Yes, especially on questions around the reformation.
At first blush, it might appear that the reformation marked this revolutionary moment in the English tradition, and in a certain sense it did. It was followed by some real tension back and forth. You had King Henry VIII, who brought about a certain set of changes. Then you had Edward VI, who pushed those changes further. Then you had Queen Mary, who sought to restore Catholicism, and after that you had Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth I ascended to the throne following a great period of religious upheaval. She sought to frame the existence of a new church, which would be a combination of different aspects of past traditions, in a certain sense a compromise between different objectives and tendencies. Obviously, it didn't satisfy everyone. At a theological level, it's not something that satisfies me because I'm a Catholic, but you can see the evolution at the same time. “Evolution” implies a positive. I wouldn't want to imply, necessarily, a positive here, but you still see the relative gradualness of change between what the tradition was and what it ultimately became on the heels of the kinds of changes that were put in place by Elizabeth I.
You had this period of figures who were asserting revolutionary changes and ultimately a great deal of upheaval, but there was this kind of reverting back to the sense that, whether we move in one direction or another, things under the British tradition should move relatively slowly.
The next century had elements of evolution and elements of revolution. Of course, the subsequent century, after the death of Elizabeth I, saw the English Civil War and what came to be known as the Glorious Revolution. Again, this was a revolution in a certain sense.
The way in which Locke justified the revolution was that in his view this was a restorative revolution. In other words, this wasn't to dramatically change the way in which things had always been done but was rather to bring things back to the way they should have been properly done and to respond, from that perspective, to what perhaps were perceived as the quasi-revolutionary tendencies of James II. I don't want to relive those I'm sure painful debates, for some members, as they think about that history.
We can see in our history uniquely this kind of gradualism of change and also ongoing concern about the risks of an overly powerful executive, which might tread on the natural and proper prerogatives of Parliament. These were many of the dynamics here, and this was the justification provided by Locke for the Glorious Revolution: that it was a restoration and a protection of rights that Locke of course situated much further back. He situated them in a kind of evolution out of a state of nature. From his perspective, these were rights that had not been respected by the deposed monarchy.
This is our tradition, one which this amendment seeks to protect, and one not honoured at all by the so-called modernization approach that is advocated by the government in its discussion paper with respect to the Standing Orders.
The most powerful articulation of this reverence for history that we are protecting with this amendment is by someone who is often thought of as one of the founders or framers of the conservative intellectual tradition in the English-speaking world, and that is of course Edmund Burke.