Abstract
Few English statesmen have been subjected to as substantial a shift in historical reputation in recent years as Sir Robert Peel. Only two years after Norman Gash completed his massive two-volume biography, Derek Beales struck the first blow at Peel’s status, amongst other things as the great reformer of English criminal law during his two terms at the Home Office during the 1820s, arguing that the real changes were made by the Whig ministries of 1830 and beyond.1 Boyd Hilton has demonstrated that, in economic matters as well as his personal penal philosophy, Peel was more often dogmatic than flexible, clinging to the established ways of doing things until the last possible moment.2 The latest and most forceful blow has come in V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (1994), which concludes with an extended portrait of Peel’s seemingly unremitting severity in enforcing the letter of England’s still extensive capital code down to 1830 at least.3
I am grateful to the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland for a Faculty Research Fellowship during which this article was completed. Earlier research for it was supported by an Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship and research grants from the University of Queensland. A short version was presented to the 1998 meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies, held in Colorado Springs. For their comments and suggestions on the first full-length draft, lowe thanks to Jerry Bannister, John Beattie, Paul Crook, Paul Griffiths, Philip Harling, Joanna Innes, Randall McGowen, Andrea McKenzie, Allyson N. May, Robert Shoemaker and Greg T. Smith. And lowe special thanks to Vic Gatrell for generouslyenduring the earlier version and calling my attention to errors in my reading of his work.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Norman Gash, Mr Secretary Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel to 1830 (1961); id., Sir Robert Peel: The Life ofSir Robert Peel after 1830 (1972); Derek Beales, ‘Peel, Russell and Reform’, HJ, 17 (1974), 873–82.
Boyd Hilton, ‘Peel: A Reappraisal’, HJ, 22 (1979), 585–614; id., ‘The Ripening of Robert Peel’, in Michael Bentley ed., Public and Private: Essays in British History presented toMaurice Cowling (Cambridge,1993), 63–84. An excellent, up-to-date survey of Peel’s life and legacy is provided in T.A. Jenkins, Sir Robert Peel (Basingstoke, 1999).
V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994; revised paperback edn, 1996). Attempts to evaluate Gatrell’s approach and conclusions include Boyd Hilton, ‘The Gallows and Mr Peel’, in T.C.W. Blanning and David Cannadine eds, History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996), 88–112; Sara Sun Beale and Paul H. Haagen, ‘Revenge for the Condemned’, Michigan Law Review, 94 (1996), 1622–59; and Randall McGowen, ‘Revisiting the Hanging Tree: Gatrell on Emotion and History’, British Journal ofCriminology, 40 (2000), 1–13.
For an earlier account of the Recorder’s Report during this era, see A. Aspinall, ‘The Grand Cabinet, 1800–1837’, Politica, 3 (1938), 333–44. Its origins after 1689 are analysed in J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), 346–62. Throughout this article I use ‘Report’ to signify the meeting, as opposed to the actual document which the Recorder of London produced and read at that meeting, no copies of which appear to have survived for the early nineteenth century.
See my forthcoming Convicts and the State: Criminal Justice and English Governance, 1750–1810, chap. 4, to be published by Palgrave Press Like Randall McGowen (‘Revisiting the Hanging Tree’, esp. 3–4), I am also uncertain that Gatrell’s emphasis on material factors goes as far as he appears to believe towards devaluing cultural considerations in explaining the reforms of the early nineteenth century. After all, two hundred years earlier, the far higher execution levels of Tudor and early Stuart England did not have a similar effect in so comprehensively de-legitimating the already comprehensive capital code of that era (see Philip Jenkins, ‘From Gallows to Prison? The Execution Rate in Early Modern England’, Criminal %ustice History, 7 (1986), 51–71).
J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 431–2. On the Home Circuit, for instance, individual cases referred to judges numbered only 2 as against 86 convicts covered by the circuit pardon in 1815, 1 against 98 at one assizes in 1820, 3 against 60 at another assizes of 1825, and 2 against 56 at yet another of 1830 (count derived from records in PRO HO 6, HO 13, HO 47, and PC 1).
Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford eds, The Greville Memoirs, 1814–1860 (8 vols, London: Macmillan, 1938), I, 304; PRO HO 6/14, Recorder of London to Robert Peel, 5 July 1829.
