Thomson’s policy initiatives and his attitudes and ideas allow us to explore
some of the major themes of the period after 1714 in London. Although none of
his personal papers appears to have survived, he has left his mark—and a strong
impression ofhis views on a number of subjects—in both the City’s records and
the State Papers, in which dozens of his letters to successive secretaries and
under-secretaries of state are to be found over the quarter century in which he
acted as recorder, and latterly, as a judge. These provide us with evidence ofhis
importance in policy-making and in the day-to-day operation of the law, and of
the lead he took in putting the work of the Old Bailey and the structure and
practice of sanctions on a new foundation. Thomson was not engaged in every
aspect of criminal administration, as we will see. My sense is that he would have
approved of the way in which the central government moved towards more ac-
tivist positions with respect to law enforcement in the second quarter of the cen-
tury, but he rarely had the opportunity to express himself on such matters in his
correspondence with the secretaries and under-secretaries of state. On the
other hand, he had a great deal of opportunity to pronounce on and to shape
the way in which convicted offenders were dealt with at the Old Bailey, and on
other central issues that concerned the London authorities. Thomson’s ideas
and attitudes help us to understand the effects of a major change in the penal
law at the outset of this period and the consequences for the work of the Old Bai-
ley of the developments in policing and prosecution that we investigated in the
first part of the book.
The Transportation Acts
Developments in policing and prosecution practices after 1714 had significant
consequences for the way that crime was dealt with in the City. But the most im-
mediately striking changes in the law and in the practice of the courts concerned
the old problem of what was to be done with offenders once they werecaught and
convicted. How were they to be punished? The need for a more effective pun-
ishment for offences of all kinds—petty as well as more serious offences—had
been discussed from time to time in the seventeenth century, as we have seen.
But attempts to find substitutes for the branding of clergy, or punishments that
might be imposed as conditions on those pardoned from a death sentence, had
failed for a variety of reasons. In the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession
those problems were once again exposed by the overcrowding in Newgate and
other gaols in London. The lack of alternatives to the death penalty and to
clergyable branding seemed as far from solution as ever. Certainly, transporta-
tion—which, after 1714 , again became the favoured condition imposed on those
pardoned from capital punishment—was as difficult as ever to carry out. The
difference in this period was that a fundamental alteration in the penal law was
not only proposed, but carried out. It was embodied in two parliamentary
statutes which not only created transportation to the American colonies as a
William Thomson and Transportation 427