'And Your Petitioners & c': Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics 1838-48 Author(s): Paul A.

Pickering Reviewed work(s): Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 466 (Apr., 2001), pp. 368-388 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/580838 . Accessed: 09/11/2011 05:17
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English Historical Review (COxford University Press 200I

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And YourPetitioners&c':ChartistPetitioning in I838-48* PopularPolitics

AT nine o'clock on Monday morning, 2 May I842, many thousands of

Londoners began to assemble at various points in the metropolis to play their part in what the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, described as a 'novel ... and dangerous experiment' - marching on the House of Commons to present a National Petition praying'that a nation's By eleven o'clock, amidst bright sunshine, wrongs should be redressed'.1 the various local and regional contingents began to converge at Lincoln's Inn Fields in Holborn. As each new section arrivedthe areabecame 'more densely crowded', enthused the reporter for the Northern Star, 'than it ever had been previouslyin the memory of the oldest inhabitant'.Within the hour the object of the congregation had arrived: the 'GRAND PETITION'. Containing 3,3I7,702 signatures the second Chartist National Petition was more than six miles in length and weighed more than six hundredweight. For carriagethe petition had been tightly encased in a wooden frame bearing the simple inscriptions, 'the Charter', 'justice', as well as the famous six points and the total number of signatures. Such was the weight that it took about 30 Chartists- mainly representativesof the London trades - to lift the petition, and they required regular replacement as the petition was carried. It was not until about I.30 p.m. that the immense procession, estimated to be about 20,000 in number, was finally formed and began to wend its way via Queen Street, Holborn, Museum Street, and Russell Street, to Tottenham Court Road; and then by Oxford and Regent Streets, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, Charing Cross and Parliament Street to the House of Commons. Accompanying the Grand Petition was a superb display of several hundred banners and flags as well as half a dozen bands of music. All along the route of the procession was crowded with spectators. The Northern Star noted that in Pall Mall the balconies of the aristocratic clubs were 'crowded with MPs and other persons of distinction', but, probably wisely, it did not attempt to guess what they thought of the passing retinue. Unlike in I848 when the government was determined to prevent the Chartists from accompanying their petition to the House, in I842 the 'dangerousexperiment' was allowed to proceed to its
*A shorter version of this paper was presented to the iith Australasian Modern British History Association Conference at the Australian National University in February I999. I am grateful to Alex Tyrrell, Glen Barclay and Bill Connelly for their comments and suggestions in relation to a subsequent draft. I am also grateful to Brian Harrison who provided me with a number of helpful references from his own notes. I. Northern Star,7 May 1842. The subsequent quotations from the Starin relation to this episode are from this report.

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conclusion. By the time the petition reached PalaceYardthe crowd had swelled to such an extent that even The Times put its size at 50,000 individuals and went on to comment that the windows of the House of Commons were crowded with 'interested MPs'.1 As several prominent Chartists, including Feargus O'Connor, the most popular national leader of the movement, together with the London trades' representatives, attempted to take the petition into the House through the Members' entrance the proceedings encountered a major difficulty. The obstacle was physical ratherthan political; as the bemused correspondent from The Times reported, the Grand Petition was soon 'jambed in the doorway'.2 There followed a comic interlude when, despite much pushing and shoving, the petition could neither go forwardsnor backwards- a scene recorded faithfully and hilariously in a contemporary cartoon.3 Only after several windows were broken and parts of the door frame and the petition box were removed did the Grand Petition finally cross the threshold of the parliament building. Once inside it was 'torn asunder' and carried into the chamber 'by a troop of petitioners, and there formed a pile which overtopped the table'.4 According to William Lovett, a leading Chartist, the House looked as if it had been snowing paper.5It was all to no avail. Thomas Duncombe, the radicalMP for Finsbury and leading parliamentarysupporter of the Chartists, moved that the petitioners be heard at the bar but this was defeated and the petition was rejected by the Tory-dominated House, much as the Whigs had done in I839. The minds of the MPs, lamented the editorial in the Northern Star, were as narrow as the entrance to the House.6 At a time when petitioning has been reduced to an anachronism with no significant role in public affairsit is easy to overlook its importance in popular politics in the I840s. During the Chartist years petitioning was arguably the most common form of political activity in Britain. In the five years up to I843 a staggering 94,000 petitions were laid on the table of the House of Commons of which the Chartist petition of I842 was but one. Despite this, petitioning has been largely ignored by students of the 'pressurefrom without'. Even those who have made it the special object of study have tended to accept the unsound assumption that petitioning was a sort of second best tactical option - a fall back for the time when all other avenues had been exhausted. Thus for B. J. Enright, a former Clerk of the House of Commons, petitioning became a habit; whereas
I. The Times, 3 May 1842. The Times, 3 May I842. 3. Cartoon is reproduced on the cover of E. Royle, Chartism, London, I980. The original is in the Mansell Collection, London. 4. Punch, vol. 2, Jan-June 1842, introduction. 5. Cited in H. L. Harris, 'The Influence of Chartism in Australia', Royal Australian Historical Transactions, vol. II, I926, 363. 6. Northern Star, 7 May I842.
2.

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for Colin Leys, a political scientist, petitioners were simply slow to realize that the politicians were not going to listen to them.1 Several recent historians have drawn attention to the central place of the Constitution in what James Vernon has called 'the mythology of English political culture'.2Vernon is surely correct when he argues that 'popular constitutionalism remained the master narrative of English politics right up to I867, and probably well beyond', but he largely overlooks the role of petitioning in it. Even James Epstein, Feargus O'Connor's foremost modern biographerwho, with Vernon and others, has done much to rediscover the importance of parliament for nineteenth-century radicals,has dismissed petitioning as an activity that held 'little inherent appeal' for many Chartists.3 For the Chartists, petitioning was involved at both the inception and the collapse of the movement. The first of the published objectives of the National Chartist Convention of I839 committed it to organising the collection of signatures and the presentation of a National Petition demanding the implementation of the Charter.4Moreover,in the minds of many contemporaries, as well as some historians, the collapse of Chartism as a mass movement was directly linked to the controversythat engulfed the I848 National Petition when there were accusations of massive fraud. During the intervening decade Chartists devoted more time and energy to petitioning than to virtually any other activity, making it an essential element of the rank and file experience.The article that follows has two principal aims. First, by restoring petitioning to its central place in the dramaturgy of Chartism and to its place in the micro-politics of the rank and file experience, the article will begin the process of rescuing the humble petition from the obscurity into which it has been consigned. It will do so by addressing some basic questions: why was petitioning so common, who signed the petitions; and what was the role of petitions in both parliamentaryand extra-parliamentary politics?These are questions for which answersarelong overdue. Having done so it will conclude by offering a new interpretation of the events surrounding the I848 Chartist Petition. According to many authorities the right of petitioning the Crown and Parliament for redressof grievanceswas an innovation of Edward I, but
I. B. J. Enright, Public Petitions in the House of Commons, House of Lords, London, I960, p. 76; C. Leys, 'Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries', Political Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 1955, 59. See also D. Judge, 'Public Petitions and the House of Commons', ParliamentaryAffairs, vol. XXXI, no. 4, Autumn, 1978, 391. 2. J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. I8I5-I867, Cambridge, I993, p. 296. See also G. Stedman Jones, 'The Language of Chartism' in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds) The Chartist Experience, London, I982, pp. 3-58; J. Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the constitution: new narratives in the political history of England's long nineteenth century, Cambridge, I996. 3. Vernon, Politics and the People, p. 296-7, 320. J. Epstein, 'The Constitutional Idiom: Radical Reasoning, Rhetoric and Action in Early Nineteenth-Century England', Journal of Social History, vol. 23, no. 3, I990, 56i. 4. Charter, 3 March I839. EHR Apr. OI

