Black Act - Aftermath

Aftermath

Three of the Blacks' leaders had already been captured during the passage of the Act, although one later escaped, and a series of raids captured a total of 32 Blacks who were tried after the Act's passage in Reading. Four were sentenced to death for the killing of the gamekeeper's son, with the executions occurring on 15 June 1723. Trials for the others continued into 1724, and 7 more were captured and tried on 7 December. This marked the effective end of the Blacks as an organised group. At the time, it was thought that the Blacks were Jacobites, with Sir Robert Walpole encouraging these ideas to advance his own interests; the rationale for the Act has been described as "at least as much to do with the hysteria induced by Walpole...as with any need for new powers to fight deer-stealing".

Modern scholars have differed in their view of whether the Blacks were Jacobites or not. Some argue that the links between the Blacks and the Jacobites were "fantasies", and that the Blacks were "simply a mixed group of foresters: labourers, yeomen and some gentry defending their customary rights". Others, however, have claimed that the Blacks were closely connected with Jacobitism and that the Black Act was designed to combat this political threat.

In March 1723 Philip Caryll was arrested by the government for drinking to the Pretender's health in the home of the Pretender's former nurse in Portsea. An innkeeper of Horndean testified that Caryll held meetings at his inn with the former Tory MP Sir Henry Goring. Goring fled to France after the Jacobite Atterbury Plot was discovered, in August 1722. It quickly became known to the Dutch ambassador that Goring had requested from the Waltham Blacks support for a Jacobite rising. The ambassador wrote that the Blacks were originally a group of smugglers and that their Jacobite allegiance was the primary reason for the passing of the Black Act. Goring wrote to the Pretender on 6 May 1723:

I had settled an affair with five gentlemen of that country who were each of them to raise a regiment of dragoons well mounted and well armed which I knew they could easily do for the men had horses and homes of their own, and were, to say the truth most of them, the persons who some time since robbed the late Bishop of Winchester's Park, and have increased in their number ever since. They go by the name of the Waltham Blacks (tho few of them live there) which is a most loyal little town...I once saw two hundred and upwards of these Blacks in a body within half a mile of my house. They had been running brandy. There was 24 customs officers following them who they abused heartily and carried off their cargo. I am told there is no less than a thousand of them and indeed I believe they have now taken loyalty into their heads, and will I hope prove very useful.

As late as the Jacobite rising of 1745-46 newspapers were reporting that the Blacks had reappeared in Hampshire, stealing deer and robbing parks.

Sir Geoffrey Elton claimed that the Act was "passed not in order to suppress legitimate protest but because organized gangs were destroying deer and planning a Jacobite rising". The Act has been described as "severe and sanguinary", and L. Radzinowicz notes in the Cambridge Law Journal that "no other single statute passed during the eighteenth century equalled in severity, and none appointed the punishment of death in so many cases". Efforts to repeal it started in 1810, with comments by William Grant as part of a wider debate on penal reform; a formal recommendation for its repeal took almost a decade, with the publication of the Report on Criminal Laws in 1819 marking the first "official" suggestion that the law be removed from the statute books. Following the publication of the Report, Sir James Mackintosh introduced a law reform bill that would have repealed the Act, but although it passed through the House of Commons successfully it was strongly opposed in the Lords. In 1823 he submitted a memo to the House of Commons, again suggesting the repeal of the Act, and a few months later Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, introduced a bill that repealed the entirety of the Black Act except for the provisions that criminalised setting fire to houses and shooting a person. This passed, and came into effect on 8 July 1823.