384 Crime and the State
the state and prosecution
In the seventeenth century, the central government intervened from time to
time through the Privy Council to encourage criminal prosecutions, though
mainly when the charges amounted to allegations of serious treasonable activ-
ity. As the Privy Council’s role in domestic oversight diminished after 1660 the
secretaries of state—and most commonly the secretary for the Northern
Department—became increasingly the government’s link with such local
officials as mayors and justices, to whom they can be found writing from time to
time about dangers in their neighbourhoods and encouraging them to do their
duty.^45 The engagement of the secretaries’ office in peace-keeping and criminal
administration was to expand notably in the eighteenth century.
A hint of this is provided by the swearing of two under-secretaries of state as
magistrates of the county of Middlesex in October 1714 —‘the business in My
Lord Townshend’s Office frequently requiring us to act as Justices of the Peace’,
as one of them said in arranging it.^46 What this business involved was made clear
in the following months and years, as the secretary for the Northern Depart-
ment and the under-secretaries became involved in the prosecution of sus-
pected enemies of the new regime. What was to be even more important, the
under-secretaries were not only involved in taking depositions and overseeing
prosecutions: the government also paid the costs of a number of cases. Such fi-
nancial support of prosecutions originated in 1696 , when a solicitor to the treas-
ury had been appointed to help organize cases in which the government had an
interest—treasonable activities in general, including offences against the
coinage.^47 After 1714 , when the enemies of the regime proliferated, and the re-
bellion in 1715 and the plotting that followed in its wake made the threat of a vi-
olent overthrow of the government entirely plausible, the under-secretaries of
state became even more heavily engaged in uncovering and prosecuting rioters,
the printers and publishers of pamphlets they thought seditious, editors of news-
papers, ballad singers, and a host of others whose activities seemed to threaten
the Hanoverian regime and the succession put in place by the Act of Settlement.
On orders from the secretaries or under-secretaries of state, the solicitor to the
treasury paid the costs of many such cases from the money advanced to him
every year as a fund ‘for carrying on Publick Prosecutions’, as it was called in
1715.^48 It was by such means that the central government became involved in the
administration of at least some aspects of the criminal law after 1714.
In the early years of George I’s reign, the government’s support of prosecu-
tions remained focused, as in the past, on matters of state. The under-secretaries
(^45) Joanna Innes, ‘The Domestic Face of the Military–Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eight-
eenth-Century Britain’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 ( 1994 ),
98 – 9.
(^46) SP 44 / 147 , 27 October 1714. (^47) J. C. Sainty, Treasury Officials, 1660 – 1870 ( 1972 ), 97 – 8.
(^48) SP 44 / 147 , 30 November 1715 ; SP 44 / 118 , p. 207.