have been active in the parliaments ofWilliam III’s reign. Many of them were
the kinds of backbenchers Joanna Innes has identified as promoters of general
domestic legislation dealing with a variety of social problems like poverty or va-
grancy, the imprisonment of debtors, as well as the criminal law and its admin-
istration.^17 Not surprisingly, at least sixteen of the MPs with a particular interest
in one or other aspects of the criminal law in William’s reign were lawyers, some
of whom were particularly well qualified to speak to such matters—men like
John Brewer, who was an important promoter of half a dozen criminal bills in
the early 1690 s, as he was of much other legislation over a long career in the
house.^18 Brewer spoke with authority on legal matters since he was also recorder
of New Romney. Of course, many MPs besides lawyers would have had experi-
ence, as magistrates, of the administration of the criminal law.
An even larger number of members ofWilliam III’s parliaments with an in-
terest in criminal legislation, perhaps as many as nineteen (five of whom were
among the lawyers noted above), can be identified as supporters of some aspects
of the moral reform campaigns against blasphemy, drunkenness, gambling, and
other forms of vice and immorality that the Societies for the Reformation of
Manners promoted so actively in the reigns of William and Anne.^19 The con-
nections between moral reform ambitions and changes in the criminal law pro-
vide clues to the anxieties that encouraged the search in this period for
punishments that might be thought to attack the roots of crime rather than sim-
ply trying to frighten potential offenders into obedience by the terror of the gal-
lows. Vice and immorality were widely agreed to be the breeding grounds of
crime: what began as blasphemy or breaking the sabbath or gambling or drunk-
enness, it was frequently said, would almost certainly lead, if unchecked, to
pilfering and theft and then on and on inexorably to the most serious offences.
Punishments that might interrupt this downward moral spiral, that might
reform and restore, had an increasingly strong and natural appeal for those who
saw moral failing as the principal cause of crime.
Such ideas had a particular appeal in London, where petty crime was so per-
vasive, and it is not surprising that the City actively promoted some of the more
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 323(^17) Innes, ‘Parliament and English Social Policy’, and idem, ‘Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal
State’. For parliament and social legislation in this period, see also L. Davison, T. Hitchcock, T. Keirn,
and R. B. Shoemaker (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive, particularly the introduction by Davison and Tim
Keirn, pp. xi–liv; T. K. Moore and H. Horwitz, ‘Who Runs the House? Aspects of Parliamentary Or-
ganization in the Later Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Modern History, 43 ( 1971 ), 205 – 27 ; and, for a
slightly later period, Richard Connors, ‘ “The Grand Inquest of the Nation”: Parliamentary Commit-
tees and Social Policy in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England’, Parliamentary History, 14 ( 1995 ), 285 – 313.
I am grateful to David Hayton, editor of the forthcoming volume of the History of Parliament: The House of
Commons, 1690 – 1715 , and to his colleagues at the History of Parliament Trust, for their help in identifying
members of parliament with interests in criminal legislation.
(^18) See his entry in Hayton (ed.), History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690 – 1715 (forthcoming).
(^19) For work on the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, see above, Ch. 1 , n. 156. I owe to David
Hayton the identification of moral reformers among MPs; see his ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics
in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons’, Past and Present, 128 (August 1990 ), 48 – 91
(esp. appendix, pp. 89 – 91 ).