The right to petition was a crucial element in shaping modern UK political culture. A major historiographical theme of recent accounts has been the emphasis on the taming or closing down of popular politics, as a result of later nineteenth-century electoral reforms, the development of organised political parties, and the rise of print culture.Footnote ¹ Others, notably Jon Lawrence, have argued that while elite politicians and parties sought to tame popular politics, it is far from evident that they succeeded in doing so.Footnote ² The problem remains that these accounts have conflated electoral culture with political culture.

The evolution of the right to petition as an open, popular right calls into question revisionist histories of nineteenth-century political culture, which, seeking to debunk older narratives, have emphasised how the political nation was defined in an exclusive way through electoral reforms and debates about the franchise. In both the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts, the official definition of the enfranchised male political subject, the argument runs, was shaped by the exclusion of others, including women, colonial subjects, or ‘unrespectable’ working-class men.Footnote ³ Yet the openness of the right to petition to all subjects meant that the political nation was much wider than those who possessed the vote, and it is misleading to conclude that franchise debates defined the Victorian nation. Subjecthood, recently recognised by historians of empire as an important marker of status, conferred rights, one of the most important of which was the right to petition.Footnote ⁴ Subjecthood is a more useful conceptual tool for understanding nineteenth-century politics than an anachronistic concept of citizenship centred on electoral rights. Examining the right to petition reveals a more open, inclusive side to the political system and offers powerful evidence against the notion of a closing down of political culture, while reminding us that there was more to popular politics than electoral culture.

The debates over the right to petition mattered. Whereas the right to vote depended on the positive sanction of Parliament through statute, the right to petition was permissive and malleable, always with the potential to be reshaped through the contests between petitioners and parliamentarians. What was at stake was who could petition, what constituted petitions, how people could petition, and what impact petitions should have in Parliament. These debates, while often taking the form of seemingly arcane discussions over procedure, had a much broader significance as they framed the parameters for the most popular and widespread form of interaction between Parliament and people. Parliamentarians successfully defined the right to petition as a right of presentation. This is why petitioners regularly complained that their prayers (or requests) had been ignored or treated with indifference by the House, although this rarely led them to cease petitioning.Footnote ⁵ In this way, the right to petition was narrowed and closed to uphold parliamentary authority against popular pressure.

Yet the limitation of the influence of petitions within the House redirects our attention to the preceding stages of the petitioning process, and here the right to petition was broadened in every respect. The result was that petitioning was transformed into a form of mass political participation and mobilisation. The right to petition legitimated other political activities, making petitioning the linchpin for a wider repertoire of popular politics and collective action. Constitutional lawyers today class the right to petition an ‘associative’ right alongside, although of lesser importance than, the freedoms of assembly and association, but in the nineteenth century the right to petition was, as the inhabitants of Chichester proclaimed in 1795, ‘the cornerstone’ of these other popular liberties.Footnote ⁶

The evolution of the right to petition in Britain was unique, shaped by precedent and parliamentary practice, or what legal scholars call the ‘invisible constitution’, rather than codified constitutional rights.Footnote ⁷ In polities across North America and Europe, the right to petition was established as part of a process of ‘rapid constitutionalization’ from the late eighteenth century.Footnote ⁸ Constitutions drafted during the ‘age of revolutions’ established the right to petition as part of their new institutional architecture, as in the USA’s Bill of Rights (1789–1791), France (1793), Portugal (1822, 1826), the Netherlands (1798, 1801), Belgium (1831), Denmark (1849), Italy (1848), and the Frankfurt constitution (1849).Footnote ⁹ The 1812 constitution in Spain did not explicitly contain a right to petition, but the emergence of the practice of public petitioning was framed within a discourse of natural rights, in contrast to traditional petitions (representaciones) for the redress of sectional, private, or corporate grievances.Footnote ¹⁰

Despite these obvious differences, the right to petition offered the same challenge to the Commons as it did to other nineteenth-century legislatures elected under a limited suffrage. Petitioners could draw on the language of popular sovereignty to challenge the legitimacy of Parliament by claiming to speak for a people broader and larger than that which elected the legislature.Footnote ¹¹ For this reason, legislatures founded in revolutionary contexts frequently granted the constitutional right to petition as one of their first acts, but then qualified that right once their authority had been established. One of the common restrictions was insisting on personal individual signatures to prevent associations from signing on behalf of others, such as in the Le Chapelier law passed by the French National Assembly in 1791.Footnote ¹² In Belgium (1830), revolutionary Italy (1848),and Austro-Hungary (1867), the right to petition under a collective name was limited to legally constituted organisations.Footnote ¹³ These restrictions sought to prevent associations or clubs from claiming to represent the people or any group apart from the individuals in the signatory list: only the legislature represented the people or nation.Footnote ¹⁴

Elite politicians in the UK similarly sought to resist the challenge of petitioners invoking popular sovereignty. Lord John Russell argued in 1823 that ‘The rights we have now been stating, viz. those of printing and petitioning, invest the people with no actual power or authority.’Footnote ¹⁵ Petitioners constantly sought to expand the meaning of the right to petition, while politicians interpreted it more narrowly. In this vein, Sir Robert Peel asserted in 1839 that ‘The public had an undoubted right to present petitions, and it was unquestionably the duty of the House to hear those petitions; but … the House had a right to determine in what way it could most conveniently discharge that duty.’Footnote ¹⁶ Yet the distinctive, permissive nature of the right to petition in the UK always left it open to contestation and reinterpretation by petitioners.

As this chapter will show, during the nineteenth century, the right to petition was defined with greater clarity through interactions between petitioners and politicians. First, the formal right to petition was widely acknowledged as open to all subjects. Second, there was little restriction on the content of petitions to Parliament. Third, after the 1820s, there were few limitations on popular assembly and association in relation to petitioning. Finally, parliamentarians asserted their authority over petitioners by resisting the attempt to expand the right of petition into a right of presence or discussion. However, such closures were never final, and always open to future challenge. Overall, the right to petition was redefined and broadened into a popular, increasingly absolute right, which explains why it provided a universal basis for UK subjects’ political participation during a period in which other rights were limited.

Popular Constitutionalism and the Right to Petition

The politics of the nineteenth century has been rewritten with popular constitutionalism as one of its central threads. Seventeenth-century lawyers and theorists developed the concept of the ancient constitution based on common law and historical precedent.Footnote ¹⁷ In the hands of Levellers and later radicals, popular constitutionalism became a powerful rhetorical resource with which to defend liberties and to appeal for a restoration of lost rights in the name of a people excluded from political power.Footnote ¹⁸ This discourse, it has been argued, was used by radicals, Chartists, Gladstonian Liberals, early founders of the Labour party, and suffragists, across the long nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ Constitutionalism was equally important to currents of popular Toryism and Conservatism.Footnote ²⁰

However, the practice that most embodied the idea of the historic liberties of British subjects – petitioning – has received scant attention. By contrast, US legal scholars have given far greater emphasis to the Anglo-American development of the right to petition, seeking to excavate and rehabilitate it as ‘a robust, essential, and institutionalized democratic practice’.Footnote ²¹ Examining the right to petition deepens and broadens existing understandings of popular constitutionalism by shifting the focus from discourse to practice, and by showing how these were reshaped by the interactions between politicians, institutions, and the people.

Because petitioners grounded their appeals on the traditional rights of subjects, the evolution of the right to petition needs to be situated within a longer historical context. Contemporary constitutional historians, such as the parliamentary clerk Erskine May, argued that the right to petition had been ‘uninterruptedly exercised from very early times’ dating back to Magna Carta.Footnote ²² However, the establishment of the right to petition was ‘largely the work of the 17th century’.Footnote ²³ To prevent a recurrence of the explosive petitioning of the 1640s, in 1661 an Act against Tumultuous Petitioning was passed.Footnote ²⁴ Henceforth, more than twenty people could not sign petitions to Parliament or the king for alterations in church or state unless three or more magistrates or a majority of a grand jury had approved them, and no more than ten signatories could present petitions. The final landmark establishing the right to petition was clause 5 of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which declared ‘That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.’Footnote ²⁵

While the seventeenth century established a right to petition, it was ambiguous, and contested for much of the century after.Footnote ²⁶ The Bill of Rights guaranteed the right to petition the monarch, not Parliament, and it remained unclear how far this was qualified by the 1661 Act, a contradiction noted by the lawyer and jurist William Blackstone.Footnote ²⁷ The Bill of Rights guaranteed an absolute right to petition the monarch, but the 1661 Act placed limits on the number of signatures and the number of petitioners who could present petitions. At the 1781 trial of Lord George Gordon over the riots linked with the Protestant Association’s presentation of an anti-Catholic petition in the previous year, Lord Justice Mansfield clarified matters by ruling that the 1661 Act ‘was in full force’ and that the 1689 Bill of Rights ‘does not mean to meddle with it at all’.Footnote ²⁸

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, politicians, commentators, and petitioners interpreted the right to petition within the general framework of popular constitutionalism.Footnote ²⁹ Blackstone regarded the right to petition as one of the five liberties enjoyed by English subjects.Footnote ³⁰ Parliamentarians increasingly conceived the right to petition as a popular right. Henry Bright, MP for Bristol, declared in 1821 that ‘of all the rights possessed by the people, the right of addressing the Crown and of petitioning parliament was the most valuable … it was the right of the people to represent their grievances by petition … it was the very life-blood of the country.’Footnote ³¹

Petitioners from across the UK asserted that that the right to petition was, as the inhabitants of Warrington declared in 1817, ‘the birthright of every Briton’.Footnote ³² In 1837, the London Working Men’s Association claimed ‘that the right is indefeasible and just, and has been exercised by the whole British people … in all the past histories of the Governments of their Country until now’.Footnote ³³ This emphasis on British subjects is important as it shows that popular constitutionalism was not just the property of English subjects, but was also claimed by Scottish and Irish petitioners. In 1838, the inhabitants of Droundariff, county Cork, argued that ‘the right of Petition [is] the inalienable privilege of all of the subjects of the British Crown’.Footnote ³⁴ In 1795, and perhaps alluding to the seventeenth-century Scottish covenanting tradition, the inhabitants of Paisley contended that the right to petition was a liberty, ‘which their Ancestors earned with many a Struggle and purchased at the Price of much Blood’.Footnote ³⁵

As these examples attest, UK political discourse revolved around ‘the constitution as the creation of historical experience’ and followed a different trajectory to other contemporary polities in Europe or North America where political cultures were reshaped by revolutionary upheaval.Footnote ³⁶ As Angus Hawkins has put it, British ‘subjects (not “citizens”) enjoyed legal entitlements (not “natural rights”) bestowed by parliament (not a codified constitution)’.Footnote ³⁷ Elite politicians and commentators, as has been well documented, frequently contrasted the UK’s liberal constitutionalism with autocratic, revolutionary, or democratic polities in Europe and North America.Footnote ³⁸ Understanding the unique nature of the right to petition in the UK emphasises the distinctiveness of its political culture. Because the right to petition was permissive it was defined with increasing clarity through the interactions between authority and petitioners. Examining these interactions means shifting from analysing the discourse of popular constitutionalism to its practice.

