The Legal Status of the Petition of Right

Abstract

One hundred years ago the most scholarly of the whig historians, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, gave the Petition of Right a leading place in his interpretation of early Stuart England, as the beginning of a constitutional revolution in which parliament took sovereignty from an autocratic Stuart monarchy. To Gardiner this was part of a movement, his portrayal of which was coloured by ideas of patriotism and moral good, and which had the sanction of historical inevitability. Clearly there were serious flaws built into Gardiner's view: teleology, narrowness of theme, implausible simplicity, belief in inevitable progress, and the selective attribution of unconscious motives to men such as Sir John Eliot. Recent historiography has demonstrated the inherent weaknesses of the traditional liberal-whig and indeed the Marxist views of this period. A most stimulating revisionist argument and a whole industry of scholarship seem likely to reduce Gardiner's work to a great narrative, graced frequently with sane judgement, but in conceptual terms virtually abolished. Nevertheless the Petition of Right remains a salient and significant feature of the early Stuart landscape. Conrad Russell has established clearly that the making of the Petition was important as the culmination of a national war crisis and as an ideological watershed. Indicative of an emerging fear of subversion – of the alteration of government and religion together – it anticipated the attitudes of those in the Long Parliament who came to oppose the Caroline regime. The Petition needs to be given due attention in seeking to understand the important relationship between the political events of the 1620s and those of the 1640s.