IAN WARD

A CHARMED SPECTACLE: ENGLAND AND ITSCONSTITUTIONAL IMAGINATION

ABSTRACT. This article argues that the fate of England – a subject of increasing con-temporary interest – is inexorably linked to that of its constitution. Englishness is animpression, one that is rooted in its constitutional imagination, a bundle of impressionand images, which can be found, not merely in statutes and cases, but in a myriad textsand treatises. The first part of the article concentrates on the constitutional imaginationfashioned by the likes of Hooker and Spenser in the wake of the Henrician and Eliza-bethan settlements. The second part then looks at the frantic efforts of men such as Burkeand Wordsworth to reinvest this imagination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies. The final part of the article suggests that the ‘charmed spectacle’ of the constitu-tion, as Bagehot terms it, still represents a formidable residual strength against which anymooted constitutional reforms must be measured.

KEY WORDS: constitutional imagination, constitutional reforms, Englishness

As the third millenium arrives, the very idea of England and English-ness has been cast into question. In his populist best-seller The English,Jeremy Paxman predicts that England will ‘rediscover’ a past which willthen be recast in a more ‘modest, individualistic, ironic, solipsistic’ image.England, he concludes, is not something in which the English live; ratherit is ‘the place they imagine they are living in’.1 Andrew Marr takes amore apocalyptic tone regarding recent events, suggesting that the entire‘shabby, gerry-built’ facade of the ‘new Jerusalem’ has been fatally under-mined.2 Simon Heffer, by way of contrast, takes the diametrically oppositeview. In Miltonic tones, he suggests that England is defined by its politicaltoleration, by a love of liberty of conscience and a reverence for historicallyestablished liberties. Englishness, accordingly, is ‘an entirely metaphysicalconcept’, a ‘sense of allegiance and a sense of belonging, a sense amongthe English of knowing what is theirs’.3

1 J. Paxman, The English: Portrait of a People (London: Michael Joseph, 1998), pp. 17–18, 142–145, 264–265.

2 A. Marr, Ruling Britannia: The Failure and Future of British Democracy (London:Michael Joseph, 1995), pp. 6–9.

3 S. Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England (London: Weidenfeld andNicolson, 1999), pp. 39–45.

Liverpool Law Review 22: 235–251, 2000.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Cutting across these debates about England and Englishness are ques-tions about its legal and political constitution. Lurking behind Heffer’srhetoric can be found the Burkean idyll of a constitution entrenched byan immutable history, and described by all the icons of the reformationsettlement. The same icons stalk Paxman’s vision, though they seem tobe rather less entrenched. According to Marr, it is these institutions andconstitutions that are now in a process of terminal decay. The evidencefor the more apocalyptic prophesies is various and variable. Althoughthe hysteria which surrounded the death of Princess Diana, in autumn1997, momentarily awakened thoughts of republicanism, in the end herdemise seemed only to strengthen further the innate dependence of theEnglish upon their monarchy. But debate continues to swirl around thepossible disestablishment of the Church, whilst other central institutionsof the constitution such as the House of Lords have already undergonepartial reform. And, of course, the very notion of Englishness has beencast into sharper focus by the experiences of devolution and Europeanintegration. It is even suggested that the age of nation-states is now passed,and that received notions of legal and political ‘sovereignty’ are themselves‘questionable’.4

Whether or not this is the case, there is little doubt that the fate ofEngland is inexorably linked to that of its constitution. Englishness is animpression, and it is one which is rooted in the fictions of its constitutionalimagination. A constitution is a cultural artefact, described in considerablepart by a collection of impressions and images, all of which provide anecessary support to any bundle of statutes, rules or conventions. This isthe constitutional imagination cast in the treatises of Hooker and Burke andBagehot, as well as the stanzas of Spenser and Donne and Wordsworth,and it is this constitution, and this imagination, which is the subject of thepresent article. The first two parts of the article will revisit the establish-ment of the English constitution in the sixteenth century, and its franticdefence during the political crises of the late eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries, whilst the final part will then consider whether Bagehot’s‘charmed spectacle’ of the English constitution can continue to enchant.