The Right of Subjects to Petition

The right to petition was a popular right formally open to all British subjects and provided an inclusive basis for political participation. This does not mean that all subjects had an equal opportunity to petition, equal resources when they did so, or that their petitions were accorded equal weight by politicians. The formal equality of all subjects to petition coexisted with inequalities of power, status, and wealth.

The right to petition was not the preserve of the respectable or propertied classes; it was not limited by literacy, the franchise, property, or economic status. Contrary to suggestions that the right to petition was limited by literacy, the right of illiterate subjects to sign petitions with a mark or ‘x’ had been confirmed by a resolution in 1689 and was repeatedly reaffirmed by parliamentarians.Footnote ³⁹ Charles James Fox declared in 1795 that ‘a man’s mark was admissible; for why should a man be proscribed from having any opinion because he has not had an opportunity to learn to write?’Footnote ⁴⁰ Over two decades later, Henry Brougham argued that denying the right to petition to illiterate men and women would ‘be inconsistent with the privileges which the Constitution guaranteed to all British subjects’.Footnote ⁴¹

There is no evidence to support the reactionary contention of one 1796 pamphleteer that the right to petition was only held by the ‘constituent part’ of the nation, that is voters.Footnote ⁴² Petitioners rarely defined their collective identity in electoral terms, preferring more demotic, inclusive terms such as ‘inhabitants’. Of the 953,926 public petitions recorded by the Select Committee on Public Petitions from 1833 to 1918, only 576 (0.06 per cent) were styled as exclusively from parliamentary electors.Footnote ⁴³ While conceptions of the franchise, and other entitlements, may have been frequently linked to property,Footnote ⁴⁴ the right to petition was not.

The absence of qualifications in terms of property or voting rights explains why the right to petition became a popular mechanism for women’s political agency during a period (1832–1918) in which the parliamentary franchise was explicitly gendered.Footnote ⁴⁵ There was a long tradition of women petitioning Parliament dating back to the late medieval period.Footnote ⁴⁶ By the late eighteenth century, we can find evidence of women signing parliamentary petitions in defence of their specific economic interests. Surviving petitions to the House of Lords against the 1785 Anglo-Irish commercial resolutions reveal a number of women signing in their capacity as business owners.Footnote ⁴⁷

However, the position of women petitioning collectively on political issues had uncertain status in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This was why pioneering agitations such as anti-slavery typically framed their activity within the discourse of a ‘woman’s mission’ to address moral and religious questions as an extension of their supposedly ‘natural’ feminine character.Footnote ⁴⁸ These campaigns played a critical role in entrenching the right of women to petition collectively on political issues. When the Whig Earl Fitzwilliam presented an anti-corn law petition from the ‘Female Inhabitants’ of the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1841, peers questioned the legitimacy of a petition from poor, illiterate women. But the petition was nonetheless received.Footnote ⁴⁹ Parliamentarians accepted the right of women to petition collectively, although, as in all cases, they retained the right to ‘judge the degree of weight which ought to be attached to those petitions’.Footnote ⁵⁰ As this example shows, the response of parliamentarians remained heavily shaped by gender, but the right of women to petition was no longer in doubt. As temperance campaigners declared in 1853: ‘Englishwomen have the right of petition to the Legislature’, and ‘the voice of women by petition was often heard, and always influentially’.Footnote ⁵¹

Finally, the right to petition Parliament was possessed by colonial subjects and was not formally restricted by race. Petitions from citizens of other countries, however, were not received by the Commons, or the monarch.Footnote ⁵² In her study of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Hannah Weiss Muller has shown that subjecthood provided a means to incorporate inhabitants of formerly French territories into the British empire. Among the liberties valued by these newly admitted British subjects was the right to petition.Footnote ⁵³ Other studies have shown that petitions, particularly to colonial authorities, were one of the political tactics available to colonised peoples.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet not all colonial subjects had equal opportunities or resources to petition. Many of the high-profile examples of petitions to Parliament from India came from, or purported to come from, well-organised groups of ‘respectable Natives’ or ‘principal Natives’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similarly, an 1827 petition regarding ‘People of Colour in the West Indies’ signed by ‘several Freeholders, of the mixed race’, described the petitioners as possessing ‘wealth and respectability’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The right of colonial subjects to petition was not restricted by language. Petitions from subjects in other languages were accepted providing that they were accompanied by an English translation that was vouchsafed by an MP.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, signatures from colonial subjects, such as Indian petitioners, were sometimes classified as illegible by parliamentary clerks and not recorded in the figures enumerated in the SCPP’s Reports, underlining how the voices of colonised peoples could be discounted through the parliamentary process.Footnote ⁵⁸

Beyond inequalities of access and the handling of petitions by parliamentary officials, there were other important reasons why the right to petition had clear limits as a tool for the political agency of colonial subjects.Footnote ⁵⁹ The right to petition for colonial subjects was doubled-edged; it was one of the few rights they possessed, yet it also underlined their subordinate status and lack of representation. An 1879 petition from the British Indian Association of Calcutta stated that ‘they have no voice in Parliament or in the administration of their revenues, but they enjoy the dearly-prized right of petition’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Like Roman subjects, the Liberal politician and intellectual James Bryce argued, Indians could only appeal through petitions to the centre, including a Parliament ‘in which the Indian subjects of the Crown have not been, and cannot be represented’.Footnote ⁶¹

Overall, the universality of the right to petition provided a minimal basis for political participation by British subjects, although the exercise of the right to petition, and the reception of petitions were shaped by inequalities of wealth, power, and status, despite the formal equality of the petitioners.

Limitations on Petitions: Form and Content

There were remarkably few restrictions on the content of petitions addressed to Parliament. Even the high Tory Lord Chancellor Lord Eldon argued in 1825 that ‘if their lordships were to observe upon every term contained in each petition, they would subject them to a trial which, not even their own debates, if dealt with in the same way, could bear’.Footnote ⁶² Most limitations on petitions related to form rather than content, with one important exception being that petitions were not allowed to refer to parliamentary debates.Footnote ⁶³

The unreformed House was particularly sensitive to the language of radical petitions, which led one pamphleteer to complain that ‘it requires a courtier’s ingenuity to petition the Parliament and not offend’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The petition of the freeholders of Middlesex, presented on 2 May 1810, was rejected 58–139, probably for accusing MPs of ‘notorious’ trafficking in seats.Footnote ⁶⁵ The 1818 reform petition from Royton, which accused the House of ‘selfish principles’, was rejected 14–43.Footnote ⁶⁶ An 1822 petition from Newcastle-upon-Tyne was rejected by over 100 votes for ‘imputing notorious and avowed corruption to this House’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The 1831 reform petition from Rye was withdrawn by its radical parliamentary sponsor, after the Speaker, Manners Sutton, complained of its ‘violent and offensive expressions’, including referring to ‘the upholders of corruption in the hon. House’.Footnote ⁶⁸ After the Lords defeated the second English reform bill in October 1831, the radical Henry Hunt presented a petition praying for the bishops, who had voted overwhelmingly against reform, to be removed from the upper house. This led the Whig Leader of the Commons, Lord Althorp, to assert that ‘a petition … declaring that one branch of the legislature had not the right of voting, was a petition which he thought that the House could not properly receive’, prompting the withdrawal of the petition.Footnote ⁶⁹ The reformed House was less sensitive than its unreformed predecessor. A rare exception was the Prittlewell petition in favour of the supposed claimant to the Tichborne baronetcy, which was rejected in 1875 for ‘offensive imputations upon’ the judiciary, the Speaker, and the ‘proceedings of the House’.Footnote ⁷⁰

The extent to which Parliament rejected or forced the withdrawal of critical petitions should not be exaggerated, however. Relatively few petitions were rejected for their content, even during the height of post-1815 radicalism. In the exceptional year of 1817, of several hundred reform petitions, thirty-six were rejected for language, but many more were rejected for breaches in form.Footnote ⁷¹ The following year, only 2 reform petitions out of almost 1,500 were rejected.Footnote ⁷² Parliamentarians gave wide latitude to the language of petitioners, and radicals quickly learned from the experience of petitions rejected early in the 1817 session and tailored their tone accordingly.Footnote ⁷³

Provided they satisfied parliamentary procedure, radical demands, such as for the abolition of the House of Lords (1848) were received.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1860, when a petition criticised the Lords for infringing the rights of the Commons, the Speaker, Denison, ruled that ‘there can be no objection to receive the petition. There is nothing in it which could render it informal.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, Denison’s successor, Brand, did not rule an 1878 petition, which called for the impeachment of the Prime Minister Lord Beaconsfield, out of order.Footnote ⁷⁶

