386 Crime and the State
the under-secretaries and their agents managed the major effort to apprehend
and prosecute the large numbers of ‘Blacks’ who protested against the loss of
their customary rights in forest communities in Hampshire and Berkshire in the
early 1720 s.^52 The private interests of whig ministers and their supporters may
have been engaged in some of these prosecutions, as Thompson argued was the
case with respect to the ‘Blacks’. But, if so, that was a very small part of the ex-
planation for the government’s long and fervent commitment to the prosecu-
tion of its enemies. The administration saw its targets in a much broader
context. The State Papers are so dense with complaints from all over the coun-
try that it is clear Delafaye and his fellow under-secretaries were principally en-
gaged in responding to what they took to be threats to the Hanoverian
settlement itself, not merely to the private interests of its supporters. Their
records also suggest that they recognized they were engaged if not in a new
order of business, at least at a new level of activity.
This is most clearly revealed in a series of ‘Entry Books’, in which the under-
secretaries kept copies of warrants, correspondence with judges and magistrates
about pardons, as well as orders relating to prosecutions and related matters.
These books were begun early in Anne’s reign, presumably as a consequence of
the increase in the under-secretaries’ work after the Revolution of 1689 and as a
way of managing the heavier flow of business. They may not initially have con-
ceived of this series of volumes as dealing with a separate order of business, but
rather a way of keeping a better account of their work—a bureaucratic ration-
alization. But at the beginning of George I’s reign the secretaries’ office was so
deeply engaged in helping to organize prosecutions that they labelled this series
of records as ‘Criminal Entry Books’.^53 The volumes after 1715 provide graphic
evidence of the way the criminal work of the office increased during the reign of
George I, as did the work of the solicitor to the treasury who was also involved
in the administration’s efforts to invigorate the prosecution of riotous protest
and seditious talk and writing.^54 Administration officials were particularly
busy in the early 1720 s, dealing with the alarms surrounding the Layer and
Atterbury Plots. These incidents caused so much work for the treasury solicitor
that Cracherode was given an assistant in 1722 —Nicholas Paxton, who was
(^52) E. P. Thomson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act( 1975 ).
(^53) When these records were rebound in the nineteenth century they were all classified as ‘Criminal
Entry Books’ by the Public Record Office. That was entirely understandable since they deal broadly with
same kind of business and form a continuous series. But internal evidence suggests that it was only with
the volume beginning 1715 that they were given the name ‘Criminal’. These volumes came to be re-
garded as an official repository of the documents surrounding the pardon process. When he was sent a
petition to comment on without the usual formal reference to him signed by a secretary of state, William
Thomson wrote to the secretaries’ office to ensure that the reference be added before the case was con-
cluded because, he said, ‘all these matters are entred in books in ye office’ and with the addition ‘it will
appeare then in a regular manner’ (SP 36 / 26 / 186 ).
(^54) In a report to the lords of the treasury in 1719 , Cracherode listed twenty-eight cases then current
in which he had paid various sums for attorney’s and other fees from the money imprested to him for
‘public prosecutions’. They all involved suspected treason or seditious or riotous activities (SP 35 / 17 / 61 ).