the established procedure) as both recorder and, after 1729 , judge. They reveal
a man who was capable of compassion and willing to support a pardon when he
thought the defendant was not settled into a life of crime or that evidence in the
trial had been weak, but also a man who was clear, consistent, and tough-
minded on what he took to be the purpose of the law.
Like many judges responding to the secretary of state’s request for informa-
tion about the trial of convicts who petitioned for the king’s mercy, Thomson
often replied in a way that left it to the king and his advisers to deal with particu-
lar cases as they chose. In such cases, judges tended merely to rehearse the evi-
dence given at the trial, stating the reasons the jury came to its guilty verdict,
and then, unless they thought a pardon clearly justified, leaving it to the king—
deferring to his superior wisdom, as they commonly said—to decide whether a
pardon should be granted. Since the decision was going to be made in the king’s
name (if not by the king himself at least in a way that seemed to invoke and ex-
press his opinion) judges were reluctant to box him in, and most often they con-
cluded their reports on pardon petitions by expressing the desire to bow to his
judgment.^82 Thomson, however, did not always follow those prudent guidelines.
He was capable of sending a strongly worded negative and that almost certainly
left the king and the secretary of state with little choice but to deny a pardon they
might otherwise have been willing to grant. About two such petitions in 1721 , he
told secretary Townshend that ‘I can add nothing which has hapned since my
report to His Majesty [in cabinet] which may render George Post or Robert
Hunter to be more objects of mercy now than at that time’, to which Town-
shend replied that ‘as you see no further reason for mercy... His Majesty ac-
quiesces in your opinion and leaves the Law to take its Course’.^83 Some years
later, the secretary informed him that the king had decided to make no further
orders in a particular case in light ofThomson’s report and would leave the con-
demned man to be executed.^84 Even in the face of a very strong and politically
motivated drive on behalf of a young man condemned to death for robbery,
whose relatives were said to have supported the whig side in City elections and
who got the signatures of twenty-eight City men on his petition, Thomson stood
firm. When Secretary Newcastle asked for his advice in 1725 as to whether this
man, Samuel Sells, was a proper object of the king’s pardon, Thomson was
scornful of Sells’ promise to amend his behaviour, and insisted that transporta-
tion was not a sufficient punishment for a street robber, especially ‘when so
many Notorious offenders are daily and nightly robbing in the most flagrant
William Thomson and Transportation 455(^82) Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 432 ; Greg T. Smith, ‘The Royal Pardon at the Accession of George III,
1760 – 1765 ’, unpub. M.A. paper (Toronto, 1991 ), 40 – 5. This occasionally led judges into comical double
talk to avoid making difficulties for the king—especially when the petitioner has asked for a pardon with-
out conditions in cases in which they clearly thought it not justified. Simon Urlin, who became recorder
of London after Thomson, wrote several reports in which he was reduced to saying that a free pardon
might lead to a man being ‘restrained by it from his former Evil courses’ (SP 36 / 40 / 236 ; and see SP
36 / 45 / 203 , 238 ).
(^83) SP 35 / 27 / 89 ; SP 44 / 79 A, p. 418. (^84) SP 44 / 83 , p. 8.