William Cadogan

William Cadogan was a successful general and senior Whig political figure whose Caversham estate became a focus of popular resistance after its expansion curtailed local people’s customary rights. Raids on his deer park in 1722 placed him among the landowners whose conflicts with their neighbors helped precipitate the Black Act and its severe penalties.

Military and Political Position

Cadogan distinguished himself in the War of the Spanish Succession, fought between 1701 and 1714, and in suppressing Jacobite revolts. George I made him a baron in 1716 and an earl in 1718. He also became an influential member of the Regency Council of Lords Justices, which presided over major affairs of state, and served as acting commander in chief. His military record and high office gave him a position of considerable influence within the Whig establishment.

Caversham and the Loss of Customary Rights

Cadogan bought about a thousand acres at Caversham, roughly twenty miles west of Windsor, where he built a grand house and ornate gardens and laid out a 240-acre deer park. The estate’s consolidation came at a cost to people living nearby: some were evicted, and customary rights to graze animals and gather peat and firewood were abrogated. The dispute was therefore not simply over deer or parkland. The estate’s expansion displaced practices on which local residents had traditionally relied.

Raids and the Black Act

Cadogan faced the wrath of the Blacks, who raided his park twice in 1722, first on January 1 and again in July. The attackers were mounted and armed; the first raid killed sixteen deer. These actions formed part of a broader pattern: the estates of other notable landowners and politicians were also raided. The attacks answered perceived Whig encroachments on common people’s rights, while exposing the conflict between the new political order’s claims to protect institutional limits and the interests of powerful estate owners.

In May 1723, Parliament passed the Black Act, creating fifty new offenses punishable by hanging. Carrying weapons and having a blackened face became crimes, and the law was soon amended so that blacking itself could be punished by hanging. Cadogan’s case belongs to the context of this governmental response: raids against his estate and those of other elites helped provoke a crackdown that sought to identify and punish the Blacks.

Enforcement and the Limits of Whig Power

Baptist Nunn organized informers in Windsor Forest, and arrests followed. Cadogan and Robert Walpole, who was both secretary of state and prime minister, were influential members of the Regency Council of Lords Justices. That council initiated the prosecution of local resident John Huntridge, accused in November 1724 of aiding deer stealers and supporting known Blacks. Walpole personally obtained evidence from an informant, Richard Blackburn, concerning Huntridge’s alleged guilt.

The prosecution nevertheless failed. After a trial lasting eight or nine hours, the jury acquitted Huntridge, partly because of irregularities in the collection of evidence. The verdict was striking because the jurors were major landowners and members of the gentry, who might have been expected to sympathize with Walpole and Cadogan. It demonstrated that even influential Whig officeholders could not simply secure a conviction through political power: the government was constrained by legal procedure and the principle that laws should not be applied arbitrarily.

Significance

Cadogan’s estate illustrates the tension between political influence and customary rights in the decades after the Glorious Revolution. His authority as an earl, general, and government figure did not prevent resistance when local rights were curtailed; nor did the Whigs’ dominance of Parliament make their power absolute. The larger episode ends not with the disappearance of repression—the Black Act remained on the statute books until its repeal in 1824, and many Blacks or sympathizers were hanged or transported to North America—but with a revealing limit on elite power: Huntridge’s acquittal showed that the rule of law could obstruct a prosecution backed by men at the center of government.