enough on the matter to oppose the bill vigorously as a threat to their rights and
independence since it could limit their power to regulate their own lighting
arrangements.^144 That threat spurred the ‘improvement committee’ to arrange
a contract with one of the rival companies that granted them a monopoly on the
provision of lighting to individual householders in return for a substantial
contribution to the City treasury. The Light Royal Company and the investors
who owned the patent on Hutchinson’s convex lamp invention were the leading
contenders, and each offered proposals. In the end, after what appears to have
been some rapid amalgamations, pooling of resources, and other manipula-
tions, an expanded group of investors known as the Proprietors of the Convex
Lights came to an agreement with the City.^145 They were, as Vernatty said later
in explaining his own failure to win a contract with the City, ‘a Company of
Rich Men’.^146 And, he might have added, they were also a company of insiders,
since they included Sir Samuel Gerrard, soon to be an alderman.
Their agreement with the City was embodied in the Orphans’ Act passed by
parliament in 1694 with the strong support of the City’s whig allies and with the
aid of some heavy bribery.^147 The act provided the City and the Orphans with
an acceptable solution to the problem that had brought the Corporation to the
edge of bankruptcy. It created a fund from which annual interest payments
would be made to the Orphans, a fund that would be supported by some re-
organization of the City’s finances, by a new tax on the inhabitants, by other
duties and fees, and by rents to be raised from those who contracted to light the
City streets.
It was thus as part of the solution to its financial problems that the City was
authorized by parliament to grant a lease for twenty-one years to the Convex
Light Company ‘for the sole use of the publick lights’ in exchange for a payment
of six hundred pounds a year.^148 The agreement was set out in an act of Common
Council and a lease signed in October 1695. The act confirmed the duty of
inhabitants whose houses fronted on thoroughfares to hang lanterns at their
214 Policing the Night Streets
(^144) The City solicitor was asked in November 1692 to meet the four City members and encourage
them to protect the City’s interests; the recorder and the sheriffs presented a petition against the bill; and
the Court of Aldermen established a committee to lobby against it in the House of Commons and—fail-
ing there—in the House of Lords (Rep 97 , pp. 30, 43–4, 83, 112; CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box B, no. 50 ).
(^145) CLRO, Minute Book of the Improvement Committee, vol. 1 , pp. 1 – 174 passim; De Beer, ‘Early
History’, 318. The proprietors of the Light Royal campaigned against granting a monopoly to the Con-
vex Light Company on the ground that their lamp suffered from glare and shadow problems (points that
were to be confirmed by future critics), and because there had been a great deal of stock manipulation in
creating the group that put forward their proposal. See Reasons against the Bill for the sole use of Convex Lights
or Glasses(n.d.,? 1694 ).
(^146) Jor 56 , fos. 198 – 9.
(^147) I. G. Doolittle, ‘The Government of the City of London, 1694 – 1767 ’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford Uni-
versity, 1979 ), 78 – 87 ; Scott, Joint-Stock Companies, 57 – 9. Among those handsomely rewarded for smooth-
ing the passage of the bill was Sir John Trevor, the speaker of the House of Commons, who was forced
to resign when it came out; see Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III(Man-
chester, 1977 ), 149 – 50.
(^1485) & 6 Wm and Mary, c. 10 , s. 5.