After some months of the new policy, in July 1713 , the deputy recorder submit-
ted a plan to the cabinet to deal with the pardoned offenders being held in New-
gate. It was necessary, he said, to make a speedy arrangement for their
disposition ‘considering the season of the year & the Number of the criminals’—
expressing the fear that overcrowding and the summer’s heat would produce an
outbreak of gaol fever. Wanting to clear the gaol, what did he propose? In the
first place, that twenty-two convicts (fifteen men and seven women) previously
pardoned for transportation, now be pardoned absolutely and released. Sec-
ondly, that twenty-two men and five women ordered to be transported now be
allowed to enter into bonds to transport themselves, and thus be released from
Newgate. And finally, that three men and a woman be sent to the workhouse for
a year each.^129 All but four of these pardoned capital offenders were essentially
to be released without punishment being imposed upon them by the state. It was
as clear a confession of a bankrupt penal system as could be imagined. And at
the very moment at which that low point was reached, the problems to be dealt
with by the criminal justice system only got worse, as the War of Spanish Suc-
cession came to an end. The peace brought a renewed increase of prosecutions
after a decade of generally moderate levels. But that was made much more seri-
ous by the passage in 1713 of the statute that removed clergy from thefts of more
than forty shillings from houses. That put a significant number of servants in
danger of being hanged, and increased the number of pardoned offenders to be
dealt with in some way other than execution.
The peace and the increase in crime in London also coincided, however, with
the accession to the throne of the new Hanoverian regime, a regime (as in the
years after the Revolution of 1689 ) that was sufficiently insecure to regard ex-
cessive levels of serious and especially violent crime as a threat to its stability. It
was also a regime sufficiently in control of the political arena to respond power-
fully to those internal threats, and willing to use the state’s resources to do so.
Property crime was not at the top of the agenda for the whig ministers who bent
their energies to defending the Hanoverian settlement. But it soon found a place
368 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^129) SP 34 / 34 , fos. 86 – 9.
Table7.7.Conditions of pardon granted in City of London cases at the
Old Bailey, 1690 – 1713
Total Free pardon Transported To serve in Committed to
pardoned forces workhouse
Men 43 6 25 10 2
% 100.0 14.0 58.1 23.3 4.7
Women 48 13 25 — 10
% 100.0 27.1 52.1 — 20.8
Source: Sample