so much increase of trouble and care from my inspecting all ye proceedings with regard
to the transportation of felons, from ye allmost continual application to me, ye refer-
ences, reports and necessary orders and directions on this account, besides ye examin-
ations of all persons claiming rewards for convicting highwaymen and housebreakers,
and several other incidents necessary to the discharging ye business of this Commission,
which is now all brought to me, and which takes up my whole time (and has forced me
to quitt greate part of ye profitts of my profession) and is now become so burthensome to
me, That unless I am encouraged by His majesty’s Ministers in a manner suitable to His
most Gracious intentions towards me, It cannot be expected that I should still goe on to
sacrifice my time, my health, my quiet of mind and further to prejudice my fortune after
having spent so many yeares in a service fruitless to myself, making enemies by my zeale
in that interest which I have constantly espoused and finding no returne, but disregard
and unkind treatment...^28
This querulous, begging letter—tedious and complaining, as he himself
said—eventually bore fruit. It was presumably in recognition of his work at the
Old Bailey that he was awarded a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year in
1724 —another element in the central government’s investment of resources in
the administration of the criminal law after 1714.^29 Thomson also accepted the
office of cursitor baron of the exchequer in 1726 , though it was an administra-
tive rather than a judicial post and of no great prestige. Whether or not he had
been a Walpole man, he was surely identified with the government by then. And
that led to a significant promotion in 1729 , when he was raised from what had
been a relatively lowly post and made a judicial baron of the exchequer, one of
the twelve high court judges.^30
Even then, having accomplished what he had surely been angling for since
Walpole and Townshend returned to power in 1722 , Thomson did not resign
the recordership. The four hundred pound salary (and twelve hundred
pound government pension if he continued to receive it) may well explain why
he continued to hold a most unusual combination of posts—recorder and
judge. But it is also possible that he remained committed to the work he had
been doing for fifteen years in the administration of the criminal law in London.
The recorder’s work had indeed grown more onerous at the Old Bailey since he
had taken up the post, as he told Walpole in 1722 ; but it had done so largely
434 William Thomson and Transportation
(^28) C(H)MSS: Correspondence, 939. The Court of Aldermen recognized his work in the summer of
1722 by giving him a gift of 200 guineas, and changing his annual gratuity of 100 guineas to a salary of
£ 400 (Rep 126 , pp. 341 – 2 ).
(^29) The recordership of London was also raised in the hierarchy of judicial offices in 1724 to a level just
below the law officers of the Crown. Thomson had by then given further practical expression ofhis sup-
port for the Hanoverian cause and his hostility to Jacobitism when he was apparently immobilized in
Boulogne (by a fall from his horse) while on a trip to France, and sent several letters to Walpole report-
ing on the coming and going of suspicious English visitors and others he thought were attached to the
‘Jacobite party’. His letters are much like those of others ofWalpole’s spies. The letters are in the Cam-
bridge University Library, C(H)MSS, Correspondence, 1066 , 1094 , 1112. For Walpole’s spy system, see
Paul S. Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto, 1975 ), ch. 10.
(^30) Foss, Biographical Dictionary of the Judges, 655.