4 N. MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Nation in the EuropeanCommonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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I. THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NEW JERUSALEM

A just and impartial spirit

The Preamble to the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals proclaimed anEnglish constitution that was established in ‘divers sundry old authentichistories and chronicles’, and a monarch whose authority was ‘institute andfurnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with plenary,whole and entire power, preeminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdic-tion to render and yield justice and final determination to all manner’ oflegal disputes. The origins of the English nation-state lie in this statute,together with the supplementary Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy.5

If the seeds of England and Englishness are rooted in these statutoryinstruments, they were to come to fruition in the fantasy world of Gloriana.The greatest defence of the Elizabethan settlement could be found inRichard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; a treatise dedicated totranslating the received myths of Englishness into constitutional text. Atthe heart of the Laws was the office of monarch, a ‘natural agent’ of God,anointed to lead to chosen people, his authority described by the perfecti-bility of the common law. An English sovereign, which Hooker comparedto the kind of ‘heathen’ sovereign who rules in Catholic Europe, is trulygodly, the embodiment of natural, divine and common law. ‘Happier thatpeople’, he advises, ‘whose law is their King in the greatest things thanthat whose King is himself their law’.6 Hooker’s thesis found a strikingliterary expression in Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, who theatrically submitsto the ‘like bold, just and impartial spirit’ of the Lord Chief Justice and thecommon law in the final act of Henry IV, Part 2.7

Above all, Hooker affirmed that the English constitution was an expres-sion of a national community, for the ‘natural subject of power civil all menconfess to be the body of the Commonwealth’. A century later, John Lockewould applaud the ‘judicious’ Hooker for recognising that all civil powerwas held on trust, for the ultimate benefit of a common national interest.

5 Maitland termed the Act in Restraint the most ‘momentous’ statute in Englishconstitutional history. More prosaically, Holdsworth thought it the greatest deceit. See F.Maitland, Roman Canon Law in the Church of England (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 92,and W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London: Methuen, 1972), vol. 1, p. 591.More generally, see also J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press,1997), pp. 270–273, and D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1996), pp. 92–94.

6 R. Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1989), p. 146.

7 W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 (London: Routledge, 1967), 5.1.73–114.

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Hooker would have been horrified. In his Laws, the king ‘doth guide thestate’. But it is the ‘law’ which ‘guides’ the godly English prince.8

As Hooker well appreciated, the future stability of the English reforma-tion settlement was dependent, not just on Acts of Uniformity orSupremacy, or any other parliamentary statutes, but on the credibility ofan array of aesthetic and cultural supplements. Hooker’s Laws are, thus, arhetorical exercise; designed not just to describe how things are, but howthey should be, and how God intends them to be. Law, he affirms, is nevermerely ‘positive’, but ‘dependeth’ upon its narrative authority. England isdefined by the perfection of a common law which has worked itself pureover centuries, for ‘we were alive in our predecessors, and they in theirsuccessors do live still’.9 Hooker, like every Tudor Englishman, was farmore interested in the dead than he was in the living.

The past was sequestered for England’s future. Copies of Foxe’sActs and Monuments were chained alongside the vernacular Book ofCommon Prayer, overlooked by the obligatory royal coat of arms, and allcomplemented by decaying rood screens and altar-rails, and stained glasswindows; a little bit of protestantism, a little bit of catholicism and a lot ofimagination. According to Foxe, the theatre of the church impressed uponevery English subject that the ‘form, usage, and institution of our presentreformed church’ is not the ‘beginning of a new church’, but the ‘renewing’of the ‘old ancient church of Christ’. All the martyrs, whose gruesomedeaths were burnt into the national consciousness, died not merely fortheir faith, but for the future of God’s chosen people and their reformedconstitution.10

The verses and sermons of John Donne, composed barely a generationlater, are possessed by the iconography of a chosen people, their ministersand their reformed constitution. Writing amidst the counter-reformationwhich emerged during the first decades of the seventeenth century, Donnesought to ply a middle way between puritan zeal and catholic resurgence.And he did so by trying to depict an English reformation as a peculiarlymoderate experience; one that was prescribed by a particular historicalnarrative. In his Devotions, Donne repeatedly recommended a ‘mixed’

8 Supra n. 7 at 147, 179.9 Supra n. 7 at 83, 93, 117–118, 221.

10 W. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a StableSettlement of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 242–247;P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change inthe Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 60–93; J. King,English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 434–443.

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monarchy, in which the ‘Heart’ of the sovereign body, the king, and the‘sinews’ of the commonwealth are mutually dependent.11

The ministry was an essential sinew, binding sovereign to common-wealth. The English commonwealth, like its godly prince, is the ‘imageof God’, and Donne was keen to promote the ‘beauty of holiness’ whichattracted a number of moderate early seventeenth century Anglicans. Thephysical presence of the established Church was itself the ultimate icon ofthe reformed constitution. Time and again, Donne’s sermons resorted tothe metaphor of a nation described by its ‘many mansions’, all preservedby the great Solomon, the restorer of temples, the King of England.12

Like Hooker, Donne was determined that England should be an ulti-mate expression of the humanist ideal of a political community. As anapostate himself, he was peculiarly devoured by the desire to belong. ‘Oursociety’ and our ‘conversation in Heaven’ is the ‘one great ingredient intothe joy which we have in this world’. It is for this reason that membersof a christian community kneel together in order to pray and to receivethe sacrament; it is not merely a supplication to a king, but a corporatesupplication to the christian community of the English commonwealth,dead and alive.13

