The Petition of Right was a formal limitation on royal prerogative, assented to by Charles I at the beginning of his reign. In Federalist No. 84, it serves as a historical example of how bills of rights originated in bargains between rulers and subjects—a form the essay contrasts with a constitution established by the people themselves.

Historical Setting

The essay places the Petition of Right in a sequence of English constitutional settlements. It describes bills of rights in their original form as stipulations between kings and subjects: concessions that abridged prerogative in favor of privileges reserved to subjects. In that account, the Petition followed Magna Carta, secured by the barons from King John, and its later confirmations by succeeding princes.

The Petition was assented to by Charles I early in his reign. The essay does not detail its provisions or the circumstances of the assent; its focus is instead on the political form the document represents. Like the earlier charter and the later Declaration of Right presented to the Prince of Orange in 1688, it is presented as a claim made against royal authority, rather than as an act of popular constituent power.

Role in the Argument

The Petition’s significance in the essay is comparative. Publius argues that rights documents born from negotiations with monarchs reserve to subjects rights not surrendered to a prince. That logic, he contends, does not apply in the same way to a constitution professedly founded on the people’s power and carried out by their representatives and servants.

The contrast turns on where political authority begins. Under a royal settlement, subjects secure particular protections by limiting prerogative. Under the proposed American Constitution, the people are described as surrendering nothing: they retain authority and establish a government to serve their purposes. The essay therefore treats popular authorship itself as a broader recognition of rights than a list of reservations directed against a monarch.

Constitutional Significance

The Petition helps clarify why the essay disputes the claim that the proposed Constitution required a separate bill of rights. Its historical example belongs to a political order in which rulers possessed prerogatives that subjects sought to restrain. Publius distinguishes that arrangement from a constitution whose authority derives from the people, while acknowledging that the proposed national government is meant to regulate general political interests rather than every kind of private concern.

The document thus functions less as a detailed legal precedent than as a point in a history of constitutional authority. Its place beside Magna Carta and the Petition’s later successors gives the argument a concrete historical contrast: rights may be framed as privileges wrested from a ruler, or understood as retained by a people who constitute their own government.