David Hume (1711–76) is mainly known today as one of the great philosophers. But in his lifetime, he became rich and famous as a historian. It was also as a historian that he was best known to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other American Revolutionaries. In the twentieth century, Hume’s History of England fell out of print, but it eventually regained its reputation as a masterpiece, partly thanks to Liberty Fund’s edition of the work, published in 1983.

Unable to get a university post because of his religious skepticism, and with a meager allowance as the second son in a Scottish gentry family, Hume served as Keeper of the Advocates Library in Edinburgh between 1752 and 1757. This gave him access to one of the best book collections in Europe, which enabled him to pursue his historical project. In six volumes, published between 1754 and 1761 (though it says 1762 on the title page), Hume narrated and analyzed the history of England from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Glorious Revolution in 1688–89. At the heart of his enterprise was a history of modern liberty.

Hume wrote and published his History backwards—like witches say their prayers, one of his critics commented. This meant that he began with the reign of the Stuart royal family in the seventeenth century before working his way back to the ancient Britons. He explained to his friend Adam Smith that he started his historical investigation with the Stuart period partly because the British parties, the Tories and the Whigs, arose at that time. Though Hume is rightly praised for breaking new ground in history-writing by paying attention to social, economic, and cultural factors, constitutional struggle and high-political drama were a fundamental part of his History.

Seeing Things Both Ways

Hume’s historical work was an attempt to rise above faction and to see things both ways, which he believed histories of England had failed to do before him. When Hume began writing his History, British historiography was still dominated by the “Tory” history of the Earl of Clarendon (published posthumously at the start of the eighteenth century), the “Whig” history of the French Huguenot Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, and the politico-historical writings of the renegade Tory Lord Bolingbroke. A host of lesser-known writers tried their hand at the genre, one of the most popular in the eighteenth century. Hume drew freely on several of them, including the controversial but learned Jacobite historian Thomas Carte. But he remained of the view that no one had fully succeeded.

“The more I advance in my undertaking,” Hume wrote in a letter to a friend in 1753 as he was working on the first volume, “the more am I convinced that the history of England has never yet been written, not only for style, which is notorious to all the world, but also for matter; such is the ignorance and partiality of all our historians.”

Hume was adamant that embracing a party was out of the question for a historian. As the French Enlightenment philosopher Pierre Bayle had earlier put it: “The very perfection of a good history is to be disagreeable to all sects and to all nations, given that it proves that the author flatters neither one party nor the other, but has given his frank opinion of each.” Hume’s History was written in this spirit. As he wrote to a correspondent: “The first quality of an historian is to be true and impartial; the next to be interesting.”

While Hume’s fixation with impartiality was not novel in the eighteenth century, the way he pursued this goal was. Being impartial for Hume did not mean never taking a side, but rather avoiding following a consistent party line. In other words, it meant being politically independent. By containing a mixture of traditional Whig and Tory arguments, sometimes in close proximity, Hume’s History puzzled his readers. The author himself said, “My view of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my presentations of persons to Tory prejudices,” referring to the rare combination of his defense of the Glorious Revolution and his sympathy for at least some of the Stuart kings in the seventeenth century.

Hume also came to believe that the first and second Stuart volumes should have been published together instead of separately. Whereas the first volume, dealing with Charles I’s regicide, was more favorable to Tory opinion, the second one, on the Glorious Revolution, was more Whiggish. If considered together, he believed that he had struck the right balance. Ironically, Hume became known as a “Tory” historian because he “shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I,” who was executed by Parliament in 1649.

Shocking Whig Sentiments

Because of his unwillingness to villainize the Stuart kings, Hume’s History caused an outcry, chiefly among Whigs, and even led to suspicions of Jacobitism (the Jacobites were those who wanted a restoration of the exiled Stuart family). Hume’s excuse for delaying, and in the end not writing, a continuation of his History beyond the Glorious Revolution was party rage—he was convinced that Whigs in high places would not give him access to the necessary papers. He complained in a letter that he was unfairly conflated with Jacobite historian Carte, who in a notorious footnote claimed that the Stuart Pretender had cured a man of scrofula by the royal touch. For Hume, it was vulgar to think that “the cause of Charles I and James II were the same, because they were of the same family.” At the same time, Hume wrote in his autobiography that all of the many revisions he made to his History were “invariably to the Tory side,” meaning that he became less inclined to blame the Stuart monarchs for the crises of the turbulent seventeenth century.