The sense of affinity is most immediately confirmed by the rituals ofsacrament. Thus, Donne confesses, when the Church ‘baptizes a child, thataction concernes me, for that child is thereby connected to the Head whichis my Head too, and engraffed into that body whereof I am a member’.And ‘when she buries a Man, that action concernes me: All mankine isof one Author, and is one volume’, for ‘No man is an Iland, intire ofitself’. Death fascinated Donne. In a 1626 sermon, he provided a graphicportrayal of a godly community, gathered together in a God’s ‘Temple’,where every ‘grain of dust’ is a ‘piece of a Christian’, where the corporealremnants of generations of Englishmen and women are mixed together,where every ‘puff of wind’ may ‘blow the father into the sons eys, or the

11 J. Donne, Selected Prose (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 113–119. See also R. Strier,‘Donne and the Politics of Devotion’, in D. Hamilson and R. Strier, eds., Religion,Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), pp. 93–114, and D. Norbrook, ‘The Monarchy of Wit and theRepublic of Letters: Donne’s Politics’, in E. Harvey and K. Maus eds., Soliciting Interpre-tations: Literary Theory and Seventeenth Century Poetry (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1990), pp. 3–36.

12 Donne, supra n. 11 at 164–165, 217–218. Both King James I, and to a lesser extenthis son Charles I, cherished the image of themselves as Solomon.

13 Donne, supra n. 11 at 289–290. See also L. Ferrell, ‘Kneeling and the body politic’,in Hamilton and Strier, supra n. 12 at 70–92.

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wife into her husbands’.14 The English constitutional settlement was asmuch a testament to the dead as to the alive. It still is.

A kind of romanze

Images of England were cast in different forms before different audiences.In the late sixteenth century, away from the congregations of credulousparishioners, the emergent English constitution was impressed upon theconsciences of the ‘middling interest’ in the verses of courtier-poets suchas Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. The idea of England wasdescribed and redescribed through a myriad fantasies. Alongside the ‘newJerusalem’ which Sidney elevated in his Letter on the projected Anjoumarriage in 1581 could be found the ‘Fairyland’ of Spenser’s epic. Lifein Elizabethan England was, as Sir John Harrington observed, lived as a‘kind of Romanze’. The cult of Elizabeth consciously tried to bridge thealternative fantasies. The chronicler Richard Nicols aligned ‘Eliza’s happyreigne’ which ‘Would then renew the golden age again’ with the ‘love-borne Astraea straight came downe/From highest heaven again’. By 1581,the MP Thomas Norton advised his son ‘I have no other dealing with theQueen but as with the image of God’.15

Spenser’s Faerie Queene was written with the ‘particular’ intentionof describing ‘the most excellent and glorious person of our soverainethe Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land’. In doing so, the poemnecessarily became a paean to England too. The Redcrosse Knight whoembarks upon his crusade in the first book of the Faerie Queene goesforth as the embodiment of England, a knight who relies entirely uponhis salvation through faith and whose efforts are dedicated to serving the‘new Hierusalem, that God has built’ for those ‘that are chosen his’.16

Like Hooker, Spenser describes an idealised protestant politics whichis securely founded on classical Aristotelian principles. An elect nationis governed not only by a godly magistracy, but also in accordance with‘lawes’ rather than mere ‘pollicie’.17 The first three books of the FaerieQueene are dedicated to the virtues of government and discipline; all of

14 Donne, supra n. 11 at 125–129, 229–230.15 S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1980), pp. 168–169; P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’,Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69 (1987), p. 409; C. McEachern, The Poetics ofEnglish Nationhood 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 36–37 and B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 227–239.

16 E. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 1.9.53 and 1.10.19, 57, 61, in the Complete Poetical Works(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

17 Supra n. 16 at 1.4.12.

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which are most perfectly represented in the England of Elizabeth. VirtuousChristian Englishmen seek to fashion their lives in the image of God; anexercise which, in Elizabethan iconography, was translated into the imageof Gloriana herself. For Spenser, as for Donne, to supplicate before amonarch was to supplicate before a chosen people and to confirm one’smembership of it:

Of all Gods workes, which do this world adorne,There is no one more faire and excellent,Then is man’s body both for powre and forme,Whiles it is kept in sober government.18

The virtues of self-government mutate into a deeper expression ofjustice in the later three books of the Faerie Queene. The presence of Una,the ‘royall virgin’, becomes increasingly central; reassuring a falteringRedcrosse that salvation lies in God; executing justice against the ‘fouleDuessa’, Mary Queen of Scots; advising Artegall that a common law isone which inheres a measure of equity and natural justice, the ability;

. . . to weigh both right and wrongIn equal balance with due recompense,And equitie to measure out along,According to the line of conscience,When so it needs with rigeur to dispence.19