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as Britain'sbest known parliamentaryscholar, Sir Thomas Erskine May, has noted, in practice the right was restricted for many centuries to petitions seeking the redressof personal and local grievances. 1 Petitions of a more general political nature came into vogue during the civil war and Long Parliament, but were actively discouraged after the Restoration.2 It was not until the late I76os, during the campaign over the fate of the irascible John Wilkes, that the prohibition on public petitions began to break down. Here the line between individual grievance and criticism of government policy was blurred. By the I820S, when Henry Hallam first published his Constitutional History of England, the notion of a public petition on an unambiguously political matter had gained general acceptance. Hallam looked back to the petitions calling for the abolition of the slave trade in I787 as the first of this sort.3 For Erskine May, however, the 'origin of the modern system of petitioning' was to be found in Christopher Wyvill's agitation for economical reform among Yorkshirefreeholders in I779-80.4 Whatever the precise origin, at the end of the eighteenth century the relativenumbers of petitions and petitioners were small. In the five years ending in I789, for example, there was a total of 88o petitions. Thereafter the numbers grew steadily to 4,498 in the five years ending in I8I5 and 24,492 petitions in the five years ending in I83I.5 Even this gives little indication of what was to come. The prodigious growth of petitioning the House of Commons reached its apogee during the Chartist years. Over the course of the decade I838-48 there was an average of i6,ooo petitions submitted every session, with a peak of 33,898 (containing more than six million signatures) in I843 alone.6 These petitions canvassed a vast range of grievances. In I844, for example, the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Petitions met forty-five times and recorded I2,462 petitions. The tightly printed pages of their reports give comprehensive details of every petition including 656 demanding the repeal of the Legislative Union with Ireland;3,86I against repeal of the Corn and Malt Duties; I27 calling for a limit to the hours of labour; 54 demanding an alteration to the New Poor Law Amendment Act; as well as i6 calling for an inquiry into the Anatomy Act; 26 demanding the repealof the Stamp Duty on hail storm insurance; and 323 against the union of the dioceses of St Asaph and

i. T. Erskine May, The ConstitutionalHistory ofEngland, London, 1878, vol. 2, p. 6i; N. Wilding and P. Laundy, An Encyclopaedia of Parliament, London, i96i, p. 469. 2. T. Erskine May, Democracy in Europe: A History, London, 1877, vol. 2, pp. 390-I; idem., Constitutional History, p. 61-2. 3. H. Hallam, The Constitutional History of Englandfor the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of GeorgeII, London, 1897 edition, p. 786n. 4. Erskine May, Constitutional History, p. 63. 5. Leys, 'Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries', 47. 6. PP. Reportsof the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions, 1843, vol. 135, pp. 1755-176i. EHR Apr. Oi

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1 The list goes on. For the student of public affairsthe reports of Bangor. the committee represent an important and hitherto under-utilized source.2 Amidst the mountains of paper that inundated the House of Commons committee the petitions submitted by the Chartists deserve special attention. First the massive Chartist petitions of I839, I842 and I848 dwarfed all previous efforts. A comparison with the anti-slavery movement is instructive. In the half-century between I780 and the end of the I830s the opponents of slavery had petitioned with increasing volume and intensity culminating in two major campaigns during the I830s. In I833, 5,020 petitions calling for the abolition of slavery were tabled, and in I837-8 this was followed by 4,I75 petitions against the scheme of compulsory unpaid labour known as the Negro apprenticeship. In both cases, however, the total number of signatures on these petitions only approximated the smallest of the Chartist petitions.3 Moreover, the Chartists were the first to collate their petitions prior to submission in order to produce one massive document which added a new dimension to both the public spectacle and the claims of the petitioners to represent national public opinion.4 If historians have failed to take petitioning seriously the same can not be said of the contemporary political elite. The rise of petitioning provoked a procedural revolution aimed at dramatically restricting the scope for MPs to occupy the time of the House with petitions. At a time when debate over the Reform Bill was elevating the role of public opinion in political life to a new level,5 Grey'sWhig administration set up a committee to look into petitioning and the practicesthat had grown up around it.6 The inquiry was taken over by the Opposition. Under Sir Robert Peel'sinspiration and guidance the committee recommended not only the introduction of a ballot of MPs as a method of selecting who
i. PP. Reportsof the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions, 1844, vOl. 142,

pp. 917-23.
2. The contrast with historians of France who have treated the cahiers de doleancesthat chronicled public grievances on the eve of the-revolution as 'an unparalleled resource' is noteworthy. See London, 1992, p. 32. P. McPhee, A Social History of Modern France I780-I880, 3. PP. Reports of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions, 1833,vOl. I, p. lix; 1837-8, vol. 104, p. 66o. See also C. Midgley, WomenAgainst Slavery: The British Campaigns, London, 1992, p. 227n. I780-I870, 4. On the other hand, between 1838and 1843 (when they suspended their petitioning campaign) the Anti-Corn Law League was the most persistent petitioner of the House. In the three months to the end of March 1840, for example, there were 2,141 petitions for Repeal submitted bearing nearly one million signatures. Over the five sessions there were i6,351 petitions for repeal tabled in the House (an average of 3,270, containing an average total of 1,153,690 signatures, every session). PP. Reports of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions, 1839, vol. 110, 1841, vol . 125, pp. 847-52, vol. 126, p. 36; 1842, vol. 130, pp. 820-5; 1840, vol. ii6, pp. 1023-29; p. 728-34; 1843, vol. 135, pp. 1755-6i. 5. See P. Fraser, 'Public Petitioning and Parliament Before 1832', History, vol. 46, i96i, 195-2II; N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, London, 1953. 6. See PP. Reportfrom the Select Committee appointed to take into consideration the best means to be adoptedforfacilitating thepresentation ofPublic Petitions, 1831-2 (639) vol. 33; reprinted 1833(2) XII, pp. 3-i6.

