Between 1780 and 1918 over 1 million public petitions were sent to the House of Commons from across the UK. These petitions contained a staggering 165 million signatures. While was part of a wider growth of mass, collective petitioning to national legislatures across North America and western Europe, the scale of petitions in the nineteenth-century UK was historically exceptional. In this blog, I discuss themes from my recent book A Nation of Petitioners: Petitions and Petitioning in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) relevant to those working on parliamentary studies.
During the nineteenth century, petitioning was transformed in the UK and other polities, including the USA, into its modern form as a participatory practice linked to representative institutions. Older traditions of petitioning the monarch sought the redress of personal, local, or sectional grievances. By contrast, the new style of petitioning was used by citizens and subjects to raise topics of national importance, make claims for citizenship and political rights, and organise massive popular campaigns in a pre-democratic era, including for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage.
Through examining the monumental scale of petitions in this period, A Nation of Petitioners has a number of themes relevant those interested in parliaments in general and the UK Parliament in particular.
First, petitions are crucial to understanding the authority and legitimacy of Parliament, particularly the House of Commons, during an era of democratisation but not democracy. Petitions institutionalised regular public engagement with Parliament on a colossal scale. Millions of British people interacted with Parliament and parliamentarians through petitions, and this remained the case even after the franchise was extended by the First and Second Reform Acts passed in 1832 and 1867. Indeed, it was not until the later 1880s, after the passing of the Third Reform Act (1885), that the registered electorate began to exceed the annual total of signatures on petitions to the House of Commons. The position of the aristocratic House of Lords was also strengthened by the tens of thousands of petitions it received. The massive waves of petitioners, even radical critics, submitting their requests to Parliament, confirmed the legislature’s authority and to an extent, legitimated, an assembly elected under limited suffrage.
At the same time, petitions could challenge the authority and legitimacy of Parliament when they claimed to represent a wider people than that which elected MPs. The three massive Chartist petitions of 1839, 1842, and 1848, calling for democratic reforms and signed by millions of working-class men and women presented just such a challenge. Recent studies of the post-2016 debates over Brexit have noted the tension between parliamentary sovereignty (based on an electoral mandate) and popular sovereignty (based on the majority in the referendum). The example of the nineteenth century suggests that the tension between parliamentary and popular sovereignty is a latent dynamic in parliamentary systems of government, albeit one that has been relatively well-contained in an era of universal suffrage when MPs could usually claim an unmatched democratic mandate.
Second, petitions were central to the evolving system of parliamentary representation. Like e-petitions today, nineteenth-century petitions provided a form of ‘linkage’ between citizens and Parliament, particularly outside elections. Petitions were an essential tool for making representative claims by both parliamentarians and petitioners. Through presenting petitions and interacting with petitioners, MPs and peers acted as representatives, even when they disagreed with petitioners. Presenting petitions enabled both geographic and issue-based representation. Petitioning also enabled the representation from different nations (Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as well as England) within the UK and also from groups, such as women, who were formally excluded from voting in elections or sitting in Parliament at this time. Petitions were also presented from settlers and colonised peoples from within the British empire who were not formally represented in Parliament.
MPs typically presented petitions from their constituencies or on issues that they were associated with. Peers usually presented petitions from areas they were associated with through landownership or had formerly represented when in the Commons; bishops, or spiritual peers, were often tasked with presenting petitions on religious or moral questions, including temperance. Presenting petitions allowed Victorian MPs who did not trouble Hansard reporters to represent their constituents. Henry Lowther, who sat as MP for Westmorland for 55 years was known as the ‘silent colonel’ due to his lack of contribution to debates; yet he still presented over 400 petitions. Presenting petitions and corresponding with petitioners was an important part of the hidden, largely unsung practice of representation that MPs like Lowther did, and emphasises the varied ways that parliamentarians represented the public outside elections.
Finally, petitions to the House of Commons declined in the early twentieth century. This was part of a trend also evident in other countries such as the USA or France. Petitioning did not decline as a form of political participation, but was rather displaced from national legislatures to a wider range of national and international authorities, including in the British case, Number 10 Downing Street. Unlike petitions to Parliament, these other types of petitions were rarely formally recorded which explains their invisibility in studies of twentieth-century British politics and history. The executive’s increasing control of the legislature in the twentieth century encouraged British citizens to appeal to other authorities, although Parliament did still receive large mass petitions on occasion, such as the three petitions about pensions during the Second World War. MPs and officials missed an opportunity to rethink petitioning tool for public engagement with Parliament in the 1970s; the unimaginative conventional wisdom of the time preferred to abolish the Petitions committee instead.
Given this historical context, the recent emergence of legislative e-petitions systems in the UK and in many other democracies is significant for reasserting parliaments as the primary institution for receiving petitions from citizens. There are some important differences of course. In an era of universal suffrage, petitioners do not perhaps pose the same challenge to representatives. In terms of representation, because citizens can usually upload their petitions to a parliamentary web platform rather than through the medium of an MP, they do not provide the same interaction between citizen and representative, although they do provide a form of public engagement with Parliament as an institution. Today, the UK Parliament’s Petitions Committee offers a wide range of actions that go far beyond the limited or ‘descriptive’ petitions system of the nineteenth century, where petitions were presented but no further action was taken. E-petitions then provide an opportunity for the UK Parliament and other legislatures to re-engage citizens, albeit in very different ways from the nineteenth century.
Henry Miller is Associate Professor (Research) at Durham University. This blog draws on his book A Nation of Petitioners: Petitions and Petitioning in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918 published by Cambridge University Press in February 2023.