Parliament not only became increasingly permissive towards critical petitions, it also relaxed some of the significant restrictions on the content of petitions. A convention dating back to 1733 held that ‘petitions against taxation now pending could not be received’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This precedent insulated Parliament’s voting of supplies from popular pressure by prohibiting petitions regarding money bills or taxes for the current year. This convention was closely policed by successive Speakers, with Liverpool merchants, West country wool manufacturers, the Corporation of London, and East Anglian farmers among the early nineteenth-century petitioners to fall foul of this precedent.Footnote ⁷⁸ The convention did not prevent petitioning against taxes, as the opposition to the renewal of income tax in 1816 emphasised, but did constrain petitioners in certain cases.Footnote ⁷⁹ The custom was finally swept away in 1842 after the campaign of the radical MP Thomas Duncombe, against an ‘inconsistent and almost obsolete practice’, which prevented petitions being received against Peel’s reintroduction of income tax.Footnote ⁸⁰

Most withdrawals or rejections were for formal breaches rather than content, and these precedents shaped the material form and practice of petitioning. With dubious validity, a 1656 precedent prohibiting the printing of private petitions before their presentation in Parliament, was used to reject radical printed public petitions in favour of parliamentary reform from the citizens of Norwich in 1793 and the inhabitants of Nottingham in 1813.Footnote ⁸¹ The latter case prompted the radical Major Cartwright to unsuccessfully petition for the reception of printed petitions.Footnote ⁸² Undeterred, in 1817, Cartwright organised a national petitioning campaign that sought to flood the Commons with printed reform petitions.Footnote ⁸³ Sir Francis Burdett, the radical MP for Westminster, presented 468 printed petitions, but they were rejected after an adjourned debate.Footnote ⁸⁴ Observing that printed petitions were received by the Crown and the Lords, Cartwright protested in vain that ‘the people have a right to petition in printed form, and it is, for a variety of reasons, the best way’.Footnote ⁸⁵ By the early twentieth century, the precedent was interpreted by Parliament as prohibiting the reception of lithographed or type-written, as well as printed, petitions.Footnote ⁸⁶ The prohibition on printed petitions did not stop the public circulation of printed petition texts, yet the comparison with the USA, where Congress admitted printed petitions, suggests that the Commons’ restriction prevented even greater standardisation of the content of petitions within mass campaigns, and limited the ability of petitioners to make typographical innovations.Footnote ⁸⁷

Parliamentary precedents, rather than the 1661 Act shaped the culture of signing petitions, because, as one commentator observed, ‘the regulations in question have long been disregarded in practice, and the Houses of Parliament receive without objection petitions however numerously signed’.Footnote ⁸⁸ A resolution of 1689 stated that all petitions had to be authentically signed by petitioners through writing their names or marks.Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1774, the House made it a breach of privilege to add the names of individuals to a petition without their authorisation.Footnote ⁹⁰ Even if individuals had given their authority for their names to be added this was prohibited after an 1808 resolution.Footnote ⁹¹ This resolution was passed after Henry Grattan presented a petition from the ‘Roman Catholics of Ireland’, in which some individuals had ‘had their signatures affixed by authority’ rather than signing personally.Footnote ⁹² In defending this practice, Grattan recalled a petition received by the late Irish Parliament that ‘had 40 or 50,000 signatures, of which only 7,000 were original, yet that produced no difficulty’.Footnote ⁹³ However, he was compelled to withdraw the petition. The important consequence was that political campaigns could not repeatedly mobilise a paper army of names. For the same reason, petitions from public meetings signed by the chairman, were counted as ‘the petition of the individual signing’.Footnote ⁹⁴

The House occasionally investigated petitions that were deemed to have fictitious or forged signatures.Footnote ⁹⁵ If evidence of a breach of privilege was proven, the Speaker could order the imprisonment of individuals.Footnote ⁹⁶ By the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, the SCPP’s policy was to deduct names in the same handwriting from the figures enumerated in their reports.Footnote ⁹⁷ This more permissive practice was probably inevitable given the impossibility of investigating all cases of potential fraud. A final requirement regarding signatures was that petitions had to have at least one name on the top petition sheet to prevent signatory lists gathered for other purposes being attached to petitions.Footnote ⁹⁸

In terms of other formal requirements, petitions could not contain interlineations or erasures, even when as in 1831, an MP admitted that he had made them as he had considered ‘the Language of the Petition too strong’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Petitions could not enclose additional documents for the House to consider.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The House became increasingly tolerant of petitions styled as remonstrances or memorials, providing they otherwise conformed to the structure of a petition. The unreformed House repeatedly rejected or asked MPs to withdraw various addresses, remonstrances, complaints, and declarations for reform and Catholic relief, especially when such petitions challenged the legitimacy of the House or censured its conduct.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Yet even here there were exceptions. In April 1810, the Speaker, Charles Abbot, noted in his diary that ‘Lord Cochrane presented the petition from the Electors of Westminster, entitled a Petition and Remonstrance, complaining of Sir Francis Burdett’s imprisonment; the corruption of the House of Commons, as avowed last year, &c. &c. and praying for a Reform of Parliament. After some discussion it was ordered to lie upon the table.’Footnote ¹⁰² After the rejection of a series of radical remonstrances in the 1830s and 1840s, the Speaker, Shaw-Lefevre, clarified the convention that ‘whenever remonstrances were presented to the House coupled with a prayer [a request], they were received as petitions’, but not otherwise.Footnote ¹⁰³ The minimal and dwindling limitations on the content of petitions was a second significant way in which the right to petition was broadened across the long nineteenth century.

Limitations on Petitioning: Meetings and Association

The third way in which the right to petition was broadened was the increasing permissiveness regarding freedom of association and assembly in relation to petitioning. Again, petitioners played a crucial role in expanding the right to petition and making it a foundation for other forms of collective action. The totemic status of the right to petition meant that it escaped the curtailments to other liberties in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Surveying the repressive statutes of this time, Katrina Navickas has commented that ‘the government still felt bound to protect the constitutional right to petition’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The relative absence of constraints on petitioning meant that ‘the right to petition provided an entering wedge even when the state had filled other gaps in the polity’s wall’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Basing association or assembly on the right to petition provided a way of legitimising such activity at a time when it was vulnerable to government repression.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Reviewing the evolution of popular politics at the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Jephson perceptively observed that the power of the right to petition was closely linked to its impeccable constitutional status:

By contrast, other freedoms were more vulnerable to the series of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century curbs that sought to regulate the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Popular rhetoric about the liberty of the press proved to be no barrier to legislative and government interference. Fears about the power of cheap print to spread seditious radical doctrines led to the paper, advertising, and newspaper stamp duties (the ‘taxes on knowledge’) being set at a high level to price radical newspapers out of the reach of the poorest classes.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Tory governments used the laws of seditious libel, high treason, and blasphemy to prosecute radicals and the threat of prosecution to deter the expression of such opinions.Footnote ¹¹⁰

How far the right to petition encompassed other associative rights was contested. The Seditious Meetings Acts of 1795, 1817, and 1819 prevented more than fifty people meeting ‘for the purpose or on the pretext’ of organising ‘any petition, complaint, remonstrance, or declaration, or other address’ to the monarch or Parliament, on matters relating to church and state, without prior authorisation by local magistrates.Footnote ¹¹¹ The 1819 Act broadened the definition of public matters to include ‘any public grievance’, including economic issues.Footnote ¹¹² The impact of these Acts, however, should not be overstated. Clive Emsley has observed that the 1795 statute was ‘rarely’ used.Footnote ¹¹³ The real significance of the Acts was in empowering local loyalist elites to harry grassroots radicalism rather than generating prosecutions and trials.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Paradoxically, the parliamentary and popular debates over seditious meetings legislation ultimately reaffirmed and entrenched the right to petition. Responding to critics, ministers were at pains to deny that these measures amounted to ‘an abrogation of the right of petitioning’, as the Prime Minister William Pitt declared in 1795.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He asked:

In the debates of 1817 and 1819, ministers went even further, conceding ‘as a settled point, that the people had a right to meet’ to petition.Footnote ¹¹⁷ These statements were significant. A few years before, the defence counsel at the trial of the Scottish radical Alexander McLaren for sedition, had argued in vain, that ‘if the right of petitioning belongs to the people, they must of necessity have the right of deliberation upon the subject of their Petitions’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Now ministers conceded this very point.

In the UK, as elsewhere, elite politicians recognised that it would be impolitic to deny or attempt to suppress the right to petition.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Ministers drew a distinction between legitimate petitioning, conducted through duly constituted authorities, which respected the ‘independence’ of the legislature, and ‘tumultuous meetings’ and ‘popular conventions’ that sought to ‘menace Parliament’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Far from abolishing the right to petition, the laws ‘secured’ it by protecting it from ‘abuse’.Footnote ¹²¹ Justifying his support for the 1817 bill, George Canning argued that ‘some temporary regulation is necessary to fence round this invaluable right of the people, and to secure to them its future, full, and lasting enjoyment.’Footnote ¹²²

Whether sincere or not, ministers had little choice but to dress these measures with encomiums to the right to petition given the opposition they faced from Whigs and radicals using the rhetoric of popular constitutionalism. The Whig barrister Thomas Erskine ‘declared the Bill of Rights repealed’ by the 1795 bill, while the London reformer Robert Waithman argued that the 1819 bill would ‘destroy the right of petitioning altogether’.Footnote ¹²³ The right to petition ‘would become a nullity’, with the legislation leaving only the ‘semblance of a right’ rather than its substance.Footnote ¹²⁴ In contrast to the Tory or Pittite concept of petitioning, Whigs asserted the right to petition as a popular right of all subjects.Footnote ¹²⁵ As Burdett put it, the proposed legislation was ‘a direct infringement upon the bill of rights, which secured to the poorest man in the kingdom the right of petitioning upon the grievances of the country’.Footnote ¹²⁶

Alongside this parliamentary opposition, ministers were placed on the defensive by a popular outpouring in defence of the right to petition. There were 88 petitions to the Commons against the 1795 seditious meetings bill (and the bill for the protection of the king’s person), including from Birmingham (4,000 signatures), the City of London (29,000), Manchester (2 petitions, 10,000), Glasgow (10,000), Halifax (6,000), Suffolk (13,000), and Edinburgh (7,000).Footnote ¹²⁷

Petitioners against the 1795 bill mixed appeals to natural rights with an emphasis on the ancient pedigree of British subjects’ right to petition, which the inhabitants of Sheffield traced back to Magna Carta.Footnote ¹²⁸ The inhabitants of Helston, Cornwall, described the bill as ‘a direct Infringement upon their just and natural Right of assembling peaceably and lawfully for the Redress of Public Grievances, a Right handed down to them by their Ancestors from the earliest Period, and confirmed to them by the Bill of Rights at the glorious Revolution’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Restricting the right to petition was contrary to the ‘Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom’ because it would ‘Alienate the Affections of the People from the established Government’.Footnote ¹³⁰ In 1817 and 1819, the right to petition was defended through print and public meetings as well as petitions. The right to petition, the assembled inhabitants of Norwich declared, was ‘the most sacred privilege … sanctioned by the Bill of Rights’.Footnote ¹³¹ The right to petition was asserted in ever more absolute terms, as the radical periodical the Cap of Liberty bluntly stated, ‘We either have or have not the right to petition.’Footnote ¹³² Legal commentators might argue to the contrary that on the basis of statute and common law, ‘the right itself of petition to the Legislature, can … be exercised only under the observance of forms’, but such a view now had little purchase in the wider popular debate.Footnote ¹³³ While Whigs, radicals, and petitioners failed to prevent the passage of the seditious meetings legislation, they had redefined the right to petition as a popular right.

