I am sure I am as little of a Jacobite as anybody but I sincerely hope that the statue of James II will not be moved, because it is a fine work of ar… - G. M. Trevelyan

A subject of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had strayed into the middle of a Westminster election in 1782, thus describes what he saw and felt there... It is true that if the good man had witnessed an election at an average English borough, or had ascertained that Manchester and Birmingham were unrepresented, he might have felt less enraptured. Nevertheless, he had seen something great, which had then no parallel in France, Spain, Italy or in his own country, something which, for all its absurdities, was of the heart of England.

If...the story of the great events and the great men of our Augustan age could be told in its truth and simplicity, as only the man of Athens could have told it, it would move like a five-act tragedy from start to finish, presenting in turn the overweening pride and the fall of Louis, then of Marlborough and of the Whigs, then of the Tories in their turn, while, through the crash of each successive crisis of war and politics, the fortune of England moves forward on the tide of destiny. And what men that little rustic England could breed! A nation of five and a half millions that had Wren for its architect, Newton for its scientist, Locke for its philosopher, Bentley for its scholar, Pope for its poet, Addison for its essayist, Bolingbroke for its orator, Swift for its pamphleteer and Marlborough to win its battles, had the recipe for genius.

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.