AN ORDERLY METROPOLIS: THE EVOLUTION OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN LONDON, 1750-1830 by VIRGINIA SUZANNE BALCH-LINDSAY, B.A., M.A. A DISSERTATION IN HISTORY Submitte<3 to the GracJuate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approvecj Accepte(3 December, 1998 1998, Virginia Suzanne Balch-Lindsay ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Any project is ultimately a collaborative effort, and this one is no exception. My thanks go first to the members of my committee. Their comments, suggestions, and encouragement made an already enjoyable undertaking even more pleasant. Special thanks go to my chairperson, Brian L. Blakeley, who retires just weeks from now. May Wisconsin's forests grow with abandon under his kind and watchful eyes. I appreciate too the support of my colleagues and students at Eastern New Mexico University. For the last three years, they have commiserated, and laughed, with me as I delved into a world far away in time and place. Thanks to the staffs of the British Library, the University of London's libraries, the Public Record Office, and the Metropolitan Police Archives for their cheerful help. And, my heartfelt love to my children, Virginia and Frank Slater, my husband, Dylan Balch-Lindsay, and my father, Ralph Balch. They have shared their lives with long-dead Englishmen and women, and did not even mind. Finally, I am grateful to my mother for the love of history she shared with me. I wish she was here to share this too. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iv CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE CAUSES OF DISCONTENT 2 9 III. THE MAGISTRATE AT BOW STREET: 1750-1763 HENRY FIELDING AND POLICE 70 IV. THE HOUSES AT WESTMINSTER: 1750-1760 105 V. SIR JOHN, AND JOHN WILKES: 1756-1770 13 9 VI. BLACKSTONE, BECCARIA, HOWARD: 1764-1779 THE PRISON AS PHILANTHROPY 176 VII. THE GORDON RIOTS, THE ASSOCIATIONS, AND SOME THOUGHTS ON POLICE: 1780-1785 215 VIII. PAIN, PLEASURE, AND PRISON: 1785-1818 BENTHAM'S ARCHITECTURE OF REFORM 251 IX. ENEMIES AT HOME AND ABROAD: 1793-1815 POLICING THE NAPOLEONIC YEARS 2 95 X. THE IMPETUS FOR CHANGE: 1795-1823 SAMUEL ROMILLY AND LEGAL REFORM 342 XI. EPILOGUE, AND A NEW BEGINNING: 1815-1829 GAOLS, LAWS, AND POLICE 3 76 BIBLIOGRAPHY 414 111 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines England's transition from a system of criminal law enforcement that relied on individual initiative to one that relied on state-centered institu­ tions. Between 175 0 and 183 0, London experienced a confluence of events, and ideas, that promoted new goals for law enforcement. The prevention of crime, not only its punishment, became an achievable goal. Reform of the crimi­ nal was another. Efficiency, effectiveness, and, humanity combined to push England's governors toward a more rational, more enforceable code of law. The governmental evolution began in the magistrate courts of mid-eighteenth century London, but gained its strength in the next eighty years from publicity. Henry Fielding, a magistrate at Bow Street Public Office and a noted author, used his literary skills to promote reform of the police. He argued that a salaried, professional police could prevent crime in the Metropolis. Successive reformers molded Fielding's ideas into a coherent plan for police. The Metropolitan Police Improvement Act (182 9) was the iv result. The "Bobbies" were a product of the transformation of the police idea from pamphlet to Parliament. Reformers attacked the logic of the law as well. In order to deter criminals, England's Parliament had passed hundreds of acts that called for the punishment of death, but her courts seldom enforced those sentences. Reforms that created proportional sentences in lieu of England's infamous "Bloody Code," were driven by humanitarianism and by calls for efficiency and consistency from the 1760s. As another element in promoting a "system" of criminal justice, law reform and the creation of the penitentiary joined with the goal to create police. Historians often view the creation of the police as separate from legal and penal reform. The three are intri­ cately related. Reformers' and pamphleteers' messages for reform joined law reform to a general plea for modernity. Reform of criminal justice proceeded slowly between 1750 and 1820, but after 1820, arguments for efficiency, rationality, and humanity made reform remarkably easy. Members of Parliament had accepted a changed rationale for government that foreshadowed the "liberalism" of some eras in the nineteenth, and twentieth, centuries. V CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Crime, or society's response to its criminals, is one feature by which historians measure the development of "government" and, perhaps, the civility of a people. The English have long celebrated their criminals. They and the tourists welcomed to England's shores admire their police as well. The English are proud of their role as the creators of a system of criminal apprehension and adjudication adapted, imperfectly, to an urban world. The Metropolitan Police Force created in 1829 claims pride of place as the world's first modern police force. But the Metropolitan