unintended by-product ofWilliam III’s involvement in European affairs and of
Queen Mary’s reluctance to take on the gruesome business of deciding these life
and death issues, in effect an accident of the Revolution. William’s absences
were clearly implicated in the creation of the new pardoning process for London
cases. The king was frequently out of the country, and when he first left to direct
the Irish campaign in 1690 he set up a committee of nine privy councillors to
take on the main burdens of government, Mary having made it clear she was not
anxious to have the sole direction of affairs.^66 Among its many other tasks, this
committee of the council was given the job of making pardon decisions, espe-
cially with respect to the offenders condemned at the Old Bailey. This pattern
was followed in subsequent years when William went to the Continent to direct
the war effort against Louis XIV.
The king’s absences made some such arrangement necessary especially when
Mary died, in 1694. But something much deeper than that was involved in a de-
velopment that changed the way the death penalty was managed at the Old Bai-
ley since London capital cases continued to be considered by the council even
when the king was in England. There is evidence of their doing so in January
1693 , for example, before William left for the campaigning season on the Con-
tinent; and again in October 1695 , when a secretary of state can be found orga-
nizing a meeting of members of the council on the king’s order. With the king
present, the council heard the recorder’s report on the offenders condemned at
the Old Bailey, and decided who among them ‘might be fit objects of his
mercy’.^67
What may have begun as a practical response to the problems caused by
William’s regular and prolonged absences thus very quickly took on a more per-
manent form. It seems reasonable to think that it did so because it was found to
be a more effective way of dealing with an issue that—if the number of proclam-
ations and legislative interventions are any guide—much preoccupied the gov-
ernment and members of parliament in the early 1690 s: the problem of crime in
London. It was after all on London cases that the new pardon system focused.^68
If William’s absences and Queen Mary’s reluctance had been the fundamental
explanation, why would not the pardon business of the whole country have been
given to the lords justices and cabinet council? Of course, Old Bailey cases
accounted for a significant proportion of the capital offences tried in the
348 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^66) Beattie, ‘Cabinet and the Management of Death’, 223. For Mary’s attitude towards pardon mat-
ters, see R. Doebner (ed.), Memoirs of Mary, Queen of England, 1689 – 1693 (Leipzig and London, 1886 ),
22 – 33 ; Baxter, William III, 262 – 3. Early in their reign Mary wrote to William in Ireland about her
discomfort at being ‘importuned’ on behalf of condemned offenders (CSPD 1690 – 1 , p. 36 ).
(^67) SP 44 / 99 , p. 225 ; Rep 97 , p. 100.
(^68) The judges occasionally gave accounts of assize sessions to the lords justices in William’s reign, es-
pecially those on the Home Circuit (see, for example, CSPD 1695 , p. 32 ; CSPD 1696 , p. 335 ). But there
was to be no change over the long term in the way pardon decisions were made on the provincial assizes.
The judges continued to send in reports at the conclusion of their circuits listing the condemned
prisoners they thought deserved the royal mercy.