George IV
and his advisers to have been in the 1820 s.^86 Nor is it clear how decisions that
were always described as proceeding from the monarch’s pleasure were actually
reached. I can only assume that the recorder’s lead was generally decisive. Cer-
tainly, the decisions were based on the evidence the recorder presented orally.
Apart from petitions, there would be no written evidence on the table—no de-
positions or accounts of the trial. The council was not looking to make fine dis-
tinctions. But occasional marginal notes and other evidence suggest that some
discussion took place. Richard Lapthorne reported in May 1693 , for example,
that after the lord mayor and several aldermen of London had lobbied Queen
Mary against a pardon being granted to a man who killed someone in a riot in
Whitefriars, ‘the business being debated in Councell Its sayd Hee wilbe exe-
cuted neer the place where the fact was comitted’.^87 That was merely a rumour,
but there are strong suggestions in the minutes of the lords justices that they did
more than simply endorse decisions made by the recorder and perhaps others
of the Old Bailey judges. In May 1695 , for example, they decided that a con-
demned man should be pardoned and transported on the ground that the facts
of the case showed him to be no more culpable than an accomplice already sen-
tenced to be sent to America. Another man, convicted of burglary, was also
saved from the gallows at this meeting and transported, ‘the evidence being that
he did not make the bettey [the iron tool] wherewith the house was broken
open, but only procured it, and the smith who made it has run away’. The lords
justices also considered petitions from his neighbours that he was a ‘quiet, in-
dustrious man’.^88 At another meeting two months later the lords justices re-
ceived a series of petitions and the recorder’s report on a murder case, reprieved
the condemned offender for a week while they sought the views of the judges
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 355(^86) Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, ch. 20. (^87) Kerr and Duncan (eds.), The Portledge Papers, 161.
(^88) CSPD 1694 – 5 , p. 474. A ‘bettey’ (or ‘betty’) was ‘an instrument made about half a yard long, and
almost as long over... which being chopt under a door, with a little help, it will make it fly off the hinges’
(A Warningfor House-Keepers, or, A Discovery of all sorts of Thieves and Robbers.. .( 1676 ), 3 – 4 ).