What stopped absolut monarchy in Britain is that the crown failed to make the large landowning aristocratic families to bend to its will like happened in France and instead the high-ranking aristocrats captured a large part of power through force of arms and the rotten parliament, stopping the development of a powerful centralized state led by an absolutist monarch.

The reason was that the crown failed to rally the emerging bourgeois class to its side against the aristocracy as happened in many other countries where absolut monarchies emerged nor was it succesful in selling to the high-ranking aristocracy the idea of increasing royal powers as a protection against the bourgeois.

Oliver Cromwell might have been able to create an absolut monarchy, had he lived much longer than he did. His position was much better and stronger than any of the Stuart rulers in the 17th century.

Even as the British Empire was build, it was internally weak, its bureaucracy a mess and it was haphazardly governed until the mid-Victorian period. Different towns could have different laws until the 1870s.