In these two ways—allowing time for enquiries into the circumstances of
some of the prisoners and considering petitions for modification of sentences—
the Old Bailey bench employed its discretionary powers to manage the trans-
portation system in London for fifteen years after the passage of the act. There
is considerable evidence to suggest that these procedures owed a great deal to
Thomson’s influence, and that he in effect made many of the decisions. It seems
clear that the system had emerged in the first place because ofhis determination
to make transportation work in the way he believed it should. Early petitions
were turned over to him,^39 and subsequent petitions were either addressed to
him or, if not, sent on for his recommendation.^40 His influence and importance
were well known. In giving a man advice about getting a sentence of trans-
portation altered for a former servant in 1721 , a man was told by a Newgate clerk
who attended the Old Bailey ‘to write but a line to Sir Wm Thomson that [the
prisoner] may receive the sentence of the court next sessions in as favourable a
manner as the court thinks fitt’.^41 It was this heavy involvement—‘inspecting all
ye proceedings with regard to the transportation of felons, from ye allmost con-
tinual application to me, ye references, reports and necessary orders and direc-
tions on this account’—that had justified in Thomson’s mind his plea to
Walpole for significant compensation in 1722.
If the system of modification of punishments bore some resemblance to the
royal power of pardon, William Thomson, for one, was not embarrassed by the
parallel. He told the Duke of Newcastle in 1729 , when he was asked about a
London prisoner’s request to the king for a pardon from transportation, that the
man ought simply to apply to the Old Bailey ‘to order his being burnt in ye hand
instead of transportation, by which meanes there will be no occasion of any fur-
ther trouble to ye Crown in relation to his being pardoned or released from
transportation’.^42 Indeed, Thomson was later to claim that the practice of modi-
fying punishments was grounded in law: ‘the court at the Old Baily’, he said in
1735 , ‘have a power by Law to change the sentence of Transportation to Cor-
poral punishment and the discharge of the prisoners where they find them real
objects of Compassion’.^43 He would have had difficulty locating that power, but
by then the issue was moot, since the court had largely abandoned the practice.
440 William Thomson and Transportation
(^39) Successful petitions received by the court in December 1719 on behalf of two women sentenced to
transportation were endorsed ‘to remain and have Judgement of Burning in the hand next sessions per
Mr Recorders directions’ (CLRO: London Sess. Papers, December 1719 ).
(^40) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, 1725 : undated petitions ( John Pritchard and Thomas Webb); July
1726 ( John Glover).
(^41) SP 35 / 26 / 9.
(^42) SP 36 / 15 / 89. The king was petitioned occasionally by those sentenced to be transported at the Old
Bailey: in January 1722 Secretary Townshend told Thomson that the king had remitted the sentence of
transportation passed against Anne Lloyd, and ordered him to get her discharged from Newgate
(SP 44 / 81 , p. 23 ; and for another case in June, see SP 44 / 81 , p. 66 ). It may have been the absence of
alternative punishments attached to these pardons that encouraged Thomson to develop the Old
Bailey’s own system of sentence reduction.
(^43) SP 36 / 35 / 141.