There is a familiar problem that attaches to any attempt to survey the English constitution at pretty much any moment in history. And it comes down to this: was there one? The reason for the confusion is of course just as familiar. Whatever passes for an English constitution is “unwritten.” The same question might be asked in other jurisdictions. But the presence of a document that claims to be a “constitution” at least prejudices the response. However, in England there is no written constitution, just what the later Victorian commentator Mountstuart Grant Duff would term a “strange abstraction.”1 The problem was given famous expression by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America, published in 1840. In England, he observed, “the Constitution can change constantly, or rather it does not exist at all.”2 Tocqueville rather evidently preferred the American way, a written constitution enumerating lots of rights. In this he was not alone. Successive revolutions, in America and then France, at the end of the eighteenth century had stimulated considerable debate as to how best to reform and perhaps write an English constitution. It was a conversation that Mary Wollstonecraft entered with a characteristic vigor. We will shortly take a closer look at what she had to say. But first we need to set the scene, to revisit the larger conversation.