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would be able to present petitions on any given day, but also the establishment of a Standing Committee to examine all petitions. The sting of the report was in its tail: Members would lose the right of speaking to petitions when they were tabled. Following the I84I General Election Peel's new Tory government moved to tighten further the Standing Orders, implementing measures that took effect a few days before the Chartists' 'dangerous experiment' of I842.1 The bi-partisan support for these measures reflected the fact that, ostensibly, a reasonablecase could be made: the inordinate amount of time occupied by dealing with petitions, it was argued, was increasingly incompatible with the demands of government, a fact exacerbatedby the convention that Ministers be present.2The Whig and Tory grandees alike must have winced when Daniel O'Connell, the leading Irish politician of the day, boasted that he had enough petitions to occupy a fortnight or three weeks'.3 There was a broader agenda shared by both major parties.4 A few years earlier Lord John Russell earned the sobriquet 'Finality Jack' by explicitly ruling out any further measures of democratic reform; in adopting Peel's procedural reforms the parliamentwas implicitly confirming the existence of a post-Reform Bill consensus that further political change was both unnecessary and undesirable. Significantly, however, the cumulative changes to the rules did not stem the flow of petitions. O'Connell, for example, continued to advocate mass petitioning as a public strategy:'send them ioo petitions today, i,ooo tomorrow', he advised a national conference of the Anti-Corn Law League in I842.5 Petitioning was also continued by O'Connell's legions of supporters in Ireland culminating in I844 with the presentation of 656 petitions containing nearly one and a half million signatures.6 The Chartists too were consistent petitioners in most sessions between I838 and I848, not just the ones dominated by their monster petitions. The halcyon years, often referred to as early Chartism, when it was truly a mass movement of national proportions were clearly reflected in the reports of the House of Commons

committee:I.2 millionsignatures in I839; 70,000 in I840; I.4 million in and 3.3 million in I842 (as well as 400,000 in I846 and 2 million in I848). Only I845 and I847 standout asyearswhen therewasvirtually
I84I;

no Chartist petitioning.7
i. Leys, 'Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries', 52-3. 2. Enright, Public Petitions, pp. 65-6; Erskine May, Constitutional History, vol. I, p. 354. 3. Hansard (Commons),6 February 1833, col. 224. 4. See Leys, 'Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries', 48. 5. WeeklyFreeman 'sJournal, i9 February I842. 6. PP. Reportsof the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions, vol. 142, i844, p. 9I7; WeeklyFreeman 'sJournal, 2 March I844. 7. PP. Reportsof the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions, vol. iio, I839, pp. 820-5; vol. ii6, I840, pp. I023-9; vol. 124, I84I, pp. 847-52; vol. I26, I841, pp. 2-I8; vol 130, 1842, p. 728; vol. I58, 1846, p. 703; vol. 176, I847-8, p. I522, 1528. See also Judge, 'Public Petitions', 392. EHR Apr. Oi

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How, then, can we explain the deluge of petitions that engulfed the House in the I84os? The answer lies, in part, in appreciating that, notwithstanding the changes to the rules, petitioning remained an integral part of the system of political representation.William Cobbett was perhaps the first to recognize that the humble petition had an especial importance for the vast majority of people who remained unenfranchized after the Reform Bill, and many Chartists also subscribed to the notion. 'The Commons are intended to represent the whole people', argued the Rev. Benjamin Parsons, a Chartist of Ebley near Stroud, 'but how can they do this unless you hold public meetings and use other legitimate means to make them acquainted with your grievances and wishes'. Further answering his own question Parsons continued: 'The right of Petition has this object especially in mind'.1 Speaking for many Chartists the editor of the TenHours'Advocate put the case more succinctly: 'How are we to be heard? Our answer is By PETITION'.2 This notion of popular representationwas deeply rooted in an understanding of the past. Petitioning was an integral part of what historians have dubbed 'popular constitutionalism', a widely supported interpretation of British history that posited Chartism as a quest for lost rights.3 Although the People's Charter was drawn up with a view to building on the reforms of I832, the demands it codified were not new. Some Chartists looked back to a golden age of Saxon democracy under Alfred the Great that had been terminated by the Norman conquest.4 Looking beyond the imposition of the 'Norman Yoke' other Chartists found Britain's'primitive parliament', the Kyfr-y-then, a mythical republican democracy based on communal property ownership that had been suppressed by the Saxons in the middle of the fifth century.5 Other Chartists invoked Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights as the basis of their claim. Alongside these variations of a popular constitutionalist idiom were theories of natural rights that had been inspired by the writings of the republican heresiarch,Tom Paine, and by the example of the French Revolution. These theoretical justifications for the demands in the Charter were not mutually exclusive (Paine himself had excoriated the patrician banditti led by William the Conqueror) and many Chartists could invoke Paine and Alfred with equal enthusiasm.6 The right of petition was a common element in these conceptions; in particular Chartists pointed to important seventeenth-century precedents which
i. Rev. B. Parsons, Tracts for Fustian Jackets and Smock Frocks, n.d.[c.I847], Stroud, p. 3, emphasis original. 2. Ten Hours Advocate, 9 January I847. 3. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, ig80, pp. 84f; J. A. Oxford, Epstein, Radical Expression:PoliticalLanguage, Ritual, and Symbol in England, I790-I850, I994, p. 76 quoting Lynn Hunt. 4. See C. Hill, 'The Norman Yoke', Puritanism and Revolution, London, i969, pp. 119-25. 5. McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 8, I5 May i841. 6. Epstein, Radical Expression, pp. 3-28. EHR Apr. OI

