Chester Petition

In the age before opinion polling, perhaps the most important way that ‘public opinion' could be represented was through petitions. Petitioning had played a major role in persuading King Charles to summon the Parliament, and from its earliest days petitions came in to both houses from both individuals and groups. One of the most notorious and well-studied is a petition from Cheshire, put together by Sir Thomas Aston and presented to the House of Lords on 27 February 1641. Aston's petition was not the first to come out of Cheshire. Eight days earlier, Parliament had received a petition from Cheshire with around a thousand signatures calling for root and branch reform of the Church of England. Aston opposed this call for reform, and began collecting signatures for his petition in order to show that the inhabitants of Cheshire did not agree with the radical proposals contained in the first petition. In reality, Cheshire, like almost everywhere else in the kingdom, was deeply divided. Aston's allies visited Chester as well as numerous towns and parishes, collecting more than six thousand signatures. As this suggests, petitioning also became one of the most important ways the wider public could participate in national politics.