The rebellion of 1688 was not a bid for a weak monarchy, but for a Protestant monarchy. Consequently, the legislative expressions of that attempt whi… - J. C. D. Clark

Strong leaders, even absolute monarchs, owe their strength to a natural social constituency rather than to an authoritarian personality. For Charles, it was the nexus of squire and parson that fuelled the uncompromising counter-revolution of populist Anglicanism. These were the men, like the Vicar of Bray, for whom Good King Charles's days were golden, at least in retrospect. At the time, they found him often reluctant to go as far as they wished in persecuting Catholics and Dissenters. Only later did Charles's reign assume the golden glow of nostalgia, as unhappy Tories under the first two Georges sought a stylish archetype which would highlight, by contrast, the Hanoverian boorishness. Then, Charles's rule came to seem a symbol of the triumph of indulgence, pleasure and tolerance over rigour, earnestness and bigotry. But at the time, it was a much more ambiguous affair.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, continental Europe was swept by grandiose ideologies and, after their exhaustion, is hurrying towards anti-nationalist federalism. England, by contrast, was largely unmoved by these ideologies, and still retains a stubborn patriotism.

It has been traditional in British historiography to trace industrial growth and technological innovation to the sturdy virtues of bourgeois individualism, and especially to the individualism of Protestant-democratic England... [T]he example of Japan in our time refutes the necessity of any such connection, for Japan has demonstrated the possible industrial dynamism of a highly deferential society, indeed a society which has only recently masked the values and practices of a divine-right monarchy. It is perhaps possible in the changed climate of the 1980s to re-emphasise the extent to which England's commercial and industrial achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested not only on success in war, averting revolution and eliminating French competition, but also on the virtues of loyalty, diligence, discipline, subordination and obedience in the work-place, whether factory, mine or office (indeed the British economy was eventually overtaken by others which practised these virtues to a higher degree). But such practices had already been elevated to the status of social ideals within the Anglican-aristocratic nexus; and it was the military elite, not the nation of shopkeepers, which won the wars. The values of nineteenth-century industrial society owed far more to the values of the ancien regime than the Victorians were prepared to admit.