Before the Bobbies. The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830

New Means to Old Ends 75

the world .... Our constitution can admit nothing like a French police; and

many foreigners have declared that they would rather lose their money to

an English thief, than their liberty to a Lieutenant de Police.U^5

The Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen of the City of London argued

that the proposed police system 'goes to the entire subversion of the char-

tered rights of the greatest city in the world, and the destruction of the

constitutional liberties of above a million of His Majesty's subjects'. The bill

was deemed an insult to the honour of the City magistrates and would create

'a system of police altogether new and arbitrary in the extreme, creating,

without necessity, new officers, invested with extraordinary and dangerous

powers, enforced by heavy penalties, and expressly exempted from those

checks, and that responsibility, which the wisdom of the law has hitherto

thought necessary to accompany every extraordinary power'.^116 The Gentle-

man's Magazine was more sympathetic to the bill but argued that until the

system of punishments was reformed, this bill would only lead to more

hangings:

This plan, so far as it goes, seems to be well enough digested for the

detection and punishment of rogues in the metropolis. But no means is

provided for prevention. Till some mode of employing rogues is devised, all

other modes are only traps to hasten them to the gallows .... The above

plan is therefore rather calculated for patronage than prevention, as all

employees are to be paid by the public, and the reward for felons, in part,

is to cease. It begins at the wrong end ... .'.^117

A serious tactical error was made when the Home Secretary, Viscount
Sydney, delayed sending an advance copy of the bill to the Lord Mayor. This
only enhanced what the bill's author, John Reeves, admitted was 'the alarm
which it at first naturally excites'.^118 Sir Archibald Macdonald claimed he
had 'conversed with every man whose situation had led him to a knowledge
of the subject', in particular the Bow Street magistrates. He had not, how-
ever, consulted the Lord Mayor or other local authorities who certainly
would have had 'a knowledge of the subject'.^119 By 30 June, the Court of
Common Council and Middlesex justices were preparing their opposition to
the bill. Government leaders were not energetic in speaking up for the bill;
Pitt admitted he was only 'slightly acquainted' with it.^120 The bill was with-
drawn, as Lord Sydney told the Lord Mayor,'on account of an informality in
the drawing it up'.^121 Thus ended the first effort by the central government
to reform the institutions of law enforcement in London on a metropolitan-
wide basis. It had proposed fundamental changes that were seen as too
drastic and its framers did not bother to consult or lobby local authorities
whose interests would have been directly affected and who wielded consider-
able clout in Parliament. The demise of the 1785 Police Bill did not mean,