who had heard the case, and discussed the issues again at a second meeting
before deciding to let the law take its course.^89
The council and the lords justices drew distinctions among the convicted
men and women in accordance with certain guidelines, if not principles. To
judge by the decisions they made, the decisive issues were the gravity of the of-
fence and the character of the offender, though what was thought to be the cur-
rent level of crime was always likely to be an important consideration, as indeed
were personal and political influences: the cabinet council and the lords justices
were after all highly partisan bodies. Few of those considerations are revealed in
the terse notes of cabinet decisions. They do not disclose all the evidence that
the recorder might have presented about the ages of the prisoners, or their pre-
vious character and disposition, or other testimony that might have emerged at
the trial. But the cabinet’s decisions do suggest that such evidence was on the
table—or as much of it as the recorder disclosed.
In our Sample of sessions in the reigns of William and Anne, seventy-three
men and sixty-one women were convicted of non-clergyable offences against
property and were sentenced to death. Thirty-seven of the men were pardoned
and thirty-four executed (two sentences are unknown); in the case of the con-
victed women, forty-five were pardoned, thirteen were executed, and the out-
comes of three cases are unknown. In selecting offenders to be saved or to be
hanged, particularly in the case of male defendans, the recorder and the cabinet
seem clearly to have had the character of the offence very much in mind. Early
in his reign William III resolved not to pardon convicted burglars^90 —a resolu-
tion that he or his ministers on his behalf could not absolutely adhere to, but that
none the less expressed a view widely held among those who administered the
criminal law, that offences that endangered life deserved the death penalty. In
the event, more than 80 per cent of the men executed at Tyburn for property of-
fences in our Sample of sessions in the reigns of William and Anne had com-
mitted burglary, housebreaking, or robbery (Table 7. 6 ). The remainder—six
men in our sample—suffered death for horse-theft, picking pockets, and simple
larceny.^91
Women accounted for more than a quarter of the property offenders hanged
in our Sample from 1690 – 1713 —a slightly higher proportion than in the previ-
ous period and higher than would be found at other times, in part because, as
we have seen, more women were prosecuted in this period than in previous or
later decades. Like men, women were executed in this period for burglary and
housebreaking, but more women than men were hanged for forms of non-
threatening theft—four for shoplifting and three for simple grand larceny, two
356 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^89) CSPD 1695 , pp. 12 , 19. (^90) CSPD 1690 – 1 , p. 36.
(^91) Twelve men and a woman were also executed in our Sample sessions for the treasonable offences
of coining and clipping as a result of the massive effort to prosecute such offences at the time of the Great
Recoinage. Almost all of the executions of coiners and clippers came in the years 1694 – 7 , when they
accounted for almost half of the offenders put to death at Tyburn.