Growing the political nation: Petitioning in the eighteenth century

The eighteenth-century, once labelled by historians as both ‘oligarchic' and ‘aristocratic', is now commonly understood to have had a far more dynamic politics and society. But the fact remains, that those who elected MPs constituted only a small proportion of population. Over the century, the proportion of adult men with the right to vote declined from 23 percent in 1722 to 17 by 1790. In only a tenth of seats did all male inhabitants have the vote, whilst many constituencies allowed only mayors and councillors to choose the community's MP. In Scotland, no MP had to meet an electorate of more than 240 voters. Because of the Whig party's Septennial Act of 1716, these voters also had to wait an average of seven years between general elections.

This made the encouragement of petitioning essential to identifying public grievances and generating consent for proposed laws. Charles Lucas, in his introductory book Constitution of Great Britain (1751), wrote that ‘every member [of the public] should timely inform the head, of every annoyance given or threatened to the inferior parts'. To one merchant, it was only by ‘providing a ‘clear light…and exposing to your [parliamentarians] view the state of our trade', that Britain's economic interests could be advanced. A ‘great statesman', was described to be one who ‘consult[ed] [a] variety of men, and men of different talents'.

Thanks to the decision of MPs to publicise their proceedings through the publication of the Votes (short daily summaries of their agenda, but which lacked any speeches), the presentation of petitions became commonplace at eighteenth-century Westminster. In total, more than 12,000 collective petitions were presented in the century after the revolution of 1688.
The numerical commonness of petitions meant that they drew upon the population outside the electorate, including women and illiterate men, and from communities lacking their own MP at Westminster. But there continued to be severe limits on their participation: petitioning on religious and constitutional issues remained the prerogative of county and town elites.

Challenging the unreformed constitution's electoral geography

Despite London and Westminster being the site of Parliament and most associated with the Enlightenment culture of newspapers and coffee-houses, localities across England took the most advantage of petitioning to present a different political geography to that defined by the distribution of parliamentary constituencies. In the first thirty years after 1688, it was Gloucestershire, not London, that sent a greater number of petitions per head of population. In the next thirty-year period, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire, Lancashire and Lincolnshire sent the same number of petitions per head of population as the capital city. Communities were thus able to use petitions to punch above their electoral weight: the county of Yorkshire had only five percent of MPs, but sent a tenth of petitions to parliamentarians in the second half of the century.

This meant that petitions gave the unreformed constitution a flexibility in representation. Whilst no re-distribution or creation of constituencies occurred between the enfranchisement of Durham in 1673 and the Reform Acts of 1832, despite the many changes in population and industrialisation, new towns were not silenced. Communities in Manchester, Birmingham and Wolverhampton employed petitions to highlight their own issues to Westminster. Indeed, in Manchester James Ogden argued against the city having an MP, claiming that ‘it would fatal' to the trading interest' if ‘ill-will between masters and workmen' was produced by holding elections, preferring instead the unity (and relative cheapness) of petitioning.

Women and petitions

Being excluded from exercising the right to vote, though not formally excluded by law from voting until the first Reform Act of 1832, not insignificant numbers of women also participated in three types of petitioning campaigns.

In a society where the protection of property rights was held to be sacred, women whose property was impacted on by parliamentary legislation signed alongside men. In petitions on the rebuilding of towns, the enclosure of land, or relating to the banking and credit, women were signed as ‘occupiers of houses', ‘owners of land' or ‘trustees'. In 1721, for example, a ‘great number of widows and maiden gentlewomen' who had invested in the South Sea Scheme, attended the Commons with a petition.

Secondly, when Parliament considered legislation relating to the cloth industry and the regulation of shops, women also formed part of the petitioning nation. This reflected the fact that a fifth of London women were involved in the manufacture of clothes during the early eighteenth century, and forty percent of shops were staffed by women. In 1689, a two-thousand strong crowd of petitioning weavers included women, as well as men. Ten years later, female bell-ringers ‘raise[d] the weaver[s]' to petition Parliament. Crowds of weavers and their families were again petitioning in 1765, when up to forty thousand carried flags to Westminster from Spitalfields.

The final topic on which substantial numbers of women participated were in issues relating to poor relief, church-building, and local social issues. This reflected the fact that women often acted in senior roles in local parishes and the maintenance of the poor.   These petitioning women were thus being described as the ‘principle inhabitants' of a community. They were never a majority on any petition, but surviving documents from Lambeth, Norfolk, and Gloucester suggest between five and twenty percent of subscribers were female. If petitioners wanted to argue that legislation had an impact on the poor, their claims would be more convincing if those responsible for them subscribed to the truth of a petition's arguments.  

Representing interest and expertise.

Parliamentarians tolerated the participation of women and received petitions from underrepresented communities, because eighteenth-century petitions were largely unconcerned with weighing the opinions of the public. Instead, in the centuries before universal suffrage and the rise of central-state statistics, petitioners were essential in delivering locally-held information to Westminster and providing Parliament with a sense of local opinion. As the pamphleteer James Whiston argued:

"that if sick, we consult a physician, so when the trade of a nation is to secured or advanced, the merchants and tradesman's advice is best able to accomplish the same: it is...impossible for noblemen and gentlemen not educated in trade, ever to arrive at a perfect understanding."

Dr Philip Loft was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. This article is informed by research funded by the AHRC and the British Academy (grant pf160004).

Image: © Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/3/238/40, Petition of inhabitants of Tetbury for rebuilding their church, 1741.