Histories of Liberty in Scottish Thought, 1747-1787 Tom Pye King’s College, Cambridge This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2018 This dissertation is the result of my own work, and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration. It is not substantially the same as any work that I have submitted, or that is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. The thesis is 78,395 words long, so does not exceed the word limit prescribed by the History Faculty. Many people helped me write this thesis. I am grateful, above all, to John Robertson, who supervised it with such patience and care. Without his support, I would have given up. Without Istvan Hont’s encouragement, I would have never started. I wish he were here to tell me I got everything wrong. Thanks to Sylvia Sebastiani and Sylvana Tomaselli for examining the thesis, and for discussion beforehand and since: their insights will strengthen the book I hope to write soon. Tom Arnold-Forster, Jos Betts, Freddy Foks, Lucian Robinson, Mike Sonenscher, Ian Stewart, and Roseanna Webster read bits of the thesis in draft. They each made it better. Throughout my time in Cambridge, I talked about history with them and with Kenzie Bok, Annabel Brett, Chris Brooke, Michaela Collord, Merve Fejzula, Jon Green, James Harris, Victoria Harris, Hetty van Hensbergen, Mimi Howard, Joel Isaac, Charlotte Johann, Rhys Jones, Duncan Kelly, Shiru Lim, Clara Maier, Jose Martinez, Paul Sagar, Ben Slingo, James Stafford, Jamie Stern-Weiner, Sam Garrett Zeitlin, and Alexa Zeitz. I also talked about history with my students, who made me think about what I was doing and why. Along with my family and friends, this community kept me going. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my research. In my final year, I was lucky enough to receive help from the History Faculty, King’s College, and my parents. Contents Introduction 1 English narratives 25 Montesquieu in Scotland 54 David Hume 112 Hume and his critics 184 Conclusion 254 Bibliography 264 1 Introduction In June 1944, Herbert Butterfield, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, published a book on the origins of the ‘whig interpretation of history’.1 A decade or so previously, he had written a polemic against historical writing with a ‘direct and perpetual reference to the present’: a habit which encouraged historians to take a Manichaean view of the past, and judge history on whether it aided or abetted the birth of the ‘modern’ world they inhabited.2 Back then, he referred to this kind of progressive historiography as ‘whig’. But the meaning he attached to the word in 1944 was different: now, Butterfield’s ‘whig interpretation’ fed off the ‘sublime and purposeful unhistoricity’ with which seventeenth-century English lawyers treated their national past.3 Picking up on the scholarship of the Cambridge legal historian, Frederic William Maitland, he explained that this view of English history had germinated in London’s Society of Antiquaries, and 1 Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), p. 3. This was the moment at which British, Canadian, and American troops were making their way into Normandy. See C.T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 115-32; Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 168-70. 2 Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931), pp. 9-33, at 28. 3 John Pocock joked that these apparently conflicting whiggisms comprise ‘das Herbert Butterfieldproblem’, whilst also explaining that no such problem exists. (The first book, he points out, was concerned with ‘selective progressivism’, the second with ‘antiquarian fundamentalism’.) See Pocock, ‘The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: a history of ideology and discourse’, in idem., Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 215-311, at 215 and 305. For further dismissals of the ‘problem’, see Pocock’s preface to Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. viii, and Peter Ghosh’s review of Bentley’s biography in The English Historical Review 121/494 (2006), 1509-12, at 1510. For an overview of some of the literature surrounding Butterfield and his whiggisms, see Keith Sewell, ‘The “Herbert Butterfield problem” and its Resolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64/4 (2003), 599-618. 2 blossomed in its inns of court.4 Articulated most influentially by Sir Edward Coke, it consisted primarily in the claim that England’s common law, its courts, and its House of Commons predated historical records.5 Coke’s history was not evolutionary: it did not yoke the development of English liberties to the slow accrual of precedents in English courts.6 It was based instead on the ‘eternal sameness’ of the claim that the English constitution had existed in this form forever, and now faced extermination by an overweening Stuart crown.7 Butterfield had wild ideas about the political effects of this vision of English history.8 Of greater significance for our purposes, however, is what his doctoral student, John Pocock, made of Butterfield’s story.9 In his dissertation and consequent monograph, Pocock dug a little deeper into his supervisor’s ground.10 At the inns of court that Butterfield had already visited, he too found the suggestion that England’s law, courts, and lower house were ‘immemorial’; this was the idea and the idiom, Pocock explained, of England’s ‘ancient constitution’, and the means with which the House of Commons voiced their opposition to the crown over the 4 Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, pp. 31-41. See also F.W. Maitland, Why the History of English Law is not written: an inaugural lecture delivered in the Arts School at Cambridge on 13th October, 1888 (London: C.J. Clay & Sons, 1888), from which Butterfield quotes in The Englishman and his History, p. 35. 5 Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, pp. 47-68, at 50. 6 Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, pp. 69-70. 7 Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, pp. 71, 79. 8 The French and the Germans, Butterfield argued, had ‘broken and tragic’ histories; but English history was continuous. That the English had avoided the fate of their continental neighbours was down to the ‘whig interpretation’ itself; Coke had introduced into English consciousness the suggestion that the king had always been ‘under the law’, thereby setting limits on English radicalism: as liberty had always been part of English history, English history had never been destroyed in its name. Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, pp. v, 34, 54, 103-17. Butterfield was ‘belting out a familiar patriotic tune’, Stefan Collini observes drily, ‘from a score marked “Whigissimo”’. See Collini, ‘Whigissimo’, London Review of Books 27/14 (2005), 24-27, as well as ‘Writing “the National History”: Trevelyan and After’, in idem., English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 9-38. Butterfield also put England’s avoidance of continental horrors down to the persistence of the ‘after-music’ of Christianity on its shores. See Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, pp. 132-33, as well as his Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949) and Christianity in European History, Riddell Memorial Lectures 23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951). 9 Pocock was Butterfield’s doctoral candidate between 1948-51, eventually completing his thesis on ‘The Controversy over the Origin of the Commons, 1675-88: A Chapter in the History of English Historical and Political Thought’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (1952). On their relationship, see the recent article by Samuel James, ‘J.G.A. Pocock and the idea of the “Cambridge School” in the history of political thought’, History of European Ideas, online edn, July 2018 [https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1498011, accessed 13 August 2018]. 10 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; repr. 1987, with a Retrospect). 3 course of a fractious seventeenth century.11 But Pocock’s enquiry did not circle the ancient constitution and those who articulated its history; he was interested above all in the antiquarian scholars who treated the Norman Conquest as ‘the one great apparent breach in the continuity of the nation’s history.’12 These scholars showed that William I conquered England and divided its land among his followers, thereby assigning a discrete – and feudal – origin to the ‘basic tenure’ of English law.13 The revelation of such a cataclysmic rupture in English history, Pocock suggested, might have put the doctrine of the ancient constitution to bed; the antiquarian discovery of the feudal law could have introduced a ‘historical method’ into English historiography that made Butterfield’s ‘sublime unhistoricity’ impossible to uphold.14 But such a method failed to emerge.15 As the seventeenth century turned into the eighteenth, the idiom of the ancient constitution acquired a new vigour.16 Feudal studies, meanwhile, came to a ‘standstill’.17 In eighteenth-century Paris, Edinburgh, Göttingen, and Naples, men and women of letters were busy constructing ‘schemes of universal history’ instead.18 These historians were doing little new research on feudalism, Pocock suggested, because they were ‘making an “ism” of it’, and attempting to fit it into a ‘pattern of general ideas’.19 These ideas appeared to cut through the history of historiography that Pocock had been narrating: historians in eighteenth-century England and Scotland, he claimed, ‘failed to continue’ the work of their seventeenth-century predecessors.20 Something 11 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 30-69. 12 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 42. Butterfield had only touched on the subject, for which see Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, pp. 72-78. 13 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 91-124, 182-228. 14 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 180, 210. 15 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 229-55. 16 This was due to its being combined with another strand of whiggism originating in the writings of the seventeenth-century English Commonwealthman, James Harrington. See Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 124-47, 222; The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975; repr., 2003); ‘varieties of Whiggism’, pp. 215-311; see also ‘The Ancient Constitution Revisited: a Retrospect from 1986’, in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 253-387. 17 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 244. 18 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 246. 19 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 249. 20 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 249. 4 else was happening, and its relation to what went before seemed (as yet) unclear.21 This thesis tries to explain what happened in the case of Scotland; it seeks to describe the character of its historical thought in the eighteenth century, and unpick its relationship to the English idiom of the ancient constitution. By the time Pocock had published his monograph in 1957, historians had begun to find Europe’s ‘Enlightenment’ in the eighteenth-century intellectual episode he had sketched.22 German social philosophers had recently associated Aufklärung with a particularly aggressive form of philosophy they blamed for the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s, and French literary scholars had already bound les lumières to a secular philosophy they found in eighteenth-century Paris.23 But in the 1950s, historians started to render eighteenth-century Enlightenment as a pan- European intellectual moment capable of representing Europe’s ‘better past’.24 One of these historians was Duncan Forbes who, like Butterfield, spent his career at the University of Cambridge. In the early 1950s he began to gesture at a group of eighteenth-century Scots who approached history from a different angle – as Pocock would later suggest – to the one we have seen already.25 Initially including David Hume, a philosopher and a sceptic, Adam Smith, a philosopher and a jurist, Adam Ferguson, a Presbyterian minister and a philosopher, and John Millar, a jurist, this group of Scots began, from around 1750, to write history that was ‘philosophical’. 21 Pocock later probed at this problem on a much larger scale in Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999-2015), which, as well as being about the English historian Edward Gibbon, is also a history of historiography in western Europe. 22 ‘Enlightenment’ was a nineteenth-century English rendering of the French lumières and German Aufklärung, both of which were widely used in the eighteenth century. On definitions, see John Robertson, The Enlightenment: a very short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 1- 15. 23 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: philosophische Fragmente, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947), first published in English as Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972); Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715 (Paris: Boivin, 1934), first published in English as The European Mind, the Critical Years, 1680-1715, trans. J. Lewis May (London: Hollis & Carter, 1953); Daniel Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la révolution française, 1715-1787 (Paris: Colin, 1933). 24 Robertson, The Enlightenment, pp. 119-31, at 124. In the 1950s, the most prolific historian in this regard was Franco Venturi, for which see Il populismo russo, 2 vols (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1952); Saggi sull’Europa illuminista I: Alberto Radicati di Passerano (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1954). The first English- language study of the Enlightenment came only later, for which see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols (New York: Knopf, 1966-69). 25 Duncan Forbes, ‘Historismus in England’, The Cambridge Journal 4/7 (1951), 387-401; ‘James Mill and India’, The Cambridge Journal 5/1 (1951), 19-34; ‘The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott’, The Cambridge Journal 7/1 (1953), 20-36; ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, The Cambridge Journal 7/11 (1954), 643-71. 5 (There were ‘probably more “philosophical” historians in Edinburgh in the second half of the eighteenth century’, Forbes declared, ‘than in any other town in Europe’.)26 The philosophical historians, he explained, were interested in ‘society’—a concept missing from the historiographical idiom reconstructed by Pocock.27 Their concern was with ‘life in society’ and ‘social man’, both of which they accessed by investigating the contours of ‘human nature’.28 Their histories were activated, moreover, by the ‘master principle’ of progress: the idea that society would necessarily move from a condition of barbarousness (or rudeness) to one of civilisation (or refinement).29 In the 1960s, this efflorescence of historical thought began to be situated in the context of a distinctive ‘Scottish Enlightenment’.30 Using this label as the title of a 1967 article, the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper asked why Forbes’s group – to which he now added Francis Hutcheson, a professor of moral philosophy, and William Robertson, a Presbyterian minister and historian – saw the problem of ‘social progress’ as so urgent.31 More than any other centre of Enlightenment, these Scots were preoccupied with how human nature changed across time and space— a question which, more often than not, led them heretically away from Presbyterian soteriology. Trevor-Roper’s explanation was that the sixteenth-century Scottish reformation had closed a previously cosmopolitan Scotland off from France, 26 Forbes, ‘James Mill and India’, p. 31. 27 Their histories, he remarked, had a ‘sociological bent’. Forbes, ‘Historismus in England’, p. 390. 28 Forbes, ‘The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott’, p. 23. 29 Forbes, ‘The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott’, p. 22; ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, pp. 643, 668. Compared to what exists in French and German, there is little Anglophone scholarship on the eighteenth-century concept of ‘civilisation’, which has perhaps been neglected in favour of thinking about ‘society’ or ‘sociability’—two concepts which have a greater purchase in the philosophical idiom of seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence (more on which below). On ‘civilisation’, see the first chapter, ‘The Word Civilization’, in Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), pp. 1-36; Bertrand Binoche ed., Les équivoques de la civilisation (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005). 30 In the 1960s, Forbes began to run a special subject course for History undergraduates entitled ‘Hume, Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment’. See John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 25n. The term, however, was coined by William Scott in 1900, for which see Francis Hutcheson: his Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), p. 265. 31 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in History and the Enlightenment, ed. John Robertson (Yale: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 17-34, at 20. The article was originally published in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967), 1635-58, and was delivered initially as a lecture to the second International Congress on the Enlightenment, held at the University of St. Andrews in August 1967. 6 encouraging a barbarous and austere Calvinism to blossom; 1688, however, had opened Scotland up to English Episcopalians, Dutch and Swiss Arminians and Socinians, and ‘independent-minded’ Jacobites—a cosmopolitan bunch who challenged the orthodoxy of the kirk by disseminating heretical ideas.32 But if the Revolution had opened up Scottish society, the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 ‘opened it wider’.33 As Scotland had joined itself to a state that was far more economically advanced, the question of progress arose in a ‘peculiarly vivid form’.34 Since the publication of Trevor-Roper’s field-defining article, scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has proliferated.35 Through his studies of Edinburgh, Nicholas Phillipson has given texture to the social and cultural world in which Forbes and Trevor-Roper’s group of ‘literati’ flourished.36 The effect of the incorporating Union on the city, he explains, was far-reaching. Scotland had kept its church and its legal system, including its feudal courts; but its parliament had been abolished in favour of returning just 45 members and 16 peers to a newly 32 Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, pp. 18, 22-27. See also ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 1-45. The deliberate and provocative ease with which Trevor-Roper wrote off late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scottish history as ‘barbarous’ muddied his reputation in the history departments of Scottish universities. As we shall see, it was an interpretation (and a style) that owed a great deal to David Hume. For a history of Trevor-Roper and post-war Scottish historiography, see Colin Kidd, ‘Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Scottish Historical Review 84/218 (2005), 202-220. For an indication of the depth of feeling Trevor- Roper continues to provoke, see William Ferguson, ‘A reply to Professor Colin Kidd on Lord Dacre’s contribution to the study of Scottish history and the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Scottish Historical Review 86/221 (2007), 96-107, as well as Kidd’s response to the response, ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship and Demonology in Scottish Historiography: a Reply to Dr. Ferguson’, The Scottish Historical Review 86/221 (2007), 108-12. 33 Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 32. On the prosperity that Union brought with it, see T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830 (London: Collins, 1969), pp. 211-515. 34 Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 31. On this point, see also Bernard Bailyn and John Clive “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America”, William and Mary Quarterly 11 (1954), 200-13; David Daiches, The Paradox of Scottish Culture: the Eighteenth-Century Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 35 The best and most recent overview of the historiography can be found in Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1-23. 36 Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in P. Fritz and D. Williams eds., City and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), pp. 125-47; ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Lawrence Stone ed., The University in Society, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), II, 407-48. See also John Clive, ‘The Social Background of the Scottish Renaissance’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison eds., Scotland in the Age of Improvement: Essays in Scottish History in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), pp. 225-45. 7 expanded British parliament at Westminster.37 (The sparsely populated region of Cornwall, for context, returned 44 members to the Commons.) The governance of Scotland itself was assigned to a ‘manager’: between 1725 and 1761, the third duke of Argyll, and from the late 1760s until 1801, Henry Dundas.38 Whilst the greater nobility and many of Edinburgh’s merchants decamped to London, the lesser nobility and small landowners remained in the city.39 Their presence was crucial: setting the limit of their horizons at the River Tweed, they created their own patronage networks and incubated a culture of ‘improvement’ in new clubs and societies, like the Society for the Improvement of the Knowledge of Agriculture.40 At the same time, Edinburgh University transformed itself from an impoverished Presbyterian seminary into a ‘modern academy’ equipped with faculties of law and medicine (as well as the already existing faculties of theology and philosophy).41 Similar reform took place at the university of Glasgow and at King’s and Marischal college in Aberdeen, and by the 1750s the laities they educated were beginning to set up successful literary clubs at an astonishing rate.42 These were the social contexts that made the Scottish study of ‘society’ possible, and since the 1980s, historians have excavated its intellectual contexts too. We have already seen John Pocock suggest that if the sociological thought emitting from eighteenth-century Scotland was historical, it was historical in a different way to the English idiom he had reconstructed. Unlike the historiography of the ancient 37 On the political debates surrounding the Union, see John Robertson ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 38 Phillipson, ‘Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 129. See also John Stuart Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society 1707-1764 (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1983); Alexander Murdoch, ‘The People Above’: Politics and Administration in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1980). 39 Phillipson, ‘Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 421. 40 The Society was founded in 1723. See Phillipson, ‘Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, pp. 130-37. On ‘improvement’ in the first half of the century, see Davis McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: a Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Washington, D.C.: Washington State University Press, 1969), pp. 13-34. On patronage, see Roger Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 41 Phillipson, ‘Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, pp. 425-29. 42 Phillipson, ‘Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 142; McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement, pp. 34-71. In May 1754, for example, Hume and Smith set up a small debating club called the Select Society, along with a dozen others. By the following spring, its membership had ballooned to 135. See McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement, pp. 48-67. On Glasgow, see Richard Sher and Andrew Hook eds., The Glasgow Enlightenment (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1995); on Aberdeen, see Paul Wood, The Aberdeen Enlightenment: the Arts Curriculum in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1993). 8 constitution, this kind of thinking was grounded in a philosophical investigation of human nature, the origins of which have now been traced to seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence.43 The jurists who spoke this language sought to unpick the relation between natural law, canon law, the divine law revealed in Scripture, and the positive law of political cities, or civitates; but as they were preoccupied with the question of obligation, they had also to think hard about the power of human reason in face of the passions.44 This, in turn, led the Protestants among them to sociability: the question of how humans could be expected to behave within and without the civitas.45 Sociability had exercised Christian jurists since the late Middle Ages, but had become increasingly fraught in the wake of the interventions of the seventeenth- century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes.46 For he had famously denied that human beings were naturally sociable. They were drawn together because they were useful to one another, but their desire to distinguish themselves from one 43 Hans Medick, Naturzustand und Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft: die Ursprünge der bürgerlichen Sozialtheorie als Geschichtsphilosophie und Sozialwissenschaft bei Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke und Adam Smith (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1973); Peter Stein, Legal Evolution: the Story of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Forbes, ‘Natural Law and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Andrew Skinner and Roy Campbell eds., The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 186-204; Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: the Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); idem., Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 44 The best recent work on this idiom is Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). See also Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150-1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). 45 The confessional divides of natural jurisprudence often break down on closer inspection, for which see Brett, Changes of State, pp. 66, 71, and passim. On the centrality of the concept of sociability to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought, see Eva Piirimäe and Alexander Schmidt, ‘Between Morality and Anthropology—Sociability in Enlightenment Thought’, History of European Ideas 41/5 (2015), 571-88; Istvan Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the “Four-Stages” Theory’, in Anthony Pagden ed., Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 253-76, later reprinted in idem., Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 159-85; James Moore and Michael Silverthorne, ‘Natural sociability and natural rights in the moral philosophy of Gershom Carmichael’, in V. Hope ed., Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), pp. 1-12; E.J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Pierre Force, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith: a Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment. 46 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen [1642], ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Leviathan [1651], ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9 another was more forceful; honour would always overwhelm utility as a motive for human action.47 For Hobbes, only the political union of the civitas could resolve the disruptiveness of honour-seeking; outside its auspices, sociability – or society – was impossible.48 Of the many troubled responses to Hobbes’s claims, those of the German jurist, Samuel Pufendorf, would become most significant to our group of Scots. In De jure naturae et gentium (1672) and De officio hominis et civis (1673), as Istvan Hont has shown, Pufendorf ‘re-instated’ utility as a force of social integration.49 Before they chose to institute the city, Pufendorf explained, human beings had an infinity of physical and psychological needs that they could not satisfy alone. This neediness, or indigentia, necessitated co-operation, and co-operation generated property, agriculture, trade, and a concomitant web of social relations that became increasingly complex over time—what Pufendorf referred to as cultura, or culture.50 These relations would eventually become complicated enough to require the erection of the civitas; but Pufendorf had conceptualised a mutable society that flourished prior to, and independently of, its creation.51 It is here that the predecessor to the Scottish enquiry into the ‘progress of society’ from barbarism to civilisation has been found, and not only because of its theoretical similarity. In 1727, Gershom Carmichael, a regent at the University of Glasgow, became the first 47 On Hobbes’s conception of sociability, see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 109-39; Hont, ‘Introduction’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 37-51; Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Hobbes on the Natural condition of Mankind’, in Patricia Springborg ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 109-27; Brett, Changes of State, pp. 195-225. 48 On Hobbes and the origins of the ‘state’, see Quentin Skinner, ‘The State’, in Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russel Hanson eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 90-132; David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Compare, however, with Brett, ‘“The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth”: Thomas Hobbes and and Late Renaissance Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics’, Hobbes Studies 23 (2010), 72-102, which suggests continuities between Hobbes and late Aristotelianism that historians have neglected. 49 Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennett, 5th edn (London: J. and J. Bonwicke et al., 1749); On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Hont, ‘Introduction’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 37- 51, at 45. 50 Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 172-82. 51 Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce’, p. 180. On Pufendorf’s theory of sociability as a response to Hobbes, see also Tim Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 40-71, 79-106; Fiametta Palladini, “Pufendorf Disciple of Hobbes: The Nature of Man and the State of Nature: The Doctrine of Socialitas,” History of European Ideas, 34/1 (2008), 26-60. 10 occupant of a new chair in Moral Philosophy.52 He immediately made De officio hominis et civis the set text for his undergraduate course, and was followed in doing so by his successor to the chair, Francis Hutcheson, as well as Sir John Pringle at Edinburgh.53 Hutcheson – the predecessor and teacher of Adam Smith – gave his inaugural lecture on the natural sociability of mankind, ensuring the idiom provided the materials through which the Scottish study of society could proceed.54 But there still appeared to be a gap between the temporalised philosophy of Pufendorf and the ‘historical’ mode of the lectures on jurisprudence Smith delivered at the University of Glasgow in the 1760s, or – to take two examples of many – Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and Millar’s Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks (1771).55 Due to some remarks made by Millar and Dugald Stewart, the successor to Ferguson in the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, scholars have attributed responsibility for this ‘historical’ turn to the French jurist, Charles Louis de secondat, Baron de Montesquieu.56 In his Historical View of the English Government (1787), Millar admitted that he had been lucky enough to hear Smith lecture on the ‘History of Civil Society’ in Glasgow. The ‘great Montesquieu pointed out the road’, he commented somewhat gnomically. ‘He was the Lord 52 James Moore and Michael Silverthorne, ‘Gershom Carmichael and the natural jurisprudence tradition in eighteenth-century Scotland’, in Hont and Michael Ignatieff eds., Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 73-89. 53 Moore and Silverthorne, ‘Gershom Carmichael and the natural jurisprudence tradition’, p. 74. 54 Francis Hutcheson, ‘On the Natural Sociability of Mankind’, in James Moore and Michael Silverthorne eds., Francis Hutcheson: Logic, Metaphysics and Natural Sociability (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), pp. 191-217. On Hutcheson, see Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 283-96. 55 Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982); Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (London: W. and J. Richardson, 1771). 56 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, eds. A.M. Cohler, B.C. Miller, and H.S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Henceforward Spirit of Laws, followed by book, chapter, and page number. The book was first published in Geneva in 1748, but a French edition appeared in Edinburgh in 1750, for which see Montesquieu, De l’esprit des loix (Edinburgh: G. Hamilton & J. Balfour, 1750). An English translation was also published in Aberdeen in 1756, for which see Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws. Written originally in French by M. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu: and translated from the edition published at Edinburgh in 1750, with the author’s latest corrections and illustrations (Aberdeen: F. Douglass and W. Murray, 1756). The best introductory work on the book is Bertrand Binoche, Introduction à De l’esprit des lois de Montesquieu (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015). 11 Bacon in this branch of philosophy. Dr. Smith is the Newton.’57 In a history of post- Renaissance philosophy, Stewart was more expansive.58 By suggesting that political and legal constitutions were determined in part by the ‘physical and moral circumstances of the human race’, Montesquieu had ‘recalled the attention of the philosopher from abstract and useless theories, to the only authentic monuments of the history of mankind.’59 Montesquieu had reconciled history with jurisprudence and, in doing so, had broken with the idiom of natural law: the ‘well-merited popularity of the Spirit of Laws gave the first fatal blow to the study of Natural Jurisprudence’.60 Smith’s approach to the progress of human civilisation had been inherited from him: ‘“The strong ray of philosophic light on this interesting subject,” which, according to Gibbon, “broke from Scotland in our times,” was but a reflection, though with a far steadier and more concentrated force, from the scattered but brilliant sparks kindled by the genius of Montesquieu.’61 Millar and Stewart have proved influential.62 As early as 1938, Roy Pascal figured Smith, Ferguson, Robertson, and Millar as a ‘school of historical thought’, and Montesquieu as an anticipant of their (apparently) materialist depiction of history.63 Gladys Bryson, an inter-war American sociologist, suggested that Montesquieu encouraged the Scots to ground their enquiry into society in history.64 57 John Millar, An Historical View of the English government: from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688, eds. Mark Phillips and Dale Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), p. 429n. For a more detailed publication history, see the fourth chapter below. 58 Dugald Stewart, Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe [1815], in Sir William Hamilton ed., The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, 11 vols (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co., 1854-60; repr. Bristol: Thommes Press, 1994), I, 189-97. 59 Stewart, Dissertation, pp. 189, 191. In order to see how, Stewart recommended turning ‘above all’ to the final book of The Spirit of Laws: ‘The theory of the feudal laws among the Franks in their relation to the revolutions of their monarchy’. See Stewart, Dissertation, p. 191n. 60 Stewart, Dissertation, p. 193. 61 Stewart, Dissertation, p. 193n. 62 Forbes signalled Montesquieu’s significance – without being a great deal more specific than that – in ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, pp. 645, 658; Trevor-Roper, meanwhile, was emphatic without being any more precise: ‘The effect’ of The Spirit of Laws, he claimed, ‘was instantaneous. It was Montesquieu who inspired Hume’s History, Ferguson’s Essay on Civil Society, Robertson’s histories, Smith’s Wealth of Nations.’ Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 31. 63 Roy Pascal, ‘Property and Society: The Scottish Historical School of the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Quarterly, 1 (1938), 167-79, at 168, 170. 64 Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), pp. 1, 41, 82, 90-91; see also her ‘Sociology considered as moral philosophy’, Sociological Review 24 (1932), 26-36, as well as ‘Some eighteenth century conceptions of society’, Sociological Review 31 (1939), 401-21; see also Albion Small, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology: a Study in the Methodology of the Social Sciences [1907] (Clifton: A.M. Kelley, 1972); W. C. Lehmann, 12 In the 1950s, Ronald Meek was a little more precise. Montesquieu lurked behind a specific theory of history articulated – he thought initially – by John Millar.65 This theory, Meek argued, modelled human progress from barbarism to civilisation as taking place through a sequence of four stages, each of which denoted a different mode of subsistence. The history of any given society followed the same pattern: it began at the moment a number of hunters banded together for survival, and ended once they had developed sequentially into shepherds, farmers, artificers and traders.66 Here was the origin, Meek thought, of Marx’s historical materialism, and the evolutionary social theory of the late-nineteenth century.67 At first, Montesquieu had only a walk-on role in the story as the ‘greatest common influence’ on Smith, Ferguson, Robertson, and Millar.68 But later, Meek identified a passage in The Spirit of Laws that allowed him to star as the common origin of the ‘four stages’ theory of history in both Smith and the French physiocrat, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot: The laws are very closely related to the way that various peoples procure their subsistence. There must be a more extensive code of laws for a people attached to commerce and the sea than for a people satisfied to cultivate their lands. There must be a greater one for the latter than for a people who live by their herds. There must be a greater one for these last than for a people who live by hunting.69 Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930); idem., ‘John Millar—Historical Sociologist’, British Journal of Sociology 3 (1952), 30-46. 65 Ronald Meek, ‘The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’, in J. Saville, ed., Democracy and the Labour movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), pp. 84-102. 66 Meek, ‘The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’, pp. 84-102. 67 On the latter, and Montesquieu’s influence upon both it and Scottish histories of society, see John Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 7. 68 Meek, ‘The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’, p. 86. 69 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 18.8.289; Meek, ‘Smith, Turgot, and the “Four Stages” Theory’, in Smith, Marx, and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1977), pp. 18-33, at 29, originally published in History of Political Economy 3/1 (1971), 9-27; see also idem., Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Meek’s shift in focus from Millar to Smith was prompted by the recovery of a set of student notes taken from a series of lectures Smith had delivered at Glasgow in the 1760s, at which point it became clear that Smith’s stadial scheme pre-dated Millar’s. Andrew Skinner (who, like Meek, was a political economist at the University of Glasgow), took up Meek’s suggestion that Montesquieu lay behind Smith’s stadial scheme. He was, however, increasingly critical of Meek’s attempt to link it to Marx. See Skinner, ‘Economics and History: The Scottish Enlightenment’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 12 (1965), 1-22, at 3; idem., ‘A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology?’, in Ian Bradley and Michael Howard eds., Classical and Marxian Political Economy: Essays in Honour of 13 The link has been tenacious. Although Meek’s reading of Smith was later gutted of its association with Marx, Montesquieu has continued to lurk in Scottish shadows.70 As Donald Winch, John Burrow, and Stefan Collini later put it, the Scots ‘transformed Montesquieu’s states of society into an elaborate sequence of stages in the historical development of civil society in order to account for the process for which a new word had to be coined, namely “civil-isation”.’71 This attempt to understand the architecture of civilisation, as John Robertson has argued, had a profound impact on the development of European thought because it turned political economy into a distinct field of enquiry.72 Setting aside the question of salvation, the Scots suggested that human betterment was possible in ‘this world, here and now.’73 Adam Smith, in particular, had managed to transpose seventeenth-century jurisprudence into the key of markets.74 One of the questions animating Pufendorf had been whether the fruits of his utility-based sociability could satisfy the needs of those who had missed out on the individuation of God’s common world—a problem that Smith now suggested could be solved by competitive markets in food and labour, which would increase industrial productivity relentlessly.75 The Scottish concern with civilisation, as Istvan Hont Ronald L. Meek (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 79-115, at 104; for a more general overview of Smith and his use of the past (which nevertheless includes a re-statement of Montesquieu’s influence), see Skinner, ‘Adam Smith: an Economic Interpretation of History’, in idem. and Thomas Wilson eds., Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 154-79, 173; see also A. L. Macfie, The Individual in Society: Papers on Adam Smith, University of Glasgow Social and Economic Studies 11 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 14. 