Petitions, Puritans, and the Civil War
Early Stuart England saw the emergence of mass petitioning. These expressions of collective grievance would advance popular politics, uncover division, and lay the road to war.
On 11 December 1640 a crowd of more than 1,000 people arrived at Parliament to present a complaint, later to be known as the Root and Branch petition. It asked that the ‘government’ of the Church of England, ‘with all its Dependencies, Roots and Branches, may be abolished’. Calling on Parliament to dissolve the entire Church hierarchy was a radical act, but the petition was particularly unprecedented as it was signed by about 15,000 named individuals. It did not come from the City of London or any other official body, but from thousands of people ‘in and about’ the metropolis, each adding their own mark of support to the great ‘roll of names’.
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