Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

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 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,