Security and liberty were obtained under the Hanoverian Constitution, because, under Walpole, the Whigs became, what they had not always been, the "m… - G. M. Trevelyan

The greatest gains with which Britain emerged from the war did not appear in the treaties. There were the unrivalled supremacy of our navy and of our mercantile marine; the reputation of having been the only Power that consistently withstood Napoleon; the possession of a Parliamentary system now more than ever the envy of "less happier lands" since the relative failure of "French principles" of liberty. With these advantages we faced the coming era.

In the Stuart era, the English developed for themselves, without foreign participation or example, a system of Parliamentary government, local administration and freedom of speech and person, clean contrary to the prevailing tendencies on the continent, which was moving fast toward regal absolution, centralized bureaucracy, and the subjection of the individual to the State.

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.