Lord Colchester ed., A Political Diary, 1828–1830, by Edward Law, Lord Ellenborough (2 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1881), I, 154–5, 267–8. Compare the reading of these quotes and their significance in Gatrell, Hanging Tree, 547–50.
Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 355 and passim. See also Beattie, Crime and the Courts, chap. 8.
Francis Bamford and the Duke of Wellington eds, The Journal of Mrs. Arbuthnot, 1820–1832 (2 vols, London: Macmillan, 1950), II, 59.
Colchester, Ellenborough Diary, I, 294, 295. Although its proper title was The Whole Proceedings on the King’s Commission of the Peace, Oyer and Terminer, and GaolDelivery for the City ofLondon; and also the Gaol-Delivery for the County ofMiddlesex; Held at Justice-Hall in the Old-Bailey, etc. contemporaries invariably used the name ‘Sessions Paper’, and the convenient short form OBSP is widely-used amongst historians. The uses of the Sessions Paper in the Report during the eighteenth century are discussed in Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 451–2, and Simon Devereaux, ‘The City and the Sessions Paper: ‘Public Justice’ in London, 1770–180’, JBS, 35 (1996), 469–82.
E.A. Smith, George IV (New Haven, CT, 1999) is a recent, largely unpersuasive effort to rehabilitate its subject.
For an example of the king exerting pressure during a Report, see the account from 1820 in Arthur Aspinall ed., The Diary of Henry Hobhouse (1820–1827) (1947), 17.
Sir Joseph Arnould, Memoir of Thomas, First Lord Denman, formerly Lord Chief Justice of England (2 vols, 1873), I, 436.
A. Aspinall ed., The Letters ofKing George IV, 1812–1830 (3 vols, Cambridge, 1938), III, 116–17; id., ed., The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, 1770–1812 (8 vols; 1963–71), VIII, 472.
John Gore ed., Creevey’s Life and Times: A Further Selection ftom the Correspondence of Thomas Creevey (1934), 392 (emphasis in original).
Colchester, Ellenborough Diary, I, 19, 29–30 (quote); id., ed., The Diary and Correspondence of Charles Abbot, Lord Colchester, Speaker of the House of Commons, 1802–1817 (3 vols, 1861), III, 548–9, 551; B.L, Add MS 40300, fos 219–20.
Viscount Esher ed., The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Diaries Between the Years 1832 and 1840 (2 vols, 1912), I, 285.
A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies (1966), 188–90.
Charles Campbell, The Intolerable Hulks: British Shipboard Confinement, 1776–1857 (3rd edn, Tucson, 2001), chap. 11.
Elaine A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720–1830 (Basingstoke, 1998), chap. 8.
Lady Dorchester ed., Recollections of a Long Life, by Lord Broughton (John Cam Hobhouse) with Additional Extracts from His Private Diaries (6 vols, 1910–11), V, 273; J.F. Stephen, History of the Criminal Law of England (3 vols, 1883), I, 478–9.
‘On the Punishment of Death: A Fragment’ (c.1814); in Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck eds, The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (10 vols, 1965; reprint of 1926–30 edn), VI, 185.
Randall McGowen, ‘The Image of Justice and Reform of the Criminal Law in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Buffalo Law Review, 32 (1983), 89–125.
Nowell C. Smith ed., The Letters of Sydney Smith (2 vols, Oxford, 1953), I, 341 (my emphasis).
Colchester, Colchester Diary, III, 145–6. For the initial effectiveness of the Caroline agitation as a focus for radical politics in general, see Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, Journal of Modenz History, 54 (1982), 417–66.
John Cannon, ‘New Lamps for Old: The End of Hanoverian England’, in Cannon ed., The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (1981), 100–24; Derek Beales, ‘The Idea of Reform in British Politics, 1829–1850’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 100 (1999), 159–74.
A recent, vigorously-argued case for continuity is Richard Price, British Society, 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge, 1999), esp. chaps 7–8. For some significant doubts, see David Eastwood, ‘The Age of Uncertainty: Britain in the Early-Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 8 (1998), 91–115.
Louis J. Jennings ed., The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Honourable John Wilson Croker (2nd edn, revised; 3 vols, 1885), I, 170.
Norman Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–1865 (1979), 118.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2004 Simon Devereaux
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Devereaux, S. (2004). Peel, Pardon and Punishment: The Recorder’s Report Revisited. In: Devereaux, S., Griffiths, P. (eds) Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523241_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523241_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43269-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-52324-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)