punishment the courts could impose on clergied offenders, but also backed the
system with sufficient resources to make it work.
I have elsewhere explored the making of this legislation and the decisive ac-
tions of the government to prevent the two American colonies to which the
transported convicts would be sent, Maryland and Virginia, from impeding the
work of the merchants who were now empowered to take those so sentenced
across the Atlantic.^9 But several aspects of the working out of that policy need to
be emphasized more than I understood in that earlier work—in particular, the
crucial role of the City of London and of the recorder, William Thomson, in the
making of the legislation, and Thomson’s influence on the way transportation
was to be implemented in practice.
The possibility of transporting convicted English convicts had had a patchy
history since at least the 1670 s. A combination of factors—resistance in Amer-
ica and the West Indies, merchants’ unwillingness to take anyone without
saleable skills, the interruptions of trade during wars—meant that while con-
victs might be sentenced to be transported as a condition of pardon, it had been
far from certain that the order would be carried out. Alternatives had been
found during the war in Anne’s reign, but they provided no long-term solution
to the fundamental weaknesses that had been all too apparent over the previous
generation and more. The answer to those persistent problems was to be found
in the early years of the new reign by an entirely new departure in criminal ad-
ministration. In the first place the courts were given the power (by 4 Geo. I, c. 11 )
to impose transportation for a term of seven years on defendants convicted of
clergyable felonies who had hitherto been subjected to branding on the thumb,
and on those convicted of petty larceny, for which the established punishment
had been public whipping. Both were now liable, at the judges’ discretion, to be
sent to the plantations in America. In addition, felons pardoned from a capital
conviction were to be transported for fourteen years; and the offence of return-
ing to British soil before the expiration of these stated terms was to be excluded
from benefit of clergy and thus became a capital crime.
The Transportation Act dealt directly with the problem of what to do with
men and women convicted of capital offences at the Old Bailey who were sub-
sequently pardoned by the cabinet and who had hitherto so often been left in
Newgate for months and years. That was important. But the new policy, and the
new thinking, went well beyond that. It also tackled the issue of the effectiveness
of punishments for property offences in general and responded to the recog-
nized inadequacy of the consequences of clergy. In addition, by making petty
larceny a transportable offence, the act created an alternative to public whip-
ping as a punishment for the most minor property crimes. In its breadth and
reach, the Transportation Act blended the interests of the central government
428 William Thomson and Transportation
(^9) Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 500 – 6 ; and see A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of
British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718 – 1775 (Oxford, 1987 ), 70.