The Spirit of the British Constitution: Parliamentary Reform from the Civil War to the Great Reform Act

How ideas of parliamentary reform aiming to restore the spirit of the constitution defined political debate at a pivotal moment in British historyEighteenth-century Britain was ruled by landed Protestant gentlemen who were united in their embrace of the country’s constitution, common law, and system of rights that had been confirmed by milestones such as Magna Carta in 1215, the Petition of Right in 1628, and the Glorious Revolution in 1688.Yet the British elite and the public at large were divided on fundamental political questions, such as how the constitution should work in practice and what reforms, if any, were needed to make reality cohere with theory. In this panoramic book, Max Skjönsberg provides the most comprehensive study to date of the history of parliamentary reform in Britain from the seventeenth century to the First Reform Act in 1832.At the heart of the book is the idea of the spirit of the British constitution, which was invoked by widely different political actors an