Robert Walpole

Robert Walpole, a leading Whig politician and member of the Regency Council of Lords Justices, helped drive the prosecution of people who resisted the enclosure of parks and the loss of customary rights. His own interests in Richmond Park connected him directly to the conflict; the failed prosecution of John Huntridge exposed a limit on the power Walpole and his allies could wield through Parliament and the state.

Political Power and Private Interests

Walpole was secretary of state and, by the time of the prosecution of John Huntridge in 1724, prime minister. Alongside William Cadogan, he dominated the Regency Council of Lords Justices, the body that presided over major affairs of state. His public authority thus stood close to the center of the government’s response to the Blacks, who raided estates in protest against landowners’ encroachment on local rights.

Walpole also had a personal stake in the enclosure of Richmond Park, in southwest London. The park had been created from common land under Charles I, and its boundaries curtailed local residents’ traditional rights to graze animals, hunt hares and rabbits, and gather firewood. Those rights had initially been enforced laxly, so grazing and hunting continued. Walpole helped close the park by arranging for his son to become its ranger; a new wall was built and man traps installed. Walpole hunted deer there and had a lodge at Houghton within the park. The security of the enclosed landscape and the government’s campaign against the Blacks therefore converged around interests that were at once political and personal.

The Black Act and the Campaign Against the Blacks

After armed Blacks raided estates belonging to prominent landowners and politicians, the Whig government answered with the Black Act, passed by Parliament in May 1723. The measure created fifty new capital offenses. It criminalized carrying weapons and even having a blackened face; a subsequent amendment made blacking itself punishable by hanging. Walpole’s government was thus enforcing a law that threatened death for acts associated with resistance to the loss of customary access and rights.

The authorities organized a search for those involved. Baptist Nunn established a network of informers in Windsor Forest, and several people were arrested. The government’s ability to pass the statute and identify suspects, however, did not guarantee that it could secure convictions. The law’s reach would be tested not only by the accused but by the courts and juries expected to apply it.

The Huntridge Prosecution

On November 10, 1724, John Huntridge, a resident outside Richmond Park, was accused of aiding deer stealers and abetting known Blacks, offenses punishable by hanging. The prosecution was initiated by the Regency Council of Lords Justices, where Walpole and Cadogan held commanding influence. Walpole personally sought evidence of Huntridge’s guilt from an informant, Richard Blackburn, bringing the prime minister into the evidentiary effort rather than leaving the case to distant officials.

Despite the political weight behind the accusation, Huntridge was acquitted after a trial lasting eight or nine hours. The jury found procedural irregularities in the way the evidence had been collected. Its verdict interrupted what might have seemed a straightforward passage from arrest, through prosecution, to execution: Parliament had enacted the law, the Whigs controlled the government, and the accused were acting against powerful landowners’ interests, yet the case did not end as the prosecution intended.

Limits on Government and the Rule of Law

The book treats Huntridge’s acquittal as a revealing check on Walpole’s power. The jurors were major landowners and members of the gentry—not obvious allies of a defendant accused of helping the Blacks, and a group that might have been expected to sympathize with Walpole. Their decision nevertheless turned on procedural defects. The episode contrasts the new constraints of eighteenth-century government with an earlier model in which the Stuart monarchy could use the Court of Star Chamber against opponents and remove judges whose decisions displeased the crown.

Walpole and his allies did not overturn the courts when the verdict went against them. The broader explanation offered is institutional: the Glorious Revolution had been a coalition against absolutism, encompassing gentry, merchants, manufacturers, Whigs, and Tories, rather than a simple transfer of power from one elite to another. Pluralist institutions grew from that coalition, and the rule of law followed from the need to prevent any one participant from accumulating power sufficient to undermine the arrangement. In that system, the constraints the government imposed on the Blacks also bound the powerful men seeking to enforce them.

Huntridge’s acquittal did not end the Black Act’s violence. Other defendants were also acquitted or had their sentences commuted, but many were hanged or transported to North America; the law remained on the statute books until its repeal in 1824. Walpole’s role therefore belongs to a larger contradiction: a government with direct interests in enclosure and a severe instrument of repression still had to submit, at least in this case, to legal process it could not simply dictate.