POPULAR POLITICS 375 established petitioning as one of the rights of a free-born Briton. Thus, when the Scottish Chartists drew up their own Declaration of Rights in I839 it featured the retention of the right to petition even in the context of a parliament elected by universal suffrage.1 As a constitutional icon petitioning was thus one of those devices that, as Geertz suggests, form part of the 'masterfiction' 'at the political center of any complexly organized society', a symbol of 'the inherent sacredness of central authority'.2 'A petition', wrote William Hill, the editor of the Northern Star in October I839, was a 'constitutional . . reason for bringing the people together'. In FebruaryI84I, Hill elaborated further: 'This form of expressing our opinions is a right which, as Britons, we ought to prize. It legalizes our meetings, and gives assurancesof safety in our attempts to spread our principles'.3 At a less ethereallevel petitions did not lose their practicalfunctions in parliament as a result of changes to the rules. They were, for example, still seen as what Hill called instruments of annoyance: 'Throughout this session let us petition. Petition in thousands, and in tens of thousands, as committees, associations, individuals, till the walls of the House re-echo the words - Universal Suffrage, the People's Charter'.The editor of the True Scotsman agreed, arguing in I839 that one reason why Chartists should 'petition again and again' was to give 'the House little else to do than discuss our modern Bill of Rights'.4 Petitions also provided what the Sheffield Chartists called a 'test of sincerity', not only for MPs whose opposition could be trumpeted around the country, but also for others in the community. In Sheffield, for example, they placed a petition praying for repeal of the new Poor Law Amendment Act for signature 'at every church, Chapel and place of worship in the town' with a view to seeing who would sign it and who would not.5 At a time when petitions have become like so much waste paper, it is difficult to appreciate the greatervalue that could be placed on a signature, particularlyto those who had no vote. On the one hand, signing the National Petition was a public act of accession, an overtly political action that was open to the scrutiny of friend and foe alike. When, for example, middle class radicals approached the Chartists to suggest an alliance, they sometimes cited the fact that they had signed 200I CHARTIST PETITIONING IN i. [Scottish] Chartist Circular, 28 September I839. 2. C. Geertz, 'Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power', J. Ben-David and T. N. Clark (eds), Culture and Its Creators, Chicago, I977, pp. I52, 171. The historian of petitioning the Crown in medieval France insists that they were not challenges to authority but 'acts of supplication'. See G. Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France, Ithica, I992. 3. Northern Star, I9 October I839; I3 February I84I. Hill also referred to the value of Memorials to the Crown, a strategy that was widely employed by the Anti-Corn Law League. See P. A. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League, London,
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4. True Scotsman extract in Charter, 7 July I839; Northern Star, 13 February 1841. 5. Sheffield Iris, 13 October 1840; 2 March 1841; Anti-Corn Law Circular, iI February 1841;

Scotsman, 9 October

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Chartists'petitions as evidence of their good faith.1 If they placed a high value of the signature of others, Chartists placed an even higher premium on their own. Signing a petition was an analogue of voting that was often regarded as precious in its own right. When Robert Lowery and Abram Duncan travelled to Cornwall on behalf of the Chartist Convention in March I839, for example, they encountered people who were prepared to stand in queues until iO pm in order to sign the National Petition.2 Moreover, part of the reason why the allegations of fraud stung so bitterly in I848 was that Chartists regarded responsible petitioning as a demonstration of their capacity for mature political action and, therefore,a vindication of their claim for the franchise. It was not taken lightly. Equally petitions continued to offer parliament a rough guide to public opinion at a time when there were few such guides. As PeterFraser has shown, following the conclusion of the French wars MPs increasingly invoked petitions as evidence of support in the nation at large; the Chartists recognized that the Whigs had enhanced the importance of petitioning as a measure of public opinion during the debates over the Reform Bill.3 Despite the changes to the Standing Orders, by the early 1840S petitions had become part of the lingua franca of politics at Westminster as the voluminous reports of the select committee testify. The most protracted use of petitions in parliamentaryexchanges before 1850involved opponents and supportersof the corn laws. With an eye to an upcoming parliamentary debate the editor of the Anti-Corn Law Circular warned: 'Your adversarieswill endeavour to get up petitions from every village, nay, almost from every farm-house in the country. How is this to be counteracted?By similar means, - by petitioning'.4 For the Chartists the case for petitioning was strengthened even further by the fact that they could count only on a handful of parliamentary supporters; petitions could compensate for numbers in making a case on behalf of the nation. Again Cobbett provided useful instruction. In the twilight of his public life Cobbett had gone to Westminster with no illusions. 'What is needed in this House', England's greatest journalist had written in 1833, is 'ten men, who care not one single straw for all the noise that can possibly be raisedagainst them'.5 In the meanwhile he used petitions to stand in for a lack of votes: in March 1833Cobbett presented ninety different petitions from different parts of the country and, following the introduction of the balloting system, he risked a rebuke from the Speaker when another member complained that he had placed his name on the waiting list at least eight times.6
6 July I842. Times, I842; Manchester Iris,22 February I. See, for example,Sheffield London,I979, p. andChartist, Lowery: Radical B. Harrisonand P. Hollis (eds),Robert Star,7 AprilI849. 'PublicPetitioningBeforeI832', 208-I0; Northern 3. Fraser, Law Circular, 3 DecemberI840. 4. Anti-Corn London,I924, p. 394. Lifeof William Cobbett, 5. Cited in G. D. H. Cole, The (Commons),27 March I833, col. II40. 6. Hansard
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The use of petitions as a measure of public opinion by Tories and radical alike - and thus as a potentially powerful source of external pressure on the incumbent government - was undoubtedly one of the principal reasons for the attempts by the political elite to stamp them out. Nevertheless the Chartists sought to break through the resistanceto external pressureby turning simple petitions into monster petitions. As the debates show, despite the fact that they were rejected, the Chartists were remarkablysuccessful, at least in 1839 and 1842. In 1839Attwood began his remarks by acknowledging that rules prevented him from speaking, but neverthelesssought indulgence given that the petition was 'very extraordinaryand important'. He then proceeded to debate the contents of the petition in flagrant breach of the rules and it was only after several minutes on his feet that he was interrupted by a point of order from a disgruntled back-bencher. Importantly, however, the Speaker ruled that Attwood's indulgence be extended given 'the circumstances of the case'. 1 In 1842 the government allowed an extended debate on Duncombe's motion that the Chartists be heard at the bar, an indulgence that clearly reflected the sheer magnitude of the petition itself. After all it was, as John Bowring, a liberal FreeTradeMP, declared in support of Duncombe, 'unexampled in importance' containing 'the greatest number of signatures than any petition ever before presented'. Speaker after speaker made the point that here was something new. Despite the rules that had recently been implemented with bi-partisan support, the size of the Chartist petition even drew the leading political figures of the day, including LordJohn Russell and Peel himself, into the debate.2 Obviously size did matter. The Scottish Chartist Circular, quoting Cobbett, noted 'where doubts are entertained of the morality of a government, we require to back our reasonable demand by numbers; and though our petition, signed by four would have little effect, let us add four million'. 'FOUR MILLIONS!! That is the number', editorialized the Northern Star in November 1841, 'We must not have less'.3 This is not to suggest that the Chartists liked petitioning. Notwithstanding occasional optimistic statements,4 most Chartists were in no doubt about the likely fate of their petitions. As the editor of the Charter, a London radical newspaper, lamented in 1839: 'The petition was not prepared, nor was it submitted to the House under any expectation, or with the slightest hope that what was set forth therein would be, for an instant, considered... '5 If the rejection of petitions thus provided tangible evidence of the dysfunction of the parliamentary system and strengthened the case for reform, this was little consolation. According
I. Hansard (Commons), I4 June I839, cols. 222-226. 2. Hansard (Commons), 3 May I842, cols. I3-88. 3. [Scottish] Chartist Circular, 28 September I839; Northern Star, I3 November I84I. 4. Northern Star, iI August I838. 5. Charter, 2I July I839. EHR Apr. Oi

