Neal Ascherson

The nobility of Poland-Lithuania, superbly quarrelsome and eccentric, left every Western visitor with a lifetime of traveller’s tales. The early 18th century put many European monarchies on the track to central control and absolutism, but the szlachta pushed the Commonwealth in the opposite direction. 

His great selling point was that he wasn’t Stalin or Khrushchev. Brezhnev, his colleagues assumed, wouldn’t have them shot or send their families to Siberia. And unlike Khrushchev, Stalin’s ebullient successor, he wouldn’t suddenly fire them in a drunken rage or set them impossible targets in titanic, half-baked projects.

Two fantasies of greatness were in conflict: the outworn vision of a global British ‘family’ radiating from the mother country, and the idea of the Commonwealth as a mighty moral example, showing the races of the world how to live in peace and unity. Both fantasies shared the belief that Great Britain was not an ordinary nation but – even in the post-imperial period – one summoned to follow a messianic destiny.

How​ did the Duke of Cumberland become the ‘Butcher’ of Culloden? Before and immediately after that battle, he was adored as the saviour of Hanoverian Britain from Jacobites and papists. As George II’s soldier son, he was the ‘martial Boy’; for Drury Lane audiences, ‘The noble Youth, whom ev’ry eye approves/ Each tongue applauds, and ev’ry...

Britain in 1815 emerged emaciated and simmering with unrest after three huge wars in a generation, but developed no written constitution. The best that can be said is that people start scribbling most frequently in stormy times, when the existing state of governance no longer carries conviction with subjects, rulers or both. All the same, Linda Colley’s book proves that constitutions can sprout from all kinds of earth. They can limit a ruler’s power, or sanctify and entrench that power. They can be grants of universal rights, or ‘no tres­passing’ notices designed to keep natives, women, immigrants and the poor out of decision-making. Some are manifestos for a political movement. Others are found­ational documents for a nation’s fresh-won independence. But the case for imposing a written constitution on ancient Britain, while touching on several of those motives, is more elementary. The ‘unconstitution’ has worked only because England’s ruling elites, out of decent self-interest, have never fully exploited its incredible lack of formal constraint on executive power. That convention is now ending, and the executive is pushing hard at its boundaries.