The petition had been circulated at the Kentish quarter sessions held at Maidstone on 29 April, and was signed by the deputy lieutenants, grand jurors, and 23 justices, as well as a number of freeholders.
The message was on Whiggish principles, asking that the Tory-dominated House would turn their loyal addresses into bills of supply, to enable the King (William III) to build a standing army and forge alliances to counteract the French threat to the peace of Europe.
An angry Commons declared the petition ‘scandalous, insolent and seditious; tending to destroy the constitution of Parliaments, and to subvert the established government of the realm’.
[1][2] On 14 May Daniel Defoe flanked by a guard of sixteen gentlemen of quality in case of any attempt to arrest him, presented a Legion's Memorial (of which he was tacitly understood to be the author) to the Speaker of the House of Commons, Robert Harley.
Daniel Defoe wrote a pamphlet, The History of the Kentish Petition, which presents the pro-petition Whig view of the affair, and describes the Tories (who had passed a bill of supply) as slinking quietly out of town before the session had completed, out of sheer terror of public opprobrium.