70 Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: an essay in historiographic revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 1-28; Richard Sher, ‘From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue and Commerce’ in David Wootton ed., Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 368-402; James Moore, ‘Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Rebecca Kingston ed., Montesquieu and his Legacy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 179-195. 71 Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, ‘Prologue: The governing science: things political and the intellectual historian’, in idem. eds., That Noble Science of Politics: a Study in Nineteenth- Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1-21, at 18. See also Karen O’Brien, ‘Between enlightenment and stadial history: William Robertson on the history of Europe’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 16/1 (1993), 53-64, at 53-54, which makes a similar point. 72 Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 29-32, 325-77. 73 Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, p. 32. 74 Hont, ‘Introduction’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 88-99. 75 Hont and Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations: an introductory essay’, in Wealth and Virtue, pp. 1-45, later reprinted as ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 389-443. 14 has argued, also produced a sophisticated discourse about the relationship between rich – or civilized – countries and poor – or barbarous – countries as they competed for international markets in ‘historical time’.76 More importantly for Hont, the Scots never forgot about politics. The problem with Marx’s ‘visionary theory of postcapitalism’, he explains, was that it had no use for politics at all: like the Genevan philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marx thought the economic inequality and class warfare generated by capitalism would eventually destroy ‘Hobbes’s “state”’.77 Hont advises a ‘retreat’ from Marx to eighteenth-century Scotland, and the political economy its most sophisticated thinkers had created.78 This discourse concerned itself with the mechanisms of civilisation in order to improve the lot of ‘society’; but it did so without forgetting that states – as well as the competition between them – were an ineliminable feature of the modern world.79 Given the conceptual richness of the intellectual environment that produced Ferguson’s Essay, Smith’s lectures and his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Hume’s Political Discourses (1752) and his History of England (1754- 76 Hont, ‘The “rich country-poor country” debate in Scottish classical political economy’, in Wealth and Virtue, pp. 271-317, later reprinted as ‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 267-325, at 267; ‘Irishmen, Scots, Jews and the Interest of England’s Commerce: The Politics of Minorities in a Modern Composite State’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi ed., Il roulo economico delle minoranze in Europa seccoli XIII-XVIII (Florence and Prato: Le Monnier, 2000), pp. 81-112; ‘The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury’, in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 379-418; ‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate Revisited: The Irish Origins and French Reception of the Hume Paradox’, in Carl Wennerlind & Margaret Schabas eds., David Hume’s Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 243-323. See also Christopher Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 77 Hont, ‘Introduction’, in Jealousy of Trade, p. 2. 78 On Hont and his relationship to Marx, see the illuminating essay by Peter Miller, ‘Marx and Material Culture: Istvan Hont and the History of Scholarship’, in Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Sophus Reinert, and Richard Whatmore eds., Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 23- 53. 79 Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory in the Eighteenth Century: the Problem of Authority in David Hume and Adam Smith’, in Willem Melching and Wyger Velema eds., Main Trends in Cultural History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 54-95; ‘Adam Smith’s history of law and government as political theory’, in Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss eds., Political Judgement: essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 131-72; Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, eds. Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2015). For pathways out of Hont’s scholarship, see the two recent festschriften: Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Richard Whatmore eds., Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Kapossy et al. eds., Markets, Morals, Politics. 15 61), and Millar’s Observations and Historical View, it is little wonder that its relation to the debate over England’s ancient constitution has often been cast as corrosive.80 Millar’s work, Forbes suggested in his first article on the Scots, was designed to cut through the parochialism of the historiography the debate had produced.81 Contemporary British politics could not be evaluated by searching for immutable institutions in the English past; in light of the principle of the ‘progress of society’, the idea made little sense. In the early stages of a society, its members might erect a government in order to arbitrate in crude disputes. A monarch could do this job perfectly well. But after developing agriculture, manufactures and trade, and the liberal arts, its increased complexity might require government to provide more than authority: a civilised society might need its government to be useful, thereby changing its form.82 Millar’s Historical View, according to Michael Ignatieff, was therefore a ‘demolition job’ on the ancient constitution so dear to every strand of the ‘Whig tradition’.83 The same has been said for Hume. For Trevor-Roper, his History of England showed that English liberty came from ‘economic change’, rather than an ‘inviolate constitution’: the seventeenth century could be explained by the growth of a strong ‘middle class’ of gentry that eventually formed an alliance with the crown.84 Forbes agreed on the focus of Hume’s scorn.85 In what continues to be the richest monograph on Hume’s political thought, he argued that the History wrought havoc on the ‘vulgar’ Whig historiography encircling England’s ancient constitution.86 80 David Hume, Political Discourses (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, R. Fleming, and A. Donaldson, 1752); The History of England: from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, ed. William Todd, 6 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983); Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981). For references to Ferguson and Millar, see above. For detailed references to Hume’s History, see the third chapter below. 81 Forbes, ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, p. 663. 82 Forbes, ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, p. 653. 83 Michael Ignatieff, ‘John Millar and Individualism’, in Wealth and Virtue, pp. 317-45, at 326. 84 Trevor-Roper, ‘David Hume, Historian’, in History and the Enlightenment, pp. 120-28. Originally published as a review of Giuseppe Giarrizzo, David Hume politico e storico (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), in History and Theory 3/3 (1964), 381-89. Trevor-Roper’s point had already been made by Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: the Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J.E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 157-86, at 178. Meinecke’s book was originally published as Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1936). 85 For Hume, the ‘notion of an “ancient” free constitution and original “liberty” was nonsense in the light provided by the progress of society.’ See Forbes, ‘Politics and History in David Hume’, The Historical Journal 6/2 (1963), 280-295, at 293. The article was also a review of Giarrizzo’s book. 86 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 16 Hume wrote the history of English liberty instead as the ‘history of civilization: the result of social and economic progress.’87 But civilisation was a European, as well as an English, theme.88 The History, in Forbes’s memorable phrase, was therefore neither a history of the English people nor English civilization: it was ‘a history of civilization in England’.89 Taking her cue from Forbes, Karen O’Brien has also recently depicted Hume and William Robertson as cosmopolitans.90 Detached from national prejudices and invested in the idea of a common European civilisation, they showed that states and nations were not intelligible objects of historical study.91 But their heterodox approach failed to last: following on from Forbes’s scholarship in particular, the history of nineteenth-century English historiography has been written as an attempt to put it back together again.92 After the Napoleonic wars, the easy cosmopolitanism of the Scots no longer seemed viable: for John Burrow, Hume became the enemy of the Whigs who flitted in and out of Holland House, the Jacobean home of Henry Richard Fox, third baron Holland.93 Hume had thrown the English constitution to the dogs, and the ‘central object’ of Henry Hallam, Charles James Fox, George Brodie, and Thomas Babington Macaulay was to repudiate him, thereby restoring the ancient constitution as the locus of English history.94 87 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 296-97. 88 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 297. See also Forbes, ‘The European, or Cosmopolitan, Dimension in Hume’s Science of Politics’, The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 1/1 (1978), 57-61. 89 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 298. 90 Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 91 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 1-21, at 2. 92 Trevor-Roper, ‘Lord Macaulay: The History of England’, in History and the Enlightenment, pp. 192- 223, at 195. The essay was originally published as an introduction to Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Washington Square Press, 1968; repr. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 7-42. 93 Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and their English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 94 Burrow, A Liberal Descent, pp. 26, 33-35. On the development of English historiography in the nineteenth century, see also his Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830-1866 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Piet Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). Compare, however, with Peter Ghosh, ‘Macaulay and the Heritage of the Enlightenment’, English Historical Review 112 (1997), 358-95, at 365-66, which casts doubt on the idea that Macaulay saw himself as ‘answering’ Hume. 17 But this account of eighteenth-century Scottish historical thinking inflated the antagonism of the Scots toward the English state and its historiography. After Forbes published his monograph, Richard Sher reminded us that Hume was exceptional: on the whole, the literati who comprised the Scottish Enlightenment were ‘professional men’.95 They inhabited either the Faculty of Advocates (the Scottish bar), the Church, or the universities, blunting their criticism of the composite British state under which these institutions flourished.96 For Sher, William Robertson, minister at Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh, and principal of Edinburgh University, typified this relationship to the state.97 Since the Patronage Act of 1712, the laity had been empowered to recommend clergy to vacant parishes, instead of committees of elders and deacons under the aegis of Presbyteries. In royal burghs, this meant that town councils presented ministers to Presbyteries for acceptance into the Church; in the country parishes which accounted for 90% of the Church, the role was played by landowners and the nobility.98 The problem was that gentlemen and noblemen could be induced or pressured into recommending particular candidates by Argyll, the government ‘manager’ until 1761. By the 1740s, the Church was split, with opponents of the Patronage Act pushing against the interference of the British state in the Scottish ecclesiastical polity. But in the 1750s Robertson led a group of clergy into taking a ‘moderate’ position on the issue. Since 1749, the Presbytery of Dunfermline had repeatedly refused to induct Rev. Andrew Richardson, the candidate for the parish of Inverkeithing, into the Church. ‘There can be no society’, Robertson declared to a meeting of the General Assembly of the 95 Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985), pp. 2-23, at 11. See also his ‘1688 and 1788: William Robertson on revolution in Britain and France’, in P. Dukes and J. Dunkley eds., Culture and revolution (London: Pinter, 1990), pp. 98-109. Knud Haakonssen also points out that Hume operated on the fringes of an Enlightenment that flourished mainly in Scottish universities, for which see ‘Natural jurisprudence and the identity of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Ruth Savage ed., Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 258-79. 96 This was a Scottish iteration of what began, at a similar time, to be described by John Pocock and Brian Young as a clerical and conservative Enlightenment in England. See Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello, M. Firpo, L. Guerci, and G. Ricuperati eds., L’età dei lumi: studi storici sul Settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, 2 vols (Naples: Jovene, 1985), I, 523-62; Brian Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 97 Sher, Church and University, pp. 23-151. 98 Sher, Church and University, pp. 47-48. See also Sher and Alexander Murdoch, ‘Patronage and Party in the Church of Scotland, 1750-1800’, in Norman Macdougall ed., Politics and Society: Scotland 1408-1929 (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1983), pp. 197-220. 18 Church in 1752, ‘where there is no subordination’; the Presbytery of Dunfermline must be forced by the Assembly into accepting the recommendation of Inverkeithing’s lay patron.99 According to John Pocock, Robertson’s ‘moderate’ position toward the British state was reflected in his historical writing, which was organised around states and their histories; the Scots, he argued recently, did not necessarily subsume the history of the English state under the progress of civilisation after all. Like Hume, Robertson wrote what Pocock calls the ‘Enlightened narrative’.100 Histories of this kind began (and sometimes ended) with the ‘Christian millennium’ spanning the fourth to the sixteenth century. This was the age of ‘barbarism and religion’: the eleven or so centuries in which Germanic tribes conquered the Roman empire and set up monarchies (‘barbarism’), and the papacy exerted a growing authority over the secular affairs of a landmass soon to be known as ‘Europe’ (‘religion’).101 After the Christian millennium came the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the eventual termination of these wars by the eighteenth-century emergence of states that were capable of curtailing both religious and civil disorder.102 Hume’s History, Pocock argues, wrote English history as the emergence of precisely this kind of state; it was a ‘triumph’, he says, ‘of the Enlightened narrative’.103 Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759), meanwhile, found that Scottish liberty was a product of Union with England, and his History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769) narrated the emergence of the European states system after the ‘Christian millennium’ had drawn to a close.104 Both historians appeared to write the history of states as well as 99 ‘Reasons of Dissent from the judgment and resolution of the commission, March 11, 1752, resolving to inflict no censure on the Presbytery of Dunfermline for their disobedience in relation to the settlement of Inverkeithing’, in Annals of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh: J. Johnstone, 1807), I, 231-42, at 233. 100 This is the theme of the second volume of Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion, sub-titled Narratives of Civil Government (1999). Robertson, however, stopped short of writing the full ‘Enlightened narrative’ because his historical works never got further than the sixteenth century. See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 298-99. 101 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 1-21. 102 As well as the six volumes of Barbarism and Religion, of which this mode of narrative is one of its many themes, see also Pocock, ‘Historiography and Enlightenment: A View of Their History’, Modern Intellectual History 5 (2008), 83-96, at 93. Pocock also expanded on this theme in ‘Cambridge Beyond Cambridge: Political Thought and History’, unpublished paper delivered to the Cambridge Seminar in Political Thought and Intellectual History, 12 May 2008. 103 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 199-268, at 261. 104 William Robertson, The History of Scotland, during the reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI. till his Accession to the Crown of England, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759); idem., The History of the Reign of the 19 the history of England, and for Colin Kidd, this slotted them into a broader Scottish pattern.105 Unlike the Irish, the Hungarians, the Italians, and the Poles, the Scots had failed to develop a ‘full-blown’ romantic nationalism in the nineteenth century.106 The reason, Kidd argues, lay at the door of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the wake of Anglo-Scottish Union, its historians had abandoned autochthonous Scottish historiography and chosen to write English history instead; Scottish history, they thought, could not explain the modern British society they inhabited.107 It is the reason, Kidd suggests, why ‘Britishness’ – in its political manifestations at least – continues to be Anglo-British, and to depend on allegiance to England’s crown and parliament.108 This leaves us with a puzzle. The Scots we have considered so far narrated histories of civilisation that left them sceptical of the stories the English told themselves about their politics. But they also told English stories themselves. They wrote histories of English government as well as the progress of society, and often combined the two.109 They raised their eyebrows at history ‘centred on the vicissitudes undergone by the original principles of a constitution’; but they left English history intact as a ‘story of continuity’, based on the survival and evolution of Gothic (if not immemorial) institutions over time.110 To overcome this tension, Kidd has described them as ‘sociological whigs’—a riff on the ‘scientific’ or ‘sceptical’ whiggism that Forbes had already affixed to the historical enterprise of Emperor Charles V, with a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, 3 vols (London: W. Strahan, 1769); Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 289-300. This kind of history, Pocock suggests implicitly throughout Barbarism and Religion’s volumes, inverts the story of Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1988), which was published originally as Kritik und Krise: ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1959). Koselleck saw the philosophical histories of human reason emitting from eighteenth-century Paris as leading, ultimately, to a violent confrontation with the state and its history; Pocock’s ‘Enlightened narrative’, on the other hand, wrote the history of the state itself, stabilising its politics in the process of doing so. 105 Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689 c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 106 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 1-12, at 1. 107 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 107-23, 204-15. 108 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 1. 109 The ‘two histories’, Pocock claims, were ‘in their perspective one’. See ‘The Ancient Constitution Revisited’, in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 375. 110 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 109, 118, 212. On the transition from immemorial time to the woods of Germany, see the first chapter below. 20 Hume, Smith, and Millar.111 For Kidd, this group of Scots – which, in addition to Hume, Smith, and Millar, included Robertson, Ferguson, and two further advocates and jurists: Henry Home, Lord Kames, and Sir John Dalrymple – were ‘sociological’ because they abstracted from constitutions in order to write histories of ‘society’. But they were ‘whigs’ because they thought that Anglo-Scottish Union had allowed Scotland to join a ‘universal modernisation process’ under the aegis of the new British state.112 As they associated England with an amalgam of liberty, civilisation, and modernity, they ultimately failed to shake the mode of historiography on which Butterfield had put his finger in 1944.113 For Kidd, and to some degree for Pocock, there is therefore no puzzle: the Scots were not really sceptical of the core narratives of English history because they were so dismissive of their own; Scotland’s putative history of liberty was a ‘lie’, whereas England’s was ‘authentic’.114 By turning the Scots back toward English history, both historians put their finger on the primary weakness of Forbes’s (and to a lesser degree, Trevor-Roper’s) account of Hume: despite his claims that Hume was a cosmopolitan, that he had been reading his Montesquieu, that he brought the new perspective of ‘civilization’ to bear on English history, Forbes made sense of Hume’s intervention in exclusively English terms.115 Hume may have rubbished the idea of an ancient constitution; but he also claimed that the Revolution settlement had created modern liberty, giving English history a viable telos and himself a 111 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 107-23. On Forbes’s ‘scientific whiggism’, see his ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, pp. 643-71. The concept of ‘scientific’ Whiggism was initially a joke: compared to the vulgar English Whiggism of the 1770s and 1780s, Forbes jibed, Smith and Millar’s Whiggism ‘may almost be said to stand as Marxian to pre-Marxian socialism, so crude, utopian, and mentally parochial is the one, so wide in the sweep of its historical survey, and so self-consciously “scientific” is the other.’ Forbes, ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, p. 661. By the time of Hume’s Philosophical Politics, Forbes had begun to refer to ‘scientific’ whiggism as ‘sceptical’: a formulation he claimed to have lifted from Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), p. 141. See Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 139-40, as well as his ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty’, in Andrew Skinner and Thomas Wilson eds., Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 179-202, at 179. Hume also referred to himself as a ‘Whig, but a very sceptical one’, in relation to his essay ‘Of the Protestant Succession’, which was eventually published as part of the Political Discourses. See Hume to Lord Kames, 8 February 1748, in J.Y.T. Grieg ed., The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), I, 111. 112 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 207. 113 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 204-15. 114 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 209. 115 Forbes’s most expansive (if nevertheless limited) remarks on Montesquieu’s influence on Hume and, in this case, Smith, can be found in ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty’, pp. 184- 86. 21 politics that was as whiggish as it was English.116 For Kidd, the ‘sceptical’ qualifier that Forbes had attached to Hume’s whiggism was therefore too strong. The less caustic ‘sociological’ was better suited to the whiggism of the Scottish historical enterprise: Kidd’s group had left English history intact, although they had managed to subject it to ‘“quality control”’.117 This thesis aims to offer a new frame for understanding the historical thought of John Dalrymple, Lord Kames, David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith. It does so, first of all, by drilling into English historiography in the middle of the eighteenth century. By then, the debate over the ancient constitution had transformed into a single ubiquitous story: that the English were free because they had broken up the estates of their feudal nobility in the sixteenth century, allowing a new crop of smaller free-holders to emerge; that this democratisation of property-holding had allowed the House of Commons – the body which represented these free-holders – to become restless and powerful enough to overturn the Crown in the middle of the seventeenth century; and that this redistribution of property had ultimately allowed parliament to attain legislative sovereignty in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The central claim of this thesis is that contrary to what Kidd and Pocock have suggested, a strand of historiographical scepticism towards this story did emerge in Scotland—but that its origins lay not in the philosophical idiom of ‘society’, but in Montesquieu’s history of feudal government in Europe. Thanks to Dugald Stewart and John Millar’s remarks, as well as the more recent discovery of the extent to which Montesquieu’s works were reprinted and translated in Scotland, Montesquieu’s influence on the Scottish Enlightenment has been played up without always being bolted down.118 Historians have sometimes 116 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 260-308. The impression of Hume’s History as both English and whiggish has recently been confirmed, as we shall see in the third chapter, in James Harris, Hume: an Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 387-408. 117 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 212. 118 On the publication history of Montesquieu in Scotland, see Alison K. Howard, ‘Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau in eighteenth-century Scotland’, The Bibliotheck 2/2 (1959), 40-63. The most precise delineations of Montesquieu’s impact have circled the relation of his views on climatic and social diversity to Hume’s essay, ‘Of National Characters’, in Eugene Miller ed., Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 197-216, and originally published in Hume, Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn (London: A. Millar, 1748). On this relationship, see Sebastiani, Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress, pp. 23-45; see also Moritz Baumstark, ‘David Hume: The Making of a Philosophical Historian: a Reconsideration’, unpublished PhD thesis, 22 struggled to show what the Scots took from Montesquieu that they could not have found elsewhere.119 This thesis, however, hopes to show that Montesquieu threw a spanner in the works of English historiography, and that two Scots in particular took notice. In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu questioned whether free-holding and parliaments could really render monarchies free; the best way of sustaining both liberty and commerce in a monarchy, he argued instead, was through feudal property and feudal courts.120 The first Scot to pick up and run with this story was John Dalrymple. He knew that Scottish land-holding remained feudal, and was concentrated in very few hands. Most observers denounced Scotland’s distribution of property as evidence of its backwardness, and pointed to English history as a model that should be imitated; but Dalrymple saw Scotland’s feudal property as an asset to the new British state, and used Montesquieu to re-write Scottish and English history as a history of Britain.121 The second Scot to reckon with Montesquieu’s story was David Hume. In his History of England, he continued along Dalrymple’s sceptical path, but built different foundations for English history. Modern liberty, he argued, had not emerged in 1688; it had arrived instead in around 1500, as England’s feudal nobility had begun to consume luxury goods instead of fighting one another, transforming their manners as they did so.122 As a result, they could no longer play the role that Montesquieu envisaged, and Hume – like Dalrymple – ended up worrying that Britain’s free-holders and parliaments were insufficient for maintaining its liberty. University of Edinburgh (2007), pp. 41-66; Paul Chamley, ‘The Conflict between Montesquieu and Hume: a Study of the Origins of Adam Smith’s Universalism’, in Essays on Adam Smith, pp. 274-305. Henceforward, all references to Hume’s essays will be to Miller’s edition, which will be referred to as Essays. 119 Istvan Hont, for example, suggested that the origins of the ‘four-stages’ theory could be found in seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence, rather than in The Spirit of Laws (as Ronald Meek had claimed). See Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce’, pp. 159-85. As we shall see in the second chapter, Kames articulated an embryonic ‘four-stages’ theory before The Spirit of Laws was published. 120 For a fuller discussion of Montesquieu, see the second chapter below. For a remarkable modern attempt to use feudal history, like Montesquieu, to generate liberty without free-holding and parliaments, in this case to support the prerogative powers of the American administrative state, see Charles Howard McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West: from the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 364-94. 121 John Dalrymple, An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (London: A. Millar, 1757). 122 For a fuller discussion of Hume, see the third chapter below. 23 Montesquieu, Dalrymple, and Hume opened a new perspective onto English history, questioning its viability as they did so.123 Lord Kames, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar, however, sought immediately to shut this perspective down. For various reasons, they wished to rebuild the historiographical architecture that Dalrymple and Hume had called into question. Two ways of thinking about English history therefore emerge from the debate: one sceptical, with its origins in Montesquieu’s feudal history; one whiggish, derived from the materials provided by English history itself. By recovering the fracture running through the middle of this episode in the history of historiography, this thesis aims to contribute not only to our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment, but to the history of eighteenth-century political thought more generally. By exploring a previously unexamined avenue of Montesquieu’s reception, it hopes also to suggest that his significance lay beyond his description of the English constitution and its ‘separation of powers’.124 Four chapters follow below. The first explores the development of English historiography and political argument from the late-seventeenth to the mid- eighteenth century. By then, as we have seen, the claim that England’s liberty had 123 David Allan’s claim that the originality of eighteenth-century Scottish historical thought lay in its sententious ‘self-congratulation’ will not be supported by what follows below. See Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 2. 124 For scholarship which is beginning to move past this view, and on which this thesis intends to build, see, chiefly, Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 95-173, as well as Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 20-31; ‘Montesquieu’s Controversial Context: The Spirit of the Laws as a Monarchist Tract,’ History of Political Thought 34 (2013), 66-88. The tendency in American scholarship to argue that England loomed largest over the horizon of Montesquieu’s politics derives from some short remarks made by Leo Strauss in a lecture series he delivered at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem between December 1954 and January 1955. The Spirit of Laws, Strauss suggested then, could be read as documenting a conflict between the political ideals of the Roman republic and England, with the latter eventually prevailing. Leo Strauss, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ [1954-55], in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 49-50. A series of self-avowed Straussians have taken these remarks as a point of departure in more substantial works on Montesquieu, for which see Thomas Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on the “Spirit of the Laws” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) and The Theological Basis of Modernity in Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Sharon Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002) and ‘The Spirit of Separate Powers in Montesquieu’, Review of Politics 62/2 (2000), 231-65; see also Johnson Wright, ‘Montesquieuean Moments: The Spirit of the Laws and Republicanism’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 35 (2007), 149-69. The most sophisticated proponent of this view is Paul Rahe, for which see Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 64, as well as its companion volume, Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 24 something to do with its parliamentary monarchy was inescapable; but in Montesquieu, the second chapter finds a disruptive voice. His claim that the French were modern and free because of their vigorous feudal institutions found its way, the chapter finds, into a mid-century debate about feudal property conducted between John Dalrymple and Lord Kames. Dalrymple had reckoned with Montesquieu’s feudal history, and became sceptical of yoking the history of British liberty to the history of England’s parliament; but Kames reaffirmed the orthodox English history that Dalrymple had attempted to rewrite, bringing the whiggish counterpoint to Dalrymple’s sceptical story into play. The third chapter examines Hume’s History of England in light of the second chapter’s debate. Hume wrote the History, as one Anglican critic put it, ‘backwards’: he began with the House of Stuart, continued with the House of Tudor, and ended with the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans.125 The Tudor and Gothic volumes have been neglected by historians; but it was only in these volumes, the chapter argues, that Hume began to construct the heterodox history of liberty that would prompt the alarmed responses of his contemporaries. The fourth chapter unpicks them, following William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar as they tried to restore the link between English liberty and parliament that Hume had undermined. The thesis concludes with what Adam Smith made of the debate, and finds him siding with Hume. 125 Richard Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues (London: A. Millar, 1759), p. 304. 25 Chapter One English narratives The Scottish protagonists of this thesis thought and wrote about English history in civil histories, historical jurisprudence, or temporalized moral philosophy. The results varied: English narratives could be confronted, rejected, adopted, or adapted. But they were never ignored, and in many cases constituted the political arguments in play. This chapter is about the history of these narratives, and the idiom of English historiography more broadly. John Pocock has described it (in its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century form) as a species of thought that attempted to settle political questions through history and time, rather than philosophy.1 Its origins, he argues, can be found in a wider ‘collision’ between the authority of sixteenth-century European monarchs and the privileges of their subjects.2 As kings and queens tended to arrogate the making of law to themselves, subjects who wished to defend these privileges – which usually revolved around property- holding – sought to shield them with laws that no sovereign could invade. Philosophers and theologians found them in nature or reason.3 But lawyers who spoke for subjects sought laws that were older than monarchs themselves.4 If laws 1 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 17; see also Thomas Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950); the point applies to other European historiographical cultures, which nevertheless took different forms. On Scotland, for example, see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past; on France, see Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) and Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003). 2 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 16-17. 3 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 4 This is the subject of the first chapter of Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 1- 30, which is taken here as a starting point for thinking about seventeenth-century English historiography. 26 came into being under the reign of a king, then the crown could claim to have authorised them; but if laws predated the earliest king known, then lawyers could claim that they were independent of his will.5 If laws antedated kings, they could be said to come from a time before records or memory; unmade and unwritten, their survival into the present could give them the authority of prescription. But it was also possible to claim that they had originally been made by another authority: popular lawyers could find peoples and parliaments making law before kings—even if Royalists could just as easily reverse the popular order.6 The English, Pocock suggests, tended to favour immemorial law over popular sovereignty.7 This he puts down to the absence of a body of written law – such as the Roman law – with which English common law could be compared.8 Monarchies like France were governed by customary law and Roman law, and the discrete historical origins of the latter made it difficult to maintain that the former had no historical origins at all.9 But in Holborn’s inns of court, the notion that customary English law was immemorial ‘ran riot’.10 To a lawyer like Sir Edward Coke, a Justice of the Peace for Norfolk, Suffolk, and Middlesex, and an MP in various Elizabethan and Jacobean parliaments, the law that judges declared had been the same since time before memory, although it incorporated the wisdom of past generations by refining itself over time.11 This was the 5 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 17. 6 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 21, 148-82. 7 See also Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: an Essay on the History of England, 1450- 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 8 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 30-69; for support for Pocock’s ‘Common- law Mind’ thesis, see Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship; idem., ‘History, English Law and the Renaissance’, Past and Present 65 (1974), 24-51; C.P. Rodgers, ‘Humanism, History and the Common Law’, Journal of Legal History 6 (1985), 129-56; Paul Christianson, ‘Political Thought in Early Stuart England’, Historical Journal 30 (1987), 955-70; for an alternative view to Pocock, see Christopher Brooks and Kevin Sharpe, ‘Debate: History, English Law and the Renaissance’, Past and Present 72 (1976), 133-42; Hans Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: a study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); see also Glen Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: an introduction to English Political Thought, 1603-1642 (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. ix, who argues that Pocock underplayed the extent to which English common lawyers argued from reason. 9 As Roman Law could be contextualized within a past state of society, Pocock argues, a more sophisticated historical understanding of law developed in late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. The same applied to Scotland, whose lawyers went to France to train. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 22, 88-89. 10 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 30. 11 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 30-37. 27 historically incredible doctrine of the ‘ancient constitution’—described by Pocock as the ‘parent’ of Herbert Butterfield’s whig interpretation of history.12 Over the course of the seventeenth century, the doctrine mutated along with English politics. Initially held by the lawyers inhabiting Chancery Lane, it had soon spread to Westminster: by 1604, the House of Commons was beginning to insist that their privileges also derived from a time before records or memory.13 It did not necessarily follow that parliament was sovereign: privileges could be unmade and unwritten. But as James I began candidly to argue that all laws, customs, and privileges derived from his will, it became possible for the lower house to argue not only that their privileges were immemorial, but that they did not derive from the king.14 From here, it was easy to claim that parliament made the law—a step taken by the lower house in 1649.15 As well as immemorial law, the ancient constitution now involved ideas of parliamentary – and in its wilder moments, popular – sovereignty. After the Interregnum, the fudge of the Restoration ensured that the updated doctrine lived on.16 By the time of the Exclusion Crisis, William Petyt and William Atwood, Whig barristers at Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn respectively, were arguing once again that parliament and law were immemorial.17 By then it had become common to narrow the focus on law to property tenure, and Petyt’s argument rested on the presence of a class of freeholders – men who held their property of neither lords nor king – in English history and immemorial time. It was these men who had anciently sat by right in the House of Commons, and these men who sat there now; their property had not been gifted to them by any superior, and they paid homage to no-one. It was a way of smuggling in the sovereignty of parliament under a ‘thin disguise’: 12 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 46; Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History; The Englishman and his History. For a sceptical view of the distinctiveness that Pocock assigns to seventeenth-century English historiography, see Joseph Levine, ‘Ancients, Moderns, and History: the Continuity of English Historical Writing in the later Seventeenth Century’, in Paul Korshin ed., Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History, 1640-1800 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 43-77. 