A chosen people is defined by its possession of a common law; a fact thatSpenser was to deploy in his defence of ‘savage justice’ in the View ofthe Present State of Ireland. A people blessed neither by God nor by acommon law need purgation, and the more brutal the better. The slaughterof the Irish was a testament to England’s crusading zeal.20

Unsurprisingly, the idea of the English as a crusading nation, with acommon law and a constitution that was the expression of a chosen people,was repeatedly deployed by Shakespeare. The second Henriad was writtenas a testament to the new born English, their constitution and their destiny.In Richard II, the play which bridged between the two Henriads, John ofGaunt described a famed idyll:

This throne of kings, this scept’red isle,This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,This other Eden, demi-paradise,This fortress built by nature herself.21

18 Supra n. 16 at 2.9.1.19 Supra n. 16 at 5.1.7.20 See A. Hadfield, ‘The ‘sacred hunger of ambitious minds’: Spenser’s savage religion’,

in Hamilton and Strier, supra n. 12 at 27–45.21 W. Shakespeare, Richard II (London: Routledge, 1966), 1.4.40–3, 57–60.

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It was this idyll, this England, which had to be rebuilt from the carnageof the fifteenth century. It is this England which will be purged in HenryV and then revisited and reformed in Henry VIII. As the Chorus declaresin Henry V, England is a nation defined by its crusading destiny, led by agodly prince, a ‘mirror of all Christian kings’, who has already establishedhis civil legitimacy by submitting his office to the authority of the LordChief Justice and the common law. As Montjoy later acknowledges, ‘Harryof England’ is the embodiment of a nation and its constitution.22

Aside from the militaristic crusading in Henry V, the enduring imageof Gloriana was cast for posterity in Shakespeare’s final play, Henry VIII,in the prophesy of Archbishop Cranmer who proclaims the baby Elizabethwho ‘yet now promises/Upon this land a thousand blessings’. It was inthe reign of Elizabeth, Shakespeare reminds his audience, that the willof God was ‘truly known’, whilst ‘those about her’ would come to know‘the perfect ways of honour’.23 Composed during the middle part of thereign of James I, Henry VIII is unashamedly nostalgic; for whilst thenew king was anxious to emphasise the cultural consistency between hisreign and that of his glorious predecessors, the ‘middling interest’ of earlyseventeenth century England was assailed with anxieties about their newdynasty; disturbed not just by the decadence of the Jacobean court or bythe counter-reformation impulses of many of James’s senior clergy, but bythe new king’s avowed determination to yoke the chosen people with theforeigners who resided beyond Hadrian’s Wall.

A chosen people, and an imagined constitution, are never safe from theforces of Satan; as Milton was to emphasise half a century later in Para-dise Lost. And Shakespeare’s audience would have known that just a fewmonths after the events described in the final scenes of Henry VIII, AnneBoleyn would be executed, Elizabeth rendered a bastard, and a chastenedCranmer retired to his Canterbury see. Shakespeare sowed doubt just as hespan reassurance. So, too, did Spenser. In the unfinished seventh book ofthe Faerie Queene, the ‘Blatant Beast’ of ‘ugly Barbarisme’ and ‘brutishIgnorance’ is loosed upon Fairyland, threatening to destroy all the fantasiesof a fairy Queen and her fairy people.24 And within a couple of generationsof Spenser’s death, God’s chosen people had indeed turned their crusadein upon themselves and plunged Fairyland into bloody civil war. Like anyfiction, that of England remained dependent upon the willing credulity ofa supplicating audience.

22 W. Shakespeare, Henry V (London: Routledge, 1991), Chorus 2.6.23 W. Shakespeare, Henry VIII (London: Routledge, 1968), 5.1.129–31, 5.2.156–67 and

5.4.14–62.24 Supra n. 16 at 7.1.7–8 and 7.6.1.

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II. A GENEROUS SENSE OF GLORY AND EMULATION

Deep and lively impressions

The tone was, however, set. Generation upon generation would revere theidealised constitutional and religious settlement of Elizabethan England.Two centuries later, during the final decade of the eighteenth century,England was entranced by the prospect of everyone else’s revolution, andthoughts turned once more to the possibility of reforming the reformationsettlement. The English experience of the French revolution in Englandmay have been vicarious, but it was deeply felt. ‘How much the greatestevent it is that ever happened in the world and how much the best’,Charles Fox declared. Even Edmund Burke was momentarily taken withthe ‘wonderful spectacle’ across the channel. But not for long. MiddleEngland convinced itself that the ‘Terror’ was contagious. Lord Aucklandfeared that ‘the whole world may go Mad, that all Governments may breakto Pieces’. Prime Minister William Pitt, keen to use the opportunity totighten his grip on the radical presses, sagely advised that ‘every thingvaluable’ in England was threatened.25

Intellects were concentrated on the English constitution, what it wasand who wrote it. Repenting his earlier enthusiasm, Burke penned hisReflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. Although the subject ofhis polemic appeared to be the French revolution, under the surface whatBurke was really writing about was the English constitution as it had beencast in the sixteenth century, and then revised in the seventeenth. It wasthis constitution which Burke wanted to retrieve and to reform.