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to the London Democratic Association petitioning was a 'waste of money time and trouble', an opinion that was obviously shared in south Yorkshirewhere the Chartists regarding it as 'like throwing a feather against the wind'.1 Why then did they continue to petition? In part it signified a lack of alternativeswhich, in turn, reflected the composition of the movement. Unlike the Anti-Corn Law League which, when faced with persistent rejection of its petitions, was able to turn to electoral politics and to other, more elaborate, extra-parliamentarydemonstrations of its constituency such as the national bazaars,2the Chartists' tactical options were circumscribedby its predominantly working class membership. As a movement that comprised mainly non-electors, the Chartists generally confined their electioneering to the theatre of the show of hands, and, as the Anti-Corn Law League experience would show, elections were very costly to fight. Petitions, on the other hand, were cheap - a point not lost on William Hill. '[A]bove all', he wrote, petitioning 'is a plan so cheap and simple that it interferesnot with any scheme that may be proposed'. The simplicity of petitioning is worthy of emphasis: as the editor of the Sheffield Iris, a liberal-radical newspaper, wrote in March 1840, 'Wherever there is a halfpenny sheet of paper, a pen and a few drops of ink, there are the materials for a petition'.3 Although Parliamentremained at the centre of the focus of Chartism, to properly understand the Chartists' passion for petitioning, we must search for answers outside Westminster. For the Chartists petitioning was, first and foremost, part of the dramaturgyof demotic politics where Hill summarized the its function and benefits were extra-parliamentary. case in 1841.A petition, he argued, 'is a means of keeping the agitation before the public mind'. Even though the petition was dealt with in the House of Commons, Samuel Kidd, another leading Chartist, suggested that this would invariablyproduce a report 'which will find its way into the columns of the newspaper press, and cause a general discussion throughout the country'.4 More importantly, petitions could serve the internal needs of the movement by reinforcing a sense of collective identity. When first promoting the National Petition in 1838, Attwood argued that petitioners would be 'banded together in one solemn and holy league'.5 For FeargusO'Connor too the monster petitions were intended 'to show the people their strength'. As he outlined to an enthusiastic crowd in Manchester in March 1848 in typically florid language, the legislature was irrelevant:6
Iris, I2 November I839; Sheffield I September i. Charter,
2.

I839.

See Pickering and Tyrrell, The People's Bread. 3. Northern Star, I3 February I84I; Sheffield Iris, 3 March 1840. 4. Northern Star, I3 February I84I; 7 April I849. 5. Northern Star, ii August I838. 6. United Irishman, 25 March I848. EHR Apr. Oi

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Did he ask them to petition parliament in the hope of this grievance being redressed?(no, no). Did he ask them to petition parliament in the hope of its having any effect on the legislature?(no). No; it was in the confidence that five

millions of men were strongin the knowledgethat they were fraternizing together. In this way petitions served as a symbol of the unity between the cause and the people. Lingering over the dramaturgy of the 'dangerous experiment' of 1842 is revealing. The Chartists' claim that they represented the nation, socially and spiritually and upheld a purer patriotism was evident in the numerous Union flags, a Welsh flag and a Scotsman 'in national dress', as well as in an honour guard of ex-grenadiers that accompanied the Grand Petition to the House of Commons. Dressing the event in patriotic garb emphasized that the 'dangerous experiment' was not a revolutionary threat to the political order. Implicit in the act of petitioning was an acceptance of the authority of the parliament;the challenge was direct, but constitutional. Like the 'dangerous experiment' of 1842, the ill-fated procession to present the 1848 petition was intended to be an elaborate statement of national purpose; an identification of the people's will with the national good. No detail was left to chance: even the box which encased the petition, it was boasted, had been made from timber hewn on one of the Chartist land colonies.1 The message was unmistakable: we are stakeholders, we sharein - or aspireto sharein - the ownership of the very soil of Britain and we demand our rights under the aegis of the venerable Constitution. Petitioning was not incidental in this context; it was central. The contrast with the strand of separatist nationalism that was emerging in Irelandin the later 1840s is significant. Commenting on the programme of the Irish Universal SuffrageAssociation in March 1848, John Mitchel, editor of the United Irishman, protested 'vehemently' against the 'method of constitutional agitation by meetings and petitions, as applied to Ireland: - we deny the right or power of the Imperial Parliament to legislate for us in any shape, even to give us the
franchise'.2

Recognizing the centrality of petitioning thus helps to define the parameters of both Chartist tactics and ideas. George Julian Harney, Hill's successor as editor of the Northern Star, predicted that the 1848 petition was doomed to 'be the very vanity of vanities, unless the people exhibit the will and determination to take other steps to enforce their claims'.3 Harney, whose aspirations for revolutionary change were reflected in the self-adopted sobriquet, LAmi du Peuple, was to be disappointed: the overwhelming majority of Chartists were unprepared
i. Manchester Examiner, i8 March 1848. United Irishman, 4 March I848; see also P. A. Pickering, ' "Repeal and the Suffrage": Feargus O'Connor's Irish "Mission", I849-50', in 0. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts (eds), The Chartist Legacy, Rendlesham, I999, pp. II9-I46. 3. Quoted in A. Briggs, Chartism, Stroud, I998, p. 92. As Briggs points out, the I848 petition advanced the cause no further than I839. EHR Apr. Oi
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to take 'other steps' if this involved stepping outside the constitution. The typical Chartist did not sharpen pikes, he collected signatures. In his discussion of these issues Epstein has stressedthe fact that in the lead-up to the presentation of the 1839 petition many Chartists avowed that it would be the last time they would do so.1 Although these views were indeed commonplace in 1839, it is the gap between rhetoric and realitythat is worthy of note. Recent developments in political theory, in particularthe emerging concept of micro-politics which draws attention to the activities, experiences and layered politics that make up everyday life, cast petitioning in a new light.2 For most Chartists petitioning continued to be the most consistent element of their rank and file experience. Despite the declarations that 1839 would to be the last petition, the reality is that many Chartists were at it again within weeks and the vast majority kept at it for most of the ensuing decade. Take Bolton for example. In 1839 the Bolton Chartists resolved almost unanimously that they would never petition again, but in 1842 they contributed 18,500 signatures to the National Petition.3 As noted, the Reports of the House Standing Committee show that the Chartists were active petitioners in every session, and not just in those marked by their monster petitions. In other words, far from being a mere pretext or a means of marking time until a better opportunity came along, petitioning was in many ways the raison detre of Chartism, at least for the rank and file. Collecting a petition provided an important stimulus to organization and fostered the development of movement culture. The Champion, a London radical newspaper edited by Cobbett's son, John Paul Cobbett, rightly pointed out that collecting the 1839 Chartist petition required a tremendous organizational effort. In the heart of London alone there were a dozen places to sign that represented an extensive geographical network of radical booksellers, newsagents, publishers, association rooms and public houses.4 The 1842 petition was collected with even more organizational structure, involving literally an army of voluntary canvassers.'Not a single meeting must be allowed to terminate without having an accession of numbers to the petition', entreated the Northern Star, 'everylocal agitator,and every office-bearer,must now, without the least delay, use every effort in contributing to perfect this work'.5Just as the Grand Petition was 'torn asunder' during its presentation, in his speech Duncombe broke the total down into its component parts, detailing impressive contributions from over 400 places: from 200,000

