fate or be allowed an alternative punishment that would spare their lives
continued to depend on the king and his ministers, for the Hanoverian mon-
archs retained the system established after the Revolution under which the
recorder brought the list of condemned offenders to the cabinet for their final
decision.^66 At that meeting the recorder or his deputy (or very occasionally the
common serjeant) reported on each case in turn, receiving judgments as they
went along whether the convicted men and women would be left to be hanged
or be pardoned, and if so on what condition. Those decisions made, the
ominous ‘dead warrant’ was sent by the recorder to announce who among the
condemned had been ordered to be hanged and to appoint the day on which
they would be taken the 3 miles from Newgate to Tyburn to be executed.^67
Those condemned might still petition the king for mercy, in which case the
recorder would be asked to report again through the secretary of state and to
make a recommendation.
After 1718 most of those pardoned by the king were ordered to be banished to
America for the fourteen years the Transportation Act authorized. Free par-
dons—pardons without conditions—continued to be granted, but, as we have
seen, they were not common, not at least until the country was again at war after
1739 , when transportation was to some extent interrupted, and several appeals
for pardons without condition (as well as pardons from the sentence of trans-
portation) were successful, and at least one convicted offender was given per-
mission to transport himself.^68 In the decades of peace that followed the Treaty
of Utrecht, and even in the 1740 s when Britain was again at war, very few men
were pardoned on condition ofjoining the forces.
The men who made those decisions, the cabinet council as it was called early
in George I’s reign, included the king and his leading ministers: the lord chan-
cellor, the two secretaries of state, the lord treasurer or first lord of the treasury,
the chancellor of the exchequer, the lord president, the lord privy seal, and one
or two court officials—a body, altogether, of a dozen or more men.^69 The insti-
tutional arrangements of Anne’s reign were resumed in George I’s; within
weeks of the king arriving in England, Mr Serjeant Dee was summoned by
Under-secretary Tilson to report on the recent sessions at the Old Bailey.^70 Such
meetings were arranged routinely thereafter and became so commonplace that
William Thomson and Transportation 449(^66) The dates on which criminal business was discussed by the cabinet in George I’s reign (at least at
the meetings for which minutes have been preserved) and by the lords justices (when the king was in
Hanover) are noted in the very helpful list of Records Relating to Ministerial Meetings in the Reign of George I,
1714 – 1727 (List and Index Society, vol. 224 , 1987 ).
(^67) In writing to Secretary Townshend in 1716 to get a condemned man reprieved at the last moment,
Thomson said that he had ‘signed ye warrant for execution on wensday morning’ (SP 35 / 74 / 22 ).
(^68) SP 36 / 50 / 152 ; SP 36 / 55 / 75 , 114 , 117 ; SP 36 / 56 / 76.
(^69) Plumb, Walpole: Making of a Statesman, 74 – 7.
(^70) SP 44 / 147 , 21 October 1714. Shortly after he became recorder, William Thomson was similarly
called to a meeting by Tilson: ‘the cabinet council being summoned to meet at St James’s tomorrow at
noon, my Lord Townshend has commanded me to acquaint you with it that you may attend to make
your Report to his Majesty’ (SP 44 / 147 , 3 May 1715 ).