At the heart of Reflections lay the evocative description of the ‘rape’ ofMarie Antoinette. When the ‘band of cruel ruffians and assassins’ stormedthe palaces at Versailles and the Tuileries they challenged, not just theFrench ancien regime, but also the English. A ‘thousand swords’ should‘have leaped from their scabbards’ to defend a fairy Queen ‘distinguished’for her ‘piety’. But they did not, and it was a failing that could onlybe ascribed to the moral degeneration of a people that had never beenchosen.26

But the English were chosen, and they had a constitution to prove it.Burke took the utilitarian premise that human experience is founded onnothing deeper than sensation, which had taken centre stage in his earlierPhilosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

25 See T. Schofield, ‘Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the FrenchRevolution’, Historical Journal 29 (1986), pp. 601–622.

26 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 164–171.

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the Beautiful, and translated it into a public philosophy that was fashionedaround a political ‘imagination’ of ‘deep and lively impressions’.27 Reflec-tions celebrated the constitutional ‘mind’ of the ‘country’, its ‘consciousdignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation’. Recog-nising the danger of the republican contagion, he recommended thatEngland must be reinvested with all the ‘ancient’ principles and ‘spirit’of the constitution described in the works of Hooker and Spenser.28

Burke defended the English constitution as an ‘entailed inheritance’,bequeathed in the Act in Restraint and the Acts of Supremacy andUniformity, and then refined in 1688; each statute further evidencing itsinnate perfectibility. In a 1782 speech to the Commons, he affirmed that‘Our constitution is a prescriptive constitution’, one whose ‘authority isthat it has existed time out of mind’. Burke was certainly not againstchange; perfectibility presumes a degree of measured change. A ‘statewithout the means of some change’, he averred, ‘is without the meansof its conservation’. Rather, he was against any notion of revolution. Aprescriptive constitution is one which inheres a ‘presumption in favour’ ofa ‘settled scheme of government against any untried project’.29

The great virtue of the Declaration of 1688, according to Burke, lay inthe entrenchment of certain ‘ancient fundamental principles of our govern-ment’, most prominent of which are the ‘security’ of ‘law and liberty’. Itis these principles which preserve the ‘spirit of our constitution’, alongsidethe institutions which describe the ‘frame of our constitution’ and whichpreserve the ‘unity in so great a diversity of its parts’. Foremost amongstthese institutions are the monarchy and the established Church. Smallwonder that King George III urged everyone to read Reflections. Burkesupported the Anglican church less out of reverence for its theology thanout of a recognition of its pivotal role in the constitution, providing a spacebetween the public and private spheres of life, one in which could be heardonly the ‘healing voice of Christian charity’. For Burke, the ‘profound andextensive wisdom’ of an ‘established’ church lay in its ability to resistpolitical and theological ‘prophanation’ alike.30

The English constitution described by Burke is in ‘harmony’ withnature, ‘placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of theworld’, perfected by the ‘disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding

27 E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 36–40, 53–56, 83–84, 149–161.

28 Supra n. 27 at 137, 172–175.29 Supra n. 27 at 106–107, 119. See also J. Pocock, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution:

A Problem in the History of Ideas’, Historical Journal 3 (1960), pp. 15–43.30 Supra n. 27 at 100, 110–119, 188–189.

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together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race’ as receivedthrough the ‘principles of our forefathers’, and described in the sharedicons of a national community, ‘our state, our hearths, our sepulchres,and our altars’. In this way, the ‘constitution of our country’ is weddedto ‘our dearest domestic ties’. Ultimately, the English nation is made upof ‘little’ constitutional ‘images’, each of which contributes to a perfectedpicture of the whole; images of monarchy, of law, of the parish church,of ancient liberties, of the landowner administering magistracy and benefi-cence, of the humble factoryman dedicating his life to the prosperity of hisneighbours. Burke’s was a utopia every bit as allusive as Thomas More’sor James Harrington’s, but it was grounded in the historical rather thanthe speculative imagination; and accordingly, it appeared so much lessimaginative, and so much more real.

