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, partly on procedural grounds, since there were irregularities with the way the evidence had been collected.
Not all Blacks or those who sympathized with them were as lucky as Huntridge. Though some others were also acquitted or had their convictions commuted, many were hanged or transported to the penal colony of choice at the time, North America; the law in fact stayed on the statute books until it was repealed in 1824. Yet Huntridge’ s victory is remarkable. The jury was made up not of Huntridge’ s peers, but of major landowners and gentry, who ought to have sympathized with Walpole. But this was no longer the seventeenth century, where the Court of Star Chamber would simply follow the wishes of Stuart monarchs and act as an open tool of repression against their opponents, and where kings could remove judges whose decisions they did not like. Now the Whigs also had to abide by the rule of law, the principle that laws should not be applied selectively or arbitrarily and that nobody is above the law.
THE EVENTS SURROUNDING the Black Act would show that the Glorious Revolution had created the rule of law, and that this notion was stronger in England and Britain, and the elites were far more constrained by it than they themselves imagined. Notably, the rule of law is not the same as rule by law. Even if the Whigs could pass a harsh, repressive law