to return to offending ; removing certain kinds of offenders from their environ-
ments and their companions, he was convinced, was an essential step in the pre-
vention of crime.^52
Not surprisingly, Thomson was even more strongly opposed to pardons that
would allow the most serious offenders to be released from custody with merely
the branding of clergy or whipping, or even worse, a pardon without any condi-
tions whatsoever. Free pardons, he thought, sent offenders back to the course of
life that got them into trouble in the first place and encouraged others to join
them.^53 He was also critical of any deviation from the procedures for trans-
portation laid down in the act, particularly the occasional attempts by the
friends or relatives of offenders to get permission to arrange their private pas-
sage overseas. When in 1736 such a privilege was about to be extended to
George Vaughan, the brother of Lord Lisburne and a convicted highway rob-
ber who had been pardoned on condition of transportation, Thomson wrote a
strong letter of protest to the Duke of Newcastle to defend the system he had es-
tablished and to set out ‘the ill consequences, which I conceive will attend this,
the first President of this nature since the Act of Parliament for transportation of
felons, which is now about seventeen yeares’. He opposed it on the grounds that
allowing Vaughan this privilege would encourage others to seek it, and the con-
sequences would be large numbers of convicted robbers would not leave, but ‘go
on in theire old courses. For experience has shown that before the Act of Parlia-
ment when felons were usually pardoned upon condition of transporting them-
selves in six months, they never performed that condition.’ As for Vaughan, he
would likely go back to highway robbery if he were allowed bail in order to
arrange his own transportation, and the friends who now pressed for this favour
would ‘soon have the mortification to heare of his being hangd’. What was
worse, such a concession would lead to the undermining of the system he had
created—a system that had at its core the guarantee of performance provided
by the contractor’s entering into a bond. Jonathan Forward had become ‘es-
teemed an Officer with a publick trust’, he said, and because of his effective
management of the transportation process it was ‘some addition to the terror of
the sentence, that [offenders] have no way to evade it’.^54
Thomson’s management had stamped the administration of transportation
with a particular character. His ideas and his active engagement—and his
William Thomson and Transportation 443(^52) ‘As to the case of Blewit [a notorious robber and gang leader], ’tis as you write’, Thomson told
Delafaye when Blewit persisted in petitioning for a pardon from transportation in 1723 , ‘and the best way
is to take no further notice of his applications and he will be gone very soon’ (SP 35 / 45 / 105 ).
(^53) SP 36 / 26 / 318 ; SP 36 / 27 / 294 ; SP 36 / 28 / 150.
(^54) SP 36 / 38 / 162. Vaughan was transported to Maryland in May 1736 aboard one of Jonathan For-
ward’s ships (Peter Wilson Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614 – 1775 (Baltimore, Md.,
1988 ), 823 ). For other comments on private transportation, see SP 36 / 27 / 34 , SP 36 / 27 / 43. And see
Ekirch, Bound for America, 71 – 2. Thomson had conveniently forgotten that he had himself supported two
previous petitions for privately arranged transportation (CLRO: London Sess. Papers, June 1725 ;
SP 36 / 34 / 120 ).