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Petitioners and Rebels: Petitioning for Parliamentary Reform in Regency England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2019

Robert Poole
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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.

Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 43 , Issue 3: The Transformation of Petitioning , Fall 2019 , pp. 553 - 579
Copyright
© Social Science History Association, 2019 

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Footnotes

The research for this article was made possible by a British Academy Small Research Grant, “The English Reform Movement of 1816–17: Understanding the Home Office Disturbances Papers” (SG 130774). I would like to thank Frank O’Gorman, Henry Miller, Malcolm Chase, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and criticisms, while I remain responsible for the final result. The article owes more than might be apparent to my participation, 40 years ago, in the late Professor Austin Woolrych’s special subject at Lancaster University on “The English Revolution.”.

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