I. Epstein, 'The Constitutional Idiom', 56i. 2. I am grateful to Professor William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University and visitor to the Humanities Research Centre, for bringing this concept to my attention. (Commons), 3 May I842, col. I375. 24 February I839; Hansard 3. Charter, I4 April I839. and Weekly Herald,22 September I839; Charter, 4. Champion Star,I3 November I84I. S. Northern

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Londoners at the apex to a 'very long' 'list of hamlets and towns from which less than io,ooo signatures were procured'.1 The 1848 petition placed even greater organizational demands on the movement. Take the Scottish village of Coalsnaughton on the river Forth as an example. Here the Chartist petition committee of twenty claimed the title of the most active in the nation on the basis that they had secured 4,350 signatures between them from the district, including the entire population of their own village except two - a poor labourer and 'a silly creature', the schoolmaster.2 There were many other Chartist petition committees that could have made an equally good claim. At the opposite end of the process from the elaborate rituals of presentation described earlierwas the hard, grinding work of collection that involved those who drew up the sheets by hand, those who sat for hours at collection tables, and those who trudged the streets in a relentless door-to-door canvass. A tool of an essentially oral political culture that was used extensively in electioneering, canvassing was inter-personal politics at its most rudimentary level. Despite his doubts about the efficacy of petitioning, James Bronterre O'Brien called for canvassing for the 1839 petition to be 'immediate, simultaneous and universal', and sought to encourage others by describing how he had personally obtained the signatures of thirty individuals, 'who but for me would not havedone so'.3 In the scaleof Chartistendeavour, however, this was a modest effort. In 1842, 8oo signatures were obtained in four days from the coastal town of Sheerness, in Kent, thanks to efforts of J. B. Merry, and 'Mr Harrison', a man 'above sixty years of age'. Their efforts were not assisted by the fact the Sheerness was a 'government place' where 'Chartism was never heard of except by the calumnies of the press', or by the fact that they had to canvass at night after they had finished their own day's work. Proselytizing proved to be an arduous task: every house was visited twice, the petition left on the first night and collected on the following. In some cases a signature was only obtained after Merry had 'drive[n]' the 'real truth of Chartism into their
heads'.4

Restoring petitioning to its rightful place as an integral part of the micro-politics of rank and file Chartism also highlights another reason for its prevalence: it was a form of political activity that was open to women. Following the end of the French wars, petitioning was increasingly seen as a legitimate form of political activity for women. A Speaker'sruling in I829 confirmed that women were fully entitled to sign petitions even though at this stage, as Linda Colley has pointed out, the
I. Hansard (Commons), 2 May I842, col. I375. 2. Northern Star, I5 April I848. 3. Operative, 27 January I839. See also 4 November I838, 4. Northern Star, 8 January I848. EHR Apr. OI

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practicewas still regardedwith a mixture of hostility and derision. Colley rightly credits the anti-slaverymovement with the innovation of separate women's petitions - a practice that was emulated and extended by the Anti-Corn Law League in the early 1840S.1It is important to stress that women signed conventional Chartist petitions along with men in substantial numbers. 'Who can sign?', asked the editor of the TenHours'Advocatein 1847. The answer he provided to his own question would perhaps surprise more historians than contemporaries: 'All persons, both male and female, above thirteen years of age, are competent to sign petitions'.2 According to Attwood the 1839 Chartist petition comprised the women. In 1842 Duncombe signatures of i,ooo,ooo men and 200,000 was more cautious in his estimate; the petition contained a 'considerable proportion' of wives, as well as 'severalhundreds of the youth belonging to the same classes'he told the House.3 In 1848the situation was even less clear. According to Colonel T. P. Thompson, a radical stalwart, one in twelve of the signatures on the petition were women's, although it is not clear what the basis of his calculation was.4 The available anecdotal evidence from places such as the village of Coalsnaughton where 'every man and woman, elector and non-elector' with two exceptions signed, suggests that the percentage of women among Chartist petitioners was generally much higher. As well as signing, women also made an invaluablecontribution to the political process as collectors of signatures.Again Colley rightly cites the anti-slaveryprecedent,5but it was undoubtedly brought to a new level of intensity by the Chartists and other movements such as the Anti-Corn Law League. Many of the best Chartist signature collectors were women. For example, when May Paris, a veteran Chartist from Greenwich, died of cholera in 1849 she was remembered by her comrades as one of the most assiduous signature collectors among the London Chartists. 'Whenever a petition was to be presented, she was one of the foremost in obtaining signatures', recorded her obituary in the Northern Star. In 1842 Pariswas reputed to have collected several hundred signatures 'by her own exertion'and proudly took part in the 'dangerousexperiment' of marching to the House to present the petition in I842.6 Anti-Corn Law League women also made an invaluable contribution to the campaign for repeal as petition collectors. Reading the reports it is hard not to be impressed by the efforts of the teams of middle class women who
i. L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, i707-i837, London, I994, pp. 292-5. Here Colley is drawing on work by Alex Tyrrell. See "'Woman's Mission" and Pressure Group Politics in Britain (I825-60)', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, vol. 63, no. i, Autumn,
I980, 2. 3. 4. I94-230.

Ten Hours'Advocate, 9 January I847. Hansard (Commons), I2 July I839, Co1.226; 3 May

1842,

col.

I40.

Northern Star,6 May I848.

S. Colley, Britons, p. 292. 6. Northern Star, I September I849.

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door-knocked the squalid cellars and garrets of working class Manchester where, to quote Stephen Marcus, 'men, women and children were living in shit', and came away with about IOO,OOO signatures on their memorial to Queen Victoria. I Building on the sociological make-up that was common to both middle and working class political activity at this time, Joseph Livesey of Preston developed the notion of a family petition. Better known for his role as an advocate of temperance than for his part in the campaigns against the corn laws and in favour of the Charter, Livesey published a facsimile of his own family's petition against the corn laws in his influential radical journal, the Struggle, in order to promote his idea. Some years later Livesey'sinitiative was welcomed by Joseph Hume, a veteran parliamentary radical, as a means of guarding against fraud.2 Hume's concern reminds us that among the reasonswhy historians have failed to treat petitioning seriously are the lingering echoes of controversy. Linked inexorably to the practice of petitioning in the Chartist decade were allegations of fraud and forgery. In particular, many historians have coupled the decline of Chartism to the accusations of fraud that surrounded the last monster Chartist petition in 1848. The tone for much of the subsequent historiography was set in 185o by Charles Kingsley in Alton Locke,his fictionalized version of the events of April 1848. Students of Chartism will remember the excruciating conclusion to the chapter, 'the tenth of April', when the monster petition is 'draggedto the floor of the House of Commons amid roarsof laughter - "inextinguishable laughter"- as of Tennyson's Epicurean Gods'.3 Early twentieth-century historians tended to follow suit blindly. For Julius West, for example, the report of the Committee on Public Petitions which concluded that the Petition contained just under
2,000,000

