been ‘ill natured reflections in ye publick prints upon this delay’.^93 But irregular
reporting and delayed executions remained the norm, one of the serious defi-
ciencies in the administration of the law that Henry Fielding was to emphasize
in his analysis of the ‘great increase of robbers’ in 1751.^94
When William Thomson died, in 1739 , he may well have thought that his Trans-
portation Act had been a considerable success: the new secondary punishment
had taken root, making it possible to punish persistent minor offenders in a way
he approved and yet at the same time underpinning the use of capital punish-
ment by introducing a reliable alternative that made the royal pardon credible.
Had he lived another decade, he would almost certainly have had less cause for
satisfaction. For Thomson died just as a war was beginning, a war that broad-
ened from a limited naval conflict against Spain into a European and imperial
struggle that led to a massive build-up of the army and navy. Even during the
war there were moments of anxiety about violent offences in London.^95 But they
paled in comparison to the anxieties that accompanied the ending of the war in
1748 and the demobilization of the forces. Once again, the transition to peace-
time saw high levels of prosecution and another panic about crime in London—
one that raised questions about all aspects of the criminal justice system,
including the usefulness of transportation and the way capital punishment
was managed.^96 It was also a crisis that was to confirm the prominence ofWest-
minster and other parts of Middlesex as centres of crime within the metropolis
and that furthered the shift of magisterial influence and leadership away from
the city, from the mayor and aldermen and the recorder towards the leading
magistrates of the West End, particularly in the first place Henry Fielding and
his half-brother, John. The problem of crime in London in the middle years
of the century induced the Fieldings and others after them to seek ways of in-
vigorating and reforming aspects of the criminal justice system. To them, and to
historians since, it looked like a new beginning. But, thinking back over the
William Thomson and Transportation 461(^93) SP 36 / 40 / 66 – 7. On another occasion Thomson urgently sought an opportunity to present his re-
port because some of the convicted ‘have layn a good while’ and there had been attempts at escape
(SP 36 / 29 / 28 ).
(^94) Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Cause of the Late Increase of Robbers, with some Proposals for Remedying
this Growing Evil( 1751 , ed. by Malvin Zirker, Oxford, 1988 ). The delays that had been experienced
during the war years in the 1740 s were no doubt encouraged by the notable fall in the number of offences
prosecuted and in the levels of capital sentences passed. On three occasions in the years 1744 – 6 , for ex-
ample, the recorder reported on three sessions together—on the first of which the cabinet dealt with a
total of eight cases accumulated from the three previous sessions and ordered only one man to be
hanged.
(^95) Violent crime was very much in the public eye in the mid- 1740 s when members of the so-called
Black Boy Alley gang were arrested by thief-takers attracted by the massive rewards—each of its dozen
members being worth £ 120 on conviction (see Ch. 8 ).
(^96) Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave: The Debate over Social Reform and Regulation,
1749 – 1753 ’, in Davison, et al.(eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive, pp. 77 – 98 ; Beattie, Crime and the Courts,
525 – 30 , 538 – 44.