Minute Book of the court which regularly in the 1690 s registered the finding of
a true bill by the grand jury in one session and the outcome of a trial on a later
occasion.^111
Whatever the reason for the postponement of trials, the effect was to exacer-
bate the crowding of the gaols and to increase the sense of breakdown that the
failure of transportation created. For there is no doubt that the major contribu-
tor to the crowding in Newgate was the absence of an alternative to the death
penalty that could be imposed on pardoned capital convicts as a condition of
their pardon, and an unwillingness of the government—for the decisions were
now securely in the hands of the council—either to order more men and women
to be hanged at Tyburn or to do what had so often been done in the 1680 s: to let
them go with a free pardon. Such pardons continued to be granted: about a
quarter of the pardons awarded to Middlesex and London offenders were with-
out conditions. But they were not issued as readily as they had been in the 1680 s;
in William’s reign, three-quarters of the pardons awarded—to well over 500
convicted felons—were given under the expectation that the recipients would
be transported to the colonies in America or the West Indies.^112
The penal problem that such an expectation created was real and pressing.
Transportation was all but unworkable in the 1690 s. Not only were the colonies
even less willing to take England’s convicts than they had been before the Revo-
lution (and the imperial state was as yet too weak to force them to do so), and not
only were merchants unwilling to take anyone but men whose services would be
valued across the Atlantic—those problems were compounded after 1689 by
the war and the serious disruption of shipping by French raiders’ attacks on
English merchantmen. The result was that while large numbers of convicted of-
fenders were pardoned by the council on condition of transportation, many of
them were destined to wait a long time in gaol before that sentence could be car-
ried out. Men were much more likely to be taken than women, whose low-level
skills were not sufficiently valued either in the West Indies or the mainland
colonies to encourage merchants to take them.^113
The evidence that a serious problem existed was particularly clear in the sec-
ond half of the 1690 s, when offences increased strongly in London, resulting in
severe overcrowding in all the City’s gaols.^114 But the problem was made espe-
cially difficult by the presence among the prisoners awaiting punishment of
364 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^111) Another sign that Newgate was thought to be dangerously crowded in the middle years of the
decade was the willingness of the recorder and London magistrates to grant bail in the summer of 1697
in cases in which it was distinctly unusual—to a woman accused of the significant theft of goods worth
£ 60 that had been found in her possession, and to another woman accused of robbery, assault, and theft
and thought to be an old offender (CLRO: SF 420 : gaol calendar (Rebecca Harris; Ann Burk) ).
(^112) Figures derived from seventeen general pardons for the prisoners in Newgate (PRO, C 82 : war-
rants for the Great Seal).
(^113) For the problems surrounding transportation in this period, see Beattie, Crime and the Courts,
478 – 83.
(^114) This no doubt explains why the aldermen called for an account of the number of offenders being
held in all the gaols in the City in July 1696 (CLRO: London Sess. Papers,July 1696 ).