Reflections was a direct challenge to the alternative histories triumphedby men such as John Wilkes and William Godwin. By the 1790s every-body, Whig and Tory, radical and moderate, were claiming the 1688revolution as their own; as they did, with varying degrees of enthu-siasm, the reformation settlement which the ‘great and glorious’ revolutionwas supposed to perfect. Everyone competed to describe a definitivelyEnglish constitution. When Wilkes was prosecuted for malicious libel,he responded that it was a ‘ridiculous warrant against the whole Englishnation’, and its constitution. The Middlesex jury agreed, and so didthe Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in the associated case ofEntick v. Carrington. The radical presses acclaimed the most ‘supremeof Englishmen’.31

Even Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice clung to the inher-ited myths of the ‘good old cause’, its constitutional narrative as muchrooted in history as Burke’s. But it was a very different history; onein which the events of 1688 proved the virtue of revolution rather thanreform. Rather than being deluded by the ‘Shibboleths of the constitu-tion’, the mythologies of the ‘positive law’, and ‘political institutions’ suchas the established Church, the truly free Englishman cherishes a ‘spiritof universal kindness’, recognising that the strength of a commonwealthdepends upon its present integrity rather than past delusions. This is an‘anarchy’ which ‘cultivates thought’, the kind of self-government whichis most effectively facilitated in Hooker’s ‘commonwealth of common-wealths’, in the ‘assemblies’ of parishes which had risen to the fore in thelate sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and which had nurtured theliberating potential of incessant ‘common deliberation’. When he looked

31 P. Thomas, John Wilkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 86–87.

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to England’s future, Godwin, like Burke, sought recourse to images of anidealised past.32

The sublimest contemplation

Just as Spenser and Donne had provided a poetic complement to Hooker’streatises, so too generations of English romantics, such as Southey andWordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, translated the political philosophiesof Burke and Godwin into stanzas and couplets. The more radical, suchas Shelley, looked to marry Godwinian ‘rational anarchy’ with a distinctlyEnglish Whig humanism. England, he proclaimed in the Ode to Liberty,‘yet sleeps’. It must be awakened, its ‘old laws’ retrieved, and the ‘pompand pageant’ of its priests and ‘hypocrites’ cast out.33

As a young man, William Wordsworth had been fascinated by theFrench revolution, racing across the channel to witness it at first hand.But like so many, by the middle of the decade, Wordsworth had begunto doubt. France had become a ‘place of fear,/Unfit for the repose ofnight’. Following his lengthy sojourn at Alfoxden in the 1797, Wordsworthemerged with the zeal of a true apostate, determined that successiverevisions of his great Prelude should erase his youthful ideologicalaberrations.34

Tintern Abbey, composed in 1798, redirected romanticism from thefrenzied ideologies of revolution to the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ in the‘green pastoral landscape’ of England.35 And the various Poems Dedicatedto National Independence and Liberty, composed between 1802 and 1816,all testified to a Burkean constitutionalism, recalling all the past, nowTory, heroes of England’s political struggles, men like ‘Sidney, Marvel,Harrington/Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend’, men who‘knew how genuine glory was put on’, and who ‘Taught us how rightfullya nation shone/In splendour’. The final odes, devoted to Waterloo, reso-nated with Shakespeare’s Agincourt and Donne’s St.Paul’s, describing a‘Commemoration holy that unites/The living generations with the dead’.36

32 W. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (London: Penguin, 1976),pp. 67–70, 267–270, 541–542. See also I. Kramnick, ‘On Anarchism and the Real World:William Godwin and Radical England’, American Political Science Review 66 (1972),pp. 114–128.

33 P. Shelley, Ode To Liberty, 181, and The Mask of Anarchy, 331–335, 363, both inComplete Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).

34 W. Wordsworth, Prelude, 10.264–99, 11.32–5, 183–185, 12.77, 193, 201–207 and14.132, 188, 206–207, in Complete Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1936).

35 Tintern Abbey, 30–35, 48–49, 90–96, 111, 154, supra n. 34.36 National Independence, XV.3–8, XXIV, 4–5, 12–14 and XLVI.66–7, supra n. 34.

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Wordsworth’s later masterpiece, The Excursion, was a paean to a ToryEngland that was now visibly fading from both memory and landscape,assailed equally by the politics of reform and the march of industrial-isation. If England was to withstand these destructive impulses, it couldonly do so by reinvesting all the icons of the reformation settlement.For stanza after stanza, the Wanderer journeys from one ‘sacred pile’ toanother, describing endless churchyards stuffed full of memorials to longforgotten crusaders and knights, figures of chivalry and honour who dedi-cated their lives to the interest of their commonwealth, rather then to profitand efficiency.37

