who had confessed to a magistrate that he had taken part with two others in a
burglary in which goods of forty pounds were stolen.
The death sentences pronounced in court against these five men were left to
stand, and one can only think that the deputy recorder’s emphasis on the violent
nature of their offences (at least in the case of four of them) led the cabinet to
those conclusions. Anything they or their witnesses might have said on their
own behalf went unreported. On the other hand, five other defendants con-
demned to death at that session of the Old Bailey and included in this report—
three men and two women—were pardoned and ordered to be transported.
None of their offences had involved violence; in two, the deputy recorder raised
a doubt about the prisoners’ guilt by reporting elements of the defences they of-
fered; in another, he revealed that the prisoner, who was charged with returning
illegally from transportation, had been prosecuted by a woman against whom
he had given evidence three years earlier: Raby also reported that the victim in
that previous case, William Hucks, a prominent brewer (indeed the king’s
brewer, though that was not said) had promised him his favour. The deputy’s
report was taken up with this story, and the prisoner’s sentence of death for his
illegal return from America after only six months was changed to transporta-
tion.^80
The broad considerations that underlay these life and death judgments in
December 1725 were those of the past. The nature of the offence, allied with the
apparent character of the offender, almost certainly remained the paramount
issue that determined whether the men and women sentenced to death at the
Old Bailey would be hanged or pardoned in the reigns of the first two Hanover-
ian kings. There was always, however, a place for personal judgement and influ-
ence, for favour, and for political considerations;^81 one could never rule out the
importance in the process of decision-making of the intervention of an influen-
tial patron or the play of sheer prejudice. And almost certainly, in the quarter
century during which he was the recorder, William Thomson’s attitudes and
ideas shaped the pattern of execution at Tyburn. We have seen his influence in
the administration of transportation and his willingness to express strong opin-
ions about penal matters in general. His views about capital punishment,
equally clear and forthright, were most directly expressed in his responses to pe-
titions on behalf of condemned prisoners, petitions that were referred to him (in
454 William Thomson and Transportation
(^80) SP 35 / 60 / 158. The cabinet minutes of the recorder’s report in May 1717 reveal a similar pattern:
three men described by Thomson as ‘notorious for House-breaking in ye night’ were ordered to be exe-
cuted, as were two men for robbing the mail (one of whom, he reported, had been pardoned in the pre-
vious October), a man for burglary, labelled by the recorder an ‘old offender’, and a woman described
by him as ‘an old Offender house-Robber’. Those pardoned were a servant who, according to Thom-
son’s report, had committed her first offence and was supported by her mistress, two young men of 16 ,
also described by Thomson as first-timers and enticed by ill company, and two other young men for pick-
ing pockets, both of whose victims-prosecutors petitioned on their behalf (SP 35 / 9 / 6 ). For another re-
port of the same year, see SP 35 / 9 / 22.
(^81) Hay, ‘Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law’, in Hay, et al.(eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree, pp. 43 – 9.