MOST OF hISTORY HAD eNDED BY 1215:

[T]o rediscover the English conservative political tradition we must ground it in the history of practical politics and rely on conservative thinkers -- such as they are and rarely though they come along -- only for occasional illumination.

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Above all, we must begin at the beginning. Which is not Burke's Reflections on the Late Revolution in France (sublime though its handful of great passages are) but the works of the Lancastrian jurist and politician, Sir John Fortescue. 

Fortescue's works were written in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the reborn English language first became capable of analytical prose. But -- just as three centuries later -- their trigger was France and her diametrically divergent development from England.

So, like Burke, Fortescue's work is an extended compare and contrast between England and France, to the huge advantage of England, of course. Burke compared febrile revolutionary France to placid and contented unrevolutionary England. Fortescue, the English "dominium politicum et regale" (a political and royal dominion) to the French "dominium regale" (a royal dominion). 

In the former, the king can only make law and impose taxation by the consent of the realm in Parliament; in the latter, the laws lie in the king's mouth and his subjects' property (or at least the property of the vast majority below noble rank) is in his hands.

Fortescue judges by results ("these be the fruits"). The English political system is superior because its protection of property leaves the common people of England prosperous, whereas the French peasantry -- mulcted by unlimited taxation and arbitrary confiscation -- are wretchedly poor. And the law of England is better too, since (among many other things) proof of guilt is by the verdict of a jury and not by confession extorted by unspeakable tortures.

Fortescue is clearly proud of his analysis of the distinction between England and France and claims for it the then unimpeachable authority of (among others) St Thomas Aquinas. But though "dominium regale" and "dominium politicum" do appear in his sources; the crucial middle term, "dominium politicum et regale" does not. 

Instead, it seems clear that Fortescue, like the good conservative that he was, derived his analysis from the observation of current political realties (or, as he put it, "experience and histories of the ancients") and then dignified it with the "shreds and patches" of the scholastic learning he had picked up in his youth at Oxford.

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But of course Fortescue's obstinate, bullish advocacy of England flew in the face of reality. France had triumphed in the Hundred Years War while defeated England had dissolved into the civil Wars of the Roses. France even offered refuge to the remnants of the dethroned House of Lancaster and its followers, including Fortescue himself. Which meant -- paradoxically -- that it was in France that Fortescue wrote his paean to England.

In short, to an informed, open-minded contemporary, like the Burgundian chronicler, Philippe de Commynes, French absolutist government represented the future and the English parliamentary system a failed and shrinking past. Nevertheless, Fortescue's confidence proved justified. 

Not least because of those very conservative things, attachment to place and force of habit. The Common Law had been taught in the Inns of Court, those quasi-university colleges, for centuries, with each generation handing down its lore to the next. And parliaments, likewise, had met more and more frequently in the same chambers of the Abbey-Palace complex of Westminster.

The result was that the only late-medieval English king seriously to try French methods was Henry VII, who, thanks to the accident of exile, had learned his statecraft in Brittany and France. And his death was followed by a swift and vigorous conservative reaction which reasserted the supremacy of Magna Carta and parliamentary finance.

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