bonafidesignatures, andnot the 5,700,000 thatthe Chartists

claimed, was 'devastating'.Similarly,for the doyen of Chartist historians, Mark Hovell, the fact that the document featured so many names of unlikely Chartists such as Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington as well a host of fictitious names such Pugnose, Flatnose, Longnose and 'numerous obscene names that the Committee declined to repeat to the House' earned the Chartists 'ridicule';it was a 'tragicfiasco' from which the movement 'never recovered'.4 Not much has changed. For John
I. S. Marcus, 'Reading the Illegible', in H. Dyos and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorian City, London, 1973, vol. I, p. 266; Manchester Times, i8 December 1841; I5 January I842. See also Pickering and Tyrrell, The People's Bread, pp. I24, I33. 2. See Pickering and Tyrrell, The People's Bread, P. I53; Hansard (Commons), 20 June I848, col. 896. I am grateful to Professor Brian Harrison for this reference. 3. C. Kingsley, Alton Locke, TaylorandPoet: An Autobiography, London, I850, p. 292. Fifty years later G. J. Holyoake was concerned that the 'extraordinary illusion' concerning the threat of revolution in I848, also initiated by Kingsley, 'had become historic, and passes as authentic'. See Bygones Worth Remembering, London, 1905, vol. I, p. 74. 4. J. West, A History of the Chartist Movement, London, 1920, p. 250; M. Hovell, The Chartist Movement, Manchester, 19I8, p. 292. EHR Apr. OI

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Ward, for example, writing in the 1970S, the petition turned Chartism into 'a joke' and, as recently as I998, Michael Levin concluded that it 'propelled Chartism into ridicule and decline'.' Not all historians have been content to reiterate contemporary prejudices. Edward Royle has drawn attention to the fact that the presence of pseudonyms did not necessarilyhave sinister overtones at a time when common people often used them to avoid persecution for their political views, and that large numbers of signatures in the same hand could just as easily reflect the fact that about thirty percent of the populace could not write, rather than deliberate fraud.2This was true also of other public movements including the Anti-Corn Law League. Evidence given before a parliamentary committee in March 1846, for example, indicated that an anti-corn law petition that had been on the counter of Joseph Barker'sshop in Cheltenham, had been signed by his father twenty-four times with the authority of the people concerned who had been unable to write.3 Other signatories to petitions - Chartists as well as other agitators - chose pseudonyms that would have greater impact through the use of humour.4 Moreover, F. B. Smith was the first to make the cogent point that derision has masked the 'remarkable genuine signatures finding' that the petition contained 2,000,000 roughly one in six of the total British population over the age of I9, and twice the size of the electorate at the time.5 In fact each of the monster Chartist petitions contained more names than the total British electorate at the time that it was submitted. In reinterpreting the events of 1848 two further points are central. First, it is important to recognize that fraudulent signatures were not new in 1848. By the end of the eighteenth century the term 'petition hunter' had come into use as a description of a person who would help boost support for a petition for a price. As Enright concludes, 'the very simplicity and versatility of petitioning made it easy to abuse'.6 During the Chartist yearsthere were many accusations of forgeryassociatedwith petitioning, and it is ironic, given subsequent history, that most of them were directed at groups other than the Chartists. In fact far more accusations of fraud were levelled at the Anti-Corn Law League than at the Chartists, including more than a hint of scandal over a petition collected at Cheltenham which led to a formal parliamentary inquiry in 1846.
London, 1974, i. J. Ward, Chartism,
Basingstoke, I998, p. I58.
p. 209;

M. Levin, The Conditionof EnglandQuestion,

p. 43. 2. Royle, Chartism, Petition),MarchI846, on the CornLaws(Cheltenham from the SelectCommittee 3. PP. Report I846, vol. VIII, pp. 23-4. Reports from Committees, Bread,p. 52. and Tyrrell,ThePeople's 4. See Pickering 5. F. B. Smith, 'The View from BritainI: "Tumultsabroad,stabilityat home"',in F. B. Smith and theExperience of I848, London, Socialism and Revolution: (eds),Intellectuals and E. Kamenka
I979, p. 112.

6. Enright,PublicPetitions,p. 2. EHR Apr. OI

385 The accusations had a familiar ring to them. According to William Rider, a prominent Leeds Chartist, some League petition hunters 'sit in the public houses, with their sheet, pint and directory, and manufacture four columned sheets at one shilling each', while others 'walkaround the town calling at every petition stand, and appending a fictitious name at each in turn'.' The latter was an accusation that was also often levelled at the Chartists. Thomas Frost, for example, recalled one enthusiastic Chartist who signed the 1848 petition every time he passed the local National Land Company Office.2 From Alnwick came a report that the League was distributing free samples of what was euphemistically called 'untaxed bread' as an inducement to all who signed their petitions;3 whereas in Huddersfield League petitions were reportedly boosted by the exploits of two burly canvasserswho visited factories in the town, one asking individuals their name, the other writing it down on the petition. In Edinburgh opponents of the League complained that its petitions were nothing more than 'sheets of dirty paper. . . scrawled and blotted by every chance adventurer that could hold a pen or forge a name'.4 At different times both the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League claimed that they were victim of attempts to compromise the integrity of their petitions by their opponents deliberately appending false names.5 The point is that a percentage of fraud was endemic to the petitioning process, not just a failing of Chartism, a fact that should not diminish the value of petitions as a source or colour our estimation of their importance in popular politics. The second point to be made in reconsidering the events of April 1848 relatesto the treatment of the petition itself. According to Hovell, when the committee reported its analysis of the 1848 petition O'Connor's response was to bluster, an inappropriate response that emphasized his unfitness to lead and exacerbated the crisis that had engulfed the movement.6 This is simply not true - as even a cursory glance at the Hansard confirms. Although it was only emphasized in the democratic press, O'Connor got to his feet and actually made a very measured and compelling case. It was not possible, O'Connor told the House, for the petition to have been checked by the thirteen clerksin seventeen hours as was claimed. As he subsequently wrote in the Northern Star, 'each clerk, besides the critical inspection of names, must have counted about 147,170 names,in roundnumbers, within the prescribed time'- this,he continued, worked out at 8,66o each hour, that is i5o every minute, or two and half every second for seventeen hours without interruption. O'Connor was correct: such an exercise was not possible. Simple
2001 CHARTIST PETITIONING IN POPULAR POLITICS i. Northern Star, 5 February I842. 2. T. Frost, Forty YearsRecollections:Literary and Political, London, I88o, p. 3. Northern Star, 5 February I842. 4. Scotsman, 22 January I840. 5. Scotsman, 22 January I840; Northern Star, 5 February I842. 6. Hovell, The Chartist Movement, p. 292. EHR Apr. OI

