within a few years it was left to the recorder to request a place on the agenda
whenever his report was ready. That remained the usual arrangement.^71 When
the king went to Hanover, as George I did on six occasions during his reign, and
as did his son when he succeeded to the throne in 1727 , the procedure with re-
spect to the recorder’s report on Old Bailey capital convictions hardly changed,
since, apart from George I’s first visit in 1716 when he left the Prince ofWales as
regent, both kings appointed their ministers as lords justices, with authority,
among their many other duties, to receive and act on the recorder’s report.^72
The procedure surrounding the recorder’s report remained broadly un-
changed under the Hanoverians. The recorder came to the meeting of the cab-
inet council or the lords justices with a list of the defendants convicted of capital
crimes and sentenced to death at the Old Bailey. He stood at the end of the
council table when he was called into the room and gave what must have been
a brief account of the offence and of the evidence presented at the trial, along
with his assessment of the character and past behaviour of the condemned man
or woman. As in the past, the king and his ministers made their decision based
on this oral evidence. They had no written material to refer to, with the possible
exception of petitions submitted on behalf of some of the defendants.
What did change in the course of several decades after 1714 was the way in
which the recorder himself prepared for the cabinet session. The evidence from
the early years of George I’s reign suggests that, as he had before 1714 , the
recorder took with him little more than a note of the names and offences of the
450 William Thomson and Transportation
(^71) In October 1718 , replying to an enquiry by the deputy recorder, an under-secretary said that the
reason two sessions of the gaol delivery of Newgate had gone by without his being summoned to make
his report to the king in council was because ‘there was no Application made, as usual, for such Sum-
mons, but as you have now made application, Orders will be given as you desire against the next Cab-
inet Council’ (SP 44 / 147 , 23 October 1718 ). On the other hand, the recorder might well be summoned to
attend the cabinet council on a given day and time as he was, for example, on 20 October 1721 , 1 Febru-
ary 1722 , and 16 April 1722 (SP 44 / 81 , p. 4 ; SP 44 / 147 , 16 April 1722 ). It is possible that the cabinet was
concerned then about the level of crime in the capital. The more common situation in those years and
after was for the recorder or his deputy to write to the secretary, as Thomson did in February 1732 , for
example, to know ‘His Majesty’s pleasure when he will be attended with ye Report of ye last Sessions’
(SP 36 / 26 / 72 ).
(^72) Their duties and powers were set out in written instructions, and are included in the minute books
they kept of their meetings (see, for example, SP 44 / 279 ). The distinction between the two kinds of par-
dons that applied when the king was in England continued to be observed—distinctions that underlie the
king’s involvement in the pardon process by the eighteenth century. With respect to London cases, the
lords justices exercised their authority cautiously at first (in 1719 )—respiting, rather than pardoning,
those they intended to save from the gallows and asking via the secretary who travelled with him for the
king’s permission to pardon (SP 43 / 1 , pp. 224 – 6 ; SP 44 / 279 , p. 13 ). They were soon reassured that the
king intended them to act with respect to the recorder’s report as though he were present, and in effect
they began to exercise the pardoning power when cases were recommended by judges well before
George II explicitly gave them that authority in 1743 (SP 36 / 60 / 176 ). On the other hand, both kings re-
tained the power to decide whether to grant pardons to convicts who petitioned for mercy when they had
been passed over by the judges at the provincial assizes and sentenced to death or, in London and Mid-
dlesex, as a consequence of the recorder’s report. Such pardons continued to be conceived as more per-
sonal acts of the king’s grace, whether the king was in fact personally involved in the decision or not. The
lords justices could issue a reprieve, but were instructed to report the case for the king’s decision.