13 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 48-49. 14 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 234. 15 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 124. 16 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660-1685 (London: Penguin, 2006). 17 William Petyt, The antient right of the Commons of England asserted (London: T. Bassett, 1680); William Atwood, Jus anglorum ab antiquo: or, a confutation of an impotent libel against the government of Kings, Lords, and Commons (London: E. Berry, 1681). 28 subservient to neither lords nor king, the house could choose to exclude an heir to the throne if they so wished.18 But by the 1680s, lawyers like Petyt and Atwood were putting out fires. In the middle of 1679, the collected works of Robert Filmer had been republished, followed in January 1680 by his Patriarcha.19 A Kent gentryman who had also been called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn (though there is no record of him practising law), Filmer had rubbished the idea of immemorial law in the idioms of both constitutional and sacred history; all law, he claimed, must have originated in some man’s will—if necessary, in the will of Adam.20 As this move raised the question of whether it was possible for any law to predate the Creation, it caused enough discomfort to prompt multiple attacks.21 For Pocock, however, it was Robert Brady, a physician and Master of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, who lit a bigger fire than Filmer. In the early 1680s, he directed numerous missives at Petyt and Atwood, and in 1685, he published his own history of England.22 Brady’s innovation, according to Pocock, was to introduce into English historiography a way of thinking about law historically. He did so by treating the arrival of the Normans into England in 1066 as a conquest that imposed the feudal law onto the English people. Earlier in the seventeenth century, the English antiquarian Sir Henry Spelman had claimed that upon his arrival in England, 18 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 191, 198, 235; on the concurrent efflorescence of ‘Old English studies’ in Oxford and Cambridge in the Restoration period, see David Douglas, English Scholars, 2nd edn (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950), pp. 52-76. 19 Robert Filmer, The Freeholder’s Grand Inquest (London: n.p., 1679); Patriarcha, or, the natural power of kings (London: Walter Davis, 1680). 20 For Filmer’s constitutional challenge, see Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 188-89; Peter Laslett’s editorial introduction to Patriarcha and other Political Works of Robert Filmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949); James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). For his sacred-historical claims, to which John Locke responded in kind, see Tom Pye, ‘Property, Space, and Sacred History in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government’, Modern Intellectual History 15/2 (2018), 327-52. 21 One of these was John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; repr. 1988), which was originally published – but not written – in 1689. See also James Tyrrell, Patriarcha non monarcha: The patriarch unmonarch’d: being observations on a late treatise and divers other miscellanies, published under the name of Sir Robert Filmer Baronet. In which the falseness of those opinions that would make monarchy jure divino are laid open: and the true principles of government and property (especially in our kingdom) asserted by a lover of truth and of his country. (London: R. Janeway, 1681). 22 Robert Brady, A full and clear answer to a book, written by William Pettit Esq; printed in the year 1680: by which it appears, that he hath mistaken the meaning of the histories and records he hath cited, and misapplyed them (London: S Lowndes, 1681); An introduction to the old English history (London: S. Lowndes, 1684); A complete history of England, from the first entrance of the Romans under the conduct of Julius Caesar, unto the end of the reign of King Henry III (London: T. Newcomb & S. Lowndes, 1685). 29 William the Conqueror had divided up ‘all England among his companions’ in exchange for military service.23 His companions, or chief men, might divide up their land in turn (also in exchange for military service). But this did not affect his central claim: that William’s division of land forced every property-holder in the kingdom to recognise him as their feudal superior.24 In his hands, the basic tenure of English law had a discrete historical origin; it was a product of the king’s will, and therefore of history.25 Brady’s genius was to see how this insight could be used to disprove the existence of the freehold tenure on which Petyt’s history of parliament had rested. As he explained in his complete history, English land at the time of Domesday was ‘holden by Military Service, or Serjeanty, and in Villanage of those Military Tenants’; there was ‘no Free Soccage’.26 Since William was the feudal superior of every single proprietor in the realm, he was owed homage and fealty by anyone who owned land. This rendered his sovereignty absolute, and showed – to Brady’s mind at least – that ‘all the Liberties and Priviledges the People can pretend to, were the Grants and Concessions of the Kings of this Nation, and were Derived from the Crown’.27 In order to exclude parliament from the exercise of legislative sovereignty, Brady had used Spelman’s scholarship to bankrupt the ancient constitution.28 Pocock’s history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English historical thought culminates in Brady: only a method such as his, Pocock suggests, was capable of curing the historiographical ‘ills’ produced by the dominance of the ‘common-law mind’.29 But Brady did not succeed. The Glorious Revolution was a 23 Henry Spelman, Archaeologus (London: J. Beale, 1626), p. 258. Cited in Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 99-100, as well as pp. 91-124. 24 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 102. 25 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 123. 26 Brady, A complete history of England, p. xxv. 27 Brady, A complete history of England, unpaginated preface. 28 For a later confirmation that, by the 1680s at least, the doctrine of the ancient constitution had come to revolve around legislative sovereignty rather than customary law, see Pocock, ‘varieties of Whiggism’, pp. 215-311, at 221-22; see also Corinne Comstock Weston and Janelle Renfrow Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), which also confirms Pocock’s point. 29 Brady’s cure was to be welcomed, Pocock argues, for political reasons unrelated to Brady’s own politics. In theory (if not in practice), Brady’s history could have enabled its readers to see the Norman conquest as occurring in a historical situation unlike their present. This could then have raised the question of how that situation had transformed into their own, creating a new historiography unlike its predecessor. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical thought had imported into history principles from without history, and used these principles to delegitimise 30 ‘triumph’ for the doctrine of the ancient constitution, and even resulted in Petyt being given Brady’s job as keeper of the records in the Tower of London. (Brady had been given the keys in the summer of 1686; they were given to Petyt in 1689.)30 Britain was now a parliamentary, or limited, monarchy, and was soon locked into almost 25 years of war with France.31 Between Revolution and the accession of the George I in 1714, Britain also developed what John Brewer has described as a military-fiscal state.32 In 1694, the Bank of England was chartered to create and manage Britain’s national debt, which was then used to fund its campaigns against Louis XIV.33 Having ballooned to £36.2 million by 1713, the debt required taxes to service it and fiscal apparatus to collect it; between 1690 and 1716, the number of office-holders involved in fiscal bureaucracy grew from 2,524 to just under 6,000.34 The Treasury also tightened its grip on both income and expenditure, and from 1715, the Whigs began to clamber on the backs of the Tories.35 The party returned 341 MPs to the Tories’ 217 in the 1715 general election, passed the Septennial Act in 1716, and soon profited from George I’s proscription of Tories from office-holding.36 In order to generate support for their English sovereignty. If the politics of this kind of historical thinking tended towards revolution, the politics of the new historiography would tend towards a (more welcome) conservative liberalism. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 55, 125-26, 180, 210. For a description of the politics of historiography as tending towards ‘conservative liberalism’, see Pocock, ‘The Politics of Historiography’, Institute of Historical Research 78 (2005), 1-14, at 9. For a claim that western European liberalism arose out of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiography, rather than any tradition of ‘rationalism’, see all six volumes of Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. For a remarkably perceptive reading of the Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law that takes horror at (and then attacks) the conservatism of its attempt to trace the origins of English liberalism to historiography, see Quentin Skinner, ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 8/2 (1964), 151-78. 30 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 212, 227. 31 Mark Goldie, ‘The English System of Liberty’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, pp. 40-78; see also Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Steven Pincus, 1688: the first Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Grant Tapsell ed., The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in honour of John Morrill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013). 32 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War and the English State, 1688-1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 25-135; see also Peter Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit (London: Macmillan, 1967). 33 Brewer, The Sinews of Power, pp. 88-135. 34 Brewer, The Sinews of Power, p. 66. 35 Brewer, The Sinews of Power, pp. 92-93; Jack Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 66-128. 36 Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability, pp. 66-98; Hoppit, A Land of Liberty, pp. 44-49; H.T. Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London: English Universities Press, 1973), pp. 40-56, 66- 92; Jeremy Black, Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 23-56. 31 administration, the Whigs – led after 1720 by the First Lord of the Treasury, Robert Walpole – distributed the crown’s vast civil and ecclesiastical patronage in exchange for loyalty.37 Their most prized winnings were seats – in 1727, there were 150 Whig placemen in the House of Commons – but borough patrons were also enlisted, who could in turn manage franchises in the government’s interest.38 This was the political landscape to which English historical thought had to adapt, and the remainder of this chapter follows three overlapping routes it took into the eighteenth century.39 The first found precedent for the revolutionary settlement in the practices of the Germanic tribes who overran the Roman empire; there were shades of complexity to the thesis, but it was given its most sophisticated and popular form by the French Huguenot historian, Paul Rapin de Thoyras. The second follows the Jacobite and Tory, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, as he turned Rapin against Walpole’s Whig oligarchy by adapting a historical narrative lifted from the seventeenth-century English Commonwealthman, James Harrington. The third route flows from Bolingbroke, and follows the implications of his story. As we shall see, Bolingbroke’s history outran his polemical purposes. His thesis became a commonplace, giving a mould to English history that was readily adopted from across the political spectrum. By providing a means of explaining the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, it also found adherents north of the river Tweed. In this context, Montesquieu could be read as having something startlingly different to say—the subject of the next chapter. Paul Rapin de Thoyras In the wake of the Revolution, the ancient constitution was often joined to a strand of ‘Gothicist’ thinking that had been developing concurrently throughout 37 Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy, pp. 66-92; Eveline Cruickshanks, ‘The political Management of Sir Robert Walpole, 1720-42’, in Jeremy Black ed., Britain in the Age of Walpole (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 23-45; see also Jack Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, 2 vols (London: Cresset Press, 1956-60). 38 Hoppit, A Land of Liberty, p. 49. 39 On the challenges of writing history under the Hanoverians, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 163-77, and also ‘Modes of Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 5 (1976), 91-102. 32 the seventeenth century.40 This kind of story traced the legislative authority of parliament all the way back to the Saxon invasion of Britannia, and from there back to Germany. (As Pocock observes, it was an easy step to transfer immemorial time to the ‘primitive German forest’.)41 In January 1689, Petyt declared to the House of Lords that the ‘original of government came from Germany’, and that this government was elective monarchy.42 Our ‘Parliamentary Constitution’, the Whig pamphleteer and journalist John Oldmixon barked, ‘is as old as the Saxons, and much the same as at present.’43 The sociological make-up of the lower house might have changed, but their role had not: they enquired into grievances, granted supplies, and exercised ‘Legislative Authority’. 44 All this, Oldmixon claimed, derived from the ‘swarms’ of Gothic barbarians who had overrun the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. The tribes had made their generals kings, and turned their leading men into ‘Concilia Magna, or Parliaments, without whose Consent no Laws were Enacted, or scarce any Thing of Importance done.’45 This legacy was common to western Europe, but it was only the English who had managed to preserve it—despite the best efforts of the Normans and their seventeenth-century champion, Robert Brady.46 William’s eldest son, Robert, had 40 On ‘Gothicism’ in English thought, see Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 75- 99, 211-87; see also the less illuminating Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: a Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1952) and R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 41 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 56-58, 64. 42 The manuscripts of the House of Lords, 1689-1690; The manuscripts of S.H. le Fleming, Esq., of Rydal Hall; The manuscripts of the Duke of Athole, K.T., and of the Earl of Home, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 12th report (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889-91), p. 14. Cited in Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 229. For a similar claim, see James Tyrrell, Bibliotheca politica: or An enquiry into the ancient constitution of the English government: both in respect to the just extent of regal power, and the rights and liberties of the subject (London: R. Baldwin, 1694). 43 John Oldmixon, The Critical History of England, Ecclesiastical and Civil (London: J. Pemberton, 1724), p. 3; see also John Hughes and White Kennett eds., A complete history of England: with the lives of all the kings and queens thereof; from the earliest account of time, to the death of His late Majesty King William III, 3 vols (London: Aylmer et al., 1706), for which Oldmixon helped to compile many of the materials. After the Critical History, Oldmixon also published The history of England during the reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (London: J. Pemberton, 1730). For his biography, see Pat Rogers, ‘Oldmixon, John (1672/3-1742)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, January 2008 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20695, accessed 3 August 2018]; for analysis along the lines given here, see Kidd, British Identities, pp. 91-92. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography will henceforward be referred to as ODNB. 44 Oldmixon, Critical History, p. 42. 45 Oldmixon, Critical History, p. 24. 46 Oldmixon, Critical History, pp. 28-29. 33 been passed over in favour of William Rufus, his second son. To Oldmixon, this showed that parliament retained the right of electing kings, and that the Saxon constitution had been ‘preserv’d against French Arms’.47 A series of ‘Court and Church Flatterers and Creatures’ had attempted to destroy the constitution since then, the worst of which were the four Stuart kings; but it had managed to survive, and was eventually secured at the Revolution.48 Oldmixon’s story was about the exclusive sovereignty of parliament: it had been established by the Saxons, threatened by the Normans and Stuarts, and put beyond doubt by 1688; English monarchs, he insisted, had always been office- holders elected by parliament. But this was post-revolutionary whiggery in a pre- revolutionary mould: Oldmixon’s history could be used neither to articulate nor to justify the system of parliamentary patronage through which the court Whigs had been ruling since 1721.49 Rapin’s Histoire d’Angleterre (1723-25), however, could. Exiled from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1686, Rapin travelled first to England and then to the United Provinces. Having entered the service of William of Orange, he soon returned to England with the Prince, landing with him at Torbay and accompanying him on his expedition to conquer Ireland. After fighting in the Battle of the Boyne and being temporarily stationed at Kinsale, he travelled to the Hague to become tutor to the eldest son of Hans Willem Bentnick, Earl of Portland, in 1693. Although he conceived of writing a history of England at Kinsale, he only started to write it in 1705, upon being released from Portland’s service. In 1707 he moved from the Hague to Wesel, in the Duchy of Cleves, where he continued to write until his death in 1725.50 Rapin published eight quartos of the Histoire d’Angleterre in the Hague in 1724, covering 47 Oldmixon, Critical History, pp. 32-33. 48 Oldmixon, Critical History, pp. 25, 32-33. 49 Hoppit, A Land of Liberty, pp. 407-18. 50 For biography, see M. Raoul de Cazenove, Rapin-Thoyras: sa famille, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Aubry, 1866); Nelly Girard D’Albassin, Un précurseur de Montesquieu: Rapin-Thoyras (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969); Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Our First Whig Historian: Paul de Rapin-Thoyras’, in Irene Scouloudi ed., Huguenots in Britain and their French Background, 1550-1800 (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 3-19; Laird Okie, Augustan Historical Writing: Histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991), pp. 47-75; Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: from Clarendon to Hume (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 146-50; M.G. Sullivan, ‘Rapin, Hume, and the Identity of the Historian in Eighteenth Century England’, History of European Ideas 28/3 (2002), 145-62, at 149; see also Sullivan, ‘Rapin de Thoyras, Paul (1661-1725)’, ODNB, online edn, September 2004 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23145, accessed 3 August 2018]. 34 the invasion of the Saxons to 1640.51 A further two quartos were published in 1725, and took the story up to the coronation of William and Mary in 1688.52 That same year, Nicholas Tindal, vicar at Great Waltham, Essex, began to translate it, publishing it – in partnership with the bookseller John Knapton – as a number book.53 Over the next six years, Tindal and Knapton worked their way through the history; they ended with fifteen volumes octavo, each of which had been released as five or six monthly numbers.54 As soon as the edition was completed, they republished the whole translation in two volumes folio, in addition to republishing the whole enterprise as sixpenny weekly folio numbers.55 The appetite for Rapin was such that Knapton’s weekly edition originated as a response to another translation by a rival bookseller, John Mechell.56 Between 1725 and 1750, no work was more frequently encountered in newspaper advertisements than the various editions and publications of Rapin’s history.57 Historians have tended to see Rapin as straightforwardly rehearsing the arguments of seventeenth-century Whigs like Petyt and Atwood. For Hugh Trevor-Roper, Rapin’s History was a ‘classic exposition of the Whig – the “old whig” – interpretation of history’.58 It was written, he suggests, to show that parliament had been with the English since the beginning of their history, and that this history had been continuous.59 More recently, historians have read Rapin as holding English liberty to be ancient, the monarchy elective, and parliament sovereign.60 But this underestimates the extent to which Rapin justified the authority of the crown. From the outset of the History, Rapin insisted that England 51 Rapin de Thoyras, Histoire d’Angleterre, 8 vols (The Hauge: A. de Rogissart, 1724). 52 Rapin, Histoire d’Angleterre, 10 vols (The Hauge: A. de Rogissart, 1724-27). 53 Rapin, The history of England: as well ecclesiastical as civil, trans. Nicholas Tindal, 15 vols (London: J. Knapton, 1726-31). On its release as a number book, see R.M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England Before 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 96. 54 For more detail on the publication history of Rapin’s history, see Wiles, Serial Publication in England, pp. 96-97; Sullivan, ‘Rapin, Hume, and the Identity of the Historian’, pp. 150-51. 55 Rapin, The History of England, trans. Tindal, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: J., J., and P. Knapton, 1732-33); Wiles, Serial Publication in England, pp. 96-97. 56 Rapin, The History of England: as well ecclesiastical as civil, trans. John Kelly, 3 vols (London: J. Mechell, 1732); see also a further rival translation and publication, Rapin, The History of England, trans. J. Templeman, 2 vols (London: E. Rider, 1734). 57 Wiles, Serial Publication in England, p. 96. 58 Trevor-Roper, ‘Our First Whig’, p. 15. 59 Trevor-Roper, ‘Our First Whig’, p. 17. 60 Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, p. 57; Hicks, Neoclassical History, p. 147; see also, less recently, Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France: les sources anglaises de “l’esprit des lois” (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1909), pp. 84-99. 35 was a ‘mixt and limited Monarchy’, like all the governments arising out of the ruins of the Roman Empire.61 He put this down to a single recognition by the Germanic barbarians who had overwhelmed the Romans: that in order to preserve ‘a perfect union between the King and the People, it was necessary to establish a way of communication between them. This was done by means of a Wittena-Gemot’.62 In the English case, all the king’s prerogatives – the calling and dissolving of parliament; the command of the military; the execution of laws; the administration of justice; the declaring of war and peace; the grant of offices of state – were the ‘effect or consequence of the mutual agreement of the first Anglo- Saxon Kings with their People.’ 63 The wittenagemot, however, withheld two prerogatives from the king: the power to change laws agreed to by the mutual consent of king and people, and the power to tax at pleasure. In explaining how this mixed constitution had arisen, Rapin had to avoid various pitfalls. If the king could be shown to have created the wittenagemot, the English monarchy would become hereditary: sovereignty would reside in the prince alone. But if the wittenagemot could be shown to have created the king, the monarchy would become elective: parliament would become sovereign, the king rendered a mere office-holder. To get around the problem, Rapin drew a distinction between the politics of the Saxons in their native Germany and their practices in Britannia as conquerors. It ‘may be advanced for certain’, he ventured, ‘that the Laws now in force, throughout the greatest part of Europe, are derived from the Laws these antient Conquerors brought with them from the North.’64 The customs of the English were, for the most part, ‘the same the Anglo- Saxons brought with them from the northern Countries, and lastly from Germany.’65 But they differed in crucial respects. In Germany, the Saxons split their territory into twelve provinces. The central wittenagemot elected governors of each province, as well as mayors of cities and boroughs. In war, the wittenagemot elected a general.66 Once settled in Britannia, however, the Saxons split themselves into 61 Rapin, The History of England, trans. Tindal, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: J. Knapton et al., 1732-33), I, iv. 62 Rapin, History, I, iv. 63 Rapin, History, I, iv. 64 Rapin, History, I, 147. 65 Rapin, History, I, 147. 66 Rapin, History, I, 147. 36 seven kingdoms. The kings (or governors) of each kingdom were not elected by a central wittenagemot: they had sovereign authority in their own domains, derived from their initial status as generals. But this did not render them absolute: the authority of each king ‘did not exempt him from all dependence on the Wittena- Gemot of his own State, which in conjunction with him regulated all important Affairs.’67 In addition to the councils of each kingdom, a central wittenagemot was instituted to regulate the affairs of the Heptarchy; in times of crisis – wars with the Britons were constant – it conferred control over the kingdoms’ armies to a single general. The role was analogous to the stadtholder of the United Provinces.68 If a stadtholder died, the Heptarchy (via their central wittenagemot) chose another.69 Neither the local nor the central wittenagemot was set up by the kings of the Heptarchy themselves: if they had had the power to institute councils, Rapin reasoned, they would have had the power to abolish them too.70 In Britannia, wittenagemot and king were contemporaneous with one another—the former produced by custom, the latter by contingency. In Germany, sovereignty lay in the hands of the wittenagemot alone; but in Britannia, it was held jointly by the wittenagemot and the king. Rapin was beginning to find precedent for the limited monarchy the Revolution had created. But unlike Petyt or Atwood, he was uninterested in allocating sovereignty exclusively to parliament, leaving the make-up of its lower house – if a lower house could be found among the Saxons at all – tangential to his concerns. His story did not depend on finding freeholders among the Saxons and showing that they survived under the Normans: fiefs were a Gothic, rather than a Norman, phenomenon, and wittenagemots had been composed of the king’s immediate vassals, ecclesiastics, and various office-holders of the crown; the presence of ceorles, or commoners, was too difficult to ascertain.71 Rapin was interested instead in how the Saxon constitution had managed to replicate itself over time. What he found was a mess. Before and after the unification of the 67 Rapin, History, I, 148. 68 Rapin, History, I, 42, 148. 69 Rapin, History, I, 46. 70 Rapin, History, I, 152-53. 71 Rapin, History, I, iv, 27, 152-57; on the origin of fiefs, see also History, I, 159-60. 37 Heptarchy, the Saxon crown had descended hereditarily.72 But on ‘extraordinary occasions’, the crown became elective instead: considering itself as ‘Supreme Legislator’, the wittenagemot had sometimes decided on the destination of the crown itself.73 At other times, succession seemed to depend on the will of the incumbent monarch—as long as their choice was confirmed by the wittenagemot. Rapin’s innovation was to turn this confusion into a constitutional principle of limited monarchy: the Saxons had resorted to different modes of succession as different circumstances dictated—‘much the same’ as at present.74 The crown may be hereditary by default; but parliament could sometimes over-rule it.75 This was what succession in a mixed government looked like: contingent and opaque. Kings and queens who understood this, Rapin suggested, were careful not to filter the muddy waters of English sovereignty. Although the surname of ‘Conqueror’ was given to William I, ‘it is certain, he never openly pretended to possess the Crown by right of Conquest, but rather, took great care that this Title should never be clearly explained.’76 Just like William III, he acceded the throne on a mixture of claims—none of which he spelled out in detail. Henry VII, too, had a mixed title to the throne: he was of Lancastrian descent, intended to marry the daughter of Edward IV, and could (by 1485) plausibly claim right of conquest. 77 James I was of a similar mongrel breed: his authority was simultaneously parliamentary (or elective), hereditary, and willed.78 Laurence Echard, archdeacon of Stowe and the historian to whom Rapin was in part responding, had seen this uncertainty as a weak seam that had been unpicked by the ‘designing men’ of the Commons.79 But Rapin saw it as a strength which James ignored. A skilful monarch could take advantage of the smoke and mirrors surrounding the English constitution, and use them to deflect and evade challenges to regal authority. But by trying to legitimate his own power by 72 Rapin, History, I, 159. 73 Rapin, History, I, 159. 74 Rapin, History, I, 159. 75 Rapin, History, I, 159. 76 Rapin, History, I, 167. 77 Rapin, History, I, 650. 78 Rapin, History, II, 158. 79 Laurence Echard, The History of England. From the First Entrance of Julius Caesar and the Romans, To the End of the Reign of King James the First, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Jacob Tonson, 1718), II, 2. Echard’s history was also notable for claiming that Oliver Cromwell did a deal with the devil—an encounter Echard described with relish. See Echard, The History of England, II, 713. 38 reference to universal principles, James left himself open to attack: he was ‘perswaded, that the authority of Sovereigns over their Subjects was unlimited, and that all Monarchical Government ought to be absolute, not considering that these maxims could not be applied to the Government of England, without destroying the constitution.’80 He considered his title to derive solely from hereditary right, and to have nothing whatsoever to do with parliament. But at least half of the 23 monarchs since William I did not accede to the crown that way: James’s claims rubbed against the grain of the constitution, and ‘in resolving to establish this pretended Hereditary Right, [James] was the first cause of the troubles which afflicted England, and which are not yet ceased.’ 81 If his predecessors had entertained anything like his view of the royal prerogative, they had kept it quiet.82 But James was forthright: he thought the ‘privileges of the Nation and Parliament were so many Usurpations, or at best, but revocable concessions of the Crown, and gave frequent occasion to believe, he had formed a design to free both himself and successors from the restraint which the Laws, Customs, and Privileges of the English Nation had laid upon his predecessors.’83 Even worse, James was guilty of thinking that the ‘Prerogative was a thing fixed, incontestable, known to all the world, though nothing was more indeterminate, or of less known extent and limits.’84 In resolving to find the universal in the particular, James (and his son) joined an undistinguished line of monarchs who had ventured foolishly into debates about the derivation of their authority: Henry III, Edward II, and Richard II had all been ruined that way.85 Wiser monarchs – Edward I, Edward III, Edward IV, Henry III, and Elizabeth – knew never to raise the issue of their authority, so rarely fought with their parliaments.86 They knew that parliament would rather allow the royal prerogative to extend than to ‘run the risk of breaking an union, which is the sole foundation of the publick happiness.’87 This is what the Stuarts had failed to see. By legitimating their 80 Rapin, History, II, 160. 81 Rapin, History, II, 161. 82 Rapin, History, II, 163. 83 Rapin, History, II, 163. 84 Rapin, History, II, 213. 85 Rapin, History, II, 213. 86 Rapin, History, II, 213. 87 Rapin, History, II, 213. 39 authority via universal principles of kingship – it followed from their assertions that a ‘King of Poland, for instance, ought to be as absolute as a King of Persia’ – they effectively banished the contingent historical union of king and parliament from the constitution.88 And this, Rapin argued, is what had driven the nation to war. Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke Rapin had ultimately indicted the Stuarts for failing to understand the history of the English constitution. But this history was not equal to the claim that English liberty was ancient, and its parliament sovereign.89 Rapin suggested instead that the responsibilities of government had been shared between crown and parliament since the Saxons: kings had always held various executive prerogatives, whilst parliaments had always legislated and granted supply. Neither parliament nor crown possessed unitary supreme authority, and no regular law of succession existed; the English constitution consisted rather of an opaque but persistent ‘union’ between crown and parliament. As Rapin was vague on parliament’s sociology, he glided over the question of liberty: what it was, where it came from, whether it was currently under threat. Contrary to what historians have often suggested, this made him easy to enlist into court Whig ideology: Walpole’s ministry depended on acting as a conduit for royal patronage, and Rapin’s history gave scope and importance to the royal prerogative. This made him serviceable to any Whig who had availed himself of Walpole’s spoils (even if, as we shall come to see, he was eventually employed by the opposition). To Tories, Jacobites, and country Whigs excluded from the patronage network of the court, however, Rapin was anathema. One historian, Thomas Carte, responded with a pungently Jacobite General History of England (1747-55), published in four rebarbative volumes of folio.90 A non-juror and clergyman at 88 Rapin, History, II, 238. 89 Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, p. 57; Hicks, Neoclassical History, p. 147. 90 Thomas Carte, A General History of England, 4 vols (London: J. Hodges, 1747-55); for a pithy biography, see Stuart Handley, ‘Carte, Thomas (1686-1754)’, ODNB, online edn, May 2015 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4780, accessed 3 August 2018]; see also Eveline Cruickshanks, 40 Bath Abbey church, Carte had been exiled in 1722, although he managed to find his way back to England six years later. His history attempted to restore the regal lustre that Rapin’s acid had corroded, and it did so by tracing the English monarchy – along with the Church of which it was the supreme head – back to the tribes led by the progeny of Gomer, eldest son of Japheth, himself son of Noah.91 Governed (both civilly and ecclesiastically) by druid patriarchs whose religion derived from ‘before the confusion of Babel and the dispersion of nations’, these tribes had settled in Britannia in around 2000 BC, and later became known as the Britons.92 Although the Britons were later invaded by the Romans, the Romans by the Saxons, and the Saxons by the Normans, Carte wove a single thread through the story: that ‘there is a natural allegiance due to the person of a king, succeeding lineally to the crown, by inherent birth-right, and proximity of blood.’93 Wherever he looked, he found patriarchs whose authority was derived from the natural allegiance human beings owed to fathers. The History traced and admonished the respective Papish, feudal, parliamentary, and puritanical attacks the English crown and Church had received throughout their history.94 The constitution that emerged was not mixed, but unitary and Erastian; rather than punishing Rapin’s Political Untouchables: the Tories and the ’45 (London: Duckworth, 1979), pp. 23-24; Cruickshanks, ‘Lord North, Christopher Layer and the Atterbury Plot: 1720-23’, in idem. and Jeremy Black eds., The Jacobite Challenge (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), pp. 92-106, 100-01; Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: the Tory Party 1714-60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 32, 87; Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 130; Monod, ‘Thomas Carte, the Druids and British National Identity’, in idem., Murray Pittock, and Daniel Szechi eds., Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 131-48; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, VI, 484. 91 Carte, General History, I, 8; Carte’s Gomerian thesis was not particularly original, and owed a great deal to L’Abbé Paul-Yves Pezron’s L’antiquité de la nation et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appellez Gaulois (Paris: Prosper Marchand and Gabriel Martin, 1703). On Pezron, see Kidd, British Identities, pp. 66-68; see also P. Morgan, ‘The Abbé Pezron and the Celts’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 2 (1965), 286-95; on the relation of ethnicity to Mosaic history in the Early Modern period more generally, see Kidd, British Identities, pp. 9-99; see also Scott Mandelbrote, ‘The bible and national identity in the British Isles, c.1650-c.1750’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride eds., Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650-c.1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 157-82. 92 Carte, General History, I, 12, 17, 21, 42. 93 Carte, General History, I, 177. 94 On British and English Christianity in contradistinction to Rome, see Carte, General History, I, 136-37, 184-86, 192, 221-24, 242-45; on the British church in eighteenth-century Anglican historiography, see Kidd, British Identities, pp. 99-100; on the threat of fiefs – and the obligations they entailed – to the operation of untrammeled royal authority, see Carte, General History, II, 845- 46; on the twin evils of parliamentarianism and puritanism, see Carte, General History, IV, 2-5. 41 Saxonism with Brady’s Normanism, he had chosen instead to go back to Filmer and sacred history. Having been impeached, attainted, and forced into exile by an embryonic Whig administration in 1715 (a process in which Walpole had taken a leading role), the Tory and Jacobite Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, also had good reason to foment opposition on his return in 1725.95 Forbidden from taking his seat in the Lords or holding office, Bolingbroke had soon set up a newspaper, The Craftsman, along with William Pulteney—a Whig who had recently fallen foul of Walpole.96 In the Autumn of 1730, Bolingbroke began to use the paper to publish weekly articles on English history, later collated and published as Remarks on the History of England.97 But unlike Carte, Bolingbroke refused to bang the drum of hereditary and indefeasible right: the Remarks, he declared later, had ‘broken’ the doctrine’s association with the Tories, substituting it for ‘new combinations’.98 Bolingbroke had ‘shuffled’ Tory ideas by availing himself of the intellectual resources provided by the English commonwealth tradition: a strand of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Whiggism interested in liberty and corruption, rather than asserting and re-asserting the legislative authority of parliament.99 In the eighteenth century, it had most recently been given voice by 95 For biography, see H.T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970). 96 On the founding of The Craftsman, see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: the Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 17-19. 97 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England (London: R. Francklin, 1743); Bolingbroke began the series in September 1730, publishing its final instalment in May the following year. For commentary, see Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 177-81; see also David Womersley, ‘Lord Bolingbroke and Eighteenth-Century Historiography’, The Eighteenth Century 28/3 (1987), 217-34. 98 Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties, first published in The Craftsman, 27 October 1733 – 26 January 1734, and 9 November – 28 December 1734. Now collected in David Armitage’s edition of Bolingbroke’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1-183, at 5. 99 Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties, p. 5; the first historian to pick up on Bolingbroke’s volte-face was Skinner, ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’, p. 171, as well as Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in Neil McKendrick ed., Historical Perspectives. Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London: Europa, 1974), pp. 93-12; see also, more expansively, Kramnick, ‘Augustan Politics and English Historiography: The Debate on The English Past, 1730-35’, History and Theory 6 (1967), 33- 56. On Bolingbroke and party more generally, see Max Skjönsberg, ‘Lord Bolingbroke’s Theory of Party and Opposition’, Historical Journal 59/4 (2016), 947-973; on the commononwealth tradition, the classic study remains Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge: MA.: Harvard University Press, 1959); but see also Zera Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945). Pocock points out that a cluster of claims organised around parliament’s legislative authority was useful to those 42 Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard’s attacks on the ministerial peculation behind the South Sea Company’s disastrous attempt to take over the national debt.100 But its origins lay further back, in the political thought of James Harrington.101 It was his interregnum tract, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), that gave Bolingbroke the thesis he needed to stitch English history together, and the idiom in which Walpole’s administration could most effectively be called into question. As John Pocock has argued, Harrington wrote Oceana in order to claim that the Protectorate could – and should – take the form of an agrarian, military republic.102 The political conditions in which such a constitution could flourish had only just emerged; England, he suggested, was at a critical historical juncture. In order to make his case, Harrington took up Machiavelli’s depiction of liberty as the capacity to bear arms for oneself, and then grafted it onto the history of Gothic, or feudal, government in Europe.103 (As we shall see, feudal property for Harrington arrived with the Germanic conquerors of Rome, rather than with the Normans.) He began his story by dividing the entirety of human history into two parts: ancient and modern prudence. The former was inhabited by what Harrington held to be the agrarian republics founded by Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, and Romulus, the last of which was a polity of farmer-warriors like the others before it degenerated, becoming an empire in which citizens no longer bore arms for themselves, but for senators and emperors at war with one another.104 Modern prudence began with ‘the inundations of Goths, Vandals, Huns and Lombards that overwhelmed the Roman Empire’.105 Across Europe, they set up systems of Whigs who wanted to rule, whilst a set of ideas focused on liberty and corruption was employed by Whigs who wanted to oppose. See Pocock, ‘varieties of Whiggism’, pp. 221-22. 100 Between 1720 and 1723, they had published a series of weekly missives in the London Journal, then an opposition newspaper before Walpole later brought it under the aegis of government after the Atterbury Plot in 1723. They were later collated and published as Cato’s Letters, 4 vols (London: W. Wilkins et al., 1724). On Trenchard and Moyle, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 401-23; on Bolingbroke’s use of them, see Machiavellian Moment, pp. 477-88. 101 On Harrington, see Pocock’s ‘Historical Introduction’ to his edition of The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 1-155, as well as Machiavellian Moment, pp. 361-401; see also Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge, 1964). 102 The Protector’s assumption of executive control over the army lurked behind Oceana’s publication. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 384-85. 103 Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in Pocock ed., The Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 192-97; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 383-400. 104 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 388. 105 Harrington, Oceana, p. 188. 43 feudal property whereby the few (the nobles) held land as vassals of the king, and the many (the commoners) held land as vassals of the few.106 These patterns of landholding corrupted politics in two ways. As vassals had to bear arms for their feudal superiors, there was no way to consider the Germanic barbarians as independent and consequently free. And as both nobles and kings controlled vassals (and therefore arms), feudal governments were neither pure monarchies nor pure aristocracies; they were a mongrel breed of both. As well as being unfree, modern politics was therefore unstable: the irruption of the barbarians into Europe had initiated a perpetual war between king and nobility that neither could win.107 In England’s case, it took until Henry VII for the deadlock to be broken, opening ‘those sluices that have since overwhelmed not the king only, but the throne’.108 Picking up on a story set out in Francis Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622), Harrington argued that Henry’s legislation against retainers and entails worked in tandem to destroy feudal property.109 By forbidding the nobility to maintain a military retinue (retainers), Henry transformed them from chiefs to courtiers, a transition for which they required new sources of funding. And by allowing them to sell off lands that were previously protected by entails – a legal device preventing the division or sale of feudal estates – he provided such a source, allowing the commons to come into property and ‘raise that head, which since hath been so high and formidable unto their princes that they have looked pale upon those assemblies.’110 For Harrington, the rise of an independently propertied commons spelled the death of modern prudence. Feudal government had destroyed itself, left property in the hands of the many, and provided the social foundations for a way back to a government modelled on republican Rome—the paradigmatic government of ancient prudence (before its imperial 106 Feudal tenures came in with the Goths, not the Normans: the feudal and the Gothic, as they would be for Rapin, were for Harrington reducible to one another. 107 Harrington, Oceana, pp. 192-97; on this point, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, III, 301; Machiavellian Moment, p. 388. 108 Harrington, Oceana, p. 197. 109 Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII [1622], ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 64-68, 182. 110 Harrington, Oceana, p. 198. 44 turn).111 The shape of Harrington’s history was therefore triadic: liberty had been found, lost, and found again.112 The constitution Oceana described was designed to perch on these historical foundations; it aimed to prevent liberty from being lost once again, in part through an agrarian law to ensure that as many as possible held property independently of one another.113 The Restoration soon put paid to Harrington’s attempt to do away with the ancient constitution altogether. But it did not put pay to Harrington: Oceana was too rich a seam to go unmined. Its argument about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England had pivoted on a transition from feudal dependence to post-feudal independence: vassals who served others had become yeomen who served themselves, moving from servitude to liberty in the process. 114 In Harrington’s hands, this was a story about feudal tenures and their disappearance; but its rendering of liberty as independence (or independent property-holding) could easily be fashioned into a critique of other forms of dependence: a move soon made in 1675 by Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, in a speech to the Lords.115 At issue was the attempt by the king’s minister and Lord Treasurer Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, to create a court party in the House of Commons through patronage, places, and pensions. Ashley and his associates claimed that this kind of gift was a species of property which rendered its recipient dependent on the donor. Members of the commons, they suggested, had to be independent if they were to act for themselves and the freeholders they represented; patronage made them act instead for the court.116 As soon as a member of parliament began to act for another agent, he could be labelled as ‘corrupt’. 111 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, III, 302-03; Machiavellian Moment, p. 395. Compare, however, with Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which wants to claim the Grecian republics as the paradigmatic governments of ancient political thought. 112 In secular time, the institution of the commonwealth of Oceana looked backwards, heralding a return from modern to ancient; but in sacred time, it looked forwards, heralding a coming of Christ’s kingdom on earth. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 398-99. 113 On this point in particular, see Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, in Political Works of James Harrington, p. 61. 114 Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, pp. 48-49, 56-60. 115 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 406. 116 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 408-20. 45 Over the following decades, this kind of Whig critique emerged in various debates before being adopted by Bolingbroke—even if, as Pocock points out, it was often subservient to the higher aim of asserting the sovereignty of parliament. 117 But another feature of Oceana had sent ripples beyond the restoration, and ultimately to Bolingbroke: for Harrington had bound the question of English liberty to the question of what was ancient, and what was modern. On his account, there had existed in antiquity a ‘golden moment’ of liberty from which modern history had departed.118 Modern history was feudal history, and feudal history was Gothic history; in England, Henry VII had unwittingly destroyed it, paving the way for the English to return to antiquity. Bolingbroke’s 1730s looked very different to Harrington’s 1650s, if only because Restoration and Revolution had allowed the crown and the Lords to rise again. But he re-purposed Harrington’s story by Anglicising it and moving its joints: Harrington’s ancient liberty, he now began to argue, could be found in the politics of the Saxons who had settled in Britannia, rather than in the agrarian republics of Hebraic and Greco-Roman antiquity.119 Bolingbroke claimed that the Saxons were free because their constitution had found a balance between its component parts. Unlike Rapin, who had dismissed the idea that the ceorls (or commoners) sat in Saxon parliaments, Bolingbroke found the Saxons’ ‘supreme Power’ to reside ‘in the Micklemote, or Wittangemote, composed of the King, the Lords, and the Saxon Freemen, that original Sketch of a British Parliament.’120 The presence of the freemen – holding property independently – infused the constitution with a ‘spirit of liberty’ which proved difficult to expel, although the Danes and the Normans soon tried.121 But the balance between the King, Lords, and Commons was easier to disrupt; one part of 117 It can be found in the pamphlet controversy over the standing army conducted between 1698- 1702, in the contests between Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison in the final years of Queen Anne’s reign, and in the autopsy of the South Sea crash mentioned above. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 416-17, 426-27. 118 On Harrington and modernity, see especially Pocock, ‘The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: a Study in History and Ideology’, Journal of Modern History 53 (1981), 49-72, at 68. 119 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 416-17; see also Pocock, ‘Modes of Political and Historical Time’, p. 95. 120 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 52; on the current of ‘Gothic’ opposition to Walpole in which Bolingbroke swam, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-42 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 108-49; for Rapin’s denial that commoners sat in Saxon wittenagemots, see Rapin, History, I, 27, 156. 121 Bolingbroke, Remarks, pp. 53-54. 46 the constitution could quite easily become dependent on another, inhibiting the flourishing of liberty in the process. In order to show how this had happened (and might happen again), Bolingbroke explained that the king had been entrusted with the executive power of a ‘supreme magistrate’ since the Saxons’ invasion. The two houses of parliament – the Lords and the Freemen – ‘pass Bills, or they refuse to pass such as are sent to them. They address, represent, advise, remonstrate. The supreme judicature resides in the Lords. The Commons are the grand Inquest of the Nation; and to Them it belongs likewise to judge of national Expences, and to give Supplies accordingly.’122 It was this ‘Division of Power, these distinct Privileges attributed to the King, to the Lords, and to the Commons’, which constituted a ‘limited Monarchy’.123 There was a sense in which these parts were dependent on one another, for the proceedings of ‘each Part of the Government, when They come forth into Action and affect the whole, are liable to be examined and countroul’d by the other Parts.’124 But more important was the sense in which they were independent of one another, which meant that ‘the Resolutions of each Part, which direct these Proceedings, be taken independently and without any Influence, direct or indirect, on the others. Without the first [dependency], each Part would be at Liberty to attempt destroying the Balance, by usurping, or abusing Power; but without the last [independency], there can be no Balance at all.’125 In a constitution ‘like ours’, he went on, the ‘Safety of the Whole depends on the Ballance of the Parts; and the Ballance of the Parts on their mutual Independency on each other.’126 It was a doctrine he claimed to have inherited from Rapin.127 But this was disingenuous. Rapin’s History had given a murky account of the different powers assigned to parliament and the crown; but without a Harringtonian account of liberty as free-holding, he had little to say about constitutional balance (and how it had been or could be 122 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 82. 123 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 82. 124 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 84. 125 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 84. 126 Bolingbroke, Remarks, pp. 80, 136. 127 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 80. 47 disrupted).128 By imputing his own work to Rapin, Bolingbroke turned him into the ‘Old Whig’ transmitted to us by Trevor-Roper.129 The Normans, Bolingbroke continued, destroyed the Gothic balance of the Saxons by introducing feudal tenures and rendering England’s freemen dependent and consequently unfree. Although they remained formidable in their ‘collective’ body, they had from this point no ‘representative’ body to boast of.130 Their ‘Weight’ in the ‘ordinary Course of Government’ had been removed, and they were not ‘wholly emancipated’ until the ‘great Change’ effected by the legislation of Henry VII, described so famously by Harrington.131 Before Henry had acceded the throne, Bolingbroke explained, the commons ‘had too much of the Dependency of Tenants, and the King, the Nobility and the Clergy had too much of the Superiority of Landlords.’132 If the first Tudor king had found a way of destroying the property of both nobles and commoners, ‘Liberty would have been lost’.133 But by suppressing the lords, he had allowed the freemen to rise: as they broke off their feudal shackles and came to hold property independently, the commons added a ‘greater Weight, in the Ballance of Government, to their representative Body.’134 By sheer force of numbers, the newly enfranchised commons could now plausibly be claimed to represent the nation; in order to gain parliament, therefore, the monarch was forced into gaining the trust of the nation at large: obtaining ‘Credit and Influence in the Nation, which can only be acquired and preserved by adhering to the national Interest, became the sole Means of maintaining a lasting Credit and Influence in the House of Commons’.135 This development, Bolingbroke concluded, had brought England back, ‘in Times very distant and in Circumstances very different, to the Principles of Government, which had prevail’d amongst our Saxon Ancestors, before they left Germany. Whatever particular Pre-eminences, or Powers, were vested in the principal Men, the great 128 Rapin’s account of Henry VII’s reign, for example, gave no indication of his role in destroying feudal tenures, or redistributing property along more democratic lines. See Rapin, History, I, 649- 701. 129 Trevor-Roper, ‘Our First Whig’, pp. 3-19. 130 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 134. 131 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 134. 132 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 134. 133 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 135. 134 Bolingbroke, Remarks, pp. 136-37. 135 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 138. 48 Affairs of State were directed by the whole Body of the Nation.–––De minoribus Principes, De majoribus Omnes.’136 Bolingbroke’s antiquity was Gothic, not Greco- Roman, but the shape of his history remained Harringtonian: the ‘great change’ had returned sixteenth-century England to liberties anciently held. Modern liberty was ancient liberty, and ancient liberty was generated by an assembly of independent commoners who could legislate for themselves. Equipped with this story, the remainder of the Remarks evaluated whether monarchs or ministries rubbed with or against the grain of history. Elizabeth went with it, and respected – according to Bolingbroke – the resurgent independency of parliament. The same could not be said for the Stuarts, although liberty had been renewed once again at the Revolution. Walpole’s regime was the latest threat to liberty: he was leading Britain into a dark, post-modern slavery.137 Harrington as orthodoxy In Rapin, Bolingbroke, and even the revanchist history of Carte, the debate surrounding the ancient constitution had mutated again. Rapin’s History, as we have seen, found that English kings and parliaments had divided their responsibilities since the invasion of the Saxons: parliaments had legislated, kings had executed, and succession had always been messily determined by one or the other. It was a history that made sense of the putatively unusual settlements of 1688 and 1701, and gave enough latitude to the crown’s authority to be co-opted by Walpole’s hacks (even if Carte read him as a parliamentary sycophant, just like his seventeenth-century predecessors). Rapin had managed this whilst conspicuously avoiding the questions of liberty, property, and feudal history that had animated Petyt, Brady, and, in another sense, Harrington. But Bolingbroke pulled them back into the picture, as well as returning to Harrington’s argument about ancient and modern. As a result, the Remarks ran a narrative that Rapin’s History could not: the ancient English Saxons had been free because they had 136 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 138; for the passage to which Bolingbroke was referring, see Tacitus, De origine et situ Germanorum [98 A.D.], in E.H. Warmington ed., Agricola; Germania; Dialogus (Cambridge, MA.: Loeb Classical Library, 1970), pp. 127-215, at 147. 137 Bolingbroke, Remarks, pp. 154, 207, 246, 229. 49 popular assemblies of independent freeholders who legislated; the Normans had inhibited their freedom by chaining them to feudal tenures; and Henry VII had unwittingly unshackled them, leading the English to a liberty that was post-feudal and modern, but also ancient. On this account, threats to the independence of the commons – whether from the Stuarts or Walpole’s tentacles – began to look like the Normans’ second coming. One option for the court press was to cut their losses.138 Rapin, sniped John Hervey, second Baron of Ickworth and one of Walpole’s closest allies, had become the in-house ‘political Evangelist’ of The Craftsman.139 His response was to dismiss pre-revolutionary English history altogether. The most cursory of looks at the past, Hervey argued in a crisp pamphlet, would show that ‘’Til the Restoration there was no such thing as Liberty; That after the Restoration was nothing compared to the Strength it gain’d at the Revolution; and the Strength it then acquired is so far, in my Opinion of things, from being now impair’d, that it never flourish’d in such full Vigor as in the happy and prosperous Reign of his present Majesty.’140 If there had been liberty among the Saxons, it hardly mattered: 1066 heralded a total rupture with the past, and since that point the constitution had simply passed from ‘one Kind of Tyranny, to another.’141 The king, the barony, and the clergy had each taken their turn as oppressors, and parliament had been powerless to stop them.142 Bolingbroke’s trumpeted balance had been achieved only through the Glorious Revolution: the ‘Bill of Rights ascertain’d all those disputable Points of Prerogative and Liberty, that had hitherto been insisted on either by the Crown or the People’.143 Liberty, which Hervey equated to ‘all Peace, all Order in Society’, 138 From around the middle of the 1720s, Walpole’s papers were the London Journal, the Free Briton, and the Daily Courant. In 1735, they were merged into the Daily Gazetteer. For the journalistic defence of Walpole’s administration, see H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 121-63; Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 111-37; Michael Harris, ‘Print and Politics in the Age of Walpole’, in Jeremy Black ed., Britain in the Age of Walpole (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 189-211; Bertrand Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: the Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-42 (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 1976); Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 175-210. 139 Lord John Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compar’d (London: J. Roberts, 1734), p. 51; on Hervey, see Browning, Ideas of the Court Whigs, pp. 35-67. 140 Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, p. 5. 141 Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, p. 6. 142 Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, p. 19. 143 Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, p. 40; this argument committed him to doing conceptual gymnastics over the right of resistance, for which see Ancient and Modern Liberty, pp. 45-47. 50 was a modern phenomenon, and modern history only began with Revolution.144 The Bill of Rights was the ‘Establishment, if not the Commencement, of every valuable Privilege we now enjoy.’145 Hervey’s line was often repeated in Walpole’s papers. As The Daily Gazetteer put it: ‘Renewal of what? A renewal of a non-entity. We never before had a constitution as was settled at the Revolution.’146 But a more common response, as Isaac Kramnick has shown, was to cut Bolingbroke off from the Saxons by resurrecting Brady, before turning his Harringtonian thesis against him.147 ‘To wish’, declared The London Journal, ‘for the return of the ancient constitution’, was to wish for ‘one freeholder, and that was the King, he was the only freeman, the only unconditional independent, and absolute freeholder.’148 In 1066, William I had appropriated the whole kingdom; as all land was held of him on condition of homage and obedience, there were no freeholders. In face of such cataclysmic change, Bolingbroke’s claim that the Normans, despite imposing feudal tenures, could not destroy the ‘old Spirit of Liberty’ was ludicrous.149 But his modification of Harrington continued to be useful. Brady’s weakness as a historian, as Pocock has pointed out, was his inability to show how feudal government had declined.150 He had explained its entry into English history through the Norman conquest; but its exit lay beyond him. One reason was that his complete history of England ended with Henry III. Another was that his politics did not fit his scholarship: his keenness to extract the crown’s sovereignty from conquest left him unable to acknowledge that fiefs damaged, as well as strengthened, royal authority.151 His depiction of feudal monarchy was static, and it was difficult to see a way out. Harrington, however, offered an escape route. For him, unlike for Brady, fiefs had been introduced into England by the Saxons. But by distributing property uneasily between kings and nobles, they had initiated a ‘wrestling match’ 144 Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, p. 3. 145 Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, p. 40. 146 The Daily Gazetteer 48 (23 August 1735), cited in Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, p. 130. 147 Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 130-33. 148 The London Journal 769 (23 March 1734), cited in Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, p. 131. 149 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 54; The London Journal 575 (8 August 1730); The Daily Gazetteer 12 (12 July 1735), both cited in Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, p. 132. 150 A weakness shared, Pocock argues, with Spelman. See Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 218-222. 151 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 220-21. 51 that neither party could win.152 This volatility explained why feudal government had imploded, and created a context in which Henry VII’s anti-feudal legislation made sense (on Brady’s account of feudal politics, it was unclear why Henry’s nobility should have troubled him at all). Perhaps more importantly, Harrington’s thesis provided a way of explaining why a restless and powerful house of commons had emerged out of a feudal world in which they initially held no place. It was the genius of Walpole’s publicists to see in this story a way of having their cake and eating it. Brady’s thesis could be used to sever the rope that Bolingbroke had cast around the Saxons, and Harrington’s thesis could be adapted to explain the tumult of the seventeenth century; Bolingbroke’s vision of liberty as independent property-holding, meanwhile, could be quietly dropped.153 Henry VII and his son had combined, declared The Daily Gazetteer, to diffuse property along democratic lines.154 After the feudal nobility broke up their estates, the ‘Ballance of Power’ was by Elizabeth’s reign ‘in the People’s Hands’.155 But the shift in the balance of property was not yet reflected in the balance of the constitution: in beginning to break up feudal tenures, Henry VII had created a mismatch between power and property that would only be resolved in 1688. Revolution could still herald the arrival of modern liberty, and Harrington and Bolingbroke’s ancient liberties could still be denied; but the collapse of feudal government provided Revolution with a plausible pre-history.156 In the wake of Bolingbroke’s Remarks, Harrington’s thesis became ubiquitous.157 The court Whig version was adopted by the French freethinker Voltaire after his self-imposed exile in England in the late 1720s.158 Feudal tenures had enslaved the English – ‘William the conqueror particularly rul’d them with a rod of iron’ – by turning people into a ‘kind of cattle bought and sold with the 152 Harrington, Oceana, p. 196. 153 Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, p. 133. 154 ‘The Reason of the Progress of Liberty in England’, The Daily Gazetteer 30 (2 August 1735). 155 ‘The Reason of the Progress of Liberty in England’, The Daily Gazetteer 30 (2 August 1735). 156 In addition to the article above, see The London Journal 24 (26 July 1735); The London Journal 768 (16 March 1734), both of which are cited in Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, p. 133. 157 On this point, see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 312, 321; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 170-71; Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, pp. 64-68. 158 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London: C. Davis & A. Lyon, 1733); on the Letters, see Dan Edelstein and Biliana Kassabova, ‘How England fell off the Map of Voltaire’s Enlightenment’, Modern Intellectual History, online edn, April 2018 [https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924431800015X, accessed 3 August 2018]. 52 land’.159 Henry VII’s legislation had then freed them, allowing the ‘cattle’ to come into property and the power of the House of Commons to increase ‘every day’.160 In William Guthrie’s General History of England (1744-51), the last of its kind to be published before Hume’s opening volume, it was Bolingbroke’s version that emerged.161 Scottish-born and London-dwelling, Guthrie wrote for the opposition papers Common Sense and Old England before founding the Constitutional Journal in 1743.162 His History found liberty among the Saxons and their ‘gemot’. They had used fiefs to secure their territory, but the invasion of the Normans had turned feudal property into an ‘instrument of regal sway’.163 Endless wars, however, soon tipped power into the hands of the nobility, before Henry VII acted to raise the ‘middling state of the subjects, as the only balance against the dangerous power of the barons.’164 After getting rid of their retainers and alienating their estates, the barons realised that they had become but ‘reeds before the wind’, and that the ‘ballance of power against the crown’ had begun to lean toward the commons.165 It fell to the ‘great men’ of the Stuart parliaments to seek the ‘return of many of the Saxon modes.’166 From its beginnings in seventeenth-century arguments about sovereignty and law, the debate over the ancient English constitution had come to revolve around liberty. Regardless of where its participants stood on the political spectrum, Harrington’s thesis provided their frame: by the middle of the eighteenth century, it had become one of the most ‘potent’ stories around which the English could organise their history.167 A country version like Bolingbroke’s found liberty in the free-holding that had characterised the Saxons and their independent parliaments, before it was constricted by the Normans, released by Henry VII’s laws, and threatened once again by Walpolean patronage. The court version denied that 159 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English, pp. 59-62. 160 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English, p. 66. 161 William Guthrie, A General History of England: from the Invasion of the Romans under Julius Caesar, to the late Revolution in 1688, 3 vols (London: T. Waller, 1744-51). 162 That is until he was ‘pensioned into silence’ by the Pelhams in 1746, which effectively ended his career as a polemicist for the party of the country. See Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, pp. 171-74. 163 Guthrie, General History of England, I, 80-103; General History of England, III, 1384-85. 164 Guthrie, General History of England, III, 1393. 165 Guthrie, General History of England, III, 1395. 166 Guthrie, General History of England, III, 1395. 167 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 171. 53 free-holding constituted liberty, but explained why England’s lower house had become restless over the course of the seventeenth century: Henry VII’s laws had tipped property into the hands of the commons, giving them good reason to oppose the arbitrary prerogatives of the crown—even if liberty had only been created by the Revolutionary settlement, and the order it brought in its train. Regardless of how it was glossed, Harrington’s thesis therefore provided English history with consistent foundations: liberty, however understood, circled around the rise of the House of Commons in the seventeenth century; the rise of the House of Commons pivoted on a democratisation of property-holding in the sixteenth century; the democratisation of property-holding in the sixteenth century precipitated the decline of feudal government; and the decline of feudal government involved English history in the question of modernity. Modern history could be held to begin at the moment the feudal system began to collapse, renewing a Gothic liberty that was ancient; but the decay of feudal government could also be held to have dragged England into a modernity that began in 1688, with the inauguration of a liberty that was entirely new. (Harrington’s original association of the Gothic with the feudal, and the feudal with an unstable modernity, had disappeared.) Whichever versions of liberty and modernity were in play, the English appeared to have found freedom because they had democratised their monarchy. The next chapter, however, finds a dissenting voice in Montesquieu, and begins to show that it was heard in Scotland. 54 Chapter Two Montesquieu in Scotland In a Scotland so recently gripped by open rebellion, Harrington’s thesis proved useful. In the Autumn of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart had cobbled together five thousand men and marched on England, getting as far as Derby before turning back.1 The following April, his army was defeated at Culloden and the autopsy began. That year, the British parliament passed a Disarming Act, forbade the wearing of Highland Dress, and attainted leading Jacobites; in 1747, parliament declared that all forfeited estates were to be annexed to the crown.2 Meanwhile, attention began to be directed to the deeper problem of Scotland’s flourishing feudal institutions: in particular, its distribution of property and its courts. For by the middle of the eighteenth century, Scotland continued to possess what Tom Devine has called ‘the most concentrated pattern of landownership in Europe.’3 In 1770, the estimated proportion of land held by bonnet lairds – minor landlords with rent rolls of £100 or less – was only 5.5%.4 Throughout the eighteenth century, this 1 Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689-1746 (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 260-83; see also Allan Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce, and the House of Stuart, 1603-1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996). 2 Lenman, The Jacobite Risings, p. 277. 3 Tom Devine, The Transformation of Rural Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), p. 62; on landholding patterns across Europe, see J.P. Cooper, ‘Patterns of inheritance and settlement by great landowners from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries’, in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E.P. Thompson eds., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 192-328; Joan Thirsk, ‘The European debate on customs of inheritance, 1500-1700’, in Family and Inheritance, pp. 177-192; John Robertson, ‘Political Economy and the “feudal system” in Enlightenment Naples: outline of a problem’, in Richard Davies and Simon Butterwick eds., Peripheries of Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), pp. 65-86; H.M. Scott, The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1995). 4 L. Timperley, ‘The Pattern of Landholding in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in M.L. Parry and T.R. Slater eds., The Making of the Scottish Countryside (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980), pp. 137-155, at 142. 55 showed no signs of increasing; the trend in landholding was rather toward larger estates, held by fewer landlords: right up until 1814, the number of landowners per parish tended to fall, rather than increase.5 By the outbreak of the ’45, there were also 160 hereditary courts of regality equipped with the power of repledging (or recalling) defendants from the king’s courts, as well as numerous smaller hereditary baronial courts and sheriffdoms that had fallen into noble hands.6 Courts were attacked before property. These hereditary jurisdictions, declared one pamphleteer in 1746, were ‘Handles of Rebellion’ that needed to be destroyed if the seeds of Jacobite violence were to be ‘plucked up for ever’.7 The Scots needed to follow the example of Henry VII, and free the commons from ‘their Dependence on their great Lords’.8 The English, agreed another pamphleteer, had languished under their feudal tenures until Henry VII had unshackled them.9 English narratives showed that Scottish feudal courts had to go.10 Heritable Jurisdictions were abolished in 1747, and thanks to the pioneering work of Colin Kidd, the Harringtonian (and anti-feudal) terms in which Scots opposed them can be fitted into a broader ‘disenchantment’ with autochthonous Scottish history.11 Until the middle of the eighteenth century, he argues, Scottish historiography had orbited an ancient constitution articulated most powerfully by George Buchanan, a historian and tutor to the young James VI. His De iure regni apud Scotos (1579) and Rerum Scoticarum historia (1582) had traced the Scottish monarchy back to Fergus I, who had come over to Albion from Ireland in 330 BC.12 5 Timperley, ‘Landholding in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, pp. 148-51. 6 Lenman, The Jacobite Risings, p. 278; Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 150-51. 7 Anon., Superiorities display’d: or, Scotland’s grievance, by reason of the slavish dependence of the people upon their great men (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, 1746), p. 3. 8 Anon., Superiorities display’d, p. 9. 9 Anon., An Ample Disquisition into the Nature of Regalities and Other Heretable Jurisdictions (London: M. Cooper, 1747), pp. 7-10. 10 Opposition to heritable jurisdictions was not total. Smaller courts, in particular, were often defended on the grounds that they generated order, and provided access to justice that the king’s courts could not. See The Scots Magazine, vol. IX (Edinburgh: W. Sands et al., 1747), pp. 47-64, 129- 33, 137-38; Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 156-57; see also C.B. Murray, Duncan Forbes of Culloden (London: International Publishing Company, 1936), pp. 196-209; George Menary, The Life and Letters of Duncan Forbes of Culloden (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1936), pp. 308-21. 11 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 97-185. 12 George Buchanan, De iure regni apud Scotos (Edinburgh: John Ross, 1579); Rerum Scoticarum historia (Edinburgh: A. Arbuthnot, 1582); for Fergus’s arrival, see Buchanan’s History of Scotland, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: D. Midwinter, A. Ward et al, 1733), I, 122; on Buchanan, see Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 19-20, 70-71, 83, 166-67. 56 Sovereignty, however, resided in a community of Scottish noblemen, or chief men. Equal in authority to one another, they had been loathe to make one of their number king, so had invited Fergus to take the crown instead.13 Although there was no clear institutional mechanism by which they elected kings and deposed tyrants, their sovereignty had remained untouched throughout Scottish history. Buchanan equated the nobility with the people, and the sovereignty of the people with Scottish liberty; Buchananite historiography, as a result, left little room for thinking about the feudal system as a source of political or commercial malaise.14 For Kidd, this tradition ‘expired’ with the ’45.15 Currents of anti-feudal thinking had existed since the economic and political crises of the 1690s, when the English had erected tariffs against Scottish coal, salt, and linen, and the Scots had disastrously attempted to found a trading colony at Darien, in Panama; 1695 had seen the first of four harvest failures, and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had begun to argue that Scotland’s fiefs needed to be destroyed if agriculture were to improve along English lines.16 These currents became stronger intermittently after Scotland had united with England to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707; the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, for example, drew attention to vassalage as the reason that John Erskine, sixth earl of Mar, had been able to summon a rebel army to his estate at Braemar so quickly.17 But it was only in the wake of the ’45 that anti-feudal sentiment mutated into ‘disenchantment’, and the ‘sociological whigs’ set to work in making Scotland a ‘historyless’ nation.18 Kames, Dalrymple, Robertson, Millar, 13 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 70-71, 83. 14 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 166. 15 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 97. 16 On the economic crises preceding the Anglo-Scottish Union, the classic study is T.C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the eve of Union, 1660-1707 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963). See also, more recently, Christopher Watley, ‘Economic Causes and Consequences of the Union of 1707: A Survey’, The Scottish Historical Review 68/186 (1989), 150-181, and Allan Macinnes, Union and Empire: the Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 135-241; on Darien, see David Armitage, ‘The Scottish vision of empire: intellectual origins of the Darien venture’, in A Union for Empire, pp. 97-201; Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, Two discourses concerning the affairs of Scotland; written in the year 1698 (Edinburgh: [n.p.], 1698); on Fletcher and feudal tenures, see Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 33-51, at 36. See also, more expansively, John Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, in Wealth and Virtue, pp. 137-179. 17 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 154-55; on the Union, see John Robertson, ‘An elusive sovereignty. The course of the Union debate in Scotland 1698-1707’, in A Union for Empire, pp. 198-228. 18 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 107-23, 157-85, 204-15. 57 Hume, Ferguson, and Smith saw the reforms of 1746-47 as a gateway, Kidd argues, between a ‘backward feudalism – Scottish history proper – and an Anglicised modernity.’19 Scotland had proved incapable of generating and then protecting the property of the commons; there had been no Scottish Henry VII, making its own Buchananite history a ‘lie’.20 Harrington’s thesis, however, proved English Whig historiography to be ‘authentic’: England had got rid of its feudal institutions, democratised its monarchy, and reached liberty and modernity in the process.21 Unlike anything indigenous to Scottish history, the Anglo-Scottish Union had allowed Scotland to break with its feudal past and accelerate its ‘modernisation’.22 The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct a line of thinking that challenged this historiographical orthodoxy. It was initiated by the 1748 publication of Montesquieu’s De l'esprit des loix, the final two books of which narrated liberty’s history in a different way to the English historiography we have so far encountered: modern French liberty, he suggested in these books, had been generated by feudal property and feudal courts—a point which, as we shall see, was immediately registered privately by David Hume.23 This chapter traces the influence of Montesquieu’s history on the Scottish debate surrounding feudal property.24 It does so in four parts. The first looks at the advocate, judge, and literary patron, Henry Home, Lord Kames, before The Spirit of Laws was published. In keeping with Kidd’s picture, it finds him indicting Scotland’s feudal institutions by fusing Harrington’s thesis with an embryonic stadial conception of history. The second part unpacks The Spirit of Laws, and attempts to describe the historical argument of its little-read final books. The third follows Montesquieu’s narrative of liberty into the political 19 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 208. 