The Seditious Meetings Acts expired in 1802, 1818, and 1826 respectively and no attempt was made to reintroduce this legislation thereafter. The example of Ireland, which was often regarded by elite politicians as an exceptional case justifying coercive measures, confirms the significant shift regarding the right to petition and public meetings. After 1830, governments increasingly turned away from Irish coercion legislation, with the important exception of the laws passed by Grey’s ministry (1830–1834), which were largely driven by the Irish Chief Secretary (and future Earl of Derby) Edward Stanley.Footnote ¹³⁴ In an official circular, Stanley contended ‘that while government had no wish to interfere with the fair exercise of the right of petitioning, it was resolved to put down every meeting which abused that right as a pretext for mischievous purposes’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Stanley’s cabinet colleagues were less hawkish and the 1833 Irish Disturbances Act had little impact on Irish petitioning.Footnote ¹³⁶ Indeed, Peel sarcastically noted that the Act was a ‘Petition Generating Bill’ as ‘there were never more petitions got up at Kilkenny, than since the district had been proclaimed under the coercion bill.’Footnote ¹³⁷ By the early Victorian period, the right to publicly meet to petition was acknowledged by government even in Ireland. This was confirmed by the Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who wrote in 1837 that ‘we have always held that the exercise of the right of petitioning should not be looked into with too much strictness and nicety … it is a necessary constitutional right that classes of people should be able to meet together and discuss their own particular interests.’Footnote ¹³⁸

Over the same period, the right to petition was broadened to encompass freedom of association. In this way, the right to petition underpinned the growth of civil society and organised collective action. While welcoming petitions from corporations, county meetings, or respectable opinion, late eighteenth-century politicians were suspicious of petitioning by voluntary associations, which they feared were potentially conventions or assemblies that sought to rival Parliament and claim a superior legitimacy based on notions of popular sovereignty.Footnote ¹³⁹ For these reasons, a series of statutes placing restrictions on associations were passed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In 1793, the Irish Parliament passed the Unlawful Societies Act (33 Geo. III, c. 29 [I]), known as Lord Clare’s Convention Act, which defined ‘assemblies, purporting to represent the people … under the pretence of preparing or presenting petitions, complaints, remonstrances, and declarations, and other addresses’ as unlawful. The 1799 Unlawful Societies Act (39 Geo. III, c. 79) suppressed the London Corresponding Society, and the United Irishmen, and defined associations that used oaths or did not retain membership lists open for magisterial inspection as unlawful. The 1825 Unlawful Societies (Ireland) Act (6 Geo. IV, c. 4) aimed to prevent the Catholic Association (CA) from using petitioning as a pretext for permanent fund-raising. The Act restricted committees preparing and forwarding petitions to a maximum of twenty members and fourteen days existence, and stipulated that they could not collect or receive money ‘other than such as may be necessary for the specific purpose of preparing and transmitting’ petitions to the king or Parliament.

These statutes had important implications for the right to petition and the practice of petitioning, even though these issues were largely absent from the parliamentary discussion of these bills. In the Irish Parliament, the Whig leader Henry Grattan denied that appointing delegates or representatives for the purpose of petitioning ‘is alone sufficient to make an unlawful assembly’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In 1811, another Irish Whig, Christopher Hely-Hutchinson, unsuccessfully moved for the repeal of Clare’s Act to ‘prevent the government of Ireland making use of it as a means of interfering with the constitutional right of the subject to petition’.Footnote ¹⁴² In 1825, Peel acknowledged that the CA might petition, but argued that Parliament had the authority to act against any association ‘at variance with the principles of the constitution’.Footnote ¹⁴³

Ultimately, the legislation entrenched and broadened the right to petition in relation to freedom of association. The 1825 Act was a temporary measure, expiring in 1828, although the CA was suppressed as a quid pro quo for Catholic emancipation in 1829. As with the seditious meetings legislation, the government was forced to reaffirm the right to petition. In 1793, Lord Clare was pressed into stating that ‘it is the undoubted and indefeasible right of the subject to petition the Throne or either house of Parliament’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Bowing to pressure, Clare conceded a proviso to his bill that stated that it did not ‘prevent or impede the undoubted Right of His Majesty’s Subjects’ to petition the king or Parliament, which was subsequently incorporated into the 1825 Act.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The 1825 bill was opposed by eighty-seven petitions to the Commons, many of which emanated from meetings of Catholic inhabitants in Ireland, where the popular defence of the right to petition was a key theme.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The unintended consequence of the 1799 statute was to confirm the central place of petitioning in British political activism at all levels. This was because to establish their legality and constitutionalism, societies linked their activity with petitioning and petitions to Parliament.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The shift in politicians’ attitudes towards political associations can be shown by the response to petitions from political unions in 1831 to 1832. Political unions – local bodies organised in favour of the reform bill – had stimulated the usual anxieties about associations, especially as they threatened to become a permanent mechanism for applying popular pressure.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ When the radical MP Henry Warburton presented a petition from the National Political Union, at a time when Grey’s government was under royal pressure to suppress political unions, a number of politicians argued that such bodies were ‘illegal and unconstitutional’ and that the House should only accept ‘petitions from acknowledged corporations, as containing the individuals who signed them’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Yet the Commons received the petition and ordered it to be printed.

By the time parliamentary reform was finally passed in 1832, the statutes restricting assembly and association in relation to petitioning were, if they had not lapsed, dead letters. It was with some justification then, that one mid-Victorian commentator on petitioning was able to write that ‘all restrictions upon its free exercise are now practically obsolete’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Limitations on Petitioning: Presentation and Discussion

The final way that the right to petition was defined was through the contest between petitioners and parliamentarians over the meaning of that right. Did petitioners enjoy a mere right of presentation, or did they possess a right to be heard and have their grievances discussed? Petitioners repeatedly pressed for a more expansive definition, with some, such as the inhabitants of Waterford in 1852, even suggesting that they had a right of outcome, implying that Parliament had to grant their demands.Footnote ¹⁵¹ These debates were significant as they reflected broader tensions over whether petitioners or parliamentarians spoke for the people, how far Parliament could or should be insulated from popular pressure, and the extent to which petitions should trigger action.

Petitioners repeatedly pressed for a right to be present or be heard. Yet only the Sheriffs of London and the Lord Mayor of Dublin had the privilege, not the right, to present petitions in person.Footnote ¹⁵² There was no right for petitioners to present their petitions and this was not unusual compared with other polities. The French law of 22 July 1879 and the Italian Fundamental Statute of 4 March 1848 both forbade petitioners from physically presenting petitions in the legislature. This general proscription on the physical presence of petitioners was one of the important differences between nineteenth-century petitioning and earlier periods, when the institution of petitions as an instrument of rule usually permitted supplicatory appeals to monarchs.Footnote ¹⁵³

Despite this context, petitioners’ presence was not formally prohibited, and in claiming a right of audience petitioners could draw on their own reading of constitutional history. In 1825, Brougham in the Commons and Lord Carnarvon in the Lords proposed in vain that the members of the CA be heard by counsel against the unlawful societies (Ireland) bill, although the Association’s leader, Daniel O’Connell had few illusions that the motions would be successful.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In 1839, Brougham and C. P. Villiers unsuccessfully moved that petitioners be heard against the corn laws by committees of the whole Houses of Commons and Lords, respectively.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Chartists and women’s suffrage campaigners pressed to be heard at the bar of the House in 1842, and 1907 and 1913, respectively.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The spokesmen for the petitioners grounded their claims on precedents.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In 1907, suffragists cited examples of women giving evidence at the bar of the House in 1681 and 1809.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Parliamentarians asserted their authority over petitioners by resisting these attempts, thereby defining the right to petition as a right of presentation. The Prime Minister Lord Liverpool declared that the request of the CA to be heard at the bar was ‘contrary to all precedent’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Over eighty years later, responding to suffragists, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal Prime Minister, stated that ‘there is no precedent for women appearing in support of a petition, or no recent precedent for so appearing’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

While parliamentarians might accede to a broadening of the right to petition in other respects, they could never accept petitioners’ claims for a right of presence because it would have undermined their authority. Permitting petitioners’ physical presence, as well as setting a precedent for future requests, would have challenged the legitimacy of Parliament by exposing the fiction that it represented all subjects.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Petitioners such as Irish Catholics before emancipation, and unenfranchised men and women, could claim to speak for groups unrepresented in and by Parliament. Although there was no formal prohibition of petitioners’ physical presence, parliamentarians nonetheless resisted attempts that would have increased popular pressure and lent credence to those who sought to challenge Parliament in the name of an unrepresented people.

