Why Nations Fail

11.
THE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE
T
HE
 B
LACK
 A
CT
W
INDSOR
C
ASTLE
, located just west of London, is one of
the great royal residencies of England. In the early
eighteenth century, the castle was surrounded by a great
forest, full of deer, though little of this remains today. One of
the keepers of the forest in 1722, Baptist Nunn, was locked
in to a violent conflict. On June 27 he recorded,
Blacks came in the night shot at me 3 times 2
bullets into my chamber window and [I]
agreed to pay them 5 guineas at Crowthorne
on the 30th.
Another entry in Nunn’s diary read, “A fresh surprise. One
appeared disguised with a message of destruction.”
Who were these mysterious “Blacks” making threats,
shooting at Nunn, and demanding money? The Blacks
were groups of local men who had their faces “blacked” to
conceal their appearance at night. They appeared widely
across southern England in this period, killing and maiming
deer and other animals, burning down haystacks and
barns, and destroying fences and fish ponds. On the
surface it was sheer lawlessness, but it wasn’t. Illegal
hunting (poaching) deer in lands owned by the king or other
members of the aristocracy had been going on for a long
time. In the 1640s, during the Civil War, the entire
population of deer at Windsor Castle was killed. After the
Restoration in 1660, when Charles II came to the throne,
the deer park was restocked. But the Blacks were not just
poaching deer to eat; they also engaged in wanton
destruction. To what end?
A crucial building block of the Glorious Revolution of
1688 was the pluralistic nature of interests represented in

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Parliament. None of the merchants, industrialists, gentry, or
aristocracy allied with William of Orange and then with the
Hanoverian monarchs, who succeeded Queen Anne in
1714, were strong enough to impose their will unilaterally.
Attempts at restoring the Stuart monarchy continued
throughout much of the eighteenth century. After James II’s
death in 1701, his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, the
“Old Pretender,” was recognized as the lawful heir to the
English Crown by France, Spain, the pope, and supporters
of the Stuart monarchy in England and Scotland, the so-
called Jacobites. In 1708 the Old Pretender attempted to
take back the throne with support of French troops, but was
unsuccessful. In the ensuing decades there would be
several Jacobite revolts, including major ones in 1715 and
1719. In 1745–46, the Old Pretender’s son, Charles
Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender,” made an attempt to
take back the throne, but his forces were defeated by the
British army.
The Whig political party, which as we saw (
this page
–
this
page
) was founded in the 1670s to represent the new
mercantile and economic interests, was the main
organization behind the Glorious Revolution, and the Whigs
dominated Parliament from 1714 to 1760. Once in power,
they were tempted to use their newly found position to prey
on the rights of others, to have their cake and eat it, too.
They were no different from the Stuart kings, but their power
was far from absolute. It was constrained both by
competing groups in Parliament, particularly the Tory Party
which had formed to oppose the Whigs, and by the very
institutions that they had fought to introduce to strengthen
Parliament and to prevent the emergence of a new
absolutism and the return of the Stuarts. The pluralistic
nature of society that emerged from the Glorious Revolution
also meant that the population at large, even those without
formal representation in Parliament, had been empowered,
and “blacking” was precisely a response by the common
people to perceptions that the Whigs were exploiting their
position.
The case of William Cadogan, a successful general in
the War of the Spanish Succession between 1701 and
1714 and in the suppression of the Jacobite revolts,
illustrates the sort of encroachment of common people’s

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rights by the Whigs that led to blacking. George I made
Cadogan a baron in 1716 and then an earl in 1718. He was
also an influential member of the Regency Council of Lords
Justices, which presided over major affairs of state, and he
served as the acting commander in chief. He bought a
large property of about a thousand acres at Caversham,
about twenty miles west of Windsor. There he built a grand
house and ornate gardens and laid out a 240-acre deer
park. Yet this property was consolidated by encroaching on
the rights of those around the estate. People were evicted,
and their traditional rights to graze animals and collect peat
and firewood were abrogated. Cadogan faced the wrath of
the Blacks. On January 1, 1722, and again in July, the park
was raided by mounted and armed Blacks. The first attack
killed sixteen deer. Earl Cadogan was not alone. The
estates of many notable landowners and politicians were
also raided by the Blacks.
The Whig government was not going to take this lying
down. In May 1723, Parliament passed the Black Act,
which created an extraordinary fifty new offenses that were
punishable by hanging. The Black Act made it a crime not
only to carry weapons but to have a blackened face. The
law in fact was soon amended to make blacking
punishable by hanging. The Whig elites went about
implementing the law with gusto. Baptist Nunn set up a
network of informers in Windsor Forest to discover the
identity of the Blacks. Soon several were arrested. The
transition from arrest to hanging ought to have been a
straightforward affair. After all, the Black Act had already
been enacted, the Whigs were in charge of Parliament,
Parliament was in charge of the country, and the Blacks
were acting directly contrary to the interests of some
powerful Whigs. Even Sir Robert Walpole, secretary of
state, then prime minister—and like Cadogan, another
influential member of the Regency Council of the Lords
Justices—was involved. He had a vested interest in
Richmond Park in southwest London, which had been
created out of common land by Charles I. This park also
encroached upon the traditional rights of local residents to
graze their animals, hunt hares and rabbits, and collect
firewood. But the ending of these rights appears to have
been rather laxly enforced, and grazing and hunting

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continued, until Walpole arranged for his son to become the
park ranger. At this time, the park was closed off, a new
wall was constructed, and man traps were installed.
Walpole liked hunting deer, and he had a lodge built for
himself at Houghton, within the park. The animosity of local
Blacks was soon ignited.
On November 10, 1724, a local resident outside the
park, John Huntridge, was accused of aiding deer stealers
and abetting known Blacks, both crimes punishable by
hanging. The prosecution of Huntridge came right from the
top, initiated by the Regency Council of Lords Justices,
which Walpole and Cadogan dominated. Walpole went so
far as to extract evidence himself as to Huntridge’s guilt
from an informant, Richard Blackburn. Conviction ought to
have been a foregone conclusion, but it wasn’t. After a trial
of eight or nine hours, the jury found Huntridge innocent,