Petitioners and Rebels: Petitioning for Parliamentary Reform in Regency England

Abstract

The national petitioning campaign for parliamentary reform in 1816–17 was the biggest such movement before Chartism. It generated more than 700 local petitions with approaching a million signatures, representing perhaps 25 percent of adult males and extending the political nation well into the working classes. It was particularly strong in the Lancashire manufacturing districts, where economic grievances such as hunger and exploitation were converted through petitioning into arguments for political reform. The moving figure was Major John Cartwright, a veteran reformer who emerges as a more radical figure than usually supposed. The rejection of so many petitions by Parliament provided a legitimation for remonstrance and resistance, feeding through into extraparliamentary protests such as the march of the Manchester “Blanketeers” in 1817 and the mass platform movement of 1819 and “Peterloo.” The research combines a study of the petitions and the radical press with a close examination of the Home Office material, yielding insights into both grassroots organization and the strategies of the authorities, local and national. While the strategy of mass action was defeated by repression, the right of the unenfranchised masses to engage in political petitioning was conceded in principle long before the advent of formal democracy.

What Did Chartism Petition For? Mass Petitions in the British Movement for Democracy

“…Petitioning was also a well-established radical strategy: in a very real sense there was nothing exceptional about Chartism's use of petitioning, except the scale of its operations. Even here, as is shown elsewhere in this collection, there was a clear precedent in the 1817 petitions for parliamentary reform (Agnés 2013 : 65;Poole 2019). Negative reactions to petitioning were likewise all-too familiar.…”

“…In many ways the successor to early-nineteenth-century radicalism (see Poole 2019 in this issue), the Chartist movement in Britain was a mass, largely working-class movement that campaigned for democratic reform in the 1830s and 1840s. It is a universal axiom that "Chartism was built around the strategy of mass petitioning, encapsulated in the three great petitions of 1839, 1842 and 1848" (Saunders 2008 464).…”

Introduction: The Transformation of Petitioning in the Long Nineteenth Century (1780–1914)

“…As Gleadle (2009) has written of Victorian Britain, women were "borderline citizens," who did participate in politics and public life, but their right to do so was always contested and lacked a secure basis in political and legal rights, which explains the huge value and popularity of the right to petition. The right to petition served as a constitutionally impeccable bridgehead for wider claims to political participation, including ultimately the right to vote (Chase 2019;Poole 2019;Zaeske 2003: 127, 140; see also Tilly 1995: 382) Fifth, the public nature of petitions as texts and petitioning as process was an effective way to publicize issues and causes to the public, media, and potential signatories, or as Malcolm Chase puts it in his contribution, "petitioning and memorializing were : : : iterative educational processes central to building political awareness." Even if individuals declined to sign petitions, activists and canvassers argued that petitioning still had a valuable educative function in terms of raising general awareness.…”

“…As Edmund Morgan has written: "Petitioners were in a sense rivals of representatives, claiming to speak the voice of the people but unrestricted by the qualifications placed on voting and uninhibited by the responsibilities of being part of the government" (Morgan 1988: 224). In Britain, antiparliaments or conventions were illegal (Parssinen 1973), but mass petitions provided another means through which radical democratic movements could question the legitimacy of MPs and Parliament (Chase 2019;Pickering 2001;Poole 2019;Tilly 1995: 145-46).…”

“…Third, the special issue engages with themes that have long been central to Social Science History and of interest to historians and social scientists. The essays examine the use of petitioning within social movements and other popular campaigns and consider petitioning as part of the wider relationship between popular contention, collective action, and citizenship (Palacios Cerezales 2019, Makovi 2019, Poole 2019, Chase 2019, Huzzey 2019, Carpenter 2019, and Brossard 2019. While most of the articles focus on specific national examples within Europe and America, points of contrast are provided by studies of petitioning in a colonial society (Jaffe 2019) and in premodern Eurasian states (Zaret 2019).…”