Parliamentarians asserted their authority in a second way, by restricting MPs ability to speak on petitions after 1833.Footnote ¹⁶² This redefined the right to petition as a mere right of presentation, and was formally enshrined in the House’s standing orders in 1842. The limitation on discussion or raising questions on petitions was reaffirmed thereafter by speakers, clerks, and MPs, who counselled against restoring the old practice whenever the idea was raised.Footnote ¹⁶³

The restriction on speaking to petitions was not without parallel. The US Congress investigated and considered every petition as part of its process.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In the 1830s and 1840s, a series of ‘gag’ rules were passed to ‘table’ (receive without further action), and later reject, anti-slavery petitions without any debate.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ While targeted at abolitionists, the American gag rules suggest that restrictions on speaking were one of the ways that nineteenth-century legislatures attempted to cope with the huge volume of petitions they received and contain popular pressure.

The restriction on speaking was supported by both the Whig and Conservative frontbenches, as well as the Speaker, who argued that the indiscriminate discussion of petitions impeded legislative efficiency and public business.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The procedural changes were one of the ways that government gradually gained control of the legislative timetable at the expense of the privileges of backbenchers.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Justifying the shift, Russell argued that speaking on petitions was a departure from the custom of the House, and its restriction was merely the restoration of the status quo ante.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ If the House received almost 17,000 petitions as it had in 1841, and each was presented and discussed, then the House would ‘do nothing else but receive petitions’, one Conservative MP grumbled.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ While sometimes regarded as the result of a frontbench conspiracy,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ the procedural changes were supported by many radical and reform MPs, as well as Daniel O’Connell, to prevent the House becoming a talking shop.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Their frustrations were summed up by the journalist and Radical MP James Silk Buckingham in 1833, who, after witnessing the discussion of petitions in morning sittings, complained that ‘This was a Reformed Parliament; and the people expected that they were to do something, and not talk so much.’Footnote ¹⁷²

Although Peel and other politicians framed their arguments in terms of improving parliamentary efficiency rather than restricting popular rights, in private they acknowledged that the reforms enabled them to partially reinsulate Parliament against popular pressure. This point was made clear by the then high Tory William Gladstone, who in 1838 wrote in his diary:

The Radical MP for Greenock Robert Wallace attempted unsuccessfully to restore the right of speaking on petitions in 1842 and 1844.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Wallace and radical MPs argued that the restriction amounted to ‘an improper suppression of public opinion’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ John Fielden, Radical MP for Oldham, complained that ‘the people were told to petition, and in the same breath it was said that their petitions would not be attended to’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ This complaint was echoed by petitioners such as the inhabitants of Newcastle, county Limerick, who ‘deeply deplore[d] the regulations of your Honourable House, whereby the right of Petition and remonstrance has become nominal and nearly useless’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Despite these laments, parliamentarians argued that the restriction on speaking on petitions did not deprive petitions of their due weight. Speaking in 1848, the Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli argued:

Disraeli’s comments show that even when resisting petitioners’ claims, elite politicians were at pains to proclaim their attachment to the right to petition as a popular liberty enjoyed by all subjects.

Conclusion

Debates over the presentation and discussion of petitions allowed parliamentarians to assert their authority over petitioners and uphold a doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty: all subjects had a formal right to petition, but Parliament retained ultimate discretion as to how those petitions were received. Even so, petitioners, as well as parliamentarians, played a crucial role in entrenching and defining the right to petition. While the right to petition might have continued to be contested, its meaning was no longer ambiguous. In isolation, the procedural reforms of the 1830s and 1840s could be used to support a narrative of the taming or closing down of popular politics.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Yet the right to petition was broadened in every other respect and in ways that transformed petitioning Parliament into a universal mechanism for mass political participation and expression. Furthermore, if the constitution, as Robert Saunders suggests, was ‘not a set of documents but a reading of history’, then petitioners could always find precedents to push for a more expansive right to petition.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The restriction of the presence of petitioners and discussion of petitions was always contingent and never final, as was shown by the attempts of suffrage activists to claim a right of presence in the early twentieth century. The implications of the broadening of the right to petition for popular politics and the representative system are examined in the final part of this book. Before then, however, we must ask who the petitioners were?

In April 1837, the ‘Protestants of Ireland’ petitioned the House of Lords for ‘protection of their dearest and most sacred Rights and Interests’ and the ‘Maintenance of our Constitution in Church and State’.Footnote ¹ The sponsor of the petition, the Marquess of Downshire, declared that the petition contained ‘the signatures of all persons, of all ranks and classes in Ireland’.Footnote ² The following week, a petition in a similar vein, over two miles in length, was presented in the Commons; the petition was ‘so bulky and heavy’ that it took two MPs to lift it onto the table.Footnote ³

As these examples suggest, through their self-descriptions, petitioners defined themselves to authority, and made claims to represent a wider group beyond the signatory list. Petitions were crucial for the creation of collective identities within UK political culture. Writing of nineteenth-century America, Susan Zaeske has commented that: ‘These labels encoded the perceived political status of potential signers, their authority to instruct elected representatives, and their expectations about how heavily their requests would be weighed.’Footnote ⁴ Whether these self-descriptions accurately reflected the social profile of the petitioners is a moot point, and the lack of surviving petitions makes it impossible to conduct a prosopography of signatory lists. Even so, the credibility of petitioners rested not only on the congruence between these self-descriptions and the signatory list, but on the perceived authenticity of their ‘voice’ as expressed in the petition. In her study of women’s petitioning during the English Revolution of the 1640s, Amanda Whiting has argued that while many petitions were authored by or with the aid of men, they were written in a feminine language that meant they were regarded as reflecting the views of women.Footnote ⁵

The act of signing a petition connected an individual to a wider collective and made a public statement of identity. Signing petitions created ‘subscriptional communities’.Footnote ⁶ Many contemporaries argued that petitions forged permanent connections. Commenting on the hundreds of thousands of signatures against the state endowment of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, a Wesleyan minister from Leeds declared in 1845: ‘Sir, these are definitions of Protestantism’.Footnote ⁷ A few years earlier one of the founding fathers of teetotalism had elaborated in detail why petitions were crucial for catalysing collective identities:

Signing petitions was constitutive and not merely reflective of collective identities.Footnote ⁹

In their self-descriptions, petitioners made representative claims that their signatory list stood for, or was a particular group. Rare surviving manuscript petitions to the House of Lords reveal some of the strategies that petitioners deployed to strengthen the credibility of their representative claims. An 1875 petition regarding the pensions of school teachers was styled from ‘parents’ of children at Whitchurch National Church of England School. The signatures were organised into columns of fathers and mothers, making the point that this was not simply men signing as patriarchs on behalf of their households.Footnote ¹⁰ In other cases, petitioners added personal details to burnish their claims. Lincolnshire petitioners who appealed to the Lords in the same year regarding the poisoning of horses, listed their acreage as well as their names.Footnote ¹¹ Ninety years earlier, coal and salt makers from Scotland listed the number of boilers they owned.Footnote ¹² Official seals indicated the petition had the imprimatur of corporations, town councils, and office-holders.Footnote ¹³ Petitions from clergymen listed titles and positions lend weight to their authority to speak on religious issues.Footnote ¹⁴

Petitioners might make bolder representative claims in the text. Petitioning in favour of the 1884 reform bill, members of the Rochester branch of the Kent and Sussex Agricultural Labourers Union declared that although the petition was signed by the chairman on their behalf it was ‘the petition of several thousand members’.Footnote ¹⁵ In the same year, thirty associates, parents, and employees of the members of the Barking and Chigwell branch of the Girls’ Friendly Society explained that this was ‘a Society representing 90,000 women and girls in England and Wales’.Footnote ¹⁶ Petitioners, then, understood the importance of stressing the representativeness of their collective self-descriptions when addressing authority. These labels mattered, which explains why they often provoked ferocious contests over representative claims.Footnote ¹⁷

This chapter, first, examines the changing self-descriptions across the long nineteenth century to chart the broadening of the petitioning public. The second part of the chapter considers the importance of petitions for making representative claims by groups seeking political rights: Protestant Dissenters, Catholics, and women. It was as petitioners addressing the state that these groups publicly asserted their collective identities, their place within political culture, and made claims on the wider community.

The Broadening of the Petitioning Public

There was a massive increase in the petitioning public from the early nineteenth century, as we have seen.Footnote ¹⁸ An analysis of the self-descriptions of petitioners reveals a parallel broadening of the petitioning public. In the late eighteenth century, petitioners’ self-descriptions were typically hierarchically structured. Hence, long-winded formulations such as a 1785 petition against the duties on cotton stuffs from the ‘Gentlemen, Clergy, Land Owners, Merchants, Manufacturers, Dyers, Bleachers and Others, interested in the Fustian Trade in the towns of Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Leigh, Warrington, Rochdale, Oldham, Ashton, Bury, Chorley, Stockport, Macclesfield, and Chapel en le Frith’.Footnote ¹⁹

Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century petitioners from across the four nations used hierarchical self-descriptions on a variety of issues, not just trade questions. In 1795, a Lincolnshire petition in favour of the bills to protect the royal person and restrict seditious meetings was styled as coming from the ‘Nobility, Gentry, Clergy, Merchants, Tradesmen, Yeomanry, and others’.Footnote ²⁰ The ‘Gentlemen, Clergy, and Landowners’ of Breconshire were among the petitioners to pray for a general enclosure act in 1812.Footnote ²¹ Kilkenny petitioners against Catholic relief in 1813 described themselves as ‘Protestant Noblemen, Gentlemen, Clergy, Freemen, Freeholders, and Inhabitants’.Footnote ²² Five years later, a petition from Ayrshire regarding the lunatic asylums bill was styled from the ‘Noblemen, Gentlemen, Freeholders, J.Ps, Commissioners of Supply, and other Heritors’.Footnote ²³

