sitting lord mayor.^12 Thomson chaired the committee that sat on the bill, carried
it to the House of Lords when it passed the Commons, and managed the recon-
ciliation of subsequent disagreements between the two houses—meeting for
that purpose with Baron Montagu, the high court judge who advised the Lords’
committee that sat on the bill.^13
The crucial matter of how felons sentenced to a term of transportation were
actually to be carried to the colonies was not immediately addressed in this le-
gislation because the House of Lords objected to Thomson’s proposal that mer-
chants be paid to take them.^14 As they had on a few occasions earlier when the
press of numbers in the London gaols had risen to crisis levels, the government
had paid in 1717 for the transportation to Jamaica and Maryland of some two
hundred pardoned felons.^15 But Thomson failed to establish in the act a satis-
factory arrangement that would ensure that those sentenced to transportation
would actually be taken. Each jurisdiction was left to make its own arrange-
ments and, predictably, it was not long after the act came into effect that the
London authorities were facing a problem. Predictably, Thomson took the lead
in its solution. Three months after the first convicts were sentenced to trans-
portation at the Old Bailey, he wrote to the treasury to recommend that
Jonathan Forward, a London merchant who had taken convicts to Maryland in
the previous year, be given a contract to manage convict transportation. For-
ward had offered to do so for three pounds a head from London and five pounds
from gaols in the rest of the country—a bargain, Thomson thought, since those
sums included the fees to be paid to a variety of officials, as well as the costs of
leg irons and guards involved in getting the convicts to the ships. It was also a
sound investment, he argued (as the author of the act), since an effective system
of transportation would ‘save [the government] considerably in rewards for
highwaymen and housebreakers.. .’.^16 Forward was given such a contract in
August 1718.^17
A more permanent arrangement was embodied in a second statute two years
later (which recorder Thomson also proposed and managed) that authorized
magistrates to contract with merchants to take all convicts sentenced to trans-
portation and ensured that they entered into a bond to do so.^18 The costs of
transporting convicts from London and the counties of the Home Circuit as-
sizes continued to be paid by the treasury—underlining the extent to which
crime was thought to be especially serious in the metropolis. The act also ad-
dressed a problem that was particularly troublesome in 1720 by declaring the
430 William Thomson and Transportation
(^12) JHC, 18 ( 1714 – 18 ), p. 667.
(^13) JHC, 18 ( 1714 – 18 ), pp. 671 , 675 , 684 , 685 – 6 , 691 , 763 – 4 , 765 , 768 ; JHL, 20 ( 1714 – 18 ), pp. 586 , 593 ,
600 , 610 , 632 , 641 , 648 – 9 , 650 – 1 , 652 , 657 – 8 , 660 , 662 ; HMC: The Manuscripts of the House of Lords,
1714 – 1718 , new ser. 12 ( 1977 ), 507.
(^14) HMC: Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 1714 – 1718 , 507. (^15) Ekirch, Bound for America, 70 , n. 1.
(^16) CTP 1714 – 19 , p. 389. (^17) Ekirch, Bound for America, 70 – 1.
(^186) Geo. I, c. 23 ( 1720 );JHC, 19 ( 1718 – 21 ), pp. 239 , 265 , 333 , 337 , 369 , 375.