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The Waltham Black Act and Jacobitism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Eveline Cruickshanks  and
Howard Erskine-Hill
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Extract

Interest in the origin of Walpole's Black Act (9 Geo. 1, c. 22), or the Waltham Black Act, as it was actually called, has arisen from work by Pat Rogers and E. P. Thompson. It was an act of exceptional severity, making no less than some fifty new offenses capital, and its origins have been debated by legal as well as by political historians. While Rogers stressed the criminality of the Blacks, Thompson set the act in a sociohistorical context, suggesting that its importance was in assisting the placemen of the Hanoverian establishment and Walpole's administration to a stronger hold on lands in the Black areas, at the expense of older and smaller gentry and the usage rights of yeomen farmers, tenantry, and the poor. In Thompson's argument the Black Act has exemplary significance for the tendency of greater Whig land owners toward more efficiently exploitative procedures, backed by ferocious legislation. The involvement in Blacking of Alexander Pope's kinsmen Charles and Michael Rackett, stressed by both Rogers and Thompson, constituted a point of additional interest.

The difference between Rogers and Thompson over whether Pope felt shame at his relatives' predicament turns in part on the political dimension of Blacking. Aside from the politics of conflict over land usage, Thompson rejected a link between the Blacks and the Jacobites, even though the act was introduced in the midst of legislation against the Atterbury conspiracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , July 1985 , pp. 358 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1985

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References

1 Rogers, Pat, “The Waltham Blacks and the Black Act,” Historical Journal 17 (1974): 465–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters (London, 1975)Google Scholar.

2 See Styles's, John comments in his review article “Criminal Records,” Historical Journal 20 (1977): 378–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We are obliged to him for suggestions on the contents of this article.

3 Thompson, pp. 145, 68–72, 196; The History of the Blacks in Hampshire (London, 1723), pp. 6–7Google Scholar; Rogers, p. 484.

4 Windsor Castle, Royal Archives, Stuart MS 67/16. In transcribing this letter, archaic abbreviations have been expanded but no other changes made. The long section in italics was printed in Glover, J. H., ed., The Stuart Papers (London, 1847)Google Scholar, in an appendix to letter no. 24, pp. 97–98.

5 Sir John St. Aubyn, third baronet, an M.P. from Cornwall from 1722 to 1744, was an active Jacobite (see Sedgwick, R., The House of Commons, 1715–1754, 2 vols. [London, 1970], 2:401–2Google Scholar; and Lambert, Sheila, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, 147 vols. [Wilmington, Del., 1975–1976], vol. 3, app. F.11)Google Scholar. Lansdowne, 's “Letter to Sir John St Aubyn” (A Letter from a Nobleman Abroad to His Friend in England. On the Approaching General Election [London, 1722])Google Scholar, of which copies survive in the British Library and in the Rashleigh MSS in the Cornwall Record Office, was a thinly disguised piece of propaganda in favor of a Stuart restoration and was circulated at the time.

6 John Plunkett, Atterbury's principal agent, who died in 1738 (see Fritz, P., The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 [Toronto, 1975], pp. 71, 96)Google Scholar.

7 See the Peregrine ed. of Thompson, 's Whigs and Hunters (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 305Google Scholar.

8 Boyer, Abel, The Political State of Great Britain, 60 vols. (London, 1711–1740), 25:667Google Scholar.

9 Horace Walpole to Lord Townshend, May 11/22, 1722, “2nd Visct. Townshend, Secretary of State papers 1721–6,” Townshend MSS (the Marquess Townshend, Raynham Hall, Norfolk). We are grateful to the marquess for permission to consult his family archives.

10 British Library (BL), Additional (Add.) MS 17677 KKK5, fols. 548–49. We should like to thank the Algemeen Rijksarchief for supplying a copy of the original of this dispatch (Brief L'Hermitage aan Staten-Generaal, no. C/349/Th.h). L'Hermitage telescopes Goring's and Caryll's names into Sir Philip Goring.

11 Pfister, C., “Le Port de Dunkerque de 1662 à 1789” (maitrise thesis, Université de Lille III, 1981), pp. 270–98Google Scholar; Archives Nationales, Marine B2 267, no. 797.

12 Hay, D., Linebaugh, P., and Thompson, E. P., eds., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975), p. 148Google Scholar.

13 Journals of the House of Commons, 18:585, 694Google Scholar; 19:47, 51, 53, 270, 283, 287, 453; 5 Geo. 1, c. 11.

14 BL, Add. MS 17677 KKK5, fols. 548–49.

15 Calendar of Treasury Books, 10:23Google Scholar; 13:69, 70, 172, 259.

16 See Sedgwick (n. 5 above), 1:64–65, 111.

17 BL, Add. MS 28226, fols. 136, 138, Add. MS 28228, fols. 142-46, and Add. MS 5711, p. 63.

18 See Erskine-Hill, H., The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response (London, 1975), pp. 73–78Google Scholar and (for the Carylls generally) chaps. 2, 3.

19 Public Record Office (PRO), State Papers (SP) 35/42/309, 367, 369.

20 Sedgwick, 2:72.

21 PRO, SP 35/42/302; Lambert, ed. (n. 5 above), vol. 3, app. F. 11.

22 Sherburn, G., ed., The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1956), 5:3–4Google Scholar.

23 Boyer (n. 8 above), 25:432–36.

24 Ibid., pp. 428–32; Cambridge University Library, Cholmondeley (Houghton) MS 69/15; Journal of the House of Lords, 22:155Google Scholar.

25 PRO, SP 35/43/223.

26 BL, Add. MS 17677 KKK 5, fols. 548–49.

27 BL, Add. MS 28228, fol. 431.