In spite of the length of the Reflections and its somewhat rambling style (which caused Burke's main antagonist, Thomas Paine, to write that "Mr Burke's book is all miscellany") Burke's "formula" for proper political leadership can be reduced to a few simple principles. Foremost is that government should be based on tradition, on long-standing values and practices. He cites the declaration of Parliament during William and Mary's reign that they, the English people, bound themselves and their posterity to the monarchy and its posterity "forever."

Burke's implication, ridiculed of course by Paine and others, was that the British had deliberately given up the right to choose their leaders or system of government. Burke did not literally mean this, but his point was that the only valid kind of political leadership was that based on tradition, on the established manner in which England (eventually all of the UK) had been ruled for centuries.

Given Burke's support for the Americans during the War of Independence, his conservatism during the French Revolution came as a shock to progressives like Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. But Burke responded that in 1776 he hadn't really been in favor of American independence but rather for conciliation with the Colonies, in order to keep them within the Empire. It was also ironic that in spite of his Irish background and his sympathy for the plight of the Catholics in Ireland, in 1790 he showed himself devoted to the monarchy of George III, and was pleased when the King himself congratulated him on the Reflections, saying "you have been of service to us."

The underlying force that bolsters Burke's traditionalist thinking is religion—not necessarily the Church of England but an ecumenical form of Christianity in which Burke, ahead of his time, believed. To Burke, not only Louis XVI and George III but all the legitimate monarchs of Europe ruled essentially by divine right. For him, Christianity is the basis of all political leadership. His thinking on this point, of course, was out of step with the Enlightenment.

But Burke was nevertheless a man of the Enlightenment in believing in human rights. His opposition to the French revolutionaries, the Jacobins, was caused as much by their alleged atheism as by their violation of the purely human rights of the upper classes in France and of the religious people. These people had become the underdogs in France, and Burke's sympathies were always with those whose rights had been violated, whether the American colonists, his Irish compatriots, or those who represented tradition and the past in the France of the Revolution and were now being persecuted.