Public Meetings, Respectable Requisitions, and Popular Politics in Great Britain and Ireland, c.1769–1850

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the practice of ‘requisitioning’ public meetings in Great Britain and Ireland. These written requests to office-holders emerged in Ireland and then Great Britain, following bitter contests over the authenticity and authority of addresses and meetings claiming to represent a county or town in the decade after 1769. If the Seditious Meetings Acts privileged meetings officially convened by local elites, they also codified the practice of householders signing their own advertisements to requisition meetings under magisterial oversight. This would, especially when revolutionary threats receded and local justices’ sympathies permitted, allow local organisers some legal and constitutional claims to public assembly, even if Peterloo demonstrated the continuing threat of the Riot Act. Alongside bi-partisan opportunism encouraging public meetings, the article emphasises the creative use of constitutional and legal claims by ‘political entrepreneurs’. Comparison with Ireland demonstrates ministers’ greater recourse to new legislation and executive powers, but also the exchange of political practices with Great Britain. The prosecution of intimidating numbers, rather than seditious conduct, after 1842 diminished the role of requisitions, as did the hybridisation of ‘public meetings’. This was not so much the loss of a demotic form of community deliberation, but a proliferation and multiplication of the meetings—and voices—claiming to represent public opinion. The changing uses of a subscriptional practice can illuminate the relationship between government initiatives and local enforcement, and highlight the talents of those forging new meanings of the law, the constitution, and the political nation from restrictive procedures.