Crime and the State 389went to Bury to organize the case, and the Treasury paid his bill of eighty-five
pounds.^62 Coke was convicted and hanged.
The rape case and this attempted murder were clearly unusual: servants did
not often break into bedrooms, armed with a sword and pistol, and rape their
employers or their children, as Arthur Gray was charged with doing on this oc-
casion; nor were gentlemen often accused of such vicious crimes as Coke’s. In
the latter case, the king’s interest—engaged perhaps by his experience and
knowledge of the criminal process of Hanover in which trained state officials
took the lead in prosecuting crime—may have been crucial in getting the gov-
ernment to act. A year later Townshend again wrote to the attorney-general
about another murder that had raised a public storm, in this case the rape and
murder of a woman by four watermen. He again conveyed the king’s personal
interest and outrage, in virtually the same words as in the Coke case, and in-
structed the attorney-general to prosecute the case himself at the Old Bailey,
and to order the treasury solicitor to ‘take care to procure the necessary Proofs’
and to prepare the brief.^63 Nor were these the only prosecutions of felonies that
were supported by the government or apparently encouraged by George I’s
personal support. A ‘barbarous murder’ in Pembroke was prosecuted at the
government’s expense in 1723 ; and the trial of the most famous criminal of the
period, Jonathan Wild, was managed by Paxton on Secretary Townshend’s
orders.^64 Even more revealing of the concern of ministers about violent main-
stream felonies, perhaps, was the decision in March 1726 that the treasury solici-
tor should take over the prosecution of Edward Burnworth, William Blewit, and
four other members of a well-known gang of street robbers for the murder of
Thomas Ball, a thief-taker, so that, Delafaye told Cracherode, they ‘may not
escape the hands of justice thro neglect or mismanagement’.^65 The government
paid the costs of the trial of another London street robber in the following
month, it being ‘His Ma[ jes]ty’s pleasure’, Secretary Townshend said, ‘that he
should be prosecuted at his Expence’.^66
By the mid- 1720 s, the under-secretaries seem to have been expecting to
pay for the prosecution of at least some felonies at the Old Bailey. That is the
217 – 24 ; Hatton, George I, 130 – 2 , 289 – 98 ). He was almost certainly in touch with contemporary concerns
about crime and about particularly horrendous cases like Coke’s and the four watermen’s attack on a
lone woman. Coming from a state in which the investigation and prosecution would have been in the
hands of trained magistrates, he may well have been appalled by a criminal justice system that was
left virtually entirely in the hands of amateurs, and in which there was little state involvement in the
maintenance of order.
(^62) SP 44 / 81 , p. 69 ; The Weekly Journal or British Gazette, 24 March 1722 , reported that ‘As the King was
wholly at the Expence of the Tryal, His majesty’s Council were there to argue on the Tryal, as was like-
wise Mr Paxton, Deputy Solicitor of the Crown, to manage the Indictment.’
(^63) SP 44 / 81 , p. 189. (^64) Ibid., pp. 169 , 176 , 224 , 228 , 390 – 1.
(^65) SP 44 / 80 , 3 March 1726. The government had offered rewards of £ 300 for the arrest and convic-
tion of four of these men (above, n. 32 ). The case, tried at the Kingston assizes, was managed by counsel
for the Crown; all six defendants were convicted and hanged. Select Trials, II, 345 – 62.
(^66) SP 44 / 81 , p. 431.