Today, online petitioning makes it easy for citizens to express political opinions. Organised campaigns aim to influence policy with thousands of signatures and a well-timed press release. But this apparently ubiquitous practice was not always so accessible. Scotland’s first large-scale petitioning campaigns appeared in the 17th century, and when the authorities realised the potential power of participatory petitioning, they sought to shut down these assertive new practices. A closer look at these events provides a reminder that modern petitioning practices were hard-won.
During the 17th and early 18th centuries, public petitioning began to establish itself as one of the most powerful mechanisms by which ordinary Scots could express political opinions and put pressure on their rulers – a development that was distinctly unwelcome to successive Scottish monarchs. Professor Karin Bowie explains
Perspective view of Parliament House and Exchequer, Edinburgh, c.1740 (Andrew Bell, after John Elphinstone) Copyright National Galleries of Scotland
For centuries, petitioning was a privilege, not a right. In Scotland and across Europe, rulers were expected – but not obliged – to hear humble grievances. Though a widely-accepted maxim said that the welfare of the people should be the supreme law (salus populi suprema lex esto), it was the monarch who decided what was best for everyone. A king might take the advice of propertied elites in his privy council and parliament, but ordinary subjects at large were thought to be mindless or easily misled.
With no recognised way to speak to the government, collective anger was expressed in rioting, leading elites to see the people as a manyheaded monster. Yet over the 17th century, the rational voices of ordinary subjects became more visible in Scottish politics through newly assertive forms of petitioning. This included, for the first time, the gathering of hundreds and even thousands of signatures from men in burghs and rural parishes.
Religious tensions drove these changes, arising from Scotland’s 1560 Protestant reformation and the formation of a British composite monarchy in 1603, when James VI of
