7 - The “Bloody Code” Debated, 1808–1821

Summary

Whig and revisionist historians alike have argued that the efforts of Samuel Romilly and James Mackintosh to reform criminal law between 1808 and 1821 were easily thwarted by a resolute Tory ministry and an ambivalent public opinion. The cause of reform was in fact more powerful than either perspective allows. Urbane public opinion lamented England’s increasingly unique adherence to a wide-ranging death penalty and viewed its victims in more compassionate terms than ever before. Conservatives clung to William Paley’s arguments that a selectively enforced “Bloody Code” was both genuinely deterrent and preferable to either preventive policing or the wider use of secondary punishments. There were limits to the logic of the positions espoused by reformers and conservatives alike. By the 1820s, however, there was good reason to believe that the reform cause was already won in the House of Commons and that victory in the Lords was at least conceivable.