E. P. Thompson

E. P. Thompson appears in the book as a historian whose account helps explain how legal principles can become constraints on the powerful who invoke them. His analysis links the struggle against Stuart absolutism to the rule of law that emerged from Britain’s pluralistic political settlement, and then to the nineteenth-century reform crisis: when elite authority was challenged, the rulers ultimately submitted to their own constitutional rules rather than risk dismantling them.

Historian of the Rule of Law

Thompson’s role here is interpretive rather than biographical. The book draws on his account to show that the rule of law was not simply a slogan used by political elites against the Crown. In the struggle against the Stuart monarchs, those opposing royal absolutism sought to present a ruling class itself subject to law, with legitimacy grounded in legal forms that applied generally. That language served the coalition’s defence against royal power, but it also carried a consequence: once rulers claimed legitimacy through universal legal principles, they could not safely reserve those principles for themselves.

The book emphasizes the resulting tension between power and legal commitment. Political actors might try to use law to advance their own interests, but their authority depended on rules they could not openly discard without damaging the political system that supported them. Thompson’s account thus supplies a historical mechanism, not merely a moral ideal: the law could restrain its authors because the legitimacy of their rule had become entangled with the appearance and practice of legal universality.

Law, Power, and the Black Act

The discussion of the Black Act makes that mechanism concrete. The Act was a harsh measure directed against people who obstructed elites’ claims to private property. Yet its enforcement did not proceed without constraint. John Huntridge, accused in 1724 of aiding deer stealers and associating with the Blacks, was tried after the prosecution had been initiated at the highest political level. Robert Walpole personally sought evidence of Huntridge’s guilt from an informant, but the jury acquitted him, in part because of irregularities in the collection of evidence. The law remained on the statute books until 1824, and other defendants were hanged or transported, so Huntridge’s acquittal did not mean that the Act’s effects were slight. Its significance lies in the limit it revealed: even a powerful government could not assume that a prosecution would deliver the result it wanted.

The jurors were major landowners and members of the gentry, not a panel chosen from Huntridge’s social peers. Their decision therefore sharpened the book’s point: the constraints of law were not reducible to the sympathy of the jury for the accused. The political settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution had made rulers and elites more answerable to legal procedures than they might have expected. The book distinguishes this rule of law from rule by law. A government may enact a repressive law, but the rule of law means that legal protections and constraints also bind those who wield state power. In Thompson’s interpretation, this wider principle arose from pluralism: with multiple groups sharing political power, no single group could safely claim an unlimited right to command.

Thompson’s formulation also explains why this restraint extended beyond the immediate conflict with the Crown. A legal instrument adopted as a defence against arbitrary royal authority could not be kept as the exclusive property of the class that first relied on it. If aristocrats, merchants, and other opponents of absolutism insisted that the law should constrain monarchs, they had helped establish a principle that could also protect ordinary people accused of challenging elite interests. The same rules that guarded the coalition’s members from royal prerogative could not easily be made unavailable to people like Huntridge without undermining the claim that the political order was governed by law.

From Constitutional Legality to Reform

The book returns to Thompson when explaining why Britain’s elite accepted parliamentary reform in 1832 rather than suppressing demands by force. Earl Grey secured passage of the First Reform Act while defusing revolutionary pressures, but the changes were limited: they roughly doubled the adult male franchise, from about 8 percent to 16 percent, removed rotten boroughs, and gave independent representation to industrializing cities including Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield. Most adults remained without the vote, and further demands and social unrest followed. The episode nevertheless posed a larger question: why did the ruling elite accept even partial reform instead of relying on repression?

Thompson describes the rulers as facing a choice between dispensing with the rule of law and surrendering part of their political dominance. They could have dismantled constitutional structures, contradicted their own rhetoric, and ruled by force; instead, after hesitating, they yielded to the legal order. The book connects this decision to the earlier limits exposed by the Black Act. In both cases, using state power without regard for the rules would have put at risk the broader political settlement that the elite itself had helped establish. Repression in 1832 threatened not only reformers but also the constitutional framework that supported the authority and security of those already in power.

That framework had been built through a broad coalition against Stuart absolutism, rather than simply replacing one ruling elite with another. Because political power was shared among multiple interests, legal restraints helped prevent any one group from accumulating enough authority to destroy the pluralistic settlement. The book presents Thompson’s account as a way of understanding why the law could become politically durable: breaking it to defeat a particular challenge might reopen the possibility of arbitrary rule, including a return to royal prerogative.

Interpretive Significance

Across the two episodes, Thompson’s contribution is to show how a principle can acquire force through the political conditions that produced it. The rule of law was initially important as a means of resistance to absolutism, but its claimed universality generated wider obligations. It constrained the implementation of a coercive statute and later shaped the response to demands for electoral change. The law’s reach was unequal in practice, and the limited reform of 1832 did not establish universal suffrage; still, the book stresses that the elite could not act as if legal constraints were merely optional.

This account makes political restraint a consequence of institutional relationships rather than an act of unprompted generosity. Those who benefited from the existing order had reasons to preserve the rules because the rules protected the coalition and kept arbitrary authority at bay. Thompson is therefore cited to illuminate a feedback process: pluralism supports the rule of law, while legal constraints help preserve pluralism and make further participation possible. His historical interpretation ties disputes over prosecution and voting rights to a common institutional question—whether political power can be exercised without limits, or whether the rules invoked to defend a constitutional order must also bind its rulers.