The occupation of Tripoli appears to rest on the same basis as the occupation of other parts of North Africa by other European Powers—viz., on the la… - G. M. Trevelyan

[T]he merits of the great settlement associated with the names of Wellington and Castlereagh gave Britain security which she used for a hundred years of progress in liberty and high civilisation; while the defects of the same settlement, for which also they were in part though in smaller degree responsible, set a date to that happiness in the end.

The erection of British naval and commercial supremacy on a footing that proved permanent for more than two hundred years, might not unreasonably be regarded as the most important outcome of the reign of Anne.

Apart from a few Crown appointments, like the Christ Church and Trinity Headships, Oxford and Cambridge had ever since the Revolution enjoyed a very complete immunity from Royal and Ministerial interference—an academic liberty that held in it the seeds of intellectual freedom for the whole country, as compared to the practice in many other lands down to our own time. The quarrel of James II with the Universities was constantly in the recollection of the dons, who, whether Whig or Tory, would never, in his daughter's reign, permit the least interference with their internal government by royal mandate or request. Any such attempt was promptly met by expressions of the hope that Queen Anne would "reflect upon what was done in Magdalen College in her father's time." Meanwhile politics swayed College elections, as in the case of poor "Mr. Entwissle's pretensions" to a Fellowship at Brazennose, for the young man was found to be a Whig, "which was against the present humour of the College." Such an incident in 1711 is not surprising, but it is a remarkable proof of academic freedom from government control that Oxford was permitted to continue such practices and to remain Tory, and largely Jacobite, under the Hanoverian kings and their Whig governments. Academic and scholastic freedom, which is a necessary condition of intellectual and political freedom, was established as against the State in Eighteenth Century England. In a great part of Europe it does not exist to-day. It is one of the island blessings we have inherited from our Whig and Tory ancestors.