The model of the atomised, acquisitive individual, dealing with others only through secularised market relations regulated by self-interest, is disas… - J. C. D. Clark

The rebellion of 1688 was not a bid for a weak monarchy, but for a Protestant monarchy. Consequently, the legislative expressions of that attempt which followed had much to do with religion, but little to do with placing limitations on the monarchy's prerogative in other spheres. Discounting the libertarian rhetoric which 1688–9 generated on the part of a small but vocal minority, it is possible to see that the effective powers of the Crown continued to grow.

The English had a well-developed historiography that traced the deeds and achievements of Englishmen (and some women, notably Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth I) over many centuries. The cult of the English common law was already ancient, and was revitalised by texts like Matthew Hale's The History of the Common Law of England (1713) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9). But the biggest body of literature outlining a shared experience concerned the English church. It was here especially that an image of a free, Protestant people was worked out and sustained, whether in best-sellers like John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1559 and many later editions) or in heavyweight theological texts like Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593; first complete edition, 1662). Between them, these texts kept alive the interpretation long ago placed on English history by the Venerable Bede (d.735) in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum that its unifying theme was providential destiny and survival in the face of overwhelming odds.

Far from seizing the initiative for the Commons, early-eighteenth-century Whigs (who comprised the majority of MPs) were more concerned that the chief agent of all initiatives in government, the Crown, should not be seized by the Stuart dynasty. The reinstatement of Jacobitism as a profoundly important issue was a major achievement of recent scholarship in the early-Hanoverian field.