man who had clear and decisive ideas about the way the act he had constructed
ought to be administered. What Thomson did not say in complaining to Wal-
pole about the burden of the recordership is that he had chosen to be involved
in these ways in the management of transportation, and that he had chosen to
do so because of his strong views about the way the criminal law should be ad-
ministered in the metropolis. We will examine those views more broadly and in
more detail when we look at Thomson’s role in reporting capital cases for the
adjudication of the cabinet, since his sense of the usefulness and purpose of
transportation can best be understood in relation to the general penal frame-
work, including capital punishment. But we might just note his convictions
about the function of transportation within that larger penal structure as those
views are revealed in his treatment of more minor offenders.
The author of the new policy regarded transportation as an essential addition
to the penal array for dealing with persistent offenders, who, once tainted by a
brush with the criminal justice system, would find it difficult, he thought, to sup-
port themselves honestly, and thus would be likely to return to crime. After
being convicted of theft, he said of one man found guilty of stealing from ships
on the river and whose pardon from transportation he was opposing, ‘he cannot
expect to be employed againe so as to maintaine his family in an honest way, and
what necessity will prompt him to may be reasonably presumed’.^48 When minor
offenders were ‘sett at liberty’, he said on another occasion, ‘they very seldom if
ever leave off that ill habit, and persons of creditt will not venture to employ ’em,
and so they are generally observed to follow ye same course of life.. .’. Appeals
to pardon such offenders, he went on to say, were often based on the petty na-
ture of their thefts. But that missed the point of transportation, in his view.
Transportation was rightly used for the punishment of those who persisted in
stealing goods of small value—‘The intent of ye Law being to prevent theire
doing further mischiefe, which they generally doe, if in theire power by being at
large after a conviction for stealing’.^49 Thomson was particularly cynical about
petitions submitted on behalf of offenders from parish authorities whom he sus-
pected of guarding their Poor Law funds. As he told the Duke of Newcastle in
1735 (in opposing a pardon petition sent to the queen), ‘the Ministers, Church-
wardens and other Inhabitants of parishes petitioned of Course [that is, as a
matter of course] where the person to be Transported had a Wife and Children
which must be maintained by the parish’. And, he added, they ‘generally say’
that the offence was his ‘first fact’.^50 He was not opposed to the mitigation of
transportation sentences when the defendant was not apparently settled into a
life of theft, or when he or she had the promise of work from a respectable em-
ployer.^51 But he was consistently tough on many of those who applied to be re-
leased from a sentence of transportation when he thought they would be likely
442 William Thomson and Transportation
(^48) SP 36 / 35 / 141. (^49) SP 36 / 40 / 228 – 9. (^50) SP 36 / 35 / 141.
(^51) SP 36 / 26 / 241 ; SP 36 / 26 / 357.