clause in the act was clearly a product of the City’s unhappy experience with the
weakness of the sanctions available for the punishment of minor thefts, and per-
haps especially concerns about the disruptive effects of public whipping. The
provisions of the act were immediately implemented at the April 1718 session.
With this new authority, the courts acquired considerable flexibility in dealing
with theft: it was left to the judges to decide in particular cases whether to order
transportation, the branding of clergy (with imprisonment in the house of cor-
rection at their discretion), or whipping. All those options came to be exercised
at the Old Bailey under Thomson’s influence. In looking at the patterns of sen-
tencing that developed in London after 1718 , it is useful to keep Thomson in
mind, and to examine his attitudes and ideas about the way the new penal sys-
tem should be managed.
Thomson had been both recorder and solicitor-general when the act was
passed in 1718 , but he was dismissed from his post in the central administration
two years later as a consequence of a dispute with Nicholas Lechmere, the
attorney-general. Apart from his frequent complaints about the way he was
treated by Lechmere—being required, as solicitor-general, to serve as ‘Mr At-
turney General’s footman’, as he said on one occasion^24 —the immediate reason
for Thomson’s dismissal was the accusation of corruption he levelled against
Lechmere in the midst of the enquiry into the South Sea Bubble in 1720 , an ac-
cusation found to be groundless by a parliamentary committee.^25 The deeper
reason may have been Thomson’s association with the Walpole–Townshend
faction of whigs who had been in opposition since Townshend’s dismissal as sec-
retary of state in 1717 and the fact that Lechmere was one of Walpole’s bitterest
enemies.^26 Thomson had made his loyalties abundantly clear by voting against
the Peerage Bill in 1719 —an opposition led by the Walpole and Townshend
whigs^27 —and they were to stand him in good stead in the future. For the polit-
ical world was changing rapidly by 1720 in the turmoil around the South Sea
Bubble, and changing very much in Thomson’s favour. Walpole and Town-
shend came back into office in 1720 and into control of the administration in
1722. Thomson’s prospects improved, though not without his having to remind
the king and Walpole ofhis usefulness to the government by his work in London.
He sought Walpole’s support and patronage early in 1722 , asking particularly
for some form of professional advancement to compensate him for the heavy
work required by the recordership of London and the loss of income it en-
tailed—income he could otherwise have generated in his legal practice. His
work at the Old Bailey had grown more onerous, he claimed, since he had taken
the post. Over the past few years it had involved
William Thomson and Transportation 433(^24) SP 35 / 18 / 15. (^25) Sedgwick (ed.), History of Parliament, 1715 – 1754 , ii. 203 , 468.
(^26) Ibid., ii. 203 – 4 ; Plumb, Walpole: Making of a Statesman, 256 , 303 – 4 , 340 , 351.
(^27) Plumb, Walpole: Making of a Statesman, 276 – 81 ; David Lemmings, Gentlemen and Barristers: The Inns of
Court and the English Bar, 1680 – 1730 (Oxford, 1990 ), 232.