Tom Furniss on Edmund Burke

“Feeling and providing as an "Englishman," Burke works continually to protect the English national character from the plague of revolutionary France... [For Burke] English feelings remain native and natural; they ensure maintenance of "liberal and manly morals"; and the reverence of the English for God, kings, parliaments, magistrates, priests, and nobility is not a slavery, as the radicals would have it, but the basis of their fitness for "rational liberty". The English national character finds its authentic expression and counterpart in the English constitution... For the English, then, to remain loyal to their constitution is to remain true to their essential national character.”

“[I]n characteristic nationalist fashion, Burke assures his readers that the English constitution he is describing, perhaps partly inventing, has its roots deep in the past. English liberties are not a new invention but have been the central concern of the English constitution from time immemorial. The continuity over time that characterizes English history and its constitution is not simply a formal or legal one. Burke figures England as a huge family which extends across time as well as space... Families are held together in the present through bonds of blood, love, and property relations, and to the past through memory and inherited property. Burke imagines the English nation as being locked together through analogous ties and affections... Burke is here engaged in consecrating the nation through a kind of ancestor worship. He is also seeking to make the English aristocracy appear to be the custodians of the national family heritage rather than being alien to the national tradition (as radical nationalism asserted).”