20 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 209. 21 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 175, 209. 22 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 207; see also Kidd, ‘Eighteenth-Century Scotland and the Three Unions’, in T.C. Smout ed., Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900, Proceedings of the British Academy 127 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 171-89, at 176. 23 See Chapter Three below. 24 For a recent reference to Montesquieu as an ‘Enlightened historian’, see John Pocock, ‘Commerce, Credit, and Sovereignty: The Nation-State as Historical Critique’, in Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Sophus Reinert, and Richard Whatmore eds., Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 265-85, at 268. In this, he was following Arnaldo Momigliano, who also referred to Montesquieu as a ‘philosophic historian’ in ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’, in idem., Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), pp. 1-40, at 21. The essay was originally published in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950), 285-315. 58 thought of the advocate and jurist, Sir John Dalrymple. Refusing to toe the orthodox line, Dalrymple questioned whether Scottish feudal property ought to be destroyed after all. Later on, as the Faculty of Advocates was conducting an investigation into entails, Dalrymple went even further: feudal property was vital for sustaining liberty in modern Britain (the fourth part). Whilst Kames appeared unaffected by Montesquieu’s history, Dalrymple’s worry found its way into Hume’s History of England: the subject of the next chapter. Henry Home, Lord Kames Coming from a different generation to most of the protagonists of this thesis, Henry Home was born at Kames, Berwickshire, in 1696.25 Admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1723, he soon made a name for himself as a jurist as well as a practicing advocate.26 In 1752, he was rewarded with elevation to the bench of the Court of Session, taking the title of Lord Kames, and in 1754 he was among the founding members of the Select Society.27 Described by his friend, John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, as having an ‘almost apostolical’ desire to promote Scottish letters, he 25 For biography, see Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); see also William C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971); Alexander Fraser Tytler of Woodhouselee, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, 2 vols (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1807). 26 Henry Home, Remarkable Decisions of the Court of Session, from 1716 to 1728 (Edinburgh: T. Ruddiman, 1728); Essays upon Several Subjects in Law (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, 1732); The Decisions of the Court of Session from its first institution to the present time, 2 vols (Edinburgh: R. Watkins, 1741). 27 On the intellectual importance of the Court of Session and the Faculty of Advocates to post- Union Scotland, see Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Lawyers, Landowners, and the Civic Leadership of Post- Union Scotland’, Juridical Review 21 (1976), 97-120; see also, more expansively, his ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province’, pp. 407-48, and the chapter on Edinburgh’s ‘early Enlightenment’ in his Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Allen Lane, 2010), pp. 72-89. On Scotland’s legal system more broadly, see D.M. Walker, The Scottish Legal System (Edinburgh: W. Green & Son, 1981); on the Select Society and the array of literary clubs and societies of eighteenth-century Scotland, see McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement. 59 was an important patron of Hume and Smith in particular.28 But he also ranged widely himself.29 In the autumn of 1745, Kames confined himself to his estate in order to write about the rebellion.30 In October that year, he had already warned a friend that a ‘disease’ had taken root in the Highlands, and was threatening Britain with ‘dissolution’; the Essays upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities diagnosed it as a persistent strain of the feudal law.31 Its introduction into Britain, Kames claimed, had spawned the law of primogeniture and the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right—the glue which had bound the Jacobites to the House of Stuart, and drove them to take up arms against a House they held as usurpers.32 In order to make his case, Kames unspooled a brief universal, or natural, history of society and government. This marked the emergence of the idiom that, as we saw in the introduction, was supposed to expose English historiography as absurd. But his natural history did not commit him to critiquing, or even just to questioning, the stories the English told themselves about their politics. Kames used it instead to give old narratives of liberty new, universal, clothes. This way, as Bertrand Binoche has pointed out, the remnants of feudal property and jurisdictions remaining in Scotland could be denounced as ‘unnatural’—more powerful, rhetorically, than ‘un-English’.33 Kames began by dispensing with Bolingbroke’s free-holding Goth, soon to be clapped in Norman chains. In Kames’s hands, Saxon men became natural men: ‘When we consider Man’, he wrote, ‘abstracted from all positive Engagements, we find nothing in his Nature, or in his Situation, to subject him to the Power of any, 28 Alexander Allardyce ed., Scotland and Scotsmen in the eighteenth century: from the MSS. of John Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1888), I, 194-95, quoted in Phillipson, Adam Smith, p. 86; see also Ross, Lord Kames, pp. 166-82. 29 Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid et al., 1751); Elements of Criticism, 3 vols (Edinburgh: A. Millar, 1762); Loose Hints upon Education, chiefly concerning the Culture of the Heart (Edinburgh: J. Bell, 1781). 30 Kames, Essays upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1747); for commentary on the Essays, see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 120-22. 31 Home to Andrew Fletcher, Lord Milton, 30 October 1745. National Library of Scotland, MS 16609, fols. 62-63. 32 Kames, ‘Touching the Indefeasible and Hereditary Right of Kings’, British Antiquities, pp. 192- 217. 33 Bertrand Binoche, Les trois sources des philosophies de l’histoire (1764-1798) (Quebec: Presses de l’université Laval, 2008), pp. 121-37, at 136. 60 his Creator, and his Parents excepted.’34 Hence the principle ‘embraced by the gravest Writers, that all Mankind are born free, and independent of one another.’35 From the outset, Kames continued, natural man was ‘fitted for Society’, and societies were fitted for government.36 But in order for either to arrive, he had to change how he subsisted. In his ‘original state’, feeding himself on acorns and drinking only water, his wants were so easily supplied that he had ‘neither Use nor Appetite for Society.’37 A ‘Culture of Corn’, or agriculture, had to develop to draw him into a ‘more extensive Intercourse’ with others, as mutual assistance was required for farming. Finally, when the mechanical arts were invented, and ‘Industry increased, it was found convenient to herd together in Towns and Villages.’38 From close proximity sprung the ‘evil’ of opposing interests, closely followed by quarrelling and the shedding of blood. Over time, aggrieved parties began to appeal to ‘Men of Weight and Probity’ to settle their disputes, and in so doing discovered the ‘necessity of fixed Judges’.39 The election of judges, which could only be ‘popular’, was the first step toward government; the first chief magistrate was no more than the first chief judge.40 Whilst society was progressing towards government, men formed the connection to things we have come to term ‘property’ via an ‘affection’, or sentiment, instilled in them at birth.41 Repeated exposure to one thing over another formed the affective bond, which is why property naturally descended equally (each male child having grown up on, and developed an affection for, the same property). Kames had divided the natural history of society into the three stages of hunting, farming, and manufacturing; with each step toward ‘industry’, social relations became more complicated, creating the need for arbitration and, finally, for government. Switching into the idiom of history, rather than natural history, he 34 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 192-93. 35 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 192-93. 36 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 193. 37 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 194. 38 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 194-95. 39 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 195. 40 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 195. Istvan Hont has argued that the divergent visions of liberty held by Rousseau and Smith originated in their disagreement about whether judges came before the law (or vice versa), for which see Hont, Politics in Commercial Society, pp. 48-68. Kames agreed with Smith that judges came first; but as we shall see, this did not prevent him from running a different narrative of liberty to Smith’s own in the Wealth of Nations. 41 Kames, Essays upon Several Subjects in Law (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, 1732), p. 101. 61 suggested that all the governments of western Europe had gone through these steps.42 That their monarchs were so often exclusive sovereigns showed only that they had grasped at ‘absolute Power’, denying sovereignty’s natural location as they did so.43 In England, exactly this had happened when the Normans imposed feudal tenures in 1066; Scotland had suffered the same fate at the hands of Malcolm Canmore shortly afterwards.44 Following the ‘accurate Spelman’, Kames claimed feudal tenures to have tilted authority toward the Crown: their intention was to ‘bestow the whole Land property upon the King, and to subject the Bulk of the People to him as his Servants and Vassals’.45 No constitution did more ‘firmly unite a People with their Sovereign, than that of the Feudal Law, nor gives him such an immediate Hold of the Persons and Property of his Subjects.’46 Fiefs were already unnatural because they rendered their holders dependent on their superiors, and therefore unfree. But they also perverted the course of nature by introducing primogeniture into Britain. The ‘Possession’, Kames explained, and ‘not the Property of Land, was given for personal Service; and when it came to be the Practice to extend such Grants in favour of children, the Master or Superior having no Claim but to one Man’s service, the eldest Son came readily into the Father’s Place.’47 The ‘Law of Nature’ determined that property must ‘descend to all Children equally, at least to all the Sons equally’.48 Primogeniture contravened it, and also spread fast. Soon it had come to determine the succession not only of military fiefs, but also of soccage tenures and, fatally, the Crown.49 Having subjected and subdued Kames’s hardy natural proprietor, the feudal law soon ‘tottered, and then fell by its own Weight’.50 Land was one of the ‘most desirable Objects’, Kames explained, but the ‘Feudal Law was most unnatural in this Respect, that the Property of Land was altogether withdrawn from 42 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 196. 43 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 195-96. 44 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 5-17. 45 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 1-5. 46 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 25; see also British Antiquities, p. 28. 47 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 131. 48 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 193. 49 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 133; this was a point, Kames claimed, that Rapin’s messy history of contested succession had failed to grasp. See Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 126, 192-93. 50 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 155. 62 Commerce’.51 In wartime, or the dangerous years after 1066, this was no problem. But ‘after the Arts of Peace began to be cultivated, Manufactures and Trade [began] to revive in Europe, and Riches [began] to encrease, this Institution behoved to turn extreme burdensome.’52 Superiors began to exchange military service for rent, which tenants welcomed. Other superiors, ‘to supply Means for Luxury, and tempted with a Price, were willing to give off detached Pieces of Land. And thus, by Degrees Lands returned to their original Condition of being the principal Subject of Commerce.’53 An ‘Appetite for Liberty and Independency’ was ‘active and universal’, so buyers of feudal property were not difficult to find.54 As they rose, this new class of proprietors tugged the rules governing succession back into line with nature. Under feudal tenures, inferiors only ever had usufruct, or a use-right, to their land. But ‘he who purchases Land, and pays a full Price, proposes to have it under his own Management, and at his own Disposal. He proposes particularly, when he dies, that it shall go to his Heirs without Limitation.’55 It was the ‘Progress of Arts and Sciences’, Kames concluded, which had ‘inspired us not only with a Taste for Liberty and Independency, but made Riches flow in among us, wherewithal to purchase these Blessings.’56 In a curious blend of natural history and history, the human beings of British Antiquities had begun with liberty—a natural ‘independency’ and the concomitant ‘appetite’ to maintain it. They had then carried it with them as they became more refined, and moved from subsisting on acorns to cultivating the mechanical arts. The historical intrusion of the Norman Conquest, however, took it away (though Kames was unclear on how, or why, his natural human beings had now become English and Scottish). In England, commerce let it flourish again by inducing the nobility to sell off their estates, allowing smaller proprietors to arise who, as a consequence of their purchase, could dispose of their estates as they wanted. In face of this growing liberality, primogeniture fell away as the principle governing the succession of private estates. The doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right – the 51 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 155. 52 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 155. 53 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 155-56; emphasis my own. 54 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 156-57. 55 Kames, British Antiquities, p. 156. 56 Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 159-60. 63 political reflection of primogeniture – soon followed suit, and by the close of the seventeenth century the crown was elective once again. Kames lacked a distinction between ancient and modern, and had substituted nature for Anglo-Saxon England and commerce (or the ‘progress of Arts and Sciences’) for Henry VII. But the shape of his story was familiar. Like Bolingbroke, he had rendered liberty as free and independent property-holding (or free-holding): to be free was to own property, and to control its sale and descent. Equipped with a vision of liberty like this, it was impossible for Kames to conceive of the feudal system as anything but catastrophic: fief-holding was not property- holding, but mere ‘possession’ in exchange for military service. In keeping with the historiographical trend identified by Colin Kidd, he had therefore located liberty in post-feudal English history.57 Commerce had allowed the English to redistribute property-holding along more equal, democratic lines; the shift had then been reflected politically, as England had transitioned from an absolute to a parliamentary monarchy. The ’45, however, had shown the Scots to be laggards. In order to catch up, they had to remove the feudal obstacles standing in their way. The English had left feudal history and returned to liberty and civilisation; the Scots had no choice but to follow. Charles-Louis de secondat, Baron de Montesquieu The Spirit of Laws ran in the opposite direction to Kames’s story because of the comparison it made between French and English feudal history. Born in 1689, Montesquieu had taken law at the University of Bordeaux, and was admitted to the bar in 1708.58 In 1714, he became a counsellor at the parlement, or civil court, of Bordeaux; in 1716, he assumed the more senior office of président à mortier, before selling the office ten years later. In 1721, he achieved literary fame with the publication of Persian Letters, an epistolary novel.59 In 1729, he travelled to England, 57 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 175. 58 For biography, see Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Montesquieu (Paris: Gallimard, 2017); Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: a Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). 59 Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. C.J. Betts (London: Penguin, 1973); an English translation was published by the Glasgow bookseller, Robert Urie, in 1751: Montesquieu, Persian Letters. 64 where he met Bolingbroke and read The Craftsman, which at that point was publishing his Remarks on English History.60 On his return to France two years later, he composed two essays on England, alongside tracts on universal monarchy and the history of Rome.61 Originally designed to comprise a book, only the latter was published.62 But the essays on England made their way into The Spirit of Laws, as chapters on the English constitution (book 11, chapter 6; book 19, chapter 27).63 Soon after De l’esprit de loix was published in Geneva, work began on the English translation that appeared in 1750.64 In July, August, and October 1749, the Monthly Review published translated extracts from the two chapters on England; in Edinburgh in 1750, they were squashed together and published as a pamphlet.65 Hived off from the rest of The Spirit of Laws, the two English chapters appear to line up with the Bolingbrokian narrative on which Kames’s British Antiquities was based, Translated from the French of M. de secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Author of the Spirit of Laws (Glasgow: R. Urie, 1751). 60 See Montesquieu’s journal, the Spicilège, in idem., Oeuvres complètes, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1949-51), II, 1354-64. Montesquieu quoted from the following issues of The Craftsman: 9 January 1730; 31 January 1730; 9 May 1930; 13 June 1730; 21 Nov 1730; October 1730; 28 November 1730. From the paper of 13 June, Montesquieu had copied out Bolingbroke’s claim that Britain’s limited monarchy was a ‘middle Point; from whence a Deviation leads, on one Hand, to Tyranny, and, on the other, to Anarchy’, for which see Montesquieu, Spicilège, 1358. For an account of Bolingbroke’s influence on Montesquieu, see Shackleton, Montesquieu, pp. 117-40, as well as his ‘Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, and the Separation of Powers’, French Studies 3 (1949), 25- 38. For a sceptical view, see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 144-50, who points out that Bolingbroke’s notion of mixed government was conventional, and that Montesquieu could have absorbed it elsewhere. 61 Shackleton, Montesquieu, p. 151; Montesquieu, ‘Reflexions sur la Monarchie Universelle en Europe’, in Oeuvres complètes, II, 19-38; Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline [1734], ed. David Lowenthal (New York: The Free Press, 1965; repr. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). In 1751, an edition was published in Edinburgh in the original French, for which see Montesquieu, Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains, et de leur decadence (Edinburgh: Balfour & Neill, 1751). A year later, it was followed by Montesquieu, Reflections on the causes of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire (Glasgow: R. Urie, 1752). 62 Paul Rahe, ‘The Book That Never Was: Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Romans in Historical Context’, History of Political Thought 26 (2005), 43-89. 63 For context to Montesquieu’s description of England, see Richard Whatmore, ‘French Perspectives on British Politics, 1688-1734’, in Jean-Phillipe Genet and François-Joseph Ruggiu eds., Les idées passent-elles la Manche? (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), pp. 83-99. 64 Montesquieu, De l'esprit des loix: ou Du rapport que les loix doivent avoir avec la constitution de chaque gouvernement, les moeurs, le climat, la religion, le commerce, &c., à quoi l'auteur a ajouté, des recherches nouvelles sur les loix romaines touchant les successions, sur les loix françoises, & sur les loix féodales, 2 vols (Geneva: Barillot & Sons, 1748); for the English translation, see Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws. Translated from the French of M. de secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, trans. Thomas Nugent, 2 vols (London: J. Nourse, 1750). 65 F.T.H. Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics, 1750-1800 (London: E. Arnold, 1939), p. 35; for the pamphlet, see Chapters of A celebrated French Work, entitled, De l’esprit des loix, Translated into English. One, Treating of the Constitution of England; Another Of the Character and Manners which result from this Constitution (Edinburgh: Hamilton & Balfour, 1750). 65 rather than cutting against it. In the first, Montesquieu claimed that the English had succeeded in separating the legislative, executive, and judicial arms of their government, and in doing so had created a constitution with ‘political liberty’ as its ‘direct purpose’.66 Parliament legislated, the monarch executed, and juries judged, which was how the English constitution protected the persons and property of its citizens. Its history, moreover, was Germanic: a look at Tacitus’s Germania, Montesquieu explained, revealed ‘that the English have taken their idea of political government from the Germans.’67 Citing the same passage of Tacitus that Bolingbroke had used – ‘On small matters the chiefs [principes] consult; on larger questions the community [omnes]’ – Montesquieu gestured at the Gothic hinterland of England’s parliamentary monarchy.68 ‘This fine system’, he claimed, ‘was found in the forests.’69 But it had only emerged after the Germanic tribes had conquered the western provinces of the Roman empire. In their native Germany, a ‘whole nation could be assembled.’ After their dispersal during conquest, this became impossible. But nations still had to ‘deliberate’ on their business, and now did so ‘by representatives’. This, Montesquieu claimed, was ‘the origin of Gothic government among us.’70 To the editor of the pamphlet on England, this claim lay at the heart of The Spirit of Laws. By finding English government ‘in the woods’, they proclaimed, Montesquieu had couched in a ‘mysterious way an opinion a Frenchman dare scarce avow’: that our constitution had been ‘secured at the revolution of 1688, concerted by the lovers of British liberty, and the Prince of Orange, at his house of the Wood.’71 A devious French ruse was at hand: Montesquieu’s woods were those of the Huis ten Bosch, or House in the Woods, William III’s summer residence in the Hague. The story of the English constitution was a story about a monarchy that had triumphantly become parliamentary, or republicanised, at the close of the seventeenth century. 66 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 11.6.156-57. 67 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 11.6.166. 68 Tacitus, De origine et situ Germanorum, pp. 127-215, at 147. 69 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 11.6.166. 70 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 11.8.167; see also, in the case of the Franks, Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws 18.30.306-307, ‘On the national assemblies among the Franks’. 71 Montesquieu, Chapters of A celebrated French Work, pp. 17-18; Tacitus, The Works of Tacitus, trans. Thomas Gordon, 2 vols (London: J. Peele, 1728-31). 66 The idea that The Spirit of Laws was a paean to the English constitution has a long history, and although historians have recently downplayed Montesquieu’s Anglophilia, they have often insisted that his interest in Gothic government nevertheless revolved around popular assemblies, representation, and the concomitant separation of legislative from executive power.72 But some historians have raised their eyebrows at this picture. Annelien de Dijn and Michael Sonenscher, in particular, insist instead that The Spirit of Laws was interested in Gothic government because it was interested in France: a constitution in which, despite its Germanic origins, legislative and executive power were united in the person of the monarch.73 The regency of Louis XV (1715-23), Sonenscher suggests, had thrown up questions about the rules governing the inheritance of the crown: if Louis had died without an heir, the throne would have reverted (through representative succession) to Philip V of Spain, thus overturning the Peace of Utrecht (1713) and risking a return to the War of the Spanish Succession.74 Montesquieu, Sonenscher argues, wished to stave off this possibility, and found a way of doing so in the history of the Franks—the Germanic tribe who had invaded Roman-dominated Gaul, and formed the polity that would eventually become France.75 The legacy of feudal property, feudal courts, and feudal custom they had bequeathed, Sonenscher suggests, allowed Montesquieu to build a distinction between sovereignty and government into an entirely new concept of monarchy.76 In a re-run of Louis XV’s prospective death, the succession could be diverted to the 72 The classic study is Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France; see also Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics, p. 19. For more recent accounts of Montesquieu’s Gothicism, which nevertheless indicate its association with (some form of) parliamentary monarchy, see Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Tacite et Montesquieu, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 232 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985), pp. 105-27, at 135; Lee Ward, ‘Montesquieu on Federalism and Anglo-Gothic Constitutionalism’, Publius: the Journal of Federalism 37/4 (2007), 551-77; Ursula Haskins Gonthier, Montesquieu and England: Enlightened Exchanges, 1689- 1755 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), pp. 131-39. For an account of Montesquieu’s England that places faction, or the ‘jealousy of liberty’, at its heart, see Céline Spector, ‘Was Montesquieu liberal? The Spirit of the Laws in the history of liberalism’, in Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt eds., French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 57-73, at 64; see also Spector, Montesquieu: pouvoirs, richesses et sociétés (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004) and Montesquieu: liberté, droit et histoire (Paris: Michalon, 2010). 73 de Dijn, French Political Thought, pp. 20-31; ‘Montesquieu’s Controversial Context’, pp. 66-88; Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 95-173. 74 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 121-29. 75 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 131-53. 76 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 131-53, at 135. 67 owner of France’s largest fief—as had already been the case with the accession of Hugh Capet to the throne in the tenth century.77 By creating a set of what Montesquieu often referred to as ‘intermediate’ powers sitting between monarch and subject, fiefs and feudal courts had also de-centralised French government without dividing French sovereignty. As inequality was built into this system from the outset, it was capable of accommodating distinctions based on wealth; unknown to the ancients, such a system was also distinctively modern.78 On this account, Montesquieu’s idea of monarchy reverberated through French political thought because it had reformatted Hobbes’s idea of representative sovereignty.79 The ripples he sent into Scotland, however, took a different route. The historical story picked up by John Dalrymple shared many of the same features Sonenscher describes: it eschewed Montesquieu’s depiction of England’s parliamentary monarchy, pointed to the proprietorial settlements of the Germans as having brokered the transition between ancient and modern, and suggested that feudal monarchies were uniquely well equipped to accommodate the inequalities produced by an economy organised around luxury consumption. But to Dalrymple and, as we shall see, to Hume, Montesquieu’s story orbited the question of whether a feudal nobility was required to sustain the liberty of an indebted commercial state like Britain. In a deeply feudal Scotland, this worry resonated more loudly than the set of questions Montesquieu had raised about succession law, sovereignty, and government. For it raised the possibility that the Harringtonian thesis we met in the first chapter was travelling in the wrong direction, and that Scotland’s relationship to its feudal property might need rethinking. 77 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 148-49. 78 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 93-108. 79 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 151-52. Montesquieu’s argument, Sonenscher shows, triggered a debate about the relations between sovereignty, government, inequality, property, and public debt that culminated in the interventions made by the Abbé Sieyès between 1788 and 1799. On this, see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 1-94. See also Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: an Eighteenth- Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), and his editorial introduction to Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), pp. vii- lxiv. For a continuation of this debate, or genealogy, into the nineteenth century, see Istvan Hont, ‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: “Nation-State” and “Nationalism” in Historical Perspective’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 447-529, originally published in John Dunn ed., The Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 166-231. For an alternative view that excludes Montesquieu from eighteenth-century thinking about sovereignty and government, see Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: the Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 121-80. 68 The story begins with Montesquieu’s discussion of a kind of liberty that Hume would later refer to as ‘personal’.80 Distinct from the ‘political’ liberty that was created by a ‘certain distribution of the three powers’ of government, this kind of liberty consisted in ‘security or in one’s opinion of one’s security’.81 It was a feeling, and it could be generated without the assistance of a particular kind of constitution: it was possible, Montesquieu pointed out, for a person to feel free under a constitution that was not.82 It could be created, moreover, by ‘mores, manners, and received examples’, and ‘certain civil laws favour it’.83 In the last two books of The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu explained how French liberty had arisen out of feudal property, manners, customs (or ‘received examples’), and courts; but not before explaining, as he had done in previous works, why republics and despotisms struggled without feudal aid.84 The problem with both kinds of government, Montesquieu claimed, was that their sovereigns had an unmediated involvement in property-holding. In republics, this was usually due to the difficulties of sustaining equality. Rome was a paradigmatic case: ‘Romulus divided the lands of his small estate among its citizens; it seems to me that the Roman laws on inheritance derive from this.’85 To preserve this equality, the number of potential heritors to property had to be restricted to two orders of people: the children of the father (sui heredes) or the closest relatives on the father’s, or male, side (agnati). It made no difference if the sui heredes were male or female; if a child of the father was female, and then married, her lands would revert to the father’s family (to an agnate) rather than going to the new husband. But the relatives on the mother’s, or female, side (cognati) could not inherit land because it would shift it into the possession of another family, and violate the 80 See below, Chapter Three. 81 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 12.1.187. 82 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 12.1.187. 83 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 12.1.187. 84 On the difficulties of sustaining liberty in a republic founded on the equal distribution of property, see Montesquieu’s fable of the Troglodytes, in Persian Letters [1721], trans. C.J. Betts (London: Penguin, 1973), letters 11-14, appendix letter 3, pp. 53-61, 286-87. On the significance of the fable, see Hont, ‘The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury’, pp. 404-06; Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 99-107. For early indications that feudal monarchy offered a way of insulating property-holding from sovereign authority, see Montesquieu, Persian Letters, letters 88, 102, 131, 136, pp. 169, 187-88, 234-35, 241. For a continuation of the same line of thinking, see Montesquieu, Considerations on the Romans, pp. 26-27, 30, 39-40, 98, 102, 125, 171. 85 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 27.521; see also Spirit of Laws, 4.5.44-47. 69 equality of the initial division.86 Since the order of inheritance was established by ‘political law, a citizen was not to disturb it by the will of an individual; that is, in the early Roman times, he was not to be permitted to make a testament.’87 As testaments would, like inheritance by cognati, have violated the equality enshrined by Romulus’ first laws, they were forbidden.88 To get around these rules, the decemviri had permitted them on the condition that they were made in ‘an assembly of the people’, so that – after the Twelve Tables – each ‘testament was, in a way, an act of legislative power.’89 This made property-holding irreducibly political: testaments became ‘acts of political right more than of civil right, of public right more than of private right’.90 In effect, they legislated for inequality: in Rome, testaments ‘introduced the ominous difference between wealth and poverty; many shares were brought together in the same person; some citizens had too much, an infinity of others had nothing.91 These disastrous consequences showed that ‘if one is to love equality and frugality in a republic, these must have been established by the laws.’92 Without them, ‘inequality will enter at the point not protected by the laws, and the republic will be lost. One must, therefore, regulate to this end dowries, gifts, inheritances, testaments, in sum, all the kinds of contracts.’93 Despotisms were like republics in how they treated property. In both types of government, property-holding was directly regulated by the legislative power; they differed only in terms of who held it. In a republic, legislative authority emanated from the aggregated will of the citizens’ assembly; in a despotism, it came from the will of the prince alone. Montesquieu summed up the latter in a two- sentence chapter: ‘When the savages of Louisiana want fruit, they cut down the tree and gather the fruit. There you have despotic government.’94 As property-holding depended entirely on the capricious will of the despot, it was impossible for subjects to sense the future gains a living tree might bring: as their property could be stripped 86 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 27.521-22. 87 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 27.522. 88 See also Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 4.5.45. 89 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 27.522-23. 90 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 27.524. 91 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 27.523. 92 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.4.44. 93 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.4.45. 94 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.13.59. 70 from them at any time, they lived in a permanent present, from moment to moment. In order to imagine a future, they required security; but security was impossible if their prince had declared himself ‘owner of all the land and heir to all his subjects’.95 Under despots, ‘one digs no ditches, plants no trees; one draws all from the land, and returns nothing to it; all is fallow, all is deserted.’96 It followed from the ‘fact that the lands belong to the prince that there are scarcely any civil laws concerning the ownership of lands. It follows from the sovereign’s right to inherit that there are no laws concerning inheritance.’97 This rendered the despot’s relationship with his subjects’ property as immediate as the republic’s relationship with its citizens’. But if the intimacy of the republican relationship between property and power was because the people ‘are everything’, in despotisms ‘it is because they are nothing.’98 The governments that had arisen out of the barbarian invasions of Rome, however, were different: the laws the Germanic tribes brought with them appeared ‘in a moment in all of Europe without connection to those known until then’. They ‘left rights when domain was ceded … set various limits to empire that was too extensive … produced rule with an inclination to anarchy and anarchy with a tendency to order and harmony.’99 The polities they cultivated were unknown to the ancients, so understanding feudal history was necessary if the foundations of modern politics were to be revealed: ‘The spectacle of the feudal laws is a fine one. An old oak tree stands; from afar the eye sees its leaves; coming closer it sees the trunk, but it does not perceive the roots; to find them the ground must be dug up.’100 The last two books of The Spirit of Laws did exactly that.101 Montesquieu began by weighing in on the historiographical debate swirling around the encounter of the Germanic Franks with Imperial Gaul. The most prominent interventions had been made by Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers, and 95 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.14.61. 96 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.14.61. 97 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 6.1.73. 98 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 6.2.75. 99 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.1.619. 100 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.1.619. 101 The best overview of these books can be found in Binoche, Introduction à De l’esprit des lois, pp. 342-363; see also Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 131-53, and Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Spirit of Nations’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, pp. 7-39. 71 Jean-Baptiste, L’Abbé Dubos.102 Boulainvilliers had seen the irruption of the Franks into Gaul as a conquest, and a definite breach with Rome; the conditions of the conquest, he claimed, had been misunderstood: Clovis, the first King of the Franks, had not arrogated the entire territory of Gaul to himself as a conqueror, before passing it on to his successors as his patrimony.103 The profits of conquest were rather shared.104 Clovis had invaded Gaul alongside his faithful, the comites described in Tacitus’s Germania: one of the advantages of such status was a ‘partage proportioné de tout ce qui étoit aquis en commun, butin ou terres.’105 Conquest brought with it Frankish ownership of the entire territory of Gaul and the subjection of its inhabitants to serfdom; nobility brought with it a claim to a share of land once it had been divided up (which heralded the introduction of fiefs into France). With this history behind him, Boulainvilliers found French sovereignty to have lain in the first general assemblies of the monarchy—the forerunners of the Estates-General.106 But it was not true, Montesquieu protested, that ‘the Franks, on entering Gaul, occupied all the lands of the country in order to make fiefs’.107 The barbarian law codes – Salic, Ripuarian, Burgundian, Visigothic – all showed that at the time of the conquest, fiefs were revocable. If a division of lands had been made, rendering all the lands of the kingdom as fiefs or dependencies of fiefs, then the king, ‘who would continually have had the disposition of the fiefs [i.e. was able to revoke them at will], that is, of the only property, would have had a power as arbitrary as is that 102 Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers, Histoire de l'ancien gouvernement de la France, 3 vols (The Hague & Amsterdam, 1727); Boulainvilliers, An Historical Account of the Antient Parliaments of France, or States- General of the Kingdom. In Fourteen Letters., trans. Charles Forman, 2 vols (London: J. Brindley, 1739); Jean-Baptiste, L’Abbé Dubos, Histoire critique de l’établissement de la monarchie françoise dans le Gaules, 3 vols (Paris: Osmont, 1734). On Dubos and Boulainvilliers, see Alfred Lombard, L’abbé Dubos, un initiateur de la pensée moderne (Paris: Hachette, 1913); François Furet & Mona Ozouf, ‘Two Historical Legitimations of Eighteenth-Century French Society: Mably and Boulainvilliers’, in Furet, In the Workshop of History, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), originally published as ‘Deux légitimations historiques de la société française au XVIIIe siècle: Mably et Boulainvilliers’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations (1979), 438-50; H.A. Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French monarchy: aristocratic politics in early eighteenth-century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘The Abbe Dubos and the Historical Defence of Monarchy in Early Eighteenth-Century France’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 267 (1989), 77-102. 103 Boulainvilliers, Histoire de l'ancien gouvernement, I, 25-26. 104 Boulainvilliers, Histoire de l'ancien gouvernement, I, 26. 105 [A proportional share of all that had been acquired in common, booty or lands.] Boulainvilliers, Histoire de l'ancien gouvernement, I, 40. 106 Boulainvilliers, Historical Account of the Antient Parliaments, I, 34. 107 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.5.622. 