ABSTRACT
In the wake of the anti-Catholic, Gordon Riots of 1780, a week of looting, arson, and defiance of authority, which shook the foundations of order, Burke cautioned the government against hanging too many rioters. On July 10, 1780, he wrote to Tory politician and Lord Chancellor 1st Baron Thurlow. Burke’s advocacy of a calculated blend of terror and mercy has come to define, for the modern historian, the nature of ‘pre-modern’ justice. Douglas Hay incorporated Burke’s “delicacy and circumspection” into an account of the way the considerable discretion embodied in the criminal law made it possible for the legal and executive authorities to use terror and mercy in a delicate adjustment of state power. Burke also pointed to some of the circumstances that should presuppose mercy: youth, sex, want of deliberation, intoxication.
