15. The Myth Makers
After it had defeated the republicanism of the Interregum, the royalist-parliamentary elite that ran England had no need to talk of a constitution. The country was governed by the king and Parliament in the mutually beneficial pact known as the Bill of Rights.
Everyone involved in the operation of the state from 1689 onwards knew what he could and could not do according to the ancient customs. The rules were not written down but deliberately left fluid; they were based on obedience to precedence and the code of gentlemanly behaviour.
The modern concept of a constitution, in the sense of an instrument of fairness, only appeared in the 18thcentury. The word was not widely adopted in Great Britain until the 19th century and only as a reaction and justification.
British conservatives, in the broadest sense, were proud not to need the kind of banal, literal document that had been adopted by American revolutionaries and which caused so many arguments in neighbouring France. Britain, they maintained, had always had its own pragmatic constitution that was better than anything any plebeian convention could compose.
The movement for reform in Britain, however – which sought to end to parliamentary corruption and top-down sovereignty – encouraged elitists to extol their “constitution” as something to be envied not criticised.
So began the mythmaking. Evidence was identified to show that Britain had a constitution even if it was like any other. Walter Bagehot was the pioneer theorist to be followed by other “canonical” authors notably Austin, Venn, Low, Amery, Laski and Jennings.
In the 20th century the field of constitution studies exploded, producing a great many more apologists, including Bogdanor, Crossman, Foley, Hazell, Hennessy, King, Norton and Turpin and Tomkins. There is strength in numbers: each author was able to validate his predecessors and contemporaries’ work, strengthening the perception that there really was and is a constitution, not an assortment of ill fitting parts.
The Cavalier Constitution 