Late eighteenth-century petitioners foregrounded their material interest when addressing Parliament, hence the stress placed on groups ‘interested in the Fustian Trade’ in the petition above.Footnote ²⁴ In 1785, Bristol tanners, curriers, and leather dealers complained that their trade ‘will be very materially injured if not entirely ruined’ by the proposed Anglo-Irish commercial treaty.Footnote ²⁵ In articulating their material interest, petitions from industrial towns often placed inhabitants last in their self-descriptions, with manufacturers or merchants given pride of place.Footnote ²⁶ For these petitioners, the size of the signatory list was less important than their economic significance. Commenting on a petition regarding the renewal of the East India Company’s charter in 1813, the secretary to the Board of Commerce in Leeds noted, ‘The signatures are not numerous,the petition is only signed by such as conceive themselves as immediately interested in the business.’Footnote ²⁷ Such considerations reflected more broadly an eighteenth-century conception of interest as the key criteria for the state’s consideration of the claims of different lobby groups.Footnote ²⁸ Hence, the weight placed by the pro-slavery lobby on their material interest in petitions regarding the slave trade. Indeed, their self-descriptions, such as ‘merchants’ or ‘planters’ denoted their direct involvement in the trade.Footnote ²⁹

Hierarchical sequencing and an emphasis on material interests remained important to petitioners on economic issues deep into the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁰ Even in the later nineteenth century after the apparent triumph of a disinterested state that had removed itself from arbitrating between economic interests,Footnote ³¹ petitioners continued to stress their material interest in certain questions. In 1884, individual petitions against the railway regulation act amendment bill, including many from women, described themselves as ‘a holder of property in railways’.Footnote ³² In this case, the material interest of petitioners was as shareholders rather than producers, but was still used to frame their claim to consideration by the legislature.

From the late eighteenth century, there was a growth of demotic, inclusive labels, the most important of which was ‘inhabitants’. This term was rarely used in petitions to Parliament in the seventeenth century although it was common when addressing local authorities.Footnote ³³ The usage of ‘inhabitants’ became more frequent during the eighteenth century. Even so, Philip Loft’s study of large petitions that responded to parliamentary legislation between 1688 and 1788 suggests that petitions from ‘inhabitants’ typically made up only 12–15 per cent of the total number in quinquennial periods.Footnote ³⁴

The broadening of the petitioning public can be charted by studying the incidence of different categories of petitioner from the beginning of our period to the mid-nineteenth century. Of the 140 ‘public’ petitions received in the 1780–1782 session, 21 came from merchants and others, 23 from owners and others, and a further 10 from corporations. The remainder reflected specific interested trades, such as ‘manufacturers and dealers in linen’, grocers, and brewers.Footnote ³⁵ In the following session, 1782–1784, the bulk of the 121 public petitions displayed a similar pattern, although there was 1 petition from ‘Citizens’, 5 from ‘Freeholders and Inhabitants’, and 8 from ‘Inhabitants’.Footnote ³⁶ The growth of these other labels thereafter was closely associated with the broadening of the range of issues addressed in petitions to Parliament beyond economic questions.Footnote ³⁷ Most of the thirty-four petitions from England and Scotland that prayed for parliamentary reform in 1793 were from inhabitants, and the same category accounted for most of the seventy-four petitions against the ‘Two Acts’ restricting public meetings and protecting the royal person in 1795–1796.Footnote ³⁸

The proportion of petitions from ‘inhabitants’ depended on which issues were most salient in a session; at the same time, the growth of these more demotic labels was closely associated with the emergence of mass petitioning. In 1812, 394 (or 25 per cent) of the 1,608 petitions were from inhabitants.Footnote ³⁹ In 1813–1814, inhabitants accounted for 821 or 60 per cent of 1,373 petitions received.Footnote ⁴⁰ The overwhelming majority of these were abolitionist petitions praying for the suppression of the slave trade to be made a condition of the peace treaty with France. The following session, 258 (35 per cent) of 739 petitions were from inhabitants, as many self-descriptions regarding the property tax and the corn laws, the major issues that year, reflected ‘interests’.Footnote ⁴¹

Trades continued to petition on specific issues, but they were increasingly dwarfed by the volume of petitions from inhabitants on questions that mobilised signatories on a massive scale. In 1818, there were 124 petitions from tanners and the leather trade as part of their longstanding dispute with butchers over the use of horsehides, but some 1,546 petitions (71 per cent of the sessional total) from inhabitants, mostly regarding parliamentary reform.Footnote ⁴² By the late 1820s and early 1830s, around a quarter of petitions came from ‘inhabitants’.Footnote ⁴³ The other main development was the growing use of denominational identities on moral, humanitarian, and religious questions; this is explored in the second part of this chapter. Of the 953,926 public petitions received by the Commons after 1833, 32 per cent were styled from ‘inhabitants’ or ‘there-undersigned inhabitants’, making it the most popular self-description.

Why then did inhabitants become the preferred label for so many petitioners? Because it was broad, inclusive, vague, demotic, and came with popular connotations that distinguished it from petitions from office holders (such as corporations) or hierarchical formulations. Moreover, alternatives were problematic. Freeholders were widely used in petitions, especially those emanating from county meetings. The term implied that the petitioners were coterminous with the county electors, and therefore was of limited use in claiming to speak for a more popular constituency. For this reason, Loft has classified ‘freeholders’ as one of the descriptive labels used by ‘middle sorts’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Another word that became common in radical circles in the 1790s was ‘citizen’ but this term was associated with the French Revolution and republicanism, and was controversial.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘Inhabitants’ had the advantage of being less politically charged but also broader and more inclusive than other contemporary terms. Finally, ‘inhabitants’ implied a strong connection to place, a topic explored in the next chapter.

While ‘inhabitants’ was the most popular self-description for petitioners, it still accounted for just under a third of labels after 1833. The variety of other terms, often joined together in innumerable combinations, emphasises the diversity as well as the broadening of the petitioning public. If any further evidence was needed to reveal the limitations of defining the late Georgian and Victorian political nation by the parliamentary franchise, the data reveals that petitions were used by a diverse range of different groups. Petitioners were women as well as menFootnote ⁴⁶; Catholics as well as ProtestantsFootnote ⁴⁷; Dissenters as well as AnglicansFootnote ⁴⁸; liberals, reformers, radicals, and conservativesFootnote ⁴⁹; English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh subjectsFootnote ⁵⁰; colonial subjects, including white settlers, missionaries, and colonised peoplesFootnote ⁵¹; artisans as well as mastersFootnote ⁵²; agricultural labourers as well as landowners and farmersFootnote ⁵³; and specific professions or trades as well as broader publics.Footnote ⁵⁴ The diversity, breadth, and size of the petitioning public suggests that the theoretical openness of the right to petition was to a large extent realised in practice.

Petitioners and Collective Identities

Petitions were integral to the emergence of collective political identities. By repeatedly coming together on a large scale, petitioners presented themselves and were perceived as possessing a collective political identity. On economic issues, petitions and petitioners ‘constituted the public as consumers or taxpayers’.Footnote ⁵⁵

There was a relationship between Chartist mass petitions and the formation of working-class political identity. Revisionists have argued that class was constructed through language rather than shaped by the socio-economic processes associated with industrialisation, and was less important than older radical ideas of the ‘people’.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, the languages of class and the ‘people’ were not mutually exclusive, but came together in Chartist petitions on a colossal scale. ‘The subscriptional community created by the movement’s petitions’, Malcolm Chase has written, ‘were “the people”’, yet at the same time ‘the 1842 and 1848 petitions shared a vocabulary of class’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Working people were represented in the massive material form of the petitions, but also in how they were perceived by contemporaries. Punch magazine’s cartoon on the presentation of the third Chartist petition in April 1848 neatly illustrated the interrelationship between collective political identity and petitions.Footnote ⁵⁸ The idealised working man handing ‘the Charter’ to the diminutive Whig Prime Minister Lord John Russell was a personification of the millions of signatories to the petition.

In the colonial context, when addressing Parliament, white settlers made claims that were often implicitly grounded on a shared racial heritage with British subjects. In 1835, the ‘Free Inhabitants’ of New South Wales, asserted that ‘it is needless to point out the inalienable rights of Britons, in whatever colony they may have fixed their abode, to the Constitution of the Mother Country’.Footnote ⁵⁹ A few years later, the ‘Inhabitants of Cape Town’, observed that because they were ‘descended from the people of Holland, or British born subjects … [they] entertain a hereditary sentiment of veneration for the free institutions of the distinguished nations from which they sprang’.Footnote ⁶⁰ These examples not only reveal some of the limitations of petitions to the imperial Parliament as a tool for colonised peoples unable to make an appeal based on kinship, but also point to the fact that the rights that some petitioners claimed were often grounded on exclusions.Footnote ⁶¹

The remainder of this chapter considers the importance of petitions for different groups claiming rights: Catholics, Protestant Dissenters, and women. As petitioners these groups asserted their collective identity, presented themselves to the state, made claims, and were perceived as emergent political actors.

iii) Women

Studies of nineteenth-century America have shown how women’s collective political identity was transformed through petitioning.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In UK political culture too, women came forward as increasingly confident petitioners to make claims on an ever-larger scale towards the end of the nineteenth century. A large body of scholarship has recovered the political activities of nineteenth-century women, from aristocrats to middle-class activists to working-class radicals.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The widespread evidence of women’s political activity has made it difficult to maintain the interpretative framework of ‘separate spheres’: that nineteenth-century women, particularly middle-class women, were restricted to the private sphere by a rigid gendered ideology.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even so, influential cultural norms regarding gender roles, combined with legal impediments, most notably the explicit exclusion of women from the franchise after 1832, ensured that women remained, in Kathryn Gleadle’s compelling phrase, ‘borderline citizens’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Other scholars have argued that the growing formalisation, and bureaucratisation of popular politics reduced the opportunities for women to politically participate.Footnote ¹¹¹

Within such a context, as Sarah Richardson has observed, informal political activity was an important outlet for women.Footnote ¹¹² Moreover, petitioning was a means for collective and self-representation. Exploring the self-descriptions used by female petitioners provides a new way of examining women’s collective identity. However, as Helen Rogers has cautioned ‘Women did not always, or only, identify themselves as women’.Footnote ¹¹³ Yet by the same token, as we shall see, it was politically significant when women came forward to petition as ‘women’ and claimed rights in a more assertive style.

