David Starkey’s Crowned Republic (Clifford Angell Bates Jr., 10/23/25, Law & Liberty)
He presents the English constitutional order as a living organism—shaped not by abstract theory but by centuries of pragmatic adaptation, legal precedent, and civic habit.
The English Constitution, often praised for its continuity and resilience, represents for Starkey a historical evolution rather than a philosophical creation. He offers a trenchant critique of rights-based and universalist narratives of liberty, arguing that England’s constitutional character and its profound influence on the American founding emerged from tradition rather than theory. The liberties embodied in representative assemblies, trial by jury, and the balance of powers, he contends, were not Enlightenment inventions but refinements of England’s deep-rooted constitutional inheritance. For American readers, Starkey’s work serves as a reminder that the republic they built, though revolutionary in form, was grounded in the slow, empirical wisdom of the English political tradition.
For Starkey, the liberties embedded within English law and political practice did not emerge from revolutionary theory but from centuries of habitual negotiation, practical governance, and the incremental development of institutions. To understand this perspective, one must trace the evolution of the English Constitution, examine Starkey’s critique of Hobbesian and Lockean abstractions, and situate the American Founders’ adoption of English republican practices alongside the selective influence of Montesquieu.
David Starkey argues that the English republican tradition originally arose from a monarchial one, where a “crowned republic” blended regal symbolism with republican limits. This view of this blended monarchial tradition arises from three medieval pillars: John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159), Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae (c. 1470), and Magna Carta (1215). Salisbury’s “body politic” metaphor portrays the king as the head accountable to law and realm, thereby distinguishing England’s dominium politicum et regale, a hybrid rule under custom and counsel, from France’s absolute dominium regale. Fortescue elaborates on this in praising England’s co-created laws and parliamentary consent, which bars tyranny through shared sovereignty. Magna Carta enacts these ideals, enforcing due process and prohibiting taxation without consent, thereby transforming the feudal pact into a constitutional restraint. Together, Starkey contends, they forge a kingship conditional on the common good, evolving through communal oversight to ensure monarchical stability.
Starkey situates the origins of English liberty in lived historical experience.
George should have just granted us our own parliament so we could enjoy our rights as Englishmen.
