Reign of William and Mary

The Reign of William and Mary is presented as a turning point in the political fortunes of the Comprachicos. After James II’s protection of the child-buying network, the new regime moved to suppress it, making the period a test of how dynastic change could redirect royal power without erasing the coercive habits of English government.

Dynastic Change and the Comprachicos

Under James II, the Comprachicos had served the Crown by acquiring children whose removal and disfigurement could clear the way for confiscation or the transfer of titles. Their secrecy made them useful to the state, while their religious associations suited the Stuart king’s Catholic commitments. The account describes the change of dynasty in 1688 as the moment when William III replaced James II; the network that had benefited from royal favor now faced a hostile sovereign.

The change is therefore more than a shift in personal allegiance. The same capacity for disappearance that had served royal policy became a reason to destroy the group. The novel places the Comprachicos within a political system in which the Crown could treat vulnerable children as instruments of succession and then turn the machinery of law against those who had carried out that policy.

Suppression by Statute

William III is described as severe toward the Comprachicos, and an early statute of the reign struck directly at their association. Those convicted faced branded marks identifying them as rogues, thieves, and man-slayers; chiefs could be pilloried, marked on the forehead, and deprived of their goods, while woodland associated with them was to be cleared. Women found among the group faced the cucking-stool, a punishment involving repeated immersion in water.

The law also made silence and non-cooperation punishable: people who failed to inform against the Comprachicos risked confiscation and imprisonment for life. Suppression thus extended beyond convicted members to those who withheld information, turning the dismantling of the network into a broader system of surveillance and compelled assistance. The novel presents the statute as devastating to the association, which was thereafter crushed as an organized force.

Policing and the Limits of Reform

The account places the crackdown within an England already covered by police efforts to identify wandering groups, especially the Comprachicos. Even under the new regime, Ursus could travel from town to town with his caravan, selling remedies and performing his trade; he passed through the police net because he belonged to no gang. His continued movement distinguishes an itinerant individual from the association the authorities sought to break up, while showing that the policy did not simply eliminate wandering life.

Other descriptions of English law complicate any picture of the new period as a clean transition to procedural liberty. Silent arrests remained a familiar practice despite the Habeas Corpus Act, and the narrative associates such captures with questions reserved in the name of raison d’état. These procedures are described across a wider historical span, not as a measure unique to William and Mary’s reign, but they frame the period’s use of state power: statutory action against the Comprachicos coexisted with older customs that could place a person in custody without public explanation.

Royal Authority and Legal Continuities

The novel also contrasts the change in policy with the persistence of inherited offices and jurisdictions. County sheriffs generally received their commissions from the Crown, while specified exceptions included the hereditary sheriff of Westmoreland and the elected sheriffs of London and Middlesex. Sheriffs and their officers apprehended and imprisoned suspected offenders for trial by circuit judges. This account of local administration supplies a wider institutional backdrop to the campaign against the Comprachicos: royal policy operated through a layered system of officials and jurisdictions rather than through statute alone.

The reign’s significance lies in this mixture of rupture and continuity. William III’s government reversed James II’s protection of the child-trading network and imposed severe penalties, yet the institutions enforcing the new policy belonged to a legal order that retained secret arrests and strong executive authority. The novel thus treats the suppression of the Comprachicos both as a real change in state policy and as evidence that a new sovereign could redirect, rather than simply undo, the powers inherited from the old regime.