11 - The mixed constitution and the common law

Summary

Accounts of England’s constitution, even in the more systematic treatments of the middle decades of the eighteenth century, followed the common early modern pattern in which political theory often comprised an uneven amalgam of classical maxims of government, narrow partisan polemics, antiquarian learning, historical researches, and technical legal doctrine. Nonetheless, ‘the constitution of England’, so constructed, enjoyed an extensive influence on liberal political philosophy and Western statecraft well beyond its place of origin and the particular circumstances of its first articulation. ‘The eye of curiosity seems now to be universally turned’ to this ‘model of perfection’, explained Jean Louis Delolme in the 1770s (Delolme 1834, p. 1). What was to be discovered in this model were the general principles of political freedom. ‘Tis the Britannic Constitution that gives this kingdom a lustre above other nations’, extolled Roger Acherley a half-century earlier, ‘as it secures to Britons, their private property, freedom and liberty, by such walls of defence as are not to be found in any other parts of the universe’ (Acherley 1727, p. vi).

The organising principle for much of the eighteenth-century celebration of the English constitution was the commonplace idea that structures of government could preserve political freedom only where they frustrated the abuse of political power. The extent to which the English enjoyed unique levels of political freedom was the result of a constitutional order which effectively prevented arbitrary or tyrannical acts of power. The achievement of this kind of political system, in turn, depended upon the existence and co-ordination of several distinct kinds of institutions and governmental procedures.