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arithmetic provided the 'most perfect circumstantial evidence', O'Connor concluded, that the Chartists were victims of an 'unjust, ungenerous and unjustifiable conspiracy'.' There is an alternative explanation of how the revised figure was arrived at by the Committee in the available time. To understand what happened it is important to appreciatethat the method employed by the Petitions Committee for examining large petitions up to this point was simply to count the number of signatures on one yard of petition and then measure the total length to extrapolate the final total.2 'What probably happened in the case of the Chartists in 1848 was that the usual simple procedure was employed but in reverse: after some suspect signatures were detected, part of the petition was counted and this was then extrapolated to provide a revised total. Taking up O'Connor's point, the Chartist Convention asked for the petition to be returned to them to check the veracity of the signatures and the total: it is perhaps not surprising that their request fell on deaf ears.3It is clear that the 1848 Chartist petition was the first such petition to be subjected to anything like the close scrutiny of each signature that was claimed by the committee; if it was not the deliberate conspiracy alleged by O'Connor, then it must be said that the outcome was propitious and skilfully exploited by the many opponents of Chartism. The petition itself no longer exists - the competing claims must remain unresolved - but the Chartists' claim at least deserves greater emphasis than it has enjoyed to date.4 Looked at from a longer perspective, the so-called fiasco of 1848 did little to dent the enthusiasm of Britons for petitioning which continued unabated for much of the long nineteenth century.5Without the vote as an alternative, the Chartists petitioned for a decade with ferocity and doggedness, and despite the ridicule to which they were subjected in 1848, they were petitioning againwithin the year.It is no surprisethat the rise of petitioning occurred alongside the growing campaign for democracy; with the advent of democracy the raison d'etreof petitioning was weakened and its popularity waned.6 In this respect it is significant that those
i. Hansard (Commons), I3 April I848, col. 285-6; Northern Star, 22 April I848. O'Connor's rhetoric was better than his arithmetic. The figures he published related to the revised total and not the original which would have been all the more beyond the capacity of thirteen clerks to count in seventeen hours. 2. Enright, Public Petitions, p. 77-9. 3. Northern Star, 22 April I848. A fragment of one the Chartist petitions is preserved in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. I am grateful to the librarian, Alain Kahan, for allowing me to examine this document. 4. May is silent on what should happen to petitions after they are submitted and recorded and there is no evidence that they were routinely stored for any length of time. Presumably the Chartist petition went to stoke the boilers of the House of Commons sooner rather than later. 5. Lord Campion (ed.), Sir Thomas Erskine May 's Treatise on the Law, Privileges Proceedingsand Usage of Parliament, I5th edition, I950, p. 8I9n. 6. See ibid, pp. 8II-I2; Enright, Public Petitions, p. 3. This view is rejected by Judge, 'Public Petitions', 393-4. EHR Apr. Oi

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who remainedformallyoutside the political nation long after many for workingmen had beengiventhe vote - women- becamerenowned in the artsof propaganda' includingthe extensiveuse of their'expertise Eleanor Rathbone, one of the leaders petitions.Fromhervastexperience, the women's movement andlaterMP,raised suffrage of the constitutional when she calculated idea of the canvass to a new level of sophistication that one million signatures could be collectedin 13 and a halfweeksby to 900 activists I2 hoursaweek.As shelater put it, 'asapprentices working ' theirinstructors'. women certainly bettered the artsof agitation, of petitioningin the Chartist experience the centrality Understanding horizonsof highlightsthe factthat,with few exceptions,the ideological and in this senseits declineowed less wereconstitutional, the Chartists of the 'master to extensionof the suffrage than to the gradualfracture Constitutionafteri867.2The factthat narrative' of England's libertarian Chartistpetitioningoccurredwithin the bounds of a popularunderstandingof the venerableConstitution did not reduce the potential threatto the politicalorder,it enhancedit. Historywas on theirside, as WilliamHick, a Chartistfrom Leedsoutlinedin simpleversein 184I:3 is thejustice of old? Oh,where
The spiritof Alfredthe great? Erethe throne wasdebasdbycorruption andgold, When the peoplewereone with the state? to vote; 'Tisgone with our freedom 'Tisundereachdespot's control; And now,e'enthe rightto petitionis naught; A farceand mockery the whole ...

As Vernon and others have shown, the 'masternarrative'of the Constitutionwashighlycontested,and the Chartists' broadconception of how representative ought to workconstitutedas much of democracy a challenge to thoseinsidethe Houseas did the contentsof the petitions themselves.The legal nuances might have been lost on some of the signatories,but most Chartistswould have agreedwith one of their leadingspokesmen,PeterMcDouall,when he arguedthat 'the people and ultimatelycommand'.4 petition,remonstrate
i. I am grateful to Professor Brian Harrison for bringing Rathbone's calculation to my attention; E. F. Rathbone, 'Changes in Public Life', in R. Starchy (ed.), Our Freedom and its Results, London,
1936, P. 21, 41.
2. For a discussion of the development of national and international identities after 1848 see M. Finn, After Chartism: Class and nation in English radicalpolitics, I848-I874, Cambridge, 1993. 3. Northern Star, 5 June 1841. 4. Charter, 17 February 1839;Vernon, Politics and the People, chap. 8. Petitioning was also one of Britain's most successful exports, being incorporated into the practice of many post-colonial parliaments and even surviving the revolution in America to be guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. See: S. S. More, Practice and Procedure of Indian Parliament, Bombay, I966, pp. 553-5; R. C. Bailey, Popular Influence upon Public Policy: Petitioning in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, Westport, 1979; P. G. Renstrom and C. B. Rogers, The Electoral Politics Dictionary, Santa Barbara, I989, pp. 68-9. I have work in progress on this subject.

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Those who sought to stem the flow of petitions knew this well. As the Speaker confided to a young Tory, W. E. Gladstone, in 1838, the restrictionson the discussion of petitions would do more than save time. Gladstone recorded that 'these discussions very greatly increased the influence of popular feeling upon the deliberations of the House; and that by stopping them he [the Speaker] thought a wall was erected
His maxim was to shut out as far as might be against such influence.... all extrinsic pressure .*.' 1 The Chartists had succeeded in actually widening the door of the House of Commons only marginally in 1842

and the damage they caused was no doubt quickly repaired,but even in rejection their petitions, along with thousands of others that flooded in during what was surely the age of petitioning, hastened the more permanent changes to an out-dated and undemocratic institution that would overtake it later in the century. Humanities ResearchCentre, Australian National University
PAUL A. PICKERING

i. Reprinted in J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, London, 1905, vol. I, p. I50.

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