What underpinned Hume’s disinclination to blame the early Stuart monarchs was not Jacobitism, however, but his disbelief in the existence of an immemorial ancient constitution that the Stuarts had supposedly vandalized. For Hume, there was no ancient constitution, since the English constitution “like all others, has been in a state of continual fluctuation.” The final two volumes Hume wrote, but chronologically the first, covering the period from the ancient Britons to the reign of Richard III (1483–85), were designed to show that the Britons and the Saxons had not been free in any meaningful sense, and in any case, the Saxon constitution had been eradicated by William the Conqueror in 1066. William and the Normans then turned England into a feudal kingdom. Royal power was checked by milestones such as the Magna Carta, but for Hume, the Great Charter did not represent a victory in the name of popular liberty but rather the military force of “petty tyrants,” the barons, who were equally oppressive of kings and the people at large.

By containing a mixture of traditional Whig and Tory arguments, sometimes in close proximity, Hume’s History puzzled his readers.

Instead of a definitive English constitution, Hume’s historical investigations revealed a series of English constitutions. In this part of History, as James Harris has shown, Hume relied in particular on Thomas Carte, who in turn echoed the seventeenth-century historian Robert Brady. Hume is likely to have had “ancient constitutionalists” such as Bolingbroke in mind when he scoffed in the second medieval volume of History: “Those who, from a pretended respect to antiquity, appeal at every turn to an original plan of the constitution, only cover their turbulent spirit and their private ambition under the appearance of venerable forms.”

At the end of the final Stuart volume, Hume bemoaned that Whig writers had depicted the seventeenth century as a straightforward battle between liberty and tyranny, rather than between liberty and authority. In the process, “vulgar Whigs” were “forgetting that a regard to liberty, though a laudable passion, ought commonly to be subordinate to a reverence for established government.” In later editions, Hume named Rapin, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and Benjamin Hoadly in a footnote as examples of “Compositions the most despicable, both for style and matter, [which] have been extolled, and propagated, and read; as if they had equalled the most celebrated remains of antiquity.”

The Origins of Liberty and Party Conflict

At the same time, Hume’s History was Whiggish in the sense that it defended the Revolution Settlement of 1688–89, even if it sought to demonstrate its contingent nature. “It may justly be affirmed,” wrote Hume, “without any danger of exaggeration, that we, in this island, have ever since [the Glorious Revolution] enjoyed, if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind.”

The Glorious Revolution had not been an inevitable outcome, but rather the unintended consequence of nearly a century of constitutional and religious struggle. In order to understand the nature of this strife, Hume focused on the history of factionalism or party (terms he used interchangeably). He argued that prototypical political parties emerged on the parliamentary stage in the reign of James I. The underlying forces were religious, social, and constitutional, and could be traced to the sixteenth century.

The British Reformation did not only lead to a split between Protestants and Catholics, but even more consequentially to the division within Protestantism among a myriad of orientations, including Episcopacy (or Anglicanism), Calvinism, and Puritanism. For Hume, the Elizabethan age was the dawn of the mixed constitution, as the “precious spark of liberty” had been kindled and preserved by the Puritan sect. The Puritans were “actuated by that zeal which belongs to innovators, and by the courage which enthusiasm inspires.” For Hume, “it was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous and habits so ridiculous, that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution.” By dominating Parliament, the Puritans checked the monarch as well as the established Church and eradicated the influence of Catholicism. Some of their preachers promoted the doctrine of resistance, but it would only take root in later generations. As a result of differences in religious opinions, England “contained the seeds of intestine discord.”

Secondly, a general increase in wealth and overseas trade in the Tudor age led to the rise of the “commons” as opposed to the nobility, and consequently the growing significance of the lower house in Parliament, that is to say, the House of Commons. Economic growth was accompanied by a revolution in learning; according to Humean political economy, commerce flourished together with the arts and sciences. As the expansion of wealth resulted in the spread of learning in England, men of education became particularly fond of reading Greek and Roman authors, who, Hume noted, encouraged them to emulate “manly virtues.”

These new developments in Tudor England became more apparent in the seventeenth century, and it meant that “the love of freedom … acquired new force” in the shape of “a passion for a limited constitution.” The sixteenth-century background was so important that Hume would come to regret that he had not written the Tudor volumes first.

Civil War

James I, a Scottish king with absolutist pretensions, succeeded Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen,” to the English throne in 1603. What was worse than his absolutism, James I had what Hume regarded as an unfortunate fondness for discussing theology. While having controversially called Elizabeth I’s administration “arbitrary” and “unlimited,” Hume admired her for not making her private views on religion known. By contrast, James I showed, from the start of his reign, “the strongest propensity to the established church.”

Hume conceded that it had been perfectly natural for James I “to take the government as he found it,” but alas “neither his circumstances nor his character could support so extensive an authority” as exemplified by Elizabeth I. Due to his small revenue and lack of frugality, he became increasingly dependent on Parliament.

