(^1) For Thomson’s career, see Edward Foss, A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England, 1066 – 1870
( 1870 ), 654 – 5 ; Sir Leslie Stephenson and Sidney Lee (eds.), The Dictionary of National Biography, 21 vols.
(Oxford, 1921 – 2 ), xix. 706 – 7 ; J. H. Baker, The Order of Serjeants at Law( 1984 ), 208 , 455 , 540 ; Romney
Sedgwick (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715 – 1754 , 2 vols. (Oxford, 1970 ), ii. 467 – 8.
Thomson is often spelled with a ‘p’. He himself never included it.
(^2) C(H)MSS: Correspondence, 592 (Thomson to [ Walpole], 12 March 1708 / 9 ).
(^3) I owe my knowledge of Thomson’s early career in Ipswich to David Clemis, ‘Government in a Provin-
cial Town: the Corporation of Ipswich, 1720 – 95 ’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Leicester, 1999 ), 220 – 32.
CHAPTER NINE
William Thomson and Transportation
Thomson as recorder of London
William Thomson was the son of a prominent London lawyer of the same name
who had risen to the rank of serjeant at law and had been awarded a knight-
hood.^1 The young Thomson grew up in Essex, attended Brentwood school and
Cambridge, and followed his father and brother to the Middle Temple and to
the bar. He was early drawn into the factional politics of Ipswich, allied initially
with a tory who was elected recorder and who appointed Thomson his deputy
in 1705 , but he soon switched allegiance to the main political manager in the
borough who had begun to support whig candidates for office. It was by these
self-serving means that Thomson was elected recorder of Ipswich in 1707 , at the
age of 31. Within a few months he was in touch with the leading whig forces in
East Anglia: at least he can be found writing to Robert Walpole in March 1709 ,
for example, about ‘business in Ipswich’^2 —and it was presumably with the help
of these allies and his Ipswich connections that he had been able to further his
professional and political ambitions by being elected to parliament for Orford
earlier that year.^3 Thomson had made his legal abilities and his commitment to
the whig party sufficiently clear to be chosen soon after he entered parliament
as one of the managers of the impeachment of Sacheverell, whose riotous sup-
porters he also helped to prosecute. This public commitment to whiggism, and
his association with Townshend and Walpole, was to further his career in the fu-
ture. Although his prominent role in the Sacheverell trial led to his being over-
whelmed by the tory tide in the election of 1710 , he returned to the Commons in
1713 for Ipswich, where his recordership had enabled him to build an interest.
He was unseated on petition in April 1714 , but re-elected in 1715 , and remained
a member for the borough until he became a judge, in 1729.
At the Hanoverian succession Thomson was an established lawyer and a