The British Constitution possesses many distinctive features: from its uncodified character and lack of entrenchment to the status as ordinary statutes rather than ‘higher’ law of those written rules that comprise it. However, all these features can be regarded as manifestations of its most distinguishing characteristic – its quality as a predominantly ‘political’ rather than a ‘legal’ constitution.1 Whereas codification, and those other features that the British Constitution notoriously lacks, comprise essential elements of a legal form of constitutionalism, their absence has traditionally been deemed necessary for the integrity of the UK’s political constitution.

Nineteenth-century MPs spent a significant proportion of their time presenting petitions and corresponding with petitioners. Petitioning and the interactions between petitioners and parliamentarians was an important component of how representation worked in practice. This chapter first examines the shift in how parliamentarians conceived petitions from an eighteenth-century system of ‘virtual representation’ to embodying aggregated popular opinion. The chapter then examines petitioning and the practice of representation. While not everyone had the right to vote, parliamentarians believed that all subjects had the right to be represented through the presentation of their petitions. The correspondence between MPs and petitioners provided a forum to negotiate the meaning of representation. Parliamentarians sought to uphold their independence in the face of petitioners demands to present and support their requests. Finally, the presentation of petitioning was a mechanism for geographic but also issue-based representation. Overall, the interaction between parliamentarians and petitioners provides new insights into the shifting relationship between politicians and the people. More broadly, it focuses attention away from theories of representation and electoral or formal representation to a wider concept of the culture of representation within a given polity.

It has frequently been argued that Edmund Burke’s account of the English constitution was based in Montesquieu’s. This chapter demonstrates that Burke favored a more powerful House of Commons than Montesquieu and that he wished for the House of Commons to be moderated not through the Crown’s veto but rather through a dignified constitutional monarch and the presence of ministers in the assembly. Burke was the great eighteenth-century theorist of parliamentarism. He also struggled with the great challenge of parliamentarism–ministers holding power through the corrupt use of patronage–and it was in response to this challenge that he offered his famous theory of political parties. Importantly, Burke argued for the emerging practices of parliamentarism not only within British politics (where he feared that George III wanted to escape the control of the House of Commons) but also during the French Revolution, as Burke believed that France’s rejection of the parliamentary model was among its greatest errors.