Historian of the Isle of Man, whose Land of Home Rule remains one of the two standard nineteenth-century accounts.

The book appeared in 1893 and is cited throughout the Manx literature that followed. A. W. Moore, prefacing his own schoolbook history, sent readers who wanted a completer view of the whole course of Manx history to the fuller works written by Sir Spencer Walpole and by himself. Later compilers use Walpole's chapters as the standard reference: chapter XIII for smuggling and the attitude of Tynwald to it, chapter XIV for the sale of the Island, chapter XVII for the modern legislature.

His formulation on smuggling is the one Manx writers quote. Smuggling, he wrote, paradoxical as the statement may seem, has in every country been the creation of law, since the difficulties law imposed and the exactions it levied on the trader had alone called the smuggler into being and made his calling profitable.