Lights to be hung out in these Courts or places tho no thorough fares.. .’.^7 That
commitment to construct defences against crime in London characterizes
Thomson’s attitude towards his work as recorder. New problems required new
solutions; if they required the intrusion of government and the raising of taxes, so
be it. The public interest was to be the guide. On the subject of lighting, Thom-
son’s view prevailed, as it did on a number of other fundamentally important
issues over the next quarter century in which he held the recordership.
It was these ideas that almost certainly encouraged the king’s ministers to
support Thomson’s election. Getting someone whose views they could trust as
the principal legal adviser to the aldermen and as their link to the lord mayor
was valuable to a government concerned about public disorder in the capital. In
the long run Thomson became even more important to the central government
as a man who might manage the problem of crime in London and act as an ad-
viser on the law and how it might best be implemented. The recorder occupied
a crucial position as the sentencing officer at the Old Bailey, and the man who
reported to the cabinet on the capital offenders who had been convicted. His
advice to the cabinet about the management of death at Tyburn would be crit-
ical if ministers had any thought of shaping the administration of the criminal
law to the needs of the time. It seems likely—given the views he was to express
and the initiatives he undertook—that Thomson’s candidacy for the recorder-
ship in the spring of 1715 was welcomed, and may have been supported, by a
government besieged on many fronts, and anxious to do what it could to deal
with violent crime and the weaknesses of the penal regime.
Thomson provided the administration with a strong voice in the capital. His
success as recorder (from their point of view, and presumably from that of a ma-
jority of the aldermen) surely explains why he was to remain in the post until his
death, twenty-four years later. His connections with what became in the early
1720 s a government dominated by Robert Walpole help to explain why he held
on to the post even when he was made a high court judge, as a baron of the ex-
chequer, in 1729 —a post that in the past would normally have led to a recorder’s
resignation. That Thomson did not treat the post as a step to higher office, but
insisted on remaining in it even as he advanced on other fronts, has naturally
been seen as evidence of his greed.^8 This cannot be entirely ruled out. But there
presumably had been greedy recorders before, and it seems to me more plaus-
ible to explain the unusual length of his tenure in the office, and his remaining
actively involved in the administration of the criminal law in London (with the
help of successive deputies), as evidence of the value placed on his advice and
experience by the government and the Court of Aldermen. With respect to this
area of public affairs, Thomson contributed to the uneasy stability the whig
regime was ultimately to impose on the country.
426 William Thomson and Transportation
(^7) CLRO,Journal of the Committee on City Lands, vol. 13 , fos. 289 – 90. And see above, Ch. 4.
(^8) Foss, Biographical Dictionary of the Judges, 654.