also because crowded gaols and longer calendars heightened concern about
crime and encouraged juries to convict and judges and the cabinet to send more
convicted offenders to the gallows.
The number of men and women executed at Tyburn on each hanging day
was also determined by the timing of the recorder’s report to the cabinet or the
lords justices. In the eighteenth century the dramatic effect of the execution day
was considerably heightened because recorders tended to report less frequently
than they had earlier and, as a consequence, there were on the whole fewer
Tyburn hanging days than in the late seventeenth century. The records do not
enable us to trace the change precisely. But it clear that, beginning in the
1730 s when the new magazines, the Gentleman’sand the London Magazine, began
to publish the dates of the Old Bailey sessions and the days on which hangings
took place at Tyburn, the recorder as often as not allowed several sessions
to go by before seeking the cabinet’s decisions on which of the death sentences
passed in court were to be carried out. Much more often than in William’s and
Anne’s reigns defendants sentenced to be hanged often had to wait several
months to learn their fate. Such irregular reporting explains why very large
numbers of men and women were occasionally hanged together. The intervals
between executions grew increasingly longer over the period. In the years 1731
to 1734 more than a quarter of the defendants sentenced at the Old Bailey
and condemned to death at a meeting of the cabinet were executed within two
weeks of the court session, and more than half within a month; another quarter
waited in Newgate for more than two months. A decade later, between 1742 and
1746 , the recorder was reporting even less frequently, and only 16 per cent of
those condemned to death were executed within a month of being sentenced.
Fully 40 per cent had to endure a wait of two months or more. Indeed, it was
not unknown for the delay to be much longer than that: defendants sentenced
to death in September 1745 , for example, were not executed until the fol-
lowing April, along with those sentenced at four subsequent sessions of the Old
Bailey.^92
On that occasion the long interval between execution days was almost cer-
tainly explained by the Jacobite rebellion that fully occupied the cabinet in the
last half of 1745 and the early months of 1746. Other delays in the recorder’s re-
porting to the cabinet may also have been caused by the press of state business,
or by the king’s indisposition. In 1737 , when Thomson became anxious about
the overcrowding in Newgate and the threat of gaol fever when two sessions of
the Old Bailey had gone unreported and a third session was about to begin, the
delay had been caused by George II’s late return from Hanover and then his ill-
ness. Thomson pressed Newcastle to arrange a meeting on this occasion be-
cause several prisoners had died and others were ill—and because there had
460 William Thomson and Transportation
(^92) Based on reports in the Gentleman’s Magazineand the London Magazine, my knowledge of which I owe
to Simon Devereaux.