strong supporter of the new regime. It seems likely that it was with the support
ofTownshend and Walpole, two of the king’s leading ministers in the early years
of the reign, that he became recorder of London in March 1715 —succeeding
Sir Peter King, who resigned the post after being named lord chief justice of the
court of common pleas. It was not an easy election. Thomson was well enough
known to tory aldermen to arouse strenuous opposition. Indeed, the aldermanic
bench was equally divided between him and another prominent lawyer, Ser-
jeant Pengelly, and Thomson got the post only on the lord mayor’s casting vote.^4
This was an important appointment for the new administration. Thomson
came to the City in a period of heightened concern about robbery and theft in
the metropolis. Of even more immediate importance to the government, per-
haps, he took up his post as the stability of the new regime was being threatened
by violent street demonstrations in London. George I’s accession had been
greeted with riotous opposition in the capital that turned into serious pro-
Jacobite protests by the spring of 1715 and foreshadowed the armed rebellion on
behalf of the Pretender that began in Scotland and the north in September.^5
The government mobilized strongly against the riots by organizing counter-
demonstrations and assaults on the strongholds of their enemies, and by passing
a sanguinary Riot Act in 1715 that immensely increased the power of the
authorities to control public assemblies and to disperse crowds.^6 And it raised an
army of veterans that defeated the Jacobite forces by the spring of 1716 and
brought the leaders of the rebellion to London to be put on trial for treason.
Thomson’s election to the recordership almost certainly owed a great deal to
the support of those who were anxious about the threat of violence in London.
His views about crime and policing and the law were presumably known from
his work as recorder of Ipswich. He certainly made it clear soon after coming to
London that he was very much in favour of strengthening the policing of the City,
even if this meant overriding some of the customary limits on the obligations of
the citizenry. When he was asked by the Committee on City Lands in 1715
whether the City could force householders who had not hitherto been obliged to
hang out lanterns to contribute to the support of street lights, he had no hesita-
tion in asserting that ‘The Common Council have power to redress all disorders
and mischiefs by a proper and fitting remedy and to prevent Robberies, Theft,
Murther, and other mischiefs which may happen in the Dark... they may require
William Thomson and Transportation 425(^4) Rep 119 , fos. 123 , 134 , 146. Thomas Pengelly was not a tory, but he was clearly more acceptable to
half the aldermen than the man who had helped to prosecute Sacheverell (Sedgwick (ed.), History of Par-
liament, ii. 334 – 5 ). King had been appointed to the bench earlier, and there is some suggestion in the date
of his resignation ( 1 March) and of the election ( 3 March) that Thomson’s candidature was anticipated.
(^5) For the anti-Hanoverian demonstrations, see Nicholas Rogers, ‘Popular Protest in Early Hanover-
ian London’, Past and Present, 79 (May 1978 ), 70 – 100 ; idem, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early
Hanoverian England’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism,
1689 – 1759 (Edinburgh, 1982 ), 70 – 88 ; idem, Whigs and Cities, ch. 10 ; idem, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Geor-
gian Britain(Oxford, 1998 ), 35 – 42 ; Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688 – 1788 (Cambridge,
1989 ), ch. 7.
(^61) Geo. I, c. 5 ( 1715 ).