“Is Britain really going to leave?” This is the question put to Boris Johnson from people around the world, the former foreign minister informed the House of Commons last night, during debate on the Government’s proposal to withdraw from the European Union.

“Do we really have the courage and the self-belief to deliver what people voted for?” Mr. Johnson pressed. “And to seize the opportunities? Independent, democratic self-government? Real free trade deals?” Will a liberated Britain have the foresight to institute a tax and regulatory regime that incentivizes entrepreneurs and investment, domestic and foreign, based on “laws made in this country and not in Brussels?

“Are we really going to embrace that future?” BoJo asked.

Mr. Johnson is not alone in putting this rhetorical question before his fellow MPs. G.K. Chesterton raised it more than a century ago. Britons, Chesterton wrote, enjoy “a lonely taste in liberty” that “perplex their critics and perplex themselves.” As the United Kingdom grapples with the fate of Brexit, this latest iteration of perplexity is played out before us.

Magna Carta, the charter in which medieval barons exerted their rights against King John, is considered the benchmark of liberty in Britain. “Magna Carta is the greatest constitutional document of all times,” senior judge Lord Denning opined, “the foun­dation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

Margaret Thatcher was all in. To a Parisian interviewer who asked during the bicentenary of the Fall of the Bastille, “Are human rights a French invention?,” she replied trenchantly, “No, of course they are not.” The Iron Lady’s riposte to Gallic chauvinism? “We had Magna Carta 1215.”

A century before Louis XVI was guillotined by the French mob, England’s Charles I ran afoul of his people and was beheaded for his haughty reign. When monarchy was restored 20 years later, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Charles’s son, James II, saved his head but had to flee the country. Staving off the horrors of another civil war, the years between 1688 and 1689 were hailed as the “Glorious Revolution,” enthroning the people and their Parliament above the rule of kings, and enshrined in a Bill of Rights.

For Edmund Burke, it was back to the future. “The Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties,” he reasoned, “and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.”

Through Burke, Russell Kirk divined clear parallels with America’s own struggle for freedom.

Colonists believed that, as Englishmen, they shared these hard-won rights. When Parliament acted otherwise, legislating and taxing for the Thirteen Colonies without “the consent of the governed,” the patriots rebelled. Was not Britain acting toward America as the Stuart kings had against their subjects, trampling upon rights guaranteed since Runnymede and 1689?

For Kirk, both the United Kingdom and the United States each experienced “a revolution not made but prevented.”

Such historical precedents informed Britain’s 2016 referendum to withdraw from the European Union, a nascent super-state that was absorbing national powers and authority unto itself.

Like their British and American ancestors, Britons would not be creating new sovereign rights, but reclaiming a national heritage, slowly ceded to continental mandarins. Like history, rival camps would form, for liberty or for subjection. Roundhead and Cavalier. Patriot and Tory. Leave or Remain.

Only the scale of the contest has changed. Personal liberty is challenged by a State apparatus for which the Stuarts and George III could only dream — yet too centralizing and all-encompassing, too powerful for even these autocrats to envy, I warrant.

This evening the House of Commons will witness the latest engagement in the Brexit battle, as the Government presents its “deal” for an EU exit, a strategy critics roundly denounce: half-in and half-out of Europe, while surrendering entirely Britain’s ability to influence policy in Brussels.

Not a revolution, but a submission. Only “no deal” will honor the legacy of Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution, not to mention the referendum of June 2016. Is Britain really going to leave?