This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
By 1628, Charles I had spent several years raising money without Parliament's consent through forced loans, imprisoning without trial the gentlemen who refused to pay, billeting soldiers in private homes at the householders' expense, and using martial law to discipline both soldiers and civilians in peacetime. Parliament, recalled because the crown badly needed funds it could not raise any other way, drafted a document naming all four practices and declaring them unlawful. Sir Edward Coke, by then in his seventies and a member of the Commons after his dismissal as Chief Justice, was its principal architect.
The Petition of Right is built as a list of grievances rather than a declaration of abstract rights, which is exactly its strength as a legal document. It does not proclaim liberty in the air; it recites specific things the king's officers had actually done, names them as contrary to the laws and statutes of the realm going back to Magna Carta, and asks the king to declare that they will not happen again and that the existing laws be put into execution. Charles assented to it, under financial pressure, on 7 June 1628, which gave it the force of statute even though he would spend much of the next decade trying to rule as though he had not. In practical, if not fully honored, form, England had committed on paper to no taxation without Parliament's consent, no imprisonment without a charge that could be tested in court, no forced billeting, and no martial law over civilians in ordinary times.
Trace any of the four practices forward and you find a doctrine that outlived the Petition itself. No imprisonment without cause shown becomes, across the following centuries, part of the due process tradition and a cousin to habeas corpus, the ancient writ that already let a prisoner demand the legal ground for their detention and that the Petition's drafters plainly had in mind. No taxation without consent crosses the Atlantic more or less unaltered and becomes one half of the American revolutionary slogan a century and a half later. The Petition of Right did not invent any of these ideas from nothing, and it explicitly grounds itself in older law rather than claiming to be original. What it did was put a specific, dated, negotiated list of them into a document the king himself had to sign, which is a different and in some ways more durable kind of achievement than simply being first to say a good idea out loud. Coke, dismissed once for telling a king he was bound by law, spent his last years in public life making that same king put it in writing.