In navigating contemporary public discourse, women often had to work within ‘the most resonant rhetorics and representations’, while potentially subverting them.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Hence, early nineteenth-century women petitioners, often acting as female members of Dissenting congregations, directed their appeals on issues such as sati, slavery, and free trade, where their political activism could be justified as an extension of women’s ‘natural’ moral and Christian instincts.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As Richardson has put it, ‘women’s petitions often emphasised the specifically feminine aspects of a political issue.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ In this vein, women petitioners often addressed the House as ‘wives and mothers’, as in the case of the female Roman Catholics of county Longford, who complained of the religious persecution of their husbands in 1839.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The following year, 20,000 females of Manchester, petitioning against the corn laws, declared that they were ‘either themselves directly engaged in the cotton and other branches of manufacture … or … the wives, mothers, daughters, or sisters of persons so engaged’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The last two cases remind us that women could and did combine presentations of themselves as ‘wives and mothers’ with other identities, be they religious or occupational.Footnote ¹¹⁹ More generally, ‘female’ petitions from this time frequently adopted an apologetic tone for intruding on political questions, as in the case of the 1833 abolitionist petition from 187,156 ‘undersigned Females of Great Britain’, which declared that ‘a painful and indignant sense of the injuries to their own sex, has peculiarly impelled them thus to step out of their usual sphere’.Footnote ¹²⁰

Women presented themselves in various guises as petitioners, particularly when appealing to the legislature as individuals.Footnote ¹²¹ In some instances, women petitioners emphasised their social status or occupation rather than their gender.Footnote ¹²² In a series of petitions in the 1840s and 1850s, Frances Barlee of Bungay, Suffolk, complained like other landowners and farmers of the ‘unfair and unequal burdens’ upon land in the form of the land tax, and poor rates.Footnote ¹²³ In 1834, the female glovers of Dublin attributed the ruin of their trade to the legislative union of Britain and Ireland that had caused the ‘absence of our nobility and gentry’, their main customers.Footnote ¹²⁴ To give a later example, Lancastrian pit-brow women protested against legislative interference in their labour.Footnote ¹²⁵

If early Victorian women were frequently apologetic for acting ‘beyond the usual retirement of female habits’, in petitioning the Commons, there was a gradual shift over the period.Footnote ¹²⁶ To be sure, there were still plenty of examples of women emphasising their religious or moral qualities when addressing the House on ecclesiastical, or temperance questions. But women petitioners became bolder in claiming to represent and speak on behalf of women more generally, staking a claim to rights, and developing a more assertive petitionary style from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.Footnote ¹²⁷

To give just a few examples from the 1850s, women’s petitions as part of the ultra-Protestant campaign for the investigation of convents were framed as a defence of women’s rights more generally. The female inhabitants of Clogher, county Tyrone, argued that ‘the civil and religious liberties of British females are endangered by the encroachments of popery and tractarianism’ as ‘British females have been allured into nunneries and detained there against their will.’Footnote ¹²⁸ Another development was that petitions making representative claims on behalf of women became more common.Footnote ¹²⁹

In the same decade, the female inhabitants of Sheffield, mobilised by the Women’s Rights Association based in the city, asserted their claim to the franchise in refreshingly forthright terms (Figure 5.1). The female inhabitants of Sheffield were not the first petitioners to pray for women’s suffrage. In 1832, Mary Smith, of Stanmore, Yorkshire, ‘a lady of rank and fortune’ had petitioned the Commons for ‘every unmarried female’ who paid taxes and met the ‘necessary pecuniary qualification’ to be granted the suffrage.Footnote ¹³⁰ Although Smith’s petition has often been referenced,Footnote ¹³¹ the Sheffield petition, has a claim to greater significance in terms of making a broader representative claim and in seeking the vote for adult women generally.Footnote ¹³²

Figure 5.1 Female inhabitants of Sheffield, petition to House of Commons for enfranchisement, 18 February 1851.

Reproduced with permission of the Parliamentary Archives, London, HC/CL/JO/6/287.

Studying petitions in the 1860s and 1870s regarding the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts and women’s suffrage reveals the growing assertiveness of women as petitioners. This was a phenomenon evident not only in Britain, but in Ireland, where Ciara Stewart has shown that women as petitioners increasingly emphasised their political agency within a gendered political culture.Footnote ¹³³ Some of these claims were based on particular localities, such as the petitions for repeal of the CD Acts presented by Lord Shaftesbury from the women of Bedford, Leeds, and Aberdeen in March 1870.Footnote ¹³⁴ However, CD Acts repealers also recognised the importance of producing ‘a great women’s petition for the United Kingdom’, including in 1871 a petition signed by a quarter of a million women.Footnote ¹³⁵ Petitioners framed the legislation as affecting all women, even though it only applied to ‘subjected areas’ because ‘the police would thus hold the entire female population at its mercy, arrest being authorised upon suspicion’ of prostitution, as the women of Nottingham protested.Footnote ¹³⁶ The blunt language of repeal petitions, which were typically short and punchy, in describing the CD Acts as ‘tyrannical, unjust, and unconstitutional’, or ‘essentially immoral in their nature and tendency’, contained a scarcely veiled rebuke to the male legislators who had so recently passed them.Footnote ¹³⁷

Women petitioners also asserted their collective identity over suffrage, particularly in the initial stages of the debate when the question was framed as to whether women should be enfranchised as a class.Footnote ¹³⁸ Parliamentary supporters such as John Stuart Mill declared that petitions were conclusive evidence against the main argument of anti-suffragists, ‘namely, that few, if any, women desire it’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Mindful of the reception of the Chartist mass petitions, early suffragists avoided petitioning the Commons in the name of women generally, preferring to make locally based representative claims.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

While the early suffrage bills would only have enfranchised unmarried or propertied women, as petitioners women presented themselves, and were presented by their advocates, as collective political actors. The pains that anti-suffragist MPs took to dismiss the representative claims of suffrage petitions to speak for women more broadly is eloquent testimony to how threatening they found this development. Opponents repeatedly dismissed petitions on the grounds that only a minority of the female population had signed, a standard rarely applied to other petitioners.Footnote ¹⁴¹ As Emily Davies ruefully reflected, ‘I think it is normally taken for granted that every woman might have signed, & that the overwhelming majority who did not, abstained deliberately.’Footnote ¹⁴²

Writing of suffrage, James Thompson has argued that ‘the submission of petitions signed by women on both sides of the debate reflected and reinvigorated women’s claims as members of the public.’Footnote ¹⁴³ This point may be extended more generally: throughout the nineteenth century, women became more assertive and insistent as petitioners. While a more drawn out process than the cases of Catholics and Dissenters, the example of women provides a further instance of the relationship between acting as petitioners and the emergence of collective political identities.

Conclusion

This chapter has made two points. First, studying the self-labels of petitioners reveals the broadening and diversification of the petitioning public. Second, the collective identities and representative claims made by petitioners were important for different groups seeking to claim political rights. While this may suggest that the political nation became more inclusive, this was not inevitable because claims from certain groups of petitioners such as women or colonised peoples met with resistance and contestation. Petitioners presented themselves in ways, such as ‘the Catholic body’ that projected a static, even monolithic, character and glossed over internal tensions and differences. Moreover, it is likely that signatories affixed their names to various petitions during their lifetimes that expressed different self-descriptions. For these reasons, the next chapter explores the more dynamic, fluid side of petitioners by considering the formation and reformation of petitioning communities at a local level and the relationship between petitioners and place.

In 1834, thirty-two signatories, styled as the ‘Minister, Churchwardens, and Inhabitants’ of the parish of Colne Engaine, Essex, petitioned the House of Commons against measures to relieve Protestant Dissenters. In the same year, the ‘Inhabitants’ of Colne appealed to peers to offer their ‘Protection of the National Church’. In 1840 and 1841, petitions from the Inhabitants, and ‘Rector, Householders, and Inhabitants’ of Colne, affixed with thirty-three and sixteen names respectively, prayed for the extension of the Church of England. In 1845, a petition from the ‘Rector and Inhabitants’, containing thirty-three names in total, opposed the permanent endowment of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth in Ireland. In 1853, the ‘Rector and Inhabitants’ (sixteen signatories), once more petitioned, this time against amending the oaths to allow Jews to sit in Parliament. In 1856, 1860, and 1861, petitioners from Colne expressed their opposition to the abolition of church rates. The parish supplied petitions signed by nine and ninety inhabitants respectively, against the disestablishment of the Church of England in 1872 and the Church of Wales in 1893.Footnote ¹

Because the original signatory lists do not survive, it is impossible to know the extent to which the subscribers for these petitions overlapped. While the individual names of the petitioners are lost to posterity, these examples from a rural parish in eastern England, with a population of just 618 inhabitants in 1831, demonstrate the importance of petitioning communities within a given locality.Footnote ² Although the petitioners may have varied in number or profile, and changed over time, the above instances reveal the existence of a petitioning community in Colne associated with Anglicanism and Protestantism, and one in which the clergy played a prominent role, a pattern that was probably repeated across the UK given the enormous volume of petitions on ecclesiastical matters.Footnote ³ Yet multiple petitioning communities could exist within the same locality. In his study of early nineteenth-century Liverpool, Joshua Civin has shown that petitioning communities could reflect attachments to a particular religious denomination, occupation, status, or institution, or could be linked to working or living in a particular part of the city. In the case of Liverpool, there were conflicts within, as well as between, different petitioning communities, such as over trade issues for instance.Footnote ⁴ Returning to Colne, another petitioning community comprised farmers, landowners, and agriculturalists. In 1839, the ‘Owners and Occupiers of Land, Gentlemen, Tradesmen, and others, interested in Agriculture’, petitioned against the repeal of the corn laws, and another petition was sent in 1841.Footnote ⁵ ‘Owners and Occupiers of the Soil, Traders, and other Inhabitants’ of the parish lobbied for the repeal of malt duty in 1850.Footnote ⁶ Because petitioning communities were fluid rather than fixed and contingent on specific subjects, some of these agriculturalist signatories may also have subscribed to the petitions on religious questions.