According to Hume, something akin to a parliamentary opposition party emerged in 1621. What had enabled it was that Parliament had become a major political player for the first time. Under the feudal constitution, Parliament only sat for a few days and no one would then have dared to oppose the monarch as he would have found himself unprotected upon its dissolution. Even under the Tudors, Parliament was not a road to either honor or preferment, as it was merely an “organ of royal will and pleasure.” In such a situation, “opposition would have been regarded as a species of rebellion.”

For Hume, the Elizabethan age was the dawn of the mixed constitution, as the “precious spark of liberty” had been kindled and preserved by the Puritan sect.

James I’s son inherited a Parliament possessed by what Hume called a “spirit of liberty.” With little patience for opposition, Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629 and did not call another one for eleven years, resorting to ship money for finance. Hume argued that the king now “entertained a very different idea of the constitution, from that which began, in general, to prevail among his subjects.” When Charles I was compelled to recall Parliament in 1640, the so-called Long Parliament prosecuted some of the king’s closest men for high treason and seeking to introduce arbitrary monarchy; the Earl of Strafford and Bishop Laud were executed.

A civil war between the king and the royalists on the one hand and the Parliamentarians on the other ensued. After the regicide in 1649, the monarchy was restored in 1660 following an “Interregnum,” much of which was spent under the essentially military government of Oliver Cromwell (for whom Hume had very little time). However, religious conflict was renewed in the Restoration era. Charles II, who had spent nearly fifteen years in exile, was reputed to be a closeted Catholic, and his brother, the Duke of York, was openly Catholic. This presented a problem since the Duke of York was next in line to the throne, as Charles II did not have any legitimate heirs. A new party division arose between Whigs, who wanted to exclude the Duke of York from the succession, and Tories, who defended hereditary monarchy. The party conflict over exclusion, Hume claimed, came close to civil war.

When the king managed to dissolve Parliament, regular opposition ceased and was overtaken by extra-constitutional schemes such as the Rye-House Plot. The failure of this plot, for which Sidney was executed, was the final nail in the coffin for the “First Whigs.” Locke and other Whigs fled to the Dutch Republic. But after James II managed to alienate the Tories by pushing the state toward Catholicism and absolutism, the Whigs returned with the Dutch stadtholder, William of Orange, in a coup d’état that resulted in the abdication of James II and the accession of William and his wife Mary, who was also James’s daughter.

Defending the Glorious Revolution

By settling fundamental questions in favor of liberty—Hume highlighted the English Bill of Rights (1689)—and by deposing one king and establishing a new royal family, Hume argued that the Glorious Revolution “gave such an ascendant to popular principles, as has put the nature of the English constitution beyond all controversy.” The contest between prerogative and privilege, or king and Parliament, which in the seventeenth century had been “much too violent both for the repose and safety of the people,” came to an end. What remained was a more limited tussle between the executive and legislature, or rather between governmental and opposition parties in Parliament, and this form of party strife became a regular feature of politics.

However, Hume was clear that the Glorious Revolution did not only establish liberty but specifically modern freedom, which he understood as a sense of security under the rule of law. For Hume, modern liberty was strongly related to political stability. What ensured stability in the new regime? Hume’s rather ironic answer was that the permanence of the mixed constitution was ensured by the Crown’s ability to “influence” Parliament through patronage. Instead of strictly separated, the fact that the ministers of the Crown were frontline members of parliament meant that the executive and the legislature were blended and pulled in the same direction. Before the Glorious Revolution, not only had the limits on the monarchy been ill-defined, but Parliament had been “uncontrollable.” Since monarchs could not influence Parliaments, they had to oppose them, and this was a recipe for civil war in Hume’s analysis. What is more, Hume was convinced that if the Crown did not have the power to influence Parliament, the House of Commons would simply dominate the entire political process. This would spell the end of mixed government, which Hume was conventional enough to support.

Hume’s History of England was a history of freedom, but it was a history full of irony, unintended consequences, and plot twists. The religious skeptic Hume credited fanatic Puritans with having generated the spirit of liberty in the sixteenth century. But in the middle of the seventeenth century, this spirit was carried too far, plunged the nation into civil war, and subverted the constitution. Liberty was finally established on a sure footing after the Glorious Revolution, but the stability of the free and mixed constitution was thereafter ensured by the influence of the Crown, or executive involvement in the legislature, known as corruption in the political parlance of Hume’s time. In short, Hume did not write a history of liberty as being a result of society’s natural progress but rather as something unintended and fragile, yet precious.

By being both impartial and interesting, Hume certainly managed to live up to his definition of the historian’s duties. But he did much more than that. Through a careful analysis of long-term social and cultural forces and the interplay between religious and political ideas and high-political drama, he presented bold arguments about historical causation, all the while being immensely readable. Though he wrote before the arrival of scientific history in the nineteenth century, Hume set a gold standard for all subsequent generations of historians.

The History of England in 6 volumes by David Hume
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