Where human-wildlife conflicts lead to illegal persecution, wide ranging impacts for recovering predator populations can ensue. They may include reducing vital rates such as reproduction as well as survival. Illegal activities and their impacts are difficult to quantify. Nonetheless, often linked to gamebird shooting management, illegal persecution of raptors notoriously occurs in the UK, in detriment to several species’ distributions and abundance. How its impact varies with population density deserves more study. We examined the impact of persecution proxies on reproductive traits of northern goshawks Accipiter gentilis in northern UK. We found no evidence of an effect of the persecution proxies or of rainfall on goshawk reproduction. However, there was a strong negative density-dependence effect on productivity. Despite the impact of persecution on reproduction being certainly underestimated in our data, the overall growth of the goshawk population indicates that it at least partially compensated for prevailing persecution levels. The observation that goshawks produced more chicks in low density neighbourhoods must have contributed to this compensation. Our study extends previous work by elucidating the spatial scale of density-dependence. This suggested that density effects extended beyond typical nearest neighbour distances, implying that individuals may be interacting and interfering with a wider section of the population than previously thought. Should the population continue to increase in size, density-dependence will probably play an increasing role in population regulation.