1706 ) managed to touch on the important issues in one brief paragraph. He had
been convicted of a robbery and sentenced to death and asked for mercy on the
grounds that
he was never before Guilty of any such Crime, untill he was unhappily Seduced by ill
Company, to be concern’d in this Fact; For which he is truely Penitent, and firmly re-
solves (if he may now be Spared) never more to Committ the like for the future: And in
regard the Prosecutor had all his Goods restored to him; And that your Petr is but 22
years of age, and very willing to Spend the remainder of his Life in your Majties Service,
in any part of the World.^98
The petition sent in on behalf ofLaurence Waterman, a bricklayer of the parish
of St Giles, Cripplegate, who had also been convicted ofhighway robbery, made
the same points as Hopley’s, but it carried additional weight by being signed by
seventy-four inhabitants of the parish, including the minister, churchwardens,
deputy alderman, members of the ward inquest, and captains of the trained
bands. The seventy-four petitioners could all sign their names, and the clerk of
the vestry added the certification that they had all ‘fined for or served All the Of-
fices belonging to the same Parish’—a form of guarantee that they were all well-
established and respectable members of the community.^99
Apart from choosing offenders to be hanged from among those convicted at
the Old Bailey, the cabinet council must have been to some extent conscious of
how many defendants they were sending to be executed at Tyburn, and the
effect this was likely to have. There is little evidence that such considerations were
uppermost in the minds of the ministers who listened to the recorders’ reports.
But they were almost certainly prepared to manage that number—to increase
the terror of the gallows when the times demanded it, and to show more mercy
when anxiety about crime in London was at a lower ebb. In his first response to
Lord Nottingham’s enquiry about the youngJames Wilson, Salathiel Lovell
was obviously inclined to allow the execution to go forward on the ground that,
at that moment, street crime was perceived to have reached dangerous levels.
Despite the fact that Wilson was 11 and that, like other boys on the street, he was
‘managed by others’, Lovell none the less argued that ‘ ’Tis grown a very com-
mon offence and requires some examples to prevent the growth of it’, before un-
dertaking the fuller investigation that led to the pardon.^100 Such sentiments as
yet caused no embarrassment: it was the function of the law and those who ad-
ministered it to discourage crime in part by manipulating its deterrent capaci-
ties, and thus to manage the number of executions carried out at Tyburn. The
comparison between the 1690 s and the first decade of Anne’s reign is instructive
in this regard. Between 1690 and 1701 —a period of major concern about
crime—about 45 per cent of those condemned to death for property crime were
executed; in the twelve years 1702 – 13 , on the other hand, a period in which for
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 359(^98) SP 34 / 8 , fo. 10. (^99) SP 34 / 34 , fos. 191 – 2. (^100) CSPD 1702 – 3 , pp. 349 – 50.