72 of the sultan of Turkey; this upsets all of history.’108 Boulainvilliers had failed to see that the Germans were not Romans; they were pastoral peoples, not agriculturalists: they placed no premium on the ownership of land. They preferred war to farming, and prior to raiding the Empire, their various tribes had been made up of ‘companions’ who followed a prince, or chief. Companions fought for distinction from the chief, and chiefs fought with one another over the number and bravery of their companions.109 There were no ‘fiefs because the princes had no lands to give, or rather, fiefs were war horses, weapons, and meals.’110 Nothing was permanent: on each new expedition, new rewards (or fiefs) needed to be doled out to followers, who were often the same people. This meant that the Franks had no use for so much Gaulish land: they ‘took what suited them and left the rest.’111 They took plenty of booty – ‘gold, silver, furniture, clothing, men, women, and boys’ – but after the ‘first ravages, they reached a political settlement with the inhabitants and left them all their political and civil rights.’112 Freemen, whether Gaulish, Frankish, or Roman, were left to their land: as the invading Franks had not occupied the entirety of Gaul, its inhabitants had not been forced to become serfs.113 Serfdom only developed due to later civil wars among the Franks, whose nobles perpetually attacked one another and subjugated the inhabitants of any towns they happened to sack.114 Landholding in the wake of conquest was patchier than Boulainvilliers had thought: the king, nobles, ecclesiastics, and freemen all appeared to have a particular relation to land. But before spelling out why this mattered, Montesquieu had to show why this heterogeneous network of property relations had not simply assumed an imperial shape. 108 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.5.623; see also, at Spirit of Laws, 30.22.658: ‘One sees no original concessions of fiefs because they were established by the division known to have been made among the victors.’ 109 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.3.621. 110 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.3.621. 111 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.8.625. 112 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.8.625; Spirit of Laws, 30.11.628. 113 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.10.626. 114 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.10.626; in these early days of the monarchy, bishops would use holy silver to attempt to buy the freedom of as many serfs as they could. Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.11.629. 73 This was the contention of L’Abbé Dubos, who had found in the Frankish encounter with Gaul continuity, rather than rupture.115 Frankish kings had assumed the position of Roman proconsuls; taxation had continued much the same through the census, with no exemption for Frankish nobles (who could not really be considered as such); and fiefs could find their origin in the military benefices of the Romans. But the idea of a ‘general and universal [Frankish] census derived from the police of the Romans’, Montesquieu argued, had to be dispensed with, along with the claim that ‘the rights of lords were similarly derived from usurpations.’116 Like Boulainvilliers, Dubos had been inattentive to the mores of the Germans: ‘Simple, poor, free, warlike, and pastoral peoples who were without industry and who were attached to their lands only by their reed huts followed their leaders in order to get booty and not in order to pay or levy taxes.’117 Frankish nobles were not taxed, and neither were freemen or ecclesiastics.118 Only serfs faced levies, but they were not centrally administered: ‘The king, the ecclesiastics, and the lords each levied regular taxes on the serfs of their domains.’119 The king could not tax outside of his own domain. The centralised taxation system of the Romans had been too complicated for the pastoral and warlike Franks to pick up; taxes had been replaced by a decentralised network of military obligations.120 But in order to account for this, Montesquieu had first to explain the origin of the fief. Frankish princes gave goods to their faithful, either leudes (lords) or ecclesiastics. These goods were fiefs.121 They delineated a domain, but did not directly correspond to property (though property formed part of the gift). More importantly, they comprised a cluster of rewards and obligations, given and rescinded at the will of the prince, before eventually being granted for a year, for life, and ultimately in perpetuity.122 The obligations, first and foremost, were military: noble and ecclesiastical fief-holders had to attend their king in war.123 They 115 Dubos, Histoire critique, I, 1-57. 116 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.14.639. 117 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.12.630. 118 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.13.635. 119 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.14.637. 120 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.13.634. 121 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.16.640-41. 122 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.16.641. 123 Bishops had to marshal their vassals and directly attend the king and war, until granted exemption by Charlemagne. See Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.17.642. 74 did so by mobilising their under-vassals, who were obliged in turn to bear arms for their superiors (whether bishops or leudes). Serfs were slaves of the land, and did not have to attend their lords in battle; allods did not fall under the aegis of fiefs, but freemen were nevertheless obliged to follow the king into war. Freemen were mobilised by counts, who were office-holders of the king; the territories comprising allodial lands were known as counties. The division issued in three tranches of soldiery: the ‘leudes or the faithful of the king, who themselves had others of the faithful dependent upon them; that of the bishops or other ecclesiastics and of their vassals; and finally that of the count who led the freemen.’124 This ensured that the ‘orders of the state balance each other, and though the leudes had vassals under them, they could be restrained by the count, who was at the head of all the freemen in the monarchy.’125 Fief-holders were also obliged to administer justice. It was a ‘fundamental principle of the monarchy’, Montesquieu explained, ‘that those who were under someone’s military power were also under his civil jurisdiction.’126 Lords and bishops were judges as well as generals. So too were counts, whose counties were governed by the same principles as fiefs: ‘counts were leudes in their counties; the leudes were counts in their lordships.’127 The significance of this system lay in the practices of the courts. It ‘must not be thought’, Montesquieu warned, ‘that the counts judged alone and rendered justice as do the pashas in Turkey; in order to judge suits they held a kind of day-court or assizes to which the notables were convoked.’128 Whoever held court – whether king, count, lord, or bishop – they never judged alone; their access to the property of inferiors under their jurisdiction was, in the first instance, mediated by the requirement to judge in the presence of their immediate under-vassals.129 It was a principle which ‘had its origins in the forests of Germany’.130 124 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.17.643. 125 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.24.706. 126 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.18.644. 127 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.18.645. 128 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.18.645. 129 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.18.646. 130 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.18.646; for the relevant passage of Tacitus, see De origine et situ Germanorum, p. 151. 75 Justice, however, came at a price: the fredum was the compensation paid by all for ‘protection granted from the right of vengeance.’131 Whoever held the fief held the jurisdiction, and whoever held the jurisdiction could demand the payment of the fredum.132 This tax was the principal reward of the fief, and was enjoyed by the fief-holder alone: kings ‘placed no levy on the lands that were in the Frankish share; still less could they reserve for themselves rights on the fiefs.’133 Fief-holders drew ‘all the fruits and all the emoluments’ from their fiefs, and jealously guarded their right to do so. This issued in an ‘infinity of charters prohibiting the judges or officers of the king from entering the territory [of fiefs] to exercise any act of justice whatever or to require any judicial emolument whatever.’134 The same rules applied to churches. They too ‘had the right to have settlements paid in their territory and to exact the fredum, and, as these rights necessarily carried with them that of preventing the royal officers from entering the territory to exact these freda and from exercising any act of justice, the right of the ecclesiastics to render justice in their territory was called immunity’.135 As royal officers could not make exactions in fiefs (whether civil or ecclesiastical), they had no reason to enter them.136 This decentralised administration of justice was with the Frankish monarchy from its inception: the justices of the lords did ‘not owe their origin to usurpations; they derive from the first establishment and not from its corruption.’137 As no golden age of unmediated royal jurisdictional authority could be found, the legal powers of the lords could not be built into a history of decay.138 131 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.20.650. 132 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.20.652. 133 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.20.652. 134 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.20.652. 135 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.21.654. 136 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.20.652. 137 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.22.656. 138 For a history which pivots around the usurpations of the lords and restorations of the kings, treating the war for authority as a zero-sum game, see Charles-Jean-François Hénault, A New Chronological Abridgement of the History of France, 5th edn, trans. Thomas Nugent, 2 vols (London: J. Nourse, 1762), I, 103, 143; the seventeenth-century jurist L’Abbé Fleury lamented that under the declining Carolingian dynasty, the commons – peasants, artisans, freemen, vassals – were ‘judged by the Nobles, that is, the Knights, and other Men of Power, who began about this time to erect themselves into Lords, and usurp’d the Publick Authority; of which, they had before, at most, but the executive Part: For as long as the Royal Power was in its full Meridian, particularly in the line of Charlemagne, there was no other Lord but the King; nor any Justice administered but in his Name, or of those put in Authority under him. But in the troublesome Times, every Man took upon him the Prerogative of judging, as well as of making War, and raising Taxes upon the 76 Until the accession of Hugh Capet to the Frankish throne, however, Montesquieu’s history of fiefs was stalked by anarchy. As long as fiefs, counties, and their respective courts developed along parallel tracks, their history could be written as a history of emergent liberty; the administration of justice was being decentralised, the monarch’s authority was being curtailed, and the prospects of the monarchy becoming unitary (and therefore despotic) were being harmed. But prior to the accession of Capet, three mutations to the early monarchy had conspired to merge them: the emergence of hereditary fiefs and justices, the widespread exchange of allods for fiefs, and the granting of counties in perpetuity. Montesquieu dated the first of these to the decline of the Merovingian dynasty and the rise of the Mayors. Charles Martel was the first king – in practice, if not in name – to create new fiefs and grant them in perpetuity, in order to buy off those who questioned the legitimacy of his authority.139 For the same reason, the Mayors also allowed many existing fiefs (and with them, justices) to become hereditary; by the end of the eighth century, most – but not all – fiefs were held in this way.140 But it was a high price to pay for security. As long as fiefs were revocable or granted for life, so too were its under-vassals and under-fiefs: the ‘under-vassal reverted to the king because he was not attached to the vassal forever, and the under-fief reverted likewise to the king’.141 But once fiefs were passed on to heirs instead of reverting to the king, so too were under-fiefs (and with them, under-vassals). What the king had once ‘held without mediation was no longer held except by mediation, and royal power was, so to speak, pushed back a degree, sometimes two, and often more.’142 The second mutation arrived in the wake of the battle of Fontenoy in 841. At some indeterminate earlier point between the reigns of Guntram and Charlemagne, freemen had acquired the ability to petition for a fief and, in doing so, convert their lands from allods into fiefs.143 At this early stage, the soldiery of the People.’ Fleury, The History of the Origine of the French Laws [1674], trans. J. Beaver (London: D. Browne, 1724), p. 51. 139 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.7.680-81; see also Spirit of Laws, 31.14.693. 140 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.7.680; see also Spirit of Laws, 31.15.694. 141 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.26.710. 142 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.26.710. 143 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.24.706; freemen wished to do so for the legal benefits that vassalage brought with it: whereas the Salic and Ripuarian law codes gave a ‘payment of six hundred sous for the death of the king’s vassal, they gave only two hundred for the death of a freeborn person’. Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.8.682. 77 count was not weakened by the transition: a freeman ‘still had to contribute [militarily] for his allod’.144 But a treaty passed by the sons of Louis the Pious (Lothair, Louis, and Charles) ‘changed the whole of the French political state’.145 In the proclamation he made to explain it, Charles (later ‘the Bald’) announced that every freeman could choose his lord, whether royal or feudal. This sapped the authority of the crown yet more. Before the treaty, allods remained ‘in the immediate power of the king, that is, under the jurisdiction of the count’.146 But after it, freemen could leave ‘the civil jurisdiction in order to enter the power of the king or the lord they wanted to choose. Thus, those who were formerly directly under the power of the king, insofar as they were freemen under the count, became imperceptibly vassals of one another’.147 The third mutation, the grant of counties in perpetuity, tipped the monarchy toward anarchy. As the administration of justice was so profitable, counts had begun to pay for the extension of their offices from the sixth century onwards.148 But Charles the Bald ‘made a general regulation that affected the great offices and the fiefs equally; he established in his capitularies that the counties would be given to the children of the count, and he wanted this regulation to apply also to fiefs.’149 It followed from this that most of the counts who had ‘formerly answered immediately to the crown answered to it only mediately. These counts who had formerly rendered justice in the king’s audiences, these counts who led freemen to war, [now] stood between the king and his freemen, and power was pushed back yet another degree.’150 Like the under-vassals of the lords, the under-vassals of the counts also ceased to revert to the king: when the ‘counties became hereditary, [the] vassals of the count were no longer immediate vassals of the king’.151 Along with the first two mutations, this last decision ‘extinguished political government and formed feudal government.’152 Kings no longer had ‘direct authority’; their power had to 144 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.25.707. 145 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.25.708. 146 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.25.708. 147 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.25.708. 148 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.1.669. 149 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.28.712. 150 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.28.712. 151 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.28.712. 152 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.32.716. 78 pass through so many ‘other powers and through such great powers’ that it was ‘checked or lost before reaching its goal’. Montesquieu had already compared the feudal system to a fine ‘old oak’; but the tree had now ‘spread its branches too far, and the top dried out’.153 The balance between king and nobility was only restored by the accession of Hugh Capet to the throne. He was already one of the most powerful lords in the kingdom, and held the towns of Paris and Orleans—the only sources of resistance to the recent attacks of the Normans. This meant that when Capet took the crown, ‘things changed, because a great fief, united to the crown, brought an end to anarchy.’154 Capet restored the monarchy to equilibrium and prevented its degeneration into a collection of disaggregated petty sovereignties; because he himself was a lord, he managed to restore income and authority to the crown without encroaching on the hereditary justices of others, noble or ecclesiastical. The accession left a patchwork of jurisdictions over which the monarch had no civil authority; feudal property had, to a large extent, been sundered from the incursions of the crown. Over time, however, the jurisdictions to which it was attached began to change. As judges could never hold court alone, fief-holders had to have a sufficient number of under-vassals beneath them in order to administer justice; but as an ‘infinity’ of men held fiefs with no under-vassals, the number of feudal courts began to decline in the wake of Capet’s accession.155 The twelfth-century rediscovery of Justinian’s Digest also brought changes to the courts.156 As scholars and jurists dedicated to translating, glossing, and interpreting it proliferated, the practice of judging began to require unprecedented ‘literacy, ability’, and even ‘study’.157 As a consequence, nobles and their vassals retreated from their courts, and the practice of ‘judging by bailiffs spread’.158 But the rise of Roman law did not precipitate the collapse of the 153 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.32.716. 154 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.16.695; see also Spirit of Laws, 31.32.717. 155 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 28.27.571. 156 Roman law had disappeared, Montesquieu explained, soon after the Franks had invaded Gaul. Although the Franks had not imposed their own law on the Romans, who could choose to be judged under Roman law, there were good reasons for them to adopt the Salic law—at that point the codified law of the Franks. If a Frankish freeman or a property-holder living under the Salic law was murdered, for example, the settlement due to his relatives was double that owed to the relatives of a murdered Roman freeman. This was what lay behind the Roman law’s original decline. See Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 28.1.532-34 to 28.11.545, as well as 28.19.558. 157 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 28.42.596. 158 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 28.42.597. 79 feudal; the decisions of the baronial courts had amalgamated into bodies of local custom, and these were codified by various jurists and kings.159 After having the Digest translated into the vernacular, St Louis cobbled together a code known as the Establishments, which blended Roman law with Frankish custom and was designed for the ‘tribunals of his domains and for those of his barons’.160 Charles VII and his successors then had the various local customs of the kingdom transcribed. Depositions were given in each lordship of their written laws and unwritten usages, and customs attained a sheen of generality; but they never lost their particularity, and the various feudal and local protections they granted to individuals.161 Since the creation of the Establishments, these newly codified customs were often tried in the parlement, a court which, prior to St Louis’s accession, had been convoked only intermittently to judge cases between lords, counts, or bishops. It had now been assembled permanently, as a general court of appeal. Soon afterwards, ‘many were created’ regionally, ‘so that there would be enough of them for all the business.’162 Montesquieu teased out the implications of this history by honing in on the unmatched ability of monarchies to secure liberty for their citizens. They did so, he argued, by placing ‘intermediate, subordinate, and dependent powers’ between sovereign and subject, crown and property.163 Monarchies stood out because of the powers of the nobility, the church, and incorporated towns—although the powers of the nobility had changed since the early years of the Frankish monarchy.164 Then, they had directly mediated the authority of the crown by administering justice themselves (and in perpetuity). Now, the importance of the nobility in particular lay in the fact that they depended for their feudal privileges and status upon the existence of the parlements: the courts which contained within them the history of French custom and law, including the history of fiefs. Together, they constituted ‘a 159 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 28.45.599-600. Compare the more typical view of Hénault: ‘The code published by Justinian in 529, and to which we had been entire strangers, was found in Apulia towards the year 1137, and brought to France, where it is become our written law.’ Hénault, Chronological Abridgement, I, 144. 160 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 28.38.590. 161 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 28.45.600-01. 162 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 28.39.593. 163 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 2.4.17; on Montesquieu’s unique typology of government, see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 149-53. 164 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 2.4.18. 80 depository of laws [dépôt de lois].’165 Their role was to ‘announce the laws when they are made and recall them when they are forgotten’ and, in doing so, to provide sites in which the authority and decisions of the crown could be contested.166 The existence of such corps politiques was fundamental to monarchy. In governments of one alone, the prince’s will should ‘produce its effect as infallibly as does one ball thrown against another.’167 But the effect of the prince’s will in a monarchy was unpredictable. The courts provided outlets for ‘tempering, modification, accommodation, terms, alternatives, negotiations, [and] remonstrances’.168 This allowed them to deflect the authority of the crown, but also to soak up discontent from below, leaving the state ‘more fixed, the constitution more unshakeable’.169 In despotisms, there was nothing standing between the despot and the unrest of subjects: the ‘people, led by themselves, always carry things as far as they can go; all the disorder they commit is extreme’.170 But in monarchies, the ‘intermediate dependent powers do not want the people to have the upper hand’. In conditions of popular unrest, ‘people of wisdom and authority [i.e. the nobility] intervene; temperings are proposed, agreements are reached; the laws become vigorous again and make themselves heard.’171 The nobility have ‘longed only for the laws and their duty and have slowed the ardour and impetuosity of factious men more than they were able to serve them.’172 It was why the histories of monarchies were full of civil wars without revolutions, whilst the histories of despotisms were full of revolutions without civil wars. As well as soaking up discontent from below and overweening authority from above, the courts slowed down the ordinary administration of justice. The ‘bodies that are the depository of the laws never obey better than when they drag their feet’.173 By constantly complaining and calling foul play, the courts slowed the 165 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 2.4.19; see also Spirit of Laws, 6.1.72. 166 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 2.4.19; ‘It is not enough to have intermediate ranks in a monarchy; there must also be a depository of laws [dépôt de lois]. This depository can only be in the political bodies [corps politiques], which announce the laws when they are made and recall them when they are forgotten.’ Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 2.4.19. 167 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 3.10.29. 168 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 3.10.29. 169 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.11.57. 170 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.11.57. 171 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.11.57. 172 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.11.58. 173 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.10.56-57. 81 haste of the prince and his councils, checking him in all his endeavours.174 The customs to which they had recourse did not only concern the goods and lives of the king’s subjects, but also their rank, or ‘honour’. The number of ‘rules, restrictions, and extensions’ they had to manage was consequently vast.175 But rather than hampering liberty, this legal complexity nurtured it. Judge the ‘formalities of justice’ on how difficult they make it to obtain redress, and they will seem somehow obstructive; judge them in ‘their relation to the liberty and security of the citizens, you will often find them too few, and you will see that the penalties, expenses, delays, and even the dangers of justice are the price each citizen pays for his liberty.’176 France’s history of feudal property had deposited so many rules and customs into its jurisprudence that even without feudal justices, the power of the crown to encroach on its subjects’ property was mediated, or ‘pushed back’.177 In (despotic) Turkey, by contrast, justice was always ‘speedily concluded’.178 As Caesar and Cromwell had shown, when men wished to render their authority absolute their first thought was to ‘simplify the laws’.179 Interested only in removing obstacles to the operation of their authority, they never had the liberty of the subject in view; but in monarchies, where ‘the head of even the lowest citizen is esteemed, his honour and goods are removed from him only after long examination.’180 The courts gave him tools for self-defence. The concept that Montesquieu used to describe the collective psychological make-up of a people who bought into such a system of legal inequality was ‘HONOUR; that is, the prejudice of each person and each condition.’181 If republics required citizens to suppress their sense of self-worth, monarchies required 174 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.10.56-57. 175 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 6.1.72; ‘The differences in rank, origin, and condition that are established in monarchical government often carry with them distinctions in the nature of men’s goods, and the laws regarding the constitution of this state can increase the number of these distinctions. Thus, among ourselves, goods are inherited, acquired, or seized; dotal, paraphernal; paternal and maternal; those of personal estates of several kinds; free, substituted; those of the lineage or not; noble, freely held, or common goods; ground rents, or those given a price in silver. Each sort of goods is subject to particular rules; these must be followed in order to make disposition of the goods, which further removes simplicity.’ Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 6.1.72-73. 176 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 6.2.74. 177 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.26.710. 178 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 6.2.75. 179 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 6.2.75. 180 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 6.2.75. 181 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 3.6.26. 82 the opposite: in order to work, every subject had to respect the gradated system of ranks and privileges prescribed by France’s feudal history. Nobles could be trusted to buy into the honour system of their own volition; those beneath them were given an incentive to do so by the venal system. The ‘practice of this country’, Montesquieu advised, was wise: ‘traders are not nobles, but they may become nobles.’182 They made as much money as possible, then used it to buy the noble status to which they continued to aspire.183 This allowed ambition to flower without ever taking aim at the constitution itself. Citizens of monarchy wanted to move up the hierarchical ladder of the feudal system; they never wanted to do away with it altogether. Montesquieu likened the healthy operation of honour to ‘the system of the universe, where there is a force constantly repelling all bodies from the center and a force of gravitation attracting them to it.’184 But monarchies could not be left to look after themselves. Laws had to ‘work to sustain that nobility for whom honour is, so to speak, both child and father.’185 Without them – dependent as they were on the courts – the liberty unique to monarchy would be lost. First of all, their property must be made ‘hereditary, not in order to be the boundary dividing the power of the prince from the weakness of the people, but to be the bond between them.’186 Entails (Montesquieu referred to them as ‘substitutions’) should be used to keep noble property in noble families, insulating them from the market.187 Nobles should also keep the right of redemption, which could ‘return to the noble families the lands that a prodigal relative has transferred.’ Both the persons and the lands of the nobility must keep all the privileges they had accrued over time; if any were lost, they were to be replaced by new legal products, like entails.188 Montesquieu was adamant that the nobility should never engage in commerce; doing so would erode the special status of their property, and remove the stake they had in defending the mediating power 182 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 20.22.350. 183 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 20.22.350; see also Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.19.70: ‘Venality is good in monarchical states, because it provides for performing as a family vocation what one would not want to undertake for virtue, and because it destines each to his duty and renders the orders of the state more permanent.’ 184 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 3.7.27. 185 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.9.55. 186 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.9.55. 187 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.9.55. 188 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.9.55. 83 of the courts (and with it, the constitution).189 Entails might hamper commerce, and the prerogatives attached to fiefs might ‘give a very burdensome power to those who hold them.’190 But it was a price worth paying for the maintenance of liberty. Against this backdrop, Montesquieu does not look especially like an Anglophile; The Spirit of Laws was peppered with warnings that English liberty had been built on foundations of sand. Monarchies became corrupted when the prerogatives of their intermediary bodies were destroyed, and the English parliament had destroyed the House of Lords in January 1649.191 The English nobility had been ‘buried with Charles I in the debris of the throne’.192 In the name of liberty, they had ‘removed all the intermediate powers that formed their monarchy’.193 Without bodies of people who depended for their special status on the maintenance of the constitution, the English were fragile; they were right to be so protective of their famed liberty, ‘for if they were to lose it, they would be one of the most enslaved peoples on earth.’194 The Restoration did not help matters; even before the civil wars, the English nobility had been collapsing. Most worryingly, they had become commercial, ‘one of the things that most contributed to weakening monarchical government there’.195 Montesquieu indicated that this trend might have had something to do with the history of the English Reformation: Henry VIII’s sacking of the monasteries had forced an ‘infinity of idle people, gentlemen, and bourgeois’ who had previously languished in monasteries to go to the city to seek sustenance. After this, the ‘spirit of commerce and industry became established in England.’196 If the lords had begun to look too much like the commons, and had become similarly embroiled in the commercial economy, this posed a threat to the operation of the bi-cameral parliament. The House of Lords operated on the assumption that in a ‘state there are always some people who are distinguished by birth, wealth, or honours [the lords]; but if they were mixed among the people and if they had only one voice like 189 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 20.21.350. 190 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.9.56. 191 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 8.6.116. 192 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 8.9.118. 193 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 2.4.19. 194 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 2.4.19. 195 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 20.21.350. 196 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 23.29.456. 84 the others, the common liberty would be their enslavement and they would have no interest in defending it, because most of the resolutions would be against them.’197 For this reason, they had formed themselves into a body that checked the House of Commons, just as the Commons had checked them.198 But without ‘separate views and interests’ to the Commons, they could no longer perform their function.199 If the Commons came to attack the constitution itself, the lords would not be able to stop them; the English might have failed to banish the spectre of despotism from their feast. Sir John Dalrymple, fourth baronet of Cousland Kames’s British Antiquities had naturalised Bolingbroke’s story in order to indict Scotland’s feudal institutions: liberty came from free-holding, rendering feudal tenures as tools of oppression. As the rules governing the inheritance of property were reflected politically, the English had democratised their monarchy as refinement in the arts had substituted free-holding for fief-holding, and property had been redistributed along more democratic lines. But Montesquieu had a different notion of liberty, and a different vision of how it could be maintained; a sense of security did not need parliaments or representation to thrive, but it required a hereditary feudal nobility for protection. One way of reforming monarchy was to redistribute property along more equal lines, as the English appeared to have done; but Montesquieu was warning against it: a republicanised monarchy, he appeared to be saying, was really no monarchy at all. The outcome of flattening the inequality of feudal tenures might simply be despotism.200 197 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 11.6.160. 198 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 11.6.160. 199 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 11.6.160. 200 For this phrasing of Montesquieu’s warning, see Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes, p. 206. Montesquieu’s project was designed, as Istvan Hont also suggests, to warn against ‘fusing republican and monarchical modes of government’. Hont, ‘Introduction’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 28-29. 85 Sir John Dalrymple of Cousland picked up Montesquieu’s story and applied it to Britain.201 His historical and political sensibilities have often been aligned with Kames, his fellow advocate, friend, mentor, and member of the Select Society.202 But by running with Montesquieu, Dalrymple ended up with a startlingly different evaluation of the presence of Scotland’s feudal institutions within the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Born in 1726, Dalrymple took law at Edinburgh and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1748.203 In 1771, he succeeded his father to become fourth baronet of Cousland and published a history of Restoration Britain and Ireland; in 1776 he was promoted to the bench of the Scottish Court of Exchequer.204 Hume was withering about the history: he scoffed that the ‘ranting, bouncing Style of that Performance may perhaps take with the Multitude’, and that there was ‘not one new Circumstance of the least importance from the beginning to the End of the Work’.205 But as we shall see, he was more intrigued by Dalrymple’s Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (1757).206 On 12 April 1757, Dalrymple sent Charles Yorke, then solicitor-general, a copy of the Essay.207 In the accompanying letter, Dalrymple explained that the essay had been given ‘the honour of some assistance from the late President Montesquieu’; in the Essay’s preface, Dalrymple referred to him as the ‘greatest genius of our age’, and claimed that he had ‘revised’ the work himself.208 Although he dedicated it to Kames, who he thanked for lending him his unpublished papers 201 Although Kidd’s story revolves around ‘antifeudalism’, he recognises Dalrymple as Montesquieu’s ‘fervent disciple’, and suggests that he ‘came close to advocating a thèse nobiliare’, for which see Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 129n. 202 Moore, ‘Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment’, pp. 188-92. 203 For biography, see Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Dalrymple, Sir John, of Cousland (1726-1810)’, ODNB, online edn, October 2013 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7055, accessed 4 August 2018]. 204 Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland from the dissolution of the last parliament of Charles II until the sea battle of La Hogue (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1771). In the 1770s, he also agitated for Catholic relief, for which see Robert K. Donovan, ‘Sir John Dalrymple and the Origins of Roman Catholic Relief, 1775-1778’, Recusant History 17/2 (1984), 188-196. 205 Hume to William Strahan, 11 March 1771, in Hume, Letters, II, 238. 206 Dalrymple, An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain. The work was an immediate success: Millar published second and third editions in 1758, and a fourth in 1759. 207 On Yorke, see John Cannon, ‘Yorke, Charles (1722-1770)’, ODNB, online edn, September 2004 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30237, accessed 4 August 2018]. 208 John Dalrymple to Charles Yorke, 12 April 1757. British Library, Hardwicke Papers, Add MS 35635, fols. 12-13; Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. iii-iv. It remains unclear whether Montesquieu had access to drafts of the Essay, or whether Dalrymple understood the concept of revision to be figurative. 86 (most likely the manuscript of his 1758 work, Historical Law-Tracts), Dalrymple nevertheless etched his title page with the aphorism with which Montesquieu had opened Book 30 of The Spirit of Laws, on the emergence of fiefs in France: ‘C’est un beau spectacle que celuy des Loix Feodalés. Un chene antique s’eleve—Quantum vertice ad auras Æthereas, tantum radice ad Tartara tendit.’209 Fiefs, he was suggesting, were something other than a nuisance: when ‘the feudal branches are lopped off’, he warned, ‘or even when the trunk is cut down, it still takes a very long time, before the roots from whence they sprung, can decay.’210 But the appropriate response to such resilience was not – as Kames would have argued – to keep on chopping: ‘I am far from thinking our old laws in Scotland’, he declared, ‘should upon every occasion be overturned, to make way for an union with the laws of England.’ Scottish laws approached English ‘of their own accord’, and the British legislature ‘need only let them decay by degrees, instead of destroying them at once.’211 Dalrymple followed Kames on the relation of fiefs to the inheritance of thrones.212 But the Essay’s preface signalled a departure from his mentor that went further than a technical disagreement over the appropriate speed of legal reform, and stemmed from Dalrymple’s transposition of Montesquieu’s history of fiefs into a British key.213 Tracking the final books of The Spirit of Laws closely, he began by breaking with the English narrative on which Kames’s British Antiquities had relied. Kames had used Spelman and Brady to date fiefs to William the Conqueror in England, and Malcolm Canmore in Scotland. For the English antiquarians as for Kames, they were an instrument of royal authority. But for Dalrymple, fiefs curtailed the authority of the monarch, and emerged out of the Germanic barbarian 209 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. iii-iv; ‘The spectacle of the feudal laws is a fine one. An old oak tree stands—As much as the top reached to the heavens above, by so much did the roots extend to Tartarus’, Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws 30.1.619. The Latin is Virgil: ‘Even as when northern Alpine winds, blowing now hence, now thence, emulously strive to uproot an oak strong with the strength of years, there comes a roar, the trunk quivers and the high leafage thickly strews the ground, but the oak clings to the crag, and as far as it lifts its top to the airs of heaven, so far it strikes its roots down towards hell’. Aeneid, in Virgil, Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid I-VI, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA.: Loeb Classical Library, 1916; rev. ed., 1999), pp. 441-46. 210 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 222. 211 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. vi. 212 In both England and Scotland, Dalrymple claimed, the rules governing the inheritance of the throne had come to mirror those governing the inheritance of fiefs. See Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 192-205, at 198. On this aspect of the Essay, see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 146-47. 