Police were not sui generis enforcers of English law. The Bobby was the last part of an administrative response to crime begun two generations earlier in England. Reformers acted, they believed, to defend civilized order against the criminal disorder that was crime. The evolution of the government's participation in criminal law began in London's magistrate courts in the mid- eighteenth century. By the end of the century, it extended to include the jails, and it addressed the problems of policing a growing urban population. Changes in court pro­ cedures and substantive law made necessary corresponding changes in England's jails. By creating a system of criminal law that included prisons, Parliament changed the mission of policing in the Metropolis. A broad trend away from amateurism to professionalism in law enforcement was the most striking feature of the change in London's policing between 1750 and 1830. Full-time criminals created strain on part-time enforcers in the courts, in jails, and in the constabulary. The interdependence of re-gulation of crime and courts, prisons, and police provided the reasons for and the means of administrative change. Centralization of cri­ minal law policy is the subject of this study. Historians of British crime have examined aspects of the administrative revolution that led to the modern crimi­ nal justice system. Victor Bailey describes two main interpretations that prevail in works on crime. The first is the "Consensus" or "Whig" view. Reformers of Britain's policing strove to create a public and parliamentary consensus to support professional policing. "[S]tatist Utilitarians" forwarded their reforms "with a benign regard for public interest" undeterred by hostility to reform within the ruling classes. Consensus histories generally attribute the development of the police force in 182 9 to increasing crime rates in the eighteenth century, caused by a breakdown in traditional moral values. Victorian histo­ ries of crime in the Metropolis display this view fully. Luke Owen Pike's monumental A History of Crime in England (1876) described changes in the laws of England as nothing less than the "progress of civilization." He sprinkled his history with anecdotal accounts of the "torture and confes­ sions of Fawkes" after the abortive Gunpowder Plot and virtually every event before and after. Percy Fitzgerald's Chronicles of the Bow Street Police-office (1888) narrated the colorful history of the famed Bow Street Public Office and its most famous magistrates, Henry and Sir John Fielding. Bow Street was a prototype of the new policing ideas in mid-eighteenth century London, and Fitzgerald promised the "benevolent reader" an entertaining account of "[tjhe 'Humours' of the Police Court." A loose narrative, long on lurid anecdotes but short on analysis, echoed Pike's approving tone.^ ^Luke Owen Pike, A History of Crime in England, Illustrating the Changes of the Laws in the Progress of Consensus histories assumed that police developed "in the conjunction of demography with the processes of urban­ ization, and both are tinted with a particularly ideological conception of law." Here, at least, the Whig historians stand on firm ground. Increasing pressure from citizens confronted with rioters and mobs made reform more palat­ able .2 The Whig or Consensus view did not decline with the advent of more rigorous historical methodologies. Twentieth-century Whig historians maintain the positive view of state action in the amelioration and enforcement of criminal law in the 1700s. Charles Reith, author of numer­ ous histories of London's police, is especially critical of the ignorance of its beneficiaries, rich and poor. Civilisation, vol. 2: From the Accession of Henry VII to the Present Time. Patterson Smith Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems, no. 19, 2 vols. (1873-76; reprint, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968), 2:vii; Percy Fitzgerald, Chronicles of the Bow Street Police-office. 2 vols., Patterson Smith Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement and Social Problems, no. 13 6 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888; reprint, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972). ^Michael Brogden, The Police: Autonomy and Consent (London: Academic Press, 1982), p. 47. The British police institution was made not by, but in spite of, the British people. It is almost solely the product of person­ alities . whose single-mindedness in vision, ideals and purpose was brought eventually ... to practical adaption in the shape of the British police as we know them today.-^ The heroic reformers, motivated by what would later be termed utilitarianism, created the institution "for­ tuitously, unconsciously, without definite and detailed plan." Reith does acknowledge the opposition of the proper­ tied and poor to the police. The Metropolitan force "had the rare effect of uniting all classes and political parties at a time when the country was more than usually riven by class and party conflict."^ Reith and fellow police enthusiast Patrick Pringle were influenced by the World War II example of totalitarianism set by wartime Germany and in the Soviet Union.