Constitutional reform evidences a nation that is ‘sick’ of ‘hollowwords’. Revisiting Hooker’s cherished conception of a ‘commonwealth ofcommonwealths’, Wordsworth advises that Englishmen must ‘turn’ onceagain to ‘neighbourhood’, to a ‘Faith’ in the ‘poetry of common speech’,and to their destiny as a chosen people. The ‘Constitution of England’remains ‘the sublimest contemplation which the history of a Society andGovernment have ever presented to it’. The reformation must be reformedonce more, its public philosophy cleansed of political imperfections; ‘letthy Word prevail’ so as ‘to take away/The sting of human nature’. Theconstitution of England ‘lives and thrives’ in the ‘hearts’ of its subjects, ornot at all.38

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was another who devoted much of his lifeto questioning England and Englishness. And, like Wordsworth, he toocame to the conclusion that it was an ideal which could only be definedin relation to its constitution. In his Bristol lectures of 1795, a youthfuland idealistic Coleridge described national sovereignty as the ‘constitu-tional expression of the general will’.39 In Religious Musings, composedat the same time, Coleridge resurrected the ‘new Hierusalem’ of Spenser,idealising a crusading nation fired by a godly zeal to cast out the ‘mitred’atheism of counter-reformation.40 And in Fears in Solitude, written in1798, Coleridge addressed the ‘mad idolatry’ which had captured the polit-ical imagination, and subjugated the sense of humanity and liberty whichtwo centuries earlier had defined Englishness.41

37 Excursion, 5.102–11, 139 and 7.923–1040, supra n. 34.38 Excursion, 5.378–82, 392, 562–567 and 9.637–8, supra n. 34.39 N. Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (London:

Macmillan, 1988), pp. 19–33 and R. Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Penguin,1990), pp. 92–110, 130–131.

40 S. Coleridge, Religious Musings, 32, 135–152, 276–286, 334, in Complete PoeticalWorks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

41 Fears in Solitude, 55–58, 72, 159–166, 172, supra n. 40.

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Thirty years later, as England contemplated Catholic emancipation,Coleridge penned his final work, On the Constitution of Church and State;a text that evoked the constitution idealised in Burke’s Reflections. Achosen people must, Coleridge averred, be in possession of a ‘nationalChurch’, whether or not it be established. And they must have a consti-tution that expresses their chosen-ness. For it is in the ‘free parishes’ ofthe commonwealth that the ‘germ’ of English ‘civilization’ is to be found.The possession of a national church was the ‘chief’ of England’s ‘manyblessings’, the institution which sealed the integrity of its constitution andwhich inspired the English to be active participants in their own crusadingdestiny.42 Whilst England prepared to repeal the statutes which founded itsconstitution, Coleridge, like Wordsworth, clung to the hope that a distinctlyEnglish constitutional imagination would somehow be preserved.

III. A CHARMED SPECTACLE STILL?

In the wake of Catholic emancipation in 1829, and the first Reform Act,three years later, England questioned its own future in just the same way asit does today. And most people were just as bewildered and uncertain, justas troubled by the thought that, having stripped away all the fictions andfantasies of fairyland, there was nothing really there. Matthew Arnold’sDover Beach became an anthem for a nation that appeared to have givenup hope, possessed of an ‘eternal sadness’. In place of the ‘Sea of Faith’which once circled God’s chosen people, now there is only a ‘melancholy,long, withdrawing roar’. The railway appeared to have replaced church andconstitution as the ultimate expression of Englishness, and Arnold took toriding up and down the Great Eastern line in order to study his compatriotsand to try to work out why.43

In Culture and Anarchy, published in 1869, Arnold mused on Burke’sdictum that the English nation-state is an ‘effective and corporate char-acter’. Hoping that it could indeed withstand the ‘banquet’ of ideological‘clap-trap’ that had seized its ‘fermenting mind’, he turned predictability tothe greatest of Tory icons, the ‘England of Elizabeth’ and the ‘harmoniousperfection’ of its constitutional settlement. A political constitution alwaysexpresses the moral integrity of a nation, and so the English constitution

42 S. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J.M. Dent, 1997), pp. 41–42, 58, 111–112, 129, 136–137, 200–213, and On the Constitution of Church and State (London: J.M.Dent, 1972), pp. 15, 33–38, 56–61.

43 M. Arnold, Dover Beach, 9–14, 17–18, 21–25, 29–37, in A Critical Edition of theMajor Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). See also I. Hamilton, A GiftImprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), pp. 179–217.

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is ‘an inward condition of mind and spirit’. It was this ‘condition’ thatArnold feared might be ‘swept’ away with the ebbing tide, loosened fromits moorings by the repeal of the statutes of reformation.44

Two years earlier, Walter Bagehot had published the collected essaysof his English Constitution. At the heart of his analysis lay the celebrateddistinction between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’ component. Despitethe seemingly inexorable march of utility, Bagehot argued that the fabricof the Tory constitution was still in place. Indeed, it retained an essentialrole in ‘disguising’ the urges of efficiency. The constitution described byBagehot is one held together by ‘vague dreams of glory’ and ‘occult’thrills, by all the institutions of monarchs and churches and parliaments,by all the symbols of ‘unity’ which the ‘imperfectly educated’ craved.The English constitution was still a ‘charmed spectacle’.45 And it wouldcontinue to be so, just so long indeed as the English needed to feel thatthere was something intrinsic about being English.