213 Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 163. 87 settlements that followed the Roman empire.214 Fiefs themselves were not an exclusively German phenomenon: the Romans had distributed land in exchange for military service. But the Germans’ inundation of the Roman Empire had ‘peculiarities’ which had never attended the invasions of other peoples, and made their proprietorial settlements historically unique.215 All other conquests in history, Dalrymple argued, had been coloured by the strict political arrangements of the country from whence they issued. The Greeks and the Carthaginians had turned their colonies into models of their native republics: as ‘equality among the citizens had been a rooted and political principle with them at home, it became now, from their situation, still more the natural and consistent principle of their union.’216 Asian conquerors were always despots who barracked standing armies in fortresses to secure new territory. The connection of Roman colonies to Rome, meanwhile, was never severed. As the threat of invasion was constant, land was never distributed on any other basis than martial virtue, and was held in the interest of defending the republic—still held by the colonists as the ‘seat of their fortunes’.217 Modern European colonies, too, were umbilically connected to the politics of their home country: ‘Their principles of settlement are not determined by the natural circumstances of the settlement itself, but by the views with which they are settled.’218 The ‘situation of the Germans was different’ because they had no ‘general system of government’ in their native land.219 Previously, they had merely been ‘subjected in their various districts, to that chieftain, who could do them most good or most hurt’. They took these loose arrangements with them when they ‘issued abroad’: they conquered ‘rather as a band of independent clans, than of independent members, with a spirit of oligarchy, and not of equality.’220 Their native politics were too localised for them to have even conceived of the resources and discipline required to maintain a standing army, and they had no notion of conquest as a means of enforcing and upholding the imperium required to defend a 214 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 1. 215 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 2. 216 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 2-3. 217 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 4-5. 218 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 4. 219 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 5. 220 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 5-6. 88 native polity. Their intentions were more prosaic. In ‘quest merely of a habitation, they took up with the more simple thought, of spreading themselves all over the country, among the ancient inhabitants.’221 As the early days were dangerous, they initially followed the practice of the Romans: lands would not descend to heirs, ‘who perhaps were not able to defend them, but would be given to those in general, who appeared the most likely to be able to do so’.222 But as soon as the danger ceased, the ‘possessions we are speaking of, in contradiction to all others in the history of the world, which have any resemblance to feudal ones, became hereditary.’223 This planted German practice deep into European soil, and changed its nutritional content entirely; the Germans had ruptured history, leaving no way back to ancient pasts: the feudal system could ‘not in the end but swallow up all the laws of all the countries where it came.’224 Fiefs issued in a politics that was neither as centralised nor as regal as Kames and the English antiquarians had thought; the king, Dalrymple suggested, did not gaze down from the apex of a pyramid. Like all native German tribes, the Saxons were made up of princes, chieftains and their followers, and serfs.225 Once they had invaded Britannia, some portions of land were ‘reserved for the prince, and the rest parcelled out among the chieftains’, each of whom – like the prince – then settled ‘upon their lands their followers of an inferior degree, and their slaves’.226 But ‘we are not to imagine’, Dalrymple warned, ‘that the whole land of the country was so distributed, or so holden.’227 Citing the eighth chapter of Book 30 of The Spirit of Laws, in which Montesquieu had denied that the Germans instituted a ‘universal division of lands’, Dalrymple explained that the ‘Germans in none of their conquests assumed the property of the whole lands to themselves, [as] the superfluity would have been burdensome’. Ancient inhabitants were allowed to keep their land under the same tenure; chiefs had also arrived with unattached freemen, who took vacant land they found without any grant or permission to do so.228 The irruption of the 221 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 6. 222 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 6. 223 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 7. 224 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 7. 225 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 8. 226 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 8-9. 227 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 9. 228 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 9. 89 Saxons had therefore left a mess of unattached freemen, serfs, ancient proprietors, vassals (or followers) subjected to chiefs, and chiefs in an ambiguous relation to princes. To assume, with Boulainvilliers, that there had been a universal division of lands was to give German princes a despotic power that they had simply failed to hold. But disempowering the king did not empower the demos: Dalrymple’s freemen and ancient proprietors were not there to flush an Anglo-Saxon parliamentary monarchy out of history. Instead, as Montesquieu had claimed, the freemen generated the authority of the king. All over Europe, the basic features of feudal property were the same. Soon after the German invasions, chieftains who had previously held fiefs at the pleasure of the prince began to hold them for life, and then hereditarily. They then granted parts of their own estates to their followers as fiefs, though initially they were granted at pleasure or for life only. Fief-holding followers, or vassals, were obliged to follow their chief, or lord, to war. Chiefs, meanwhile, judged all the people who inhabited their estates.229 Feudal courts were glutted with emoluments, and were jealously defended: from the outset of the feudal system, the king could not judge a vassal that was not his.230 But unattached freemen and ancient proprietors were vassals of nobody: in French terminology, they held their land allodially, not feudally.231 But as it was ‘necessary to reduce to subjection, under government, in a political, those, who were not subjected in a feudal capacity’, the king sent his own officers to judge them and lead them to war.232 These officers were often called counts, the territories over which they had jurisdiction counties. They worked on the same principles as fiefdoms: lords could no more judge the king’s freemen than the king could judge his lords’ vassals.233 In Britain, the distinction between fiefs and allods was identical to that between ‘Thain Land or Boc Land, and Reve Land or Folk Land’.234 Possessors of Bocland were called ‘Thegen, that is lords’, with ‘Theoden’, or vassals, 229 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 270. 230 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 272. 231 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 10. 232 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 9-10. 233 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 10; at this point, Dalrymple cited chapters 17, 18, and 20 of Book 30 of The Spirit of Laws. The first described the symmetry of the relation between lords and vassals, counts and freemen; the second explained the civil and military obligations attached to fiefs and counties; the third emphasised that the civil and military powers of the lords did not derive from usurpation, and explained that in early France, the king could not even enter the fiefs of his lords. 234 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 11. 90 underneath them; land over which ‘the King’s officer, called in the Saxon language, Reve, and afterwards sherriff, had jurisdiction, was called Reveland.’ Occupants of Reveland were attached to the king only in a ‘political capacity’.235 Like those of other Germanic nations, the embryonic settlements of the Saxons could not be considered as wholly feudal—the system was ‘not established at once, in any one kingdom of Europe’.236 Too much land was held allodially, and the few feudal tenures that did exist were held only by chiefs. Keenly aware that their authority hung on their ability to transmit fiefs to heirs, they were chary of extending the privilege to inferiors: initially, the grants they made to their followers were ‘of the nature of Leases, not of Fiefs, and the possessors of them were tenants, not rear vassals.’237 As long as fiefs failed to transform the lower orders into ‘rear vassals’, feudal relations could not take on that ‘regular subordination’ which later made them ‘compleat’.238 It took the Normans to push feudal tenures down through the ‘various ranks of the nation’, transforming allods into fiefs as they did so.239 But the effect was to weaken the crown.240 In the hereditary fiefs of the Saxon chiefs, the ‘out-lines of the feudal system’ could be seen; the Normans only expedited its completion.241 Seeking to reflect the ‘greater progress of the feudal system’ in France, they made three changes to the Saxon constitution. In doing so, Dalrymple remarked, they had ‘dazled’ the antiquarians into thinking that William I had introduced ‘the Primordia of the Fiefs’ himself.242 The first, as the Domesday book made clear, was to transform remaining allods into fiefs (even the Church, receiving its first mention, was made to hold its land feudally).243 This should have destroyed the offices founded on allodial 235 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 12-13. 236 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 17. 237 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 16. 238 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 15. 239 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 17. 240 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 16; at this point Dalrymple cited chapter 25 of Book 31 of The Spirit of Laws—‘The Principal Cause for the Weakening of the Carolingians’. Here, Montesquieu explained that those freemen who exchanged their allods for fiefs ‘left, so to speak, the civil jurisdiction in order to enter the power of the king or the lord they wanted to choose.’ Formerly ‘directly under the power of the king, insofar as they were freemen under the count, [they] became imperceptibly vassals of one another, for each freeman could choose the lord he wanted, whether the king or another lord.’ Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.25.708. 241 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 17. 242 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 18. 243 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 19. 91 property. But in France, counties and earldoms had long since become hereditary, and were ‘held of the sovereign by a feudal tenure’. The counts, in turn, ‘had spread the same system under themselves, and made the freemen hold of them by the same tenure’ again.244 Upon conquest, William followed the Normans’ native practice: the second Norman ‘alteration’ was to render ‘seignoral and perpetual’ honours which ‘among the Saxons were only official, and during pleasure.’245 This was a catastrophe for royal authority: the ‘interposition of the earls between the king and the freemen’ necessarily threw his power over them ‘one step further back’.246 But more than these ‘great offices’ were made hereditary. The final Norman change was to ensure that ‘the whole fiefs of the nation, as well those holding of the great officers, as those holding of the lords, became such’. Or, put another way: to ensure that ‘the rights of the rear-vassals advanced to the same degree of firmness, with that of the more immediate vassals of the crown.’247 As lords sprouted everywhere, the king’s authority continued to wilt. Given this hinterland, the famous restrictions the Normans placed on property looked less like expressions of absolute royal authority than attempts to compensate for its loss. The Conqueror had assigned so many ceremonies to homage, Dalrymple explained, in order to ‘preserve the memory of the tenure’ at a time in which ‘the heirs of many thousand vassals holding both of the king and subjects, were claiming possession, and could no longer even by the last be refused it.’248 Both king and lords used the ceremony to recoup some of the authority that widespread hereditary tenures had leaked. The same went for ‘wardship and marriage of the heir, of which, as Sir Henry Spellman proves, there are no vestiges in Saxon law’.249 Soon after 1066, incidents of wardship and marriage could be found ‘taking place in favour both of the king as superior lord, and of the subject as superior lord’. Norman nobles, in particular, had been accustomed to making these demands in exchange for granting land hereditarily—a practice they continued in 244 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 19. 245 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 20. 246 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 273; the ‘earls acquired the same power over the freemen become now their vassals, as had formerly belonged to the king’. Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 273. 247 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 20. 248 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 21. 249 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 21. 92 England.250 The Scots soon followed in the Normans’ wake. Before Malcolm II, fiefs were ‘advanced in much the same degree’ as they were in England. Imitating William I, Malcolm then ‘completed the feudal structure’ in Scotland.251 Dalrymple’s careful account of the emergence of fiefs in Britain was almost identical to Montesquieu’s history of the Franks. Feudal property and feudal courts were unique to the post-Roman settlements of the Germans, and mediated the relationship between property-holding and sovereignty; for this reason, they were modern, and also bolstered the authority of the nobility rather than the crown. On this account, fief-holding was not poisonous by virtue of its antithetical relationship to free-holding: feudal tenures were not the suppressants of liberty that Kames had thought them to be. Dalrymple was initially unsure, however, about what ought to be preserved, and what ought naturally to decay. For feudal property was not just property: it also entailed territorial jurisdictions, the final vestiges of which had recently been abolished in Scotland. In 1758, Dalrymple had welcomed the 1747 Act: a ‘few wise statutes after the late rebellion’, he wrote to Charles Yorke in October that year, ‘spread more liberty & industry & wealth through this country, than all the violent efforts of ministers & princes from James the first down to the Union.’252 But in the first edition of the Essay, he equivocated. Cromwell, he worried more than once, had been quick to abolish both English and Scottish feudal jurisdictions upon his ascension to the protectorate.253 Before him, James VI had 250 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 21-22. 251 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 24; at this point, Dalrymple cited Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.8.682-84 again. 252 Dalrymple to Charles Yorke, 17 October 1758. British Library, Hardwicke Papers, Add MS 35635, fols. 172-73. In the same letter, Dalrymple passed on his regards to Margaret Lygon, Yorke’s wife, and expressed his hope that her current reading – the ‘ode to contemplation’ – would live up to Montesquieu’s Le temple de Gnide (Paris: Simart, 1725). He was perhaps referring to William Hamilton’s Contemplation: or, the Triumph of Love (Edinburgh: Hamilton & Balfour, 1747). 253 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 85, 294; Dalrymple cited two statutes (1654, cap. 9; 1656, cap. 4) to make his case. The first, titled ‘Scotland made one Commonwealth with England’, decreed that all shall be ‘for ever hereafter freed and discharged of, and from all suits, and appearing at or in any their lords or superiors courts of justiciary, regality, stuartry, barony, bayliary, heritable sheriffship, heritable admiralty, all which, together with all other offices heritable, or for life, are hereby abolished and taken away’. The act also ordained that ‘all forfeitures, escheats, simple, or of life, rent bastardy, and last heir, which heretofore escheated forfeited and fell to the king, lords of regality, or other superiors, shall from henceforth fall, escheat, and forfeit to the lord protector of the commonwealth’. The second declared that all tenures held ‘by knights service of the late king, or any other person, and all tenures by soccage in chief, be taken away; and all Tenures are hereby enacted and declared to be turned into free and common soccage’. See Henry Scobell ed., A Collection of Acts and Ordinances of General Use, made in the Parliament (London: H. Hills & J. Field, 1658). This was the collection Dalrymple used. 93 tried and failed to do the same thing in Scotland.254 The 1747 Act itself, he ventured cautiously, had abolished jurisdictions that ‘were found’ dangerous, and ‘brought the courts in Scotland nearly on the same footing with the courts in England.’255 He made no attempt at evaluation. This initial caution, Dalrymple later admitted to Yorke, flowed from the difficulty he had had ‘in reconciling President Montesquieu’s notions with the abolition of our heretable jurisdictions in Scotland.’256 It seemed, he explained, that ‘his principles laid down tended to blame that measure’.257 But Yorke had given him a way out by suggesting that Montesquieu’s ‘opinion was that though hereditary jurisdictions in absolute monarchy are barriers against the crown, even whilst they form petty tyrannys over the meaner subjects; yet in limited monarchys the abolition of them, tends to establish and diffuse law and liberty’.258 Britain had a parliament, rendering the jurisdictional power of the nobility less important than it might have been in France. Yorke’s perception, Dalrymple informed him gratefully, had now made it into the second edition. The ‘ward-holding act and the jurisdiction act’, Dalrymple now proclaimed, ‘were the ideas of one [Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, Yorke’s father] to whose plans of police and of law, Lord Bacon, had he seen them, would have given the character, which he gave of the laws of another framer of British police [Henry VII]’. Those who sought the ‘weight of president Montesquieu’s authority’ to oppose Hardwicke’s bill, he went on, had failed to grasp Yorke’s point: ‘Perversion of judgment not to reconcile that illustrious author’s sentiments!’, Dalrymple exclaimed.259 Hereditary jurisdictions were ‘barriers against the crown’ only in ‘absolute monarchies’; in ‘limited monarchies, the abolition of them tends to establish, and diffuse law and liberty.’260 With feudal courts out of the way, only feudal property remained. Its history since the conquest had diverged wildly in Scotland and England; but rather than 254 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 293. 255 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 294-95. 256 Dalrymple to Charles Yorke, 14 February 1758. British Library, Hardwicke Papers, Add MS 35635, fols. 102-03. 257 Dalrymple to Yorke, 14 February 1758. 258 Dalrymple to Yorke, 14 February 1758. 259 Dalrymple, An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain, 2nd edn (London: A. Millar, 1758), p. 247. 260 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, 2nd edn, p. 247. 94 lambasting the chasm between these histories, Dalrymple defended it by narrating the emergence of entails in Britain. Entails were legal devices that allowed proprietors to do two things: force their estates to descend perpetually along particular genetic lines, and prevent them from being broken up (either directly, by being sold off; or indirectly, by being used as collateral for the contracting of debt).261 They mimicked the unique quality of feudal property, but had only emerged in response to the decay of feudal tenures themselves: in order for proprietors to need entails, land had first to become the subject of commerce; and in order for land to become the subject of commerce, landowners had to be able to break up and sell off – or ‘alienate’ – their estates. This began to happen at different moments in English and Scottish history, which Dalrymple explained by reaching for a natural history of the ‘progress of society’.262 Like Kames, he argued that human beings naturally move through a sequence of societal ‘states’, refining their ideas of property as they do so; ‘the extent of the notions of mankind concerning their powers over property increases with society’.263 Beginning as hunter-gatherers, the ‘inconveniences and dangers’ of such a life soon lead them to pasturage. In neither state did humans have any notion of property in land. But once they could no longer subsist on the ‘flesh and milk of their cattle’, they turned from necessity to the ‘art of agriculture’.264 Only then did the idea of land-property begin to emerge, as farmers went through the repeated affective exposure to one bit of land over another.265 After this, traders in towns began to complicate the ways in which property could be acquired and transmitted.266 Alienation was a complicated idea and a modern phenomenon. The Romans, Dalrymple explained, were agriculturalists, and had not yet progressed to 261 Similar kinds of legal product existed all over Western Europe: mayorazgos in Spain, majorats and substitutions in France, and fideicommissa in Germany and Italy. See A.W.B. Simpson, ‘Entails and Perpetuities’, The Juridical Review 24 (1979), 1-20, at 3, as well as Cooper, ‘Patterns of inheritance’, pp. 192-328. The first instance of entail in Scotland was recorded in the late 1290s, and by the early fourteenth century they had become common. See D.M. Walker, A Legal History of Scotland, 5 vols (Edinburgh: W. Green & Son, 1988-98), II, 634. 262 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 86. 263 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 94. 264 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 86-88. 265 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 88. 266 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 94. 95 a societal state in which it was possible to conceive of the free alienation of land. Picking up on Montesquieu’s treatment of Roman property, Dalrymple claimed that in the ‘earlier ages of the Roman law’, the Romans could not ‘alienate their heritage but in calatis comitiis, and with the consent of the people.’267 This was a huge constraint on the free disposal of property.268 But when with ‘these restraints, in this state of society, there chances to intervene the concurrence of feudal principles, the bar against the power of alienation becomes double.’269 The first occurrence of alienation of English land therefore arose later, among twelfth-century ‘trading people’ in a ‘more extended state of society than people living in the country’.270 Soon after alienation arose in towns, holders of soccage tenures began to follow suit.271 In both England and Scotland, as the ‘strictness of the feudal system yielded to a more moderate temperament, alienation of even ‘the military holdings of both nations’ became so widespread that under Henry III, it ‘became requisite to restrain it by law’.272 The restraint did not work for long. Soon sub-feuing increased, which meant that vassals were gifting parts of their fiefs to inferiors to hold as fiefs. Initially, the new rear-vassals this created owed their allegiance not to the vassal who had gifted them their fief, but to his original lord. But this connection waned over time, and the ‘superior lord in the end came to be deprived of his services and emoluments.’273 Vassals wanted to alienate, but their superiors were wary of losing their emoluments; in 1285, Edward I passed the statute Quia emptores terrarum in order to break the deadlock, before it was transcribed into the Scottish statute-book under Robert I. In favour of vassals, the Quia allowed alienation; in favour of lords, it enacted that any lands alienated be held of the original lord, not the alienor.274 But 267 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 89. 268 In attempting to bolster the interests of creditors against those of debtors, Justinian had ordered that ‘a portion of the moveables equivalent to the debt, should first be sold; but if these did not suffice, that an equivalent portion of the land should be sold; and if no purchaser appeared, that the subject offered to sale, should become the property for ever of the creditor.’ Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 142. 269 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 89. 270 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 94. 271 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 95. 272 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 95; the restraint itself, Dalrymple claimed, could be found in Magna Carta, and was translated into the laws of Scotland by William the Lion. Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 95. 273 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 96-97. 274 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 97. 96 it was the vassals who won out. The ‘necessary effect’ of the Quia was to make ‘feudal land as much the subject of commerce, as if it were allodial’.275 Amidst such chaos in land-property, superior lords continued to face the problem of severed ties, and the free alienation of land was ‘brought to perfection’ in England by the reign of Charles II.276 But in Scotland, the Quia did not work to such dramatic effect. The Scots, Dalrymple warned, had ‘followed too close upon the English statute’.277 Wherever the feudal law had already ‘somewhat abated’ (as it had in England), it was ‘right to allow an unlimited alienation’. But in Scotland it was otherwise: ‘the Feudal System still flourished, and where the lord had a very strong interest in the fief, to give the vassal an unlimited power of alienating, was bestowing upon him a power of giving away what did not belong to himself.’278 So superiors refused to observe the law, and it never showed up in any decision made by the Court of Session since its inception in 1532.279 Welcome attempts were made at facilitating alienation by James II and James IV, both of whom legislated to encourage ‘all people to set their ward lands in feu farm, or by soccage tenure, holding of themselves’.280 The acts, designed to facilitate commerce in land, were ‘made from national considerations, and from national interests’.281 But soon they gave way to ‘particular considerations and particular interests’, and were repealed in part by James VI and completely by Charles I.282 At the turn of the seventeenth century, Dalrymple lamented, Scotland was a ‘monarchy, controuled by nothing but a most grievous oligarchy’. The repeals revealed its condition: the king and the nobility simply ‘could not bear to see the subjection under which they thereby held their country, broke through, by the independency of the soccage tenure, into which their vassals were continually turning their lands.’283 Fortunately, however, a ‘greater independence of the people, 275 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 100. 276 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 99-100. 277 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 100. 278 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 100. 279 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 101. 280 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 102. 281 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 103. 282 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 103. 283 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 103. 97 and bent of that people in favour of alienation, joined to a greater moderation in the government’, had since brought alienation in Scotland ‘to perfection’.284 Divergent histories of alienation, though, meant divergent histories of entails: here, the Scots lagged behind. In thirteenth-century England, it had become obvious to nobles that the ‘allowing land to come so much into commerce’ threatened to weaken them irreparably; their lands, they saw, ‘were continually shifting into the hands of people, who had formerly been little better than their slaves.’ In order to stem the flow, they ‘invented the artifice of entails, which took particular estates out of commerce, and with regard to those estates, revived the spirit of the feudal law.’285 The same year as the Quia was passed, they extracted from Edward I the statute De donis conditionalibus, which gave ‘sanction by publick law to private men to entail their estates’. Most great families availed themselves of the law, and over time, the ‘property of these great families continually increasing, and never diminishing, their power grew to such a height, as enabled them totally to enslave the people, and sometimes to overshadow the crown.’ (It was a truism in politics, Dalrymple claimed, that ‘power follows property’.)286 Two developments brought them to heel. First, the ‘increase of commerce gave a more general and universal bent for the alienation of land; and as that commerce established a luxury, which the great families, beyond others, rushed into; many of the nobles, to supply their prodigality, were willing to shake off the fetters of their entails’.287 But it was the ‘politick prince Henry VII’ who sealed the nobility’s fate. Seeing the superiority which ‘the preservation of land property in their families had given to the nobles’, and which had lost his predecessors their lives and their crowns, he repealed De donis and, in doing so, effectively banned entails in England.288 As the ‘genius of the times was bent against the feudal system’, neither the landed men, the money-men, the lawyers, nor the judges objected to the reform. None of them foresaw its consequences either. The dissolution of entails, Dalrymple explained, ‘added greatly to the transition of property from the lords to the commons, which so soon after made the commons possess almost all the land 284 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 104. 285 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 155. 286 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 156. 287 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 156-57. 288 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 158. 98 property of the kingdom’.289 After their power overwhelmed the nobility and the king, they became ‘insolent’ enough to declare the ‘nobles no necessary part of the constitution, and by a publick trial and publick execution, to put their sovereign to death.’290 In England, then, the history of entails was recognisably Harringtonian, if lacking the triumphal gloss and triadic shape which Bolingbroke and Kames had given it. The destruction of entails had allowed the house of commons to rise to a prominence which now ‘distinguishes the British constitution, from almost all the hereditary sovereignties in Europe’; the commons’ power, he acknowledged, had become the ‘foundation-stone of the English liberty’.291 But entails took a different course in Scotland. As in England, the ‘desire of reviving the feudal law, at a time when that spirit was decaying’, had introduced them.292 But they came later to Scotland than to England: as the nation took longer to rail against the ‘strictness of the feudal system’, attempts to revive it were delayed too. As long as land was not subjected to commerce, there was no need to pluck estates from the market’s clutches, and hence no need for entails. But as soon as ‘arts and commerce introduced luxury, when the alienation of land property became more frequent, and when the voice of the laws was heard through the land, then people, to secure their families, introduced entails.’293 The first Scottish charter bearing a clause prohibiting alienation dated to 1489, and by the seventeenth century, clauses of this kind had become common. But they were not sanctioned by public law until 1685, at which point parliament passed the Entails Act in order ‘to give precision to a form of conveyance, that was now becoming so extremely important in its consequences.’294 Entails, Dalrymple pointed out, had been ‘made as effectual by statute among us, as they had been made by the statute De donis among the English’, exactly four hundred years earlier.295 But this schism did not mean, as it had done for Kames, that the Scots had to catch up. Many Scottish entails, just like those of the English, had begun to be broken through various means; their strictness, Dalrymple thought, had been 289 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 160. 290 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 160. 291 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 62. 292 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 161. 293 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 161-62. 294 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 162-66. 295 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 167. 99 overplayed.296 Contrary to Kames’s claim, the number of entailed estates had in fact been falling, and those that remained posed no threat: ‘many of the old families are still enabled to preserve themselves in their estates, and while they share the wealth, the liberty, and the safety of the English, find their antient lustre the same’.297 The ‘excise-man’ did not need to be ‘more honoured and revered than an antient noble of the land’; preserving their ‘antient lustre’ did not even come at the expense of commerce: a ‘total dissolution’ of entails would flood the market with land-property and, from the ‘cheapness occasioned by that tide, would call the money out of trade to the purchase of land’.298 Landed men would become ‘discontented and bankrupt’; traders, meanwhile, would ‘hasten to be little lairds, poor, proud, and idle.’299 Protecting entailed estates, he went on, would keep the supply of land-property low, and its price high. Low supply would ‘turn our native country-men into manufacturers and merchants’, and the high price of land would ‘put it out of their thoughts when they become such, to convert their circulating cash into a dead stock of land.’300 The problem with the ‘clamour’ raised by those arguing for a total dissolution of entails, Dalrymple concluded, was that it was insufficiently historical. Lawyers were often more interested in ‘foreseeing what might happen, than what has happened’; their ‘prophecies were founded on reason’, but had come to nothing.301 If the much trumpeted ‘mischiefs’ which ‘in reason seem to attend upon entails, should in fact happen’, entails would fall away. If commerce developed to such a degree ‘that any attempt to preclude men from the most unbounded commerce of land’ became a disadvantage, then entails would ‘share the fate’ of the rest of the feudal law.302 Paraphrasing Montesquieu, Dalrymple warned that wise governments ‘find it safer to conduct than to thwart, to point out to men their good, than to drive them to it’.303 Scottish entails did not need to go. 296 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 168-80, 181. 297 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 182-83. 298 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 183. 299 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 183. 300 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 183. 301 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 184. 302 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 184-85. 303 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, pp. 186-87. 100 It is difficult to overstate the novelty of Dalrymple’s argument. As we saw in the first chapter, Harrington’s thesis had become the orthodox way of spinning the story of English liberty. In the case of England, the Essay had also deployed it: a combination of luxury consumption and Henry VII’s legislation had redistributed English property along more democratic lines, accounting for the rise of the House of Commons in the sixteenth century. The parliamentary monarchy this had created, Dalrymple had acknowledged, was the ‘foundation-stone’ of English liberty.304 Dalrymple wanted none of this to be rolled back; he had also welcomed Scottish alienation and the ‘independence of the people’ it ushered in.305 But Montesquieu had given him a nagging sense that the English story should not be imitated; unlike Kames, Dalrymple was reluctant to bend Scotland’s distinctive history into an English shape. Behind this reluctance lurked the suspicion that in a modern and indebted commercial state like Britain, liberty could not be guaranteed by parliamentary monarchy alone. As yet, Dalrymple did not follow Montesquieu all the way to the claim that only a hereditary feudal nobility could resist the destruction of a constitution in crisis. But his Essay was a history of Great Britain: Scotland’s feudal history, the title suggested, fed into the modern British state; no Anglicising exorcism was required. The advocates’ debate over entails A year after the first edition of the Essay was published, Kames published the manuscript that he had already circulated to Dalrymple as Historical Law-Tracts.306 As we have seen in the introduction, John Millar and Dugald Stewart saw Kames’s book as the first Scottish work to grasp Montesquieu’s project. But to Dalrymple, their claims would have been absurd: The Spirit of Laws was a book about the relevance of feudal history to modern politics, and when he accused Scottish lawyers of abandoning this history in favour of ‘prophecies founded on reason’, Kames was his primary target. He had already universalised Bolingbroke’s account of English 304 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 62. 305 Dalrymple, Feudal Property, p. 104. 306 Kames, Historical Law-Tracts, 2 vols (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1758). 101 history in British Antiquities. But as David Lieberman has shown, he went a step further in Historical Law-Tracts.307 The rationality or irrationality of any given law, he now claimed, could be determined by its relation to a particular kind of ‘historical knowledge’.308 This knowledge could be obtained, first and foremost, by tracking the law ‘from its first rudiments among savages, through successive changes, to its highest improvements in a civilized society.’309 Doing so, however, required some scholarly sleight of hand: in ‘dark ages unprovided with records’, it was impossible to form ‘any regular historical chain’ connecting savagery to its civilised terminus.310 But ‘broken links’ could be repaired by ‘hints from poets and historians’, and ‘cautious conjectures drawn from the nature of the government, of the people, and of the times.’311 This was a vision of history capacious enough to accommodate a priori speculation about nature and time; it housed various kinds of contextual data, any or all of which could be used to sift the rationality of statutory law. Contextualise statutes like this, Kames suggested, and better judgements could be made about legal reform.312 In Britain this was an especially urgent task: neither Anglo-Scottish Union, royal or parliamentary, had reduced English and Scottish law into one another; it was an ‘unhappy circumstance’ that different parts of the same kingdom continued to be governed by different laws.313 In the highly charged environment of 1707, the Scots could not have been expected to float such a project. (What nation, he asked, would ‘tamely surrender its laws more than its liberties?’)314 But it had now become possible to begin compiling a ‘regular institute of the common law of this island, deducing historically the changes which that law hath undergone in the two nations’.315 Kames presented the Historical Law-Tracts as a contribution to the 307 On how Kames sought to adapt Scottish law to the ‘needs’ of commercial society, see David Lieberman, ‘The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: the Jurisprudence of Lord Kames’, in Wealth and Virtue, pp. 203-35, at 209, as well as Lieberman, The Providence of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 144-75, at 157. See also James Moore, ‘Natural Rights in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, pp. 291-316, at 304-307. 308 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, ix. 309 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, v. 310 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 36. 311 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 36. 