This chapter examines petitioners and petitioning communities within a range of localities across the four nations to explore the politics of place. There has always been a strong tradition of local studies in scholarship about nineteenth-century politics.Footnote ⁷ More recently, a theme of revisionist scholarship has involved excavating local political cultures and their particularities, in part as a reaction to older modernisation narratives emphasising the rise of ‘national’ political parties or class-based voting.Footnote ⁸ The costs of such an approach, Luke Blaxill has recently contended, have been in disconnecting local political cultures from general patterns, and a reluctance to offer ‘causal explanation’ as opposed to intensive studies of particular places.Footnote ⁹ Focusing on petitioning communities provides a new way of reconnecting the politics of place to a broader UK political culture. Petitioners acted locally to gather signatures, and most petitions were rooted in their immediate geographic contexts. Yet petitioners frequently addressed issues of national importance, and often did so through making common cause with others within petition drives that attracted support from across the UK. Moreover, through appealing to Parliament, petitioners connected local action with national political institutions.Footnote ¹⁰

The chapter examines the relationship between petitioners and place in two ways. First, the analysis demonstrates the ways in which particular topics brought together petitioners from across the four nations. Second, the chapter surveys a range of localities to offer a comparative study of petitioning communities, emphasising similarities and patterns as well as local variations, differences, and particularities.

Petitioners and the Four Nations

Building on the analysis of how petitions allowed issues of concern from across the four nations to be raised in Parliament, it is worth emphasising how petitions brought together petitioners from across the UK.Footnote ¹¹ Petitioners from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales appealed to Parliament, although unevenly, and the proportions of petitions from the different nations fluctuated over time and were contingent on the major issues in a given year. In 1821, there were 833 petitions from England (76 per cent), 119 (11 per cent) from Scotland, but only 42 (4 per cent) from Ireland, and 18 (1.6 per cent) from Wales.Footnote ¹² By 1832, the geographical distribution of petitions addressed to the Commons was very different: 1,239 (51 per cent) were from England, 849 (35 per cent) were from Ireland, 240 (10 per cent) from Scotland, and 26 (1 per cent) from Wales.Footnote ¹³ While it is likely that English petitions typically accounted for the majority in a session, the precise proportions fluctuated depending on the topics addressed. It is tempting to argue that in 1832, the coincidence of topics such as the Whig government’s education scheme, parliamentary reform, and the tithes question drew Irish petitioners to address the House in greater numbers. Yet petitioners were not merely responding to questions raised in Westminster, but proactively seeking to place certain topics on the agenda. Moreover, Irish petitioners addressed some 114 topics in the session, pointing to a broader engagement with Parliament beyond a handful of key issues.

Mass petition drives on key topics were important in integrating petitioners from across the UK within a common campaign, even if contributions from across the four nations were often uneven. For most of the post-1801 period for which we have census records, Scotland accounted for around 10 per cent of the UK population, and the proportion of petitions accounted for by Scottish petitioners in 1821 and 1832 mentioned above roughly corresponds to this percentage.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet in many major petition drives, Scottish petitioners contributed disproportionately. Iain Whyte’s study has shown that Scotland contributed 16 petitions (or 16 per cent) against the slave trade in 1787–1788 and 185 (or 36 per cent) in 1792, although the mass petitioning of the 1830s for abolition of colonial slavery and slave apprenticeships included 1,200 petitions from Scotland (or around 8 per cent).Footnote ¹⁵ Scottish petitioners accounted for 1,148 of the petitions in favour of the 1872 permissive bill to restrict the sale of alcohol, containing 202,518 signatures. This contribution was equivalent to 18 per cent of petitions and 15 per cent of signatures on this topic in that session.Footnote ¹⁶ Scotland accounted for 522 (or 11 per cent) out of the 4,702 anti-corn law petitions in 1841, with 27 from Ireland, and just 19 from Wales.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet on other issues, it was Welsh petitioners who contributed disproportionately. In 1829, there were 271 petitions against Catholic relief directed to the House of Lords from the Principality, or 11 per cent of the total, at a time when Wales accounted for around 4 per cent of the UK population.Footnote ¹⁸ Given the strength of Welsh Nonconformity, it is unsurprising that Welsh petitioners also contributed disproportionately to the late Victorian petition drives in favour of temperance and Sabbatarianism. For instance, in 1880, there were 587 petitions in favour of closing national museums on Sundays (containing around 85,000 signatures), with Wales accounting for 45 petitions (or 7.6 per cent).Footnote ¹⁹

The case of Ireland was different again. Irish petitioners did contribute to UK-wide petition campaigns; however, some of the issues that united petitioners across the four nations most effectively were those associated with Protestantism and Anglicanism, which perhaps reveals some of the limits of petitions as a tool with which to integrate Irish Catholics into the UK polity. For instance, of the 306 petitions against the Whig government’s plan for non-denominational education in 1832, 186 (61 per cent) were from Ireland, 80 (26 per cent) from England, 34 (11 per cent) from Scotland, and 2 (1 per cent) from Wales.Footnote ²⁰ To give some later examples, there were almost 3,000 petitions against the disestablishment of the Irish church in 1869, over 800 of them from Ireland, while members of the Church of Ireland and Presbyterian denominations were among the Irish petitioners who opposed Gladstone’s second Home Rule bill in 1893.Footnote ²¹ Protestant petitioning communities were a mainstay of the culture of petitioning in Ireland, as well as in England, Scotland, and Wales. Yet Irish petitioners were not exclusively Protestant. From the 1820s through to the 1840s, Daniel O’Connell made petitioning central to a series of mass mobilisations of Irish Catholics around topics such as Catholic relief, repeal of the union, tithes and the Irish church, and Irish municipal reform, to name just a few issues.Footnote ²² Such mass petition drives contributed to the 10,000 petitions from Ireland that were presented to the Commons between 1833 and 1841, according to one account.Footnote ²³

A full geographical analysis of petitions would be needed to reveal the precise trends within the fluctuating relationship between Irish petitioners and Parliament. However, there is some evidence to suggest that aside from Unionists and Protestants, Irish petitioners were less willing to appeal to Parliament in the later nineteenth century. This was perhaps partly a result of tactical choices. The late Victorian Irish leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, routinely presented petitions, particularly from his constituencies of county Meath (1875–1880) and Cork city (1880–1891), but petitioning was not central to his political strategy, as it had been for O’Connell.Footnote ²⁴ The land question of the 1870s was significant as the last time that Irish issues, aside from Home Rule, generated a sufficient number of petitions and signatures.Footnote ²⁵ In her study of Irish women’s petitioning in the later nineteenth century, Ciara Stewart has demonstrated that the main petition organisers for women’s suffrage, temperance, and repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts typically came from a middle-class Protestant milieu, a profile similar to their counterparts across the Irish sea.Footnote ²⁶ Comparing certain localities, such as Dublin, Cork, Kilkenny, Belfast, and Tipperary, in the 1830s and 1840s and the last two decades of the century suggests a slight decline in the number of petitions from Ireland by the latter period. The small town of Youghal, county Cork, sent up ninety-five petitions between 1833 and 1849, but only twenty in the final two decades of the century. However, it is difficult to establish to what extent the Irish experience was merely in line with the general downward trend in the number of petitions and issues addressed in the later Victorian period.Footnote ²⁷ For these reasons, whether the apparent decline of Irish petitioners appealing to the Commons is evidence of a broader disengagement from Parliament and the authority of the UK state remains an open question, and one that requires further evidence than that presented here to determine. A closer examination of the shifting relationship between Irish petitioners and Parliament would have significance not least for its implications in understanding the trajectory of Irish politics in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

While petitions were rooted in specific localities, these were transcended as petitioners associated themselves with broader bodies of opinion that connected subjects across the four nations. Although petitions could bring together English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh signatories in common cause, the contributions of each nation varied depending on the topic involved.

Petitioning Communities and Local Political Cultures

The range of petitioning communities varied from place to place. A broader analysis reveals similar types of petitioning communities in different localities, whether industrial towns, ports, small boroughs, or agricultural areas. Before examining and emphasising the particularities or peculiarities of specific local petitioning cultures, we should acknowledge the wider similarities across places. A second point is that even though petitioners increasingly favoured the demotic, inclusive label of ‘Inhabitants’ when addressing Parliament, it is still possible to discern a range of different petitioning communities at a local level.

Conclusion

While the last chapter examined the identities that petitioners expressed when addressing Parliament, the analysis here has provided a comparative examination of petitioning communities. Viewed from a local perspective, petitioning communities were fluid and diverse, rather than static and fixed entities. Contests between petitioners were significant in stimulating local popular politics as we shall see in the next chapter. Local contexts are important to understanding the nature and strength of different petitioning communities within a given area, shaped as they were by political traditions, religious demography, and economic geography, among other factors. While the emphasis here has been on identifying general patterns or similarities, further studies of particular localities or communities will tell us more about the important differences shaped by these various contexts. Rather than offering a collection of local studies, this analysis has been directed at a more general level to demonstrate how the politics of place can be re-connected with national contexts, as well as considered within particular political cultures. Petitioning communities were usually connected horizontally to petitioners in other places who subscribed to the same prayers, such as Anglicans defending the established church. At the same time, petitioners were connected vertically to national political structures because they appealed to institutions such as Parliament, or the monarch.

A final point is that while petitioning communities within particular places were diverse and fluid, there were also strong currents of continuity over time in terms of certain groups of petitioners, notably religious congregations, or the salience of certain issues. These continuities were important not only in fostering and developing certain traditions within local political cultures and articulating the identities of petitioners, but in sustaining the broader culture of petitioning over many decades. That culture of petitioning is the focus of the final part of the book.