A Charmed Spectacle: England and its Constitutional Imagination

This article argues that the fate of England – a subject of increasing contemporary interest – is inexorably linked to that of its constitution. Englishness is an impression, one that is rooted in its constitutional imagination, a bundle of impression and images, which can be found, not merely in statutes and cases, but in a myriad texts and treatises. The first part of the article concentrates on the constitutional imagination fashioned by the likes of Hooker and Spenser in the wake of the Henrician and Elizabethan settlements. The second part then looks at the frantic efforts of men such as Burke and Wordsworth to reinvest this imagination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The final part of the article suggests that the`charmed spectacle' of the constitution, as Bagehot terms it, still represents a formidable residual strength against which any mooted constitutional reforms must be measured. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.