‘The Lowest Degree of Freedom’: The Right to Petition Parliament, 1640–1800

Abstract

AbstractThe essay examines the right to petition from the revolutions of the 17th century to the start of the age of reform. It shows that, by legislating for a right to petition the monarch, the revolution of 1688 appeared to resolve some of the uncertainty about the right to petition that had been apparent since the 1640s, but failed to confirm a right to petition parliament and left considerable ambiguities about the legitimacy of popular pressure exerted in this way. Throughout the 18th century, the right to petition parliament, and hence to exert popular pressure on it, thus remained contested. Indeed, a history of the points of conflict in Georgian Britain could be written through a study of petitioning controversies. Government supporters asserted the supremacy of formal parliamentary representation over informal representation of the popular voice through petitions and frequently sought to curtail, limit and emasculate any right to petition, and even, in 1795, to ban public petitioning altogether. Such attacks, nevertheless, provoked strong responses: claims to popular sovereignty over parliament, to natural rights, and to the notion that the right to petition was part of a set of interlinking rights of free speech and assembly. The 18th‐century arguments were also played out with explicit reference to 17th‐century ones, with the 1689 settlement in particular, providing a key reference point.