Introduction

It was natural for the despairing author of Burke's Tracts on the Popery Laws to look outside Ireland for a properly constituted society, just as one might expect the admiring author of An Abridgement of English History to find it on the other side of St George's Channel. Yet the intellectual energy Burke gave to English society assumed rather than expounded the role he attributed to the property and social leadership of the aristocracy. He came to develop a different concern: the view that England's political arrangement was under threat. When he came into Parliament, he wrote later, he found the House of Commons ‘surrendering itself to the guidance of an authority not grown out of an experienced wisdom and integrity, but out of the accidents of Court favour’. We must set this view in the history of English politics.

England prided itself on possessing a balanced constitution. The most striking theory, that of Montesquieu, identified the three parts of the legislature (King, Lords and Commons) as bodies which balanced one another for the benefit of the governed. In Paley's words, ‘there is no power possessed by one part of the legislature, the abuse, or excess of which is not checked by some antagonist power, residing in another part’. But precisely how the balance should be constituted, as a matter of right, had been left vague. Its indistinct character permitted the disputes about the proper role of the monarchy in government which characterized the 1760s.