On 2 May 1842, the second of the three great national
Chartist petitions demanding the Six Points was presented to Parliament.
As I have pointed out before, there were in fact six
petitions in all, but those of 1839, 1842 and 1848 were the three that Chartism
is remembered for, and there is good reason to draw a veil over the final
post-1848 attempts to mobilise popular opinion.
In May 1842, however, Chartism was at its peak. The second petition
ran to 3,315,752 names, was six miles
long and weighed in at a massive six hundredweight (or 305kg).
The petition was
carried to the Houses of Parliament on the shoulders of 16 trade union
delegates, and was so large that the doors to the House of Commons had to be
dismantled for it to enter the chamber.
Thomas SlingsbyDuncombe, the great radical MP and friend of the Chartist movement presented
the petition. But his motion for the petitioners to be heard at the bar of the
House was defeated by 287 votes to just 49.
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