Once again, as the twenty-first century arrives, England is questioningwhether it really is ‘charmed’. Time and again throughout the last century,recourse was made to the constitutional imagination, to residual images ofa chosen people. Stanley Baldwin famously rhapsodized over the ‘soundsof England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy,the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against thewhetstone, the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of the hill,the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and maybe seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every worksin England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight ofEngland’.46

Sixty-seven years later, John Major imagined a country which would‘still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer,invincible green suburbs, dog lovers’, and ‘as George Orwell said, oldmaids bicyling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’. Yet, Majormissed the irony, for it was Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier which renderedBaldwin’s rhapsody distasteful and grotesque, whilst urban squalor andrural degradation half a century on condemned Major’s in just the sameway. It is an idyll, as Orwell commented, that stands for ‘nothing but an

44 M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993), pp. 59–70, 83–84, 126–141, 180–211, 195, 202–203.

45 W. Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: Fontana, 1963), pp. 60–65, 82–90,108–111, 225–227, 248.

46 P. Clark, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 134–135.

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enormous gush of country sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit from astomach stuffed with place-names’.47

The images of country smithies and bicycling maids are no morecredible than those of the Redcrosse Knight, the Fairy Queen and God’schosen people. But they still possess the political imagination. It is theseto which England will always turn. Even Orwell, despite himself, turned tothe ‘mystical’ image of England which was ‘somehow bound up with solidbreakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, greenfields and red pillar-boxes’. In The Lion and the Unicorn, he proclaimedhimself proud to be a ‘patriot’ of an England that had fostered the spiritsof Magna Carta and Henry V, of Shakespeare and Spenser, Shelley andColeridge.48

As globalization increases its grip on national economies, as theEuropean Union limps from Treaty to Treaty, middle England will clingever more desperately to its ‘spectacle’. It will buy its jubilee mugs, andread about its People’s Princess, and crave a fairy prince to come; andit will worry about the disestablishment of Church to which only a tinyfraction of the population can be bothered to go on a Sunday morning;and it will cherish all the myths of parliamentary sovereignty which stilldelude subjects into thinking they are citizens; and generations of school-children will learn about Good Queen Bess and read stanza after stanza ofShakespeare and Wordsworth.

There is much talk about the ‘beast’ of English nationalism that willrear its head in the coming decades. But the chosen people are far morelikely to go shopping than to go on crusade. A thirst for God, as Orwellcaustically observed, has been replaced by a thirst for tea, the soundof iconoclastic fury drowned out by the pervasive sound of the ‘teapotendlessly brewing’.49 Although middle England may still be zealous, itis possessed of a zeal for conservation rather than for revolution. Thefuture of England, as always, lies in visions of the past. Tony Blair payshomage to a ‘nation that has a great history to celebrate and a great futurebuild’. The prophets of a ‘third way’ anticipate a ‘life politics’ which willoscillate around a ‘common morality of citizenship’, a reinvested sense ofcommunity, of ‘belonging’ and ‘participation’. The rhetoric of the ‘third

47 J. Major, The Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 376, and G. Orwell,The Essays of George Orwell (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 116–117.

48 Orwell, supra n. 47 at 144–194.49 Orwell, supra n. 47 at 146–147, 283.

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way’ is the rhetoric of Hooker and Spenser, Burke and Wordsworth; therhetoric of Tory humanism for half a millenium.50

The very idea of England is inexorably bound up with its history, andevery prophesy is rooted in the past, from Hooker to Burke to Bagehot toBlair. To think of England and its future is to think of England and its past.Above all, it is to contemplate that essential fictions of nation and consti-tution; and to worry about them. As middle England worries once again,the voice of William Cobbett comes echoing down the ages. The Englandof 1820, Cobbett observed, wanted ‘great alterations’ but ‘nothing new’.A hundred and eighty years later, the English constitutional imagination ispossessed by precisely the same essential ambiguity.51

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Clare McGlynn for her many helpful observationson earlier drafts of this article, and also the participants at the NewcastleLaw School ‘Constitutionalism’ seminar.

Newcastle Law SchoolUniversity of Newcastle upon TyneNewcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RUUK

50 See H. Colebatch, Blair’s Britain (London: Claridge, 1999), p. 20, A. Giddens, TheThird Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 44, 65–66, 72–76, 102–108, and W. Hutton, The State We’re In (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995),pp. 285–286, 290.

51 W. Cobbett, Rural Rides (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 342–345, 350–351.