I have argued throughout this book that Constitutional Royalism was a cluster of interdependent ideas whose secular and religious aspects can be distinguished but not separated. It is impossible to isolate any one element within Constitutional Royalism without doing violence to its intrinsic nature. The beliefs that the royal prerogative and the subjects' liberties operated in symbiosis; that the monarch's powers were sovereign yet consistent with the rule of law; that to abrogate those powers therefore violated both the constitution and the laws; that monarchy and episcopacy were bound together by the royal supremacy enshrined in statute – all these components meshed to form one coherent whole. If there was a single principle underpinning these ideas, colouring them and holding them in equilibrium, it was the rule of law, understood to be an amalgam of God's law and the English common law. Constitutional Royalism had affinities with both the so-called 'common law mind' and the values of the Great Tew circle, yet remained distinct from both. It drew on earlier traditions within English political and religious thought, but also represented a response to the specific developments of the 1640s. It was guided by a temperate spirit which saw unity and reciprocity as the normative relationship between monarch and people, Crown and Parliament, Church and State. In that sense, it was an outlook rather than an ideology, a frame of mind rather than a creed.

This last point in turn suggests other parallels, other contexts within which Constitutional Royalism may be understood.