Crime and the State 405the largest rewards for thief-takers in 1730 – 3 have every appearance ofbeing the
prosecutions carried on ‘against innocent Persons for the sake of Rewards’ that
the Gentleman’s Magazinecomplained about in 1733. That seems the likely explan-
ation of the prosecution and conviction of five robbers in July 1732 , in which each
was indicted separately for robbing Samuel Atkins. Perhaps Samuel was not
related to Henry Atkins, the constable/thief-taker; perhaps their common
surname was the merest coincidence. But the fact that Samuel and Henry, along
with Henry’s thief-taking associates, Francis Waker and William Atley, and three
other men, shared reward money of seven hundred pounds (one hundred and
forty pounds for each of the five men convicted) at least raises the suspicion that
the Atkins’ were related, and that these five men had been trapped into com-
mitting robberies for which they could be immediately arrested by the thief-
takers, and convicted with the help of an accomplice’s evidence.
The fear that weak or false charges were being brought against the innocent
or against offenders who had been manœuvred into committing robberies—in
general the sense that rewards were encouraging entrapment—merged in the
early 1730 s with the parallel concern about the intrusion of solicitors and vari-
ous other agents into the criminal process. They both gave rise to a good deal of
disquiet among some of those most closely involved in the administration of the
criminal law in London within a few years of the renewal of the proclamation in
1728. We have seen the anxieties expressed by an anonymous pamphleteer in
1728 , and by the City grand jury in 1733. In the previous year, William Thom-
son, the recorder of London and now also a baron of the exchequer, had sug-
gested a change in policy aimed at reducing the possibility of men being trapped
into robberies and then immediately arrested by corrupt thief-takers. Thomson
had almost certainly favoured the institution of the proclamation rewards in
1720 , and possibly had a hand in devising them. As recorder and judge he was
as well acquainted as anyone with the problems they had given rise to by the
early 1730 s. His solution—he told Walpole in October 1732 —was not to abolish
massive rewards, but to increase the judges’ discretionary powers over their dis-
tribution. The judges should be required, he thought, to draw a distinction be-
tween cases in which the prosecutors had gone to some trouble and put
themselves at risk to make an arrest following a robbery, and those that had re-
quired no particular bravery and had involved no danger. In Thomson’s view,
the one hundred pounds should continue to be paid in the first case, but not the
second—though prosecutors and witnesses would continue to earn shares of
the parliamentary forty pounds, which the judges had no discretionary author-
ity to withhold. The main aim—apart from saving money—was almost cer-
tainly to discourage thief-takers from profiting by setting up young and naïve
men to commit a robbery on members of their gang so they could be plucked
and turned to account. Where there had been no ‘hazard or danger or any
other merit’ in the apprehension and conviction of the offender, Thomson
suggested, it should be left to the bench to decide whether the prosecutors