I’m late to this discussion. I missed this entire post somehow. Anyway, it’s true that the UK is a constitutional monarchy. However, it’s different than most, if not all, other constitutional monarchies in that it doesn’t have a single, codified Constitution. Its Constitution is a collection of documents including and dating back to the Magna Carta. While the execution of Charles I and the subsequent civil war certainly reduced the power of the monarchy a lot, they didn’t have one singular event or document such that you can draw a line through a year and say, “Before this year, the UK (or Britain) was a traditional monarchy, and after it was a constitutional monarchy.” It’s been a more gradually evolving change in governance. And if you put a gun to my head and made me pick a date when it started inevitably down the road to a constitutional monarchy, I’d probably pick 1215. So I think it’s accurate to say the current monarchy is the same one that existed in 1776. It has lost power and influence, but, as you said, there is a continuous line from now to then.
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