312 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, v-ix. 313 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, xiii. 314 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, xiii. 315 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, xv. 102 endeavour; his method of relating statutes to a civilizational scale could be used, he thought, to purge anachronisms in either body of law. The ‘feudal system’ was his most prominent example, and brought the British legal schism into relief. Although it formerly housed ‘the chief part’ of municipal British law, only the English had succeeded in reducing it ‘to a shadow’.316 In British Antiquities, Kames had already issued a warning that the Scots had yet to do the same; in Historical Law-Tracts, he narrowed his focus to the persistence of entails in Scotland. His new universal history allowed him to critique them as ‘uncivilised’, but he also admonished them because of their deleterious effect on liberty. At this point, the limitations of his conjectural method became clear: whilst it permitted him to re-narrate old narratives of English liberty, it did not – and could not – obviate them. Before indicting the entails that Dalrymple had defended, Kames articulated his history of civilisation in a footnote to the tract on criminal law. Resembling the four ‘states’ that Dalrymple had outlined in the Essay (perhaps because Dalrymple had taken them from Kames’s manuscript), Kames began with ‘hunting and fishing’ as the ‘original occupations of man’.317 These was followed by the ‘shepherd life’ (a form of sustenance not present in British Antiquities), and the ‘next stage was that of agriculture.’318 These ‘progressive changes,’ Kames explained, ‘in the order now mentioned, may be traced in all nations.’319 Social bonds were thin among hunters and fishers, and even among shepherds. The ‘true spirit of society, which consists in mutual benefits, and in making the industry of individuals profitable to others as well as to themselves, was not known till agriculture was invented.’320 This was because the development of farming required a concurrent proliferation of carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons, whose reliance on one another for subsistence entangled them ‘an intimate society of mutual support’.321 New-found intimacy generated an unprecedented number of ‘social duties’ which had to be ascertained by laws and enforced by punishment. Government therefore became necessary as soon as farmers and artificers became 316 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, viii. 317 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 77-78n. 318 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 77-78n. 319 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 77-78n. 320 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 78n. 321 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 78n. 103 bound up in each other’s lives: laws and punishment were impossible without ‘lodging power in one or more persons, to direct the resolutions, and apply the force of the whole society.’322 It followed, Kames suggested, that ‘in every society, the advances of government towards perfection, are strictly proportioned to the advances of society towards intimacy of union.’323 The question was how entails related to this history or, to put it another way, how far they were ‘consistent with the nature of property’.324 Unlike Dalrymple, who had followed Montesquieu in pointing to the Romans’ difficulties with making testaments, Kames saw the Romans as having free disposal of their property. The Romans sat at the apex of Kames’s civilizational scale; they had discovered the ‘true spirit’ of society. As a consequence, they understood that it was the ‘will of the proprietor which must regulate his own succession; and not the will of any other, not even of a predecessor.’325 They held fast to the maxim that no man could name ‘an heir to succeed to his heir’, and in doing so aligned themselves with nature: ‘This maxim then is not founded upon any particularity in Roman law, but upon the very nature of property.’326 The feudal system, however, comprised a network of leases, granted by superiors to inferiors in exchange for military service. For this reason, it was in the power ‘of the granter to regulate the succession of the lessee’; he could ‘substitute heirs without end, to take the feudal subject successively one after another.’327 The superior’s extraordinary power not only ‘paved the way for a perpetual succession, but [also] secured the heirs by preventing dilapidation.’328 The vassal, having ‘liferent or usufruct only’, had no power of alienating property that was not his own.329 Entails themselves, though suggested by the ‘nature of the feudal system’, only emerged in response to its collapse.330 At its inception, superiors regulated the succession of lessees in a way that opened up the theoretical possibility of perpetual 322 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 78n. 323 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 79n. 324 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 184. 325 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 190. 326 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 190-91. 327 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 193. 328 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 197. 329 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 197. 330 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 202. 104 succession. But the exigencies of war did not call for it. Men only dreamt of ‘distant futurity’ in times of peace, which meant the feudal law had to erode before entails could come into being.331 As in British Antiquities, Kames’s explanation of how this had happened consisted of arguments drawn primarily from his natural history of civilisation. The martial imperatives of the feudal law made it an ‘unnatural system, which could not be long supported in contradiction to love of independency and property, the most steady and industrious of all the human appetites.’332 In Kames’s view, nothing could cut against the grain of nature for long: as the Normans established themselves and the danger of revolt and insurrection began to wane, feudal tenures began to mutate. Initially, property was held by the superior alone, ‘the right given to the vassal being only an usufruct’.333 Yet soon afterwards, the vassal came to be understood as a proprietor: he could ‘alien his land to be held of himself, and the alienation was effectual to bar the superior even from his casualties of ward, marriage, escheat’.334 Eventually the practice was reflected in the legislature: in 1285, Edward III passed a statute permitting alienation, Quia emptores terrarum.335 A statute so ‘repugnant to the most obvious principles’ of feudal law could only have been passed due to the resilience of nature. Property ‘originally differed nothing from a right of possession, which gave the enjoyment of the fruits’.336 As usufruct conferred possession and ‘enjoyment of the fruits’ on a vassal, nature began to prevail over the feudal law, and ‘the vassal came by degrees to be considered as proprietor’.337 And thus, Kames explained, ‘the property of the feudal subject was imperceptibly transferred from the superior to his vassal, which made the latter in a good measure independent.’338 Free commerce in land and then luxury followed on from this, inducing ‘the great lords’ to continue breaking up their estates; Quia emptores terrarum recognised that land had come ‘again to be the chief subject of commerce’, and vassals had come again to be proprietors.339 331 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 198. 332 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 198. Emphasis added; compare Kames, British Antiquities, pp. 156-57. 333 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 178. 334 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 178. 335 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 178. 336 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 179. 337 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 291; see also, Law-Tracts, I, 179. 338 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 291-92. 339 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 198-99. 105 Entails were a response to this decay. Feudal superiors had begun, during peace, to think about perpetuating their families. Now they began ‘to regret the never-ceasing flux of land-property from hand to hand’, and to seek for ways to restore the stability of land-property introduced by the feudal law.340 In the same year as Quia, they succeeded in passing De donis conditionalibus. The statute gave superiors the privilege of establishing entails by ‘depriving the heirs of the power of aliening, which could not be done by the common law.’341 Four hundred years later, in 1685, the Entail Act authorised them in Scotland, though they had existed in practice long before. By this point, however, any residue of the feudal law in England had been ‘quite extirpated’; though Kames did not mention it directly, he can only have been referring to the moment at which Henry VII had destroyed English entails in 1485.342 But the Scots had had no such king, as the Entail Act showed. It betrayed the ‘blindness in our legislature’, Kames complained, ‘to encourage entails by a statute, at a time when the publick interest required a statute against those which had already been imposed upon us.’343 The Act had allowed a huge proportion of Scottish land to be restricted by entails, and the problem was only getting worse: new entails were adding land daily to the existing ‘dead stock’, and Parliament needed to act swiftly to ban them.344 If it did not, Kames prophesied, ‘the time in which the whole will be locked up is not far distant.’345 Kames’s concerns rested on two grounds, natural-historical and historical. Entails could not be considered as rational, as Kames had already suggested, because they hampered the operation of the commerce that characterised the interface between the third and fourth stages of his natural history. In order to lubricate the relations between farmers and artificers, every proprietor had to have ‘the free disposal of his goods during his life, and to name the persons who shall enjoy them after his death.’346 The Romans and the Greeks, Kames claimed, saw these powers as ‘inherent’ in property-holding: they were ‘sufficient for all the purposes to which the goods of fortune can be subservient. They fully answer the 340 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 199. 341 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 201. 342 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 202. 343 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 218. 344 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 218-19. 345 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 219. 346 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 217. 106 purposes of commerce’.347 By hampering the operation of these powers, those who had recourse to entails showed only that ‘the passions of men are not to be confined within the bounds of reason’.348 Their mimicry of the feudal law showed only that we ‘thirst after opulence, and are not satisfied with the full enjoyment of the goods of fortune, unless it also be in our power to give them a perpetual existence’.349 How ‘unfit for the frail condition of mortals’, Kames asked in a purple outburst, were ‘such swoln conceptions? The feudal system unluckily suggested a hint for gratifying this irrational appetite.’350 The eradication of entails was crucial if the Scots were to re-enter the realm of commercial civilisation. But this was only part of the problem: that entails were ‘subversive of industry and commerce was not the worst that can justly be said of them.’351 They were also a ‘perpetual source of discontent by subverting that liberty and independency, to which all men aspire, with respect to their possessions as well as their persons.’352 Liberty, again cashed out as a quality natural to human beings, could be found in history wherever proprietors controlled their property. If they could sell it, split it, and choose their heirs, they were independent and consequently free. This kind of liberty, however, simultaneously signalled refinement: ‘independency’ characterised an interconnected society of farmers and artificers perched at the top of Kames’s progressive scale, and rendered liberty and civilisation as two sides of the same coin. As a result, Kames’s universal history re- narrated a familiar story. The Ancients had carried property to its ‘utmost length’, making them civilised but also free. Fiefs were a cancer. They had rendered nations like Britain uncivilised by taking land out of commerce; and by restricting sale and succession, they had rendered the British and others unfree. Natural affection for property, commerce, and luxury had corroded this kind of tenure in England, producing the class of middle-sized independent proprietors that had tugged English government back to its former ‘perfection’. The Bolingbrokian narrative 347 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 217. 348 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 217. 349 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 217. 350 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 218. 351 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 219. 352 Kames, Law-Tracts, I, 219. 107 Kames had offered up in British Antiquities had crept back into his story, albeit in a more textured form. By February 1758, Kames had already sent a draft bill for the abolition of Scottish entails to Sir Gilbert Elliot, third baronet and Lord Minto; by August 1759, the bill had made its way into the hands of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke.353 Continuing in the vein of British Antiquities and Historical Law-Tracts, it read as a paean to the middle-sized proprietor. A protraction of entails, the bill warned, would concentrate Scottish land into fewer and fewer estates, allow lords to treat tenants as ‘bond-slaves’, and retard the development of Scottish agriculture and manufactures yet further.354 This would neglect the cultivation of smaller proprietors, who ‘link together in social affection the whole numbers of the state’, and in whom ‘only is found the true spirit of liberty’.355 Their hostility to servility was matched only by their abhorrence of tyranny. The few Scots in whose hands land had begun to accumulate, however, had different ideas: their enormous estates ‘must necessarily produce an irregular and poisonous influence in electing members to serve in Parliament, a subversion of that freedom and independence in electors which is the corner-stone of the British constitution.’356 Such a body of nobles could potentially overthrow the commons and turn Britain into a version of Poland—a pejorative eighteenth-century shorthand for aristocratic government.357 Although the bill gained no traction that year, the entails question refused to die. A few years later, on 30 June 1764, Alexander Lockhart of Craighouse, then Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, asked Dalrymple and six other advocates to investigate whether entails could ‘overwhelm the whole nation’ and prevent ‘the bulk of lands of Scotland from being the Subject of Commerce.’358 Their findings, 353 Kames to Sir Gilbert Elliot, third baronet and Lord Minto, 6 February 1758. National Library of Scotland, Minto Papers, MS 11014, fol. 111; Kames, ‘Considerations upon the state of Scotland with respect to Entails: addressed to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, with accompanying letter,’ 29 August 1759, in Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames, pp. 327-331. 354 Kames, ‘Considerations upon Entails’, p. 329. 355 Kames, ‘Considerations upon Entails’, p. 330. 356 Kames, ‘Considerations upon Entails’, p. 330. 357 On Poland in the eighteenth century, see Jerzy Lukowski, Disorderly Liberty: the Political Culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century (London: Continuum, 2010). 358 The Minute Book of the Faculty of Advocates, vol. 3, Stair Society vol. 46 (Edinburgh: Stair Society, 1999), pp. 135-6. The full names of the sub-committee are as follows, with the dates of their admittance to the bar given in brackets: James Erskine (1734), John Swinton Jr (1743), Sir John Dalrymple of Cousland (1748), Sir William Johnstone of Westerhall, later Lord Pulteney (1751), Sir Adam Fergusson of Kilkerran (1755), James Ferguson Jr of Pitfour (1757), and Alexander 108 he instructed them, were to be mocked up into a bill and sent down to Westminster, where it could (hopefully) find its way onto the floor of the Commons. The sub- committee took only a month to formulate their position. Deciding that entails should be abolished, they ran the draft of their bill past the assembled Faculty on 4 August, who quickly endorsed it by a majority of 43-4.359 But a year passed before they resolved to send it to parliament, during which time it became clear that Dalrymple had been among the dissenting four.360 In November 1764, Dalrymple published a pamphlet to air out the arguments he had unsuccessfully been pushing in sub-committee meetings.361 Unsettled by the direction in which the Faculty had been travelling, Dalrymple was more strident than he had been in the Essay. He began by reiterating his worries that releasing Scottish land from entails would drive down its value and turn Scottish traders and artisans into petty landlords.362 As holders of entailed estates would now be able to either sell them off or use them to raise credit, there would also be a spike in domestic luxury consumption. This in turn would reduce exports and drive up imports, creating a trade deficit that would make it harder to raise the taxes required to service the public debt.363 Dalrymple was suggesting that feudal property was crucial to sustaining an economy organised around the production and consumption of luxury goods.364 But it was on the question of liberty that Murray of Henderland (1758); for analysis of the novelty of this move by a professional legal institution, see Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Lawyers, Landowners’, pp. 97-120. 359 The Minute Book of the Faculty of Advocates, p. 138. For this vote, the identities of the voters were not recorded. 360 The Faculty decided to send the bill down on 28 November, to which Dalrymple objected on grounds that the responses of the parties consulted about the bill had not been received. But he was overwhelmingly defeated: only six members of a ‘pretty numerous’ meeting assented to any further delay. The Minute Book of the Faculty of Advocates, pp. 151-53. Once in Westminster, the bill had a torrid time, failing to even reach a first reading in parliament. But eventually, it resulted in the passing of the Entail Act of 1770 (10 Geo. III c. 51), which enabled long leases but stopped short of releasing entailed lands into the market. See Phillipson, ‘Lawyers, Landowners’, p. 117. An elaboration of the reasons for Dalrymple’s dissent was published in the Scots Magazine in December. See Scots Magazine, vol. XXVII (Edinburgh: W. Sands et al., 1765), pp. 706-707. 361 Dalrymple, Considerations upon the Policy of Entails in Great Britain (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1764). 362 Dalrymple, Considerations, pp. 12-15, 24-28. 363 Dalrymple, Considerations, pp. 28-58. 364 This was another idea he absorbed from Montesquieu: monarchies, he claimed, were uniquely suited to an economy based on luxury because they retained bodies of feudal landholders who could not participate in commerce, but who nevertheless consumed its fruits. This, in turn, produced high interest rates and both necessitated and facilitated the production of high- profitability goods. On this point, as well as the usefulness of Montesquieu for understanding understanding commerce in eighteenth-century France, see Michael Sonenscher, Work & Wages: 109 Dalrymple was apocalyptic: ‘a nation without families’, he warned, ‘will either become unfeeling to its liberties, or abuse them. Such a nation is a mere rope of sand void of cohesion, and will slide away at the very instant when government most needs its assistance.’365 The ‘fall of the higher’, he went on, ‘is almost always attended with the ruin of the political liberties of the inferior orders of the state’.366 The reason eastern empires like Turkey were so easily overturned was that ‘in almost no age have they had a hereditary, authoritative, intermediate rank, who could maintain resistance against an enemy, after the Sovereign was fallen, or rouze it against him when he trampled upon human nature.’367 Scottish entails, Dalrymple now argued, gave Britain an advantage ‘which no nation, ancient or modern, ever had, of containing within herself at once, a great class of [Scottish] high-spirited gentry, and a great class of industrious honourable traders.’368 For this reason, ‘the support of families, almost always expedient, is now necessary in Britain.’369 The ‘monarchical’ and ‘aristocratical’ parts of the constitution, Dalrymple concluded, had yielded too much to the ‘democratical’; it was now time to give the aristocratic the kind of help the democratic once required. A ‘solid and lasting nobility and gentry’ were the ‘best barriers against the invasions of the crown, and the false popularity of particular men, and the insolences of the rabble.’370 Dalrymple’s pamphlet did not gain widespread support.371 But it confirmed his break from Kames. Despite their shared theory of the ‘progress of society’, they had ended up in different places because they disagreed about the apparently recondite subject of feudal history; that they could diverge so drastically on the question of modern British liberty suggests that it was here, in the weeds of constitutional historiography, that they cut their political teeth. Their debate also reveals a fracture Natural law, politics, and the eighteenth-century French trades, 2nd paperback edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. vii-xx, at xvii-xx. 365 Dalrymple, Considerations, p. 59. 366 Dalrymple, Considerations, p. 61. 367 Dalrymple, Considerations, p. 62. 368 Dalrymple, Considerations, pp. 64-65. 369 Dalrymple, Considerations, p. 66. 370 Dalrymple, Considerations, p. 67. 371 The advocate Patrick Murray, Lord Elibank, however, claimed to have been proselytised. See Elibank, Queries relating to the Proposed Plan for Altering the Entails in Scotland (Edinburgh: n.p., 1765), pp. 5, 16. 110 that would continue to develop. Kames had naturalised Bolingbroke’s gothic proprietor whilst retaining the Harringtonian shape of his narrative of liberty. Bolingbroke had rendered liberty as free-holding, and found it in the Saxon freemen he declared to have sat in the wittenagemot. Attempting to synthesise Harrington with Brady, he followed the fortunes of these freemen as they lost their independence to the ‘feudatory sovereignty’ of Norman kings and barons, had it unwittingly restored by Henry VII, and threatened once more by Robert Walpole and his legion of placemen (an unwelcome reincarnation, Bolingbroke suggested, of the Conqueror and his followers).372 Kames kept Bolingbroke’s notion of liberty, but found it instead to originate in nature – human beings were born ‘independent of one another’ – before sidestepping uneasily into history and walking down the path that Bolingbroke had trod already. His reading of English history left him with no doubts about Scottish entails: they mimicked feudal tenures, and had to be eradicated in order to nourish the small and independent proprietors on which the rise of the English House of Commons had depended. But Dalrymple had read Montesquieu, and perhaps even collaborated with him. The Spirit of Laws allowed Dalrymple, unlike Kames, to see a way of incorporating Scotland’s laggardly feudal history into a new history of Britain. In doing so, he questioned the foundations of English history by turning his back on the claim that free-holding and parliaments were both the engines and guardians of liberty. A spike in free-holding may have underwritten the rise of England’s lower house. But in a state like Britain, characterised by large public debts and high levels of domestic luxury consumption, the only way of sustaining liberty – understood loosely as security of property – was by maintaining feudal property itself. If Britain were to be secured against catastrophe, it needed a body of hereditary nobility who were isolated from the capital markets, and ready to defend the constitution in moments of crisis. Montesquieu had worried that such a body was lacking in England, but had failed to take notice of Scotland; their entailed landholders, Dalrymple pointed out, provided a way of reconciling British liberty to civilisation. Like Montesquieu’s French nobility, their capacity to do so made them post- ancient, as nothing of the kind had existed in Greco-Roman antiquity. For this 372 Bolingbroke, Remarks, p. 56. 111 reason, it also made them modern. In the following chapter, we shall see Hume dismiss the idea that Scotland’s nobility could play such a role, and that Scotland’s history could be incorporated into the history of Britain. But we shall also see him apply pressure to the idea that English liberty derived from its parliamentary monarchy, leading him to fear – like Dalrymple – that Montesquieu might have been right. 112 Chapter Three David Hume Before The Spirit of Laws suggested that liberty could be generated without parliaments, David Hume had been ploughing a similar furrow. Having completed his degree at Edinburgh in 1725, he embarked on a period of study that historians have only partially been able to fill in.1 After spending the early 1730s at his family house in Chirnside, just ten miles from the village of Kames, he moved to Paris in 1734; from there he moved to Rheims and finally alighted at La Flèche, during which period he wrote what would become A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40).2 In its third book, ‘Of Morals’, Hume famously distanced himself from the idea that our allegiance to government derived from consent.3 Having given a careful 1 M.A. Stewart, ‘Hume’s Intellectual Development, 1711-1752’, in M. Frasca-Spada and P. J.E. Kail eds., Impressions of Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 11-58; R.L. Emerson, ‘Hume’s Intellectual Development: Part II’, in idem., Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 103-126; for Hume’s biography, the standard work is now Harris, Hume; for greater anecdotal detail, see Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1954); see also John Robertson, ‘Hume, David (1711-1776)’, ODNB, online edn, January 2009 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14141, accessed 7 August 2018], as well as Tom Pye, ‘David Hume the Polymath’, History of European Ideas 43/6 (2016), 683-86. 2 The first two books, on the understanding and the passions, were published anonymously as A Treatise of Human Nature: being an Attempt to introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, 2 vols (London: J. Noon, 1739); the final book, on the morals, was also published under the same title (London: T. Longman, 1740). Whilst at Chirnside he befriended Kames, to whom he subsequently became very close. See Harris, Hume, pp. 64-66. 3 This has been widely recognised by scholars. See John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 105-37; Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 91-102; David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 1-19, 78-101, 163-87; Frederick G. Whelan, Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 3-32, 189-294; Donald Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 306-43; Annette C. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflection on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991); John Robertson, Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 256-325, at 289- 308; Harris, Hume, pp. 78-143; Paul Sagar, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 103-39. 113 account of how human beings learn to refrain from invading one another’s goods, thereby developing the ‘artificial virtue’ of justice, Hume went on to describe how the convention of ‘promising’ had also arisen over time.4 It was only in the earliest days of society that human beings promised allegiance to magistrates in exchange for the protection of their persons and goods; eventually, allegiance to government took ‘root of itself’, and obtained an ‘original obligation and authority, independent of all contracts.’5 As obedience preserves ‘order and concord in society’, Hume explained, ‘seditious and disloyal actions’ come to make us feel uneasy, and ‘attach to them the idea of vice and moral deformity.’6 This was what Hume referred to as the ‘moral obligation’ to government, and it easily outran the initial obligation derived from promising.7 The political upshot was that it could also be felt under absolute government. Despite the lack of an institution – like a parliament – that could be associated with consent, the citizens of absolute monarchies continued to feel that their government was owed obedience.8 The question of which particular magistrates to obey, moreover, was determined by a tangle of imaginative habits and sentiments.9 Hume referred to these habits and sentiments as ‘opinion’, and claimed that it was ‘on opinion only that government is founded’.10 The dismissal of consent this entailed has often landed Hume in the weeds of ‘conservatism’, although he has more recently (and plausibly) been assigned to the ‘scientific’, ‘sceptical’, or ‘sociological’ brand of whiggism we met in the introduction.11 But before reading 4 On justice, see Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. D.F. Norton and M.J. Norton, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vol. I, book 3, part 2, section 2, paragraphs 1-28; on promising, see Hume, Treatise, I, 3.2.5.1-15. 5 Hume, Treatise, I, 3.2.8.3. 6 Hume, Treatise, I, 3.2.8.7. 7 Hume, Treatise, I, 3.2.8.8. 8 Hume, Treatise, I, 3.2.8.9. 9 Hume, Treatise, I, 3.2.10.1-19. 10 Hume, ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, in Essays, pp. 32-37, at 32. The essay first appeared in Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1741). 11 For Hume and ‘conservatism’, or a ‘conservative’ political tradition, see Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, & co., 1876), I, 43-57; Sheldon Wolin, ‘Hume and Conservatism’, American Political Science Review 48/4 (1954), 999-1016; Giarrizzo, David Hume politico e storico; Laurence Bongie, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Miller, Philosophy and Ideology, pp. 163-87; Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, pp. 306-43; Whelan, Order and Artifice, pp. 294-329. For the association of Hume with ‘sceptical’ whiggism, see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 139-40; for his association with ‘sociological’ whiggism, see Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 107-23. 114 The Spirit of Laws and then turning to English history himself, the Treatise also led him into a critique of Bolingbroke’s notion of liberty as free-holding (and, indirectly, as law-making). In private, Hume was rude about him: ‘so little Variety & Instruction’, he remarked of an edition of Bolingbroke’s collected works, ‘so much Arrogance & Declamation’; in public, he defenestrated him by taking a different tack to Lord Hervey.12 Rather than dismissing pre-revolutionary English history altogether, as Hervey had done, Hume pointed out in a 1741 essay that by Bolingbroke’s own lights, the Commons was far from under threat: the ‘share of power’ allotted to it was ‘so great, that it absolutely commands all the other parts of the government.’13 In order for the king to exercise his own share of (executive) power, he required money, and the Commons were the only authority able to grant it.14 If the property of the commons derived solely from the gift of the king, he would (according to Bolingbroke’s criteria) be absolute. But in England, it was the other way round. The question to be asked, therefore, was why the Commons did not simply remove the king. The answer was that ‘such an usurpation would be contrary to the interest of the majority of its members.’15 The crown had just enough offices at its disposal to influence a large enough bloc of the Commons, through either patronage or the expectation of it, to ‘preserve the ancient constitution from danger.’16 Such influence might well be known by ‘the invidious appellations of corruption and dependence; but some degree and some kind of it are inseparable from the very nature of the constitution, and necessary to the preservation of our mixed government.’17 In another essay in the same collection, Hume took his critique a step further. Initially titled ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’, it collapsed the sharp distinction usually 12 Hume to L’Abbé Le Blanc, 24 October 1754, in Hume, Letters, I, 208. 13 Hume, ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, in Essays, pp. 42-47, at 44. The first volume of Hume’s early political essays was published, as noted above, in 1741; the second was published a year later as Essays, Moral and Political: volume II (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1742). For commentary, see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 125-224; Harris, Hume, pp. 143-98; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, pp. 177-99. 14 Hume, ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, p. 44. 15 Hume, ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, p. 45. 16 Hume, ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, p. 45. 17 Hume, ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, p. 45. As Isaac Kramnick has pointed out, there was nothing especially original about this argument; it could be found quite easily in Walpole’s press. See Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 122-24. 115 drawn between England and the monarchies of Western Europe.18 It was difficult, Hume suggested, to fix general truths in politics: history was too volatile, the constant revolutions in human affairs too unpredictable.19 The growing importance of trade to politics, for example, required redrawing the wisdom of the ancients.20 Commerce and learning had now been shown to thrive under absolute governments: France had ‘scarcely ever enjoyed any established liberty, and yet has carried the arts and sciences as near perfection as any other nation’.21 The same went for its commerce.22 In fact, ‘private property seems to me almost as secure in a civilized European monarchy, as in a republic’.23 The sovereign posed as much of a threat to private property as earthquakes, or ‘any accident the most unusual and extraordinary’: a monarchy like France had ‘order, method, and constancy, to a surprizing degree. Property is there secure; industry encouraged; the arts flourish’.24 Liberty was not free-holding, defined in contradistinction to vassalage; Hume rendered it rather as security of property, or the absence of fear, and suggested that it did not require a republicanised monarchy in order to flourish. By indicting Bolingbroke’s reliance on a legislative and representative popular assembly, Hume was ridiculing the parochialism of his vision of English history. He was also beginning to probe at ‘civilized’, rather than parliamentary, monarchy: what it was, whether it was compatible with commerce and liberty, how it related to what Hume described as ‘modern times’.25 This, perhaps, was why he quickly recognised that Montesquieu had approached the same set of problems from a different angle. In April 1749, shortly after The Spirit of Laws was published, Hume told Montesquieu as much.26 There is no evidence that Hume had received a letter of introduction to him—the customary requirement for embarking on a 18 Hume, ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ [1741], retitled in 1757 to ‘Of Civil Liberty’, in Essays, pp. 87-96. 19 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, pp. 87-88. 20 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, p. 88. 21 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, p. 91. 22 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, p. 92. 23 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, pp. 92-93. 24 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, pp. 93-94. 25 Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, p. 94. 26 Hume to Montesquieu, 10 April 1749, in Hume, Letters, I, 133-39. 116 correspondence in the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters.27 Yet he wrote Montesquieu an extraordinarily wide ranging and detailed letter about what he made of The Spirit of Laws, touching variously on taxation, the balance of trade, public debt, the politics of Sparta, and the civil law. Hume’s first and most prominent comment, however, recognised that there was more to Montesquieu’s story than England and its parliaments, and picked out his fear that reforming monarchies along republican lines would lead only to despotism. Citing the passage in which Montesquieu worried that the English had removed all the ‘intermediate powers that formed their monarchy’, Hume told him he was onto something: the British parliament, he explained, had recently decided that the ’45 stemmed from Scotland being ‘insufficiently republican’ [la nation écossaise n’étoit pas suffisamment républicaine], and for this reason had abolished Scotland’s hereditary jurisdictions in 1747.28 But this had betrayed a peculiarly English complacence about the ability of parliament to defend the constitution in moments of crisis: the consequences predicted by Montesquieu, Hume confirmed, ‘would certainly arrive in the case of revolution’.29 Over the next two years, Hume recast the third book of the Treatise as An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), and published the Political Discourses (1752), a collection of essays on commerce, international trade, war, and public debt.30 In the first months of 1752, he was then appointed keeper of the library of the Faculty of Advocates.31 Newly furnished with books and time, he set to work on 27 On the conventions of eighteenth-century ‘epistolary commerce’, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 139-52. 28 Hume to Montesquieu, 10 April 1749, p. 134. For the passage Hume cited, see Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 2.4.19. 29 Hume to Montesquieu, 10 April 1749, p. 134. 30 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (London: Andrew Millar, 1751); Political Discourses. Hume had already recast the first book of the Treatise as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (London: A. Millar, 1748). On this period of extraordinary productivity, see Harris, Hume, pp. 216-32, 248-305. On the significance of the Political Discourses to European thinking about the relation between politics and commerce, see István Hont, ‘The “rich country- poor country” debate in Scottish classical political economy’, in Wealth and Virtue, pp. 271-317, reprinted as ‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in idem., Jealousy of Trade, pp. 267-325, as well as his more recent ‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate Revisited: The Irish Origins and French Reception of the Hume Paradox’, in Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas eds., David Hume’s Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 243-323. A curiosity of Harris’s biography is that he ignores this literature, and as a consequence plays down the novelty of Hume’s political economy. See Harris, Hume, pp. 265-89. 31 On his election, see Hume to John Clephane, 4 February 1752, in Hume, Letters, I, 164-67. 117 what he initially conceived as a history of Great Britain.32 By Autumn that year, he had decided where to start: ‘Twas under James’, he wrote to Adam Smith, ‘that the House of Commons began first to raise their Head, & then the Quarrel betwixt Privilege & Prerogative commenc’d.’33 By the following summer, he had become convinced that this history had ‘never yet been written’; all attempts to do so had been too cramped in their style, and too ignorant and partial in their politics.34 Rapin was among the worst culprits—‘totally despicable’, Hume said.35 By 1754, he had published the first volume of the enterprise, beginning with the accession of James I and closing with the Regicide.36 He published the second in 1756, carrying the story up to 1688.37 After this, he decided to go backwards and drop Scotland from the story; two volumes on the house of Tudor were published in 1759.38 The final two volumes arrived in 1761, and ran from Caesar’s invasion of Britannia to the accession of Henry VII.39 In 1762, he re-published the whole enterprise as The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688.40 Historians have tended to read the History as intervening in the fraught historiographical world of the first chapter of this thesis, and the classic account remains Duncan Forbes’s.41 Hume, he argues, was a Whig: he thought obedience was owed to the House of Hanover, and his politics were above all designed to ‘promote moderation’ in the interest of an establishment he viewed as insecure.42 But he was a ‘scientific’, or ‘sceptical’ one because he questioned the ‘holiness of the 32 On this period, see Harris, Hume, pp. 305-25. 33 Hume to Adam Smith, 24 September 1752, in Hume, Letters, I, 167-69. 34 Hume to James Oswald of Dunniker, 28 June 1753, in Hume, Letters, I, 178-79. 35 Hume to James Oswald, 28 June 1753, in Hume, Letters, I, 179. 36 Hume, The History of Great Britain. Vol. I. Containing the Reigns of James I. and Charles I. (Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill, 1754). 37 Hume, The History of Great Britain. Vol II. Containing the Commonwealth, and the reigns of Charles II and James II (London: Andrew Millar, 1757). Though the date reads 1757, it was published in 1756. 38 Hume, The History of England under the House of Tudor, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759). 39 Hume, The History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the accession of Henry VII, 2 vols (London: Andrew Millar, 1762), which, although reading 1762, was published in 1761. 40 Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols (London: Andrew Millar, 1762). Hereafter, all references are to the London bookseller Thomas Cadell’s posthumous edition of 1778, containing Hume’s last corrections and improvements and recently reprinted as The History of England: from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, ed. William Todd, 6 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983). 41 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 125-324; see also Forbes, ‘Politics and History in David Hume’, pp. 280-323. 42 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 136. For a confirmation of this point, see Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 33-60, at 37. 118 holy cows of the Whigs’.43 Forbes identifies three idols that Hume delighted in smashing, as each of them could be manipulated to corrode the legitimacy of the establishment he wished to protect: the contractual basis of government; the sharp distinction between English liberty and French slavery; and the ‘ancient constitution’ that was conjured into existence by seventeenth-century lawyers, and continued to thrive in the hands of a motley crew of ‘vulgar’ Old Whigs, Tories, and Jacobites.44 We have already seen how Hume attacked the first two in the Treatise and the Essays; the History, Forbes claims, was designed to deal with the last. As eighteenth-century ‘ancient constitutionalism’, on Forbes’s account, meant defending the ‘essential continuity of the English form of government’, Hume duly ripped English history into shreds.45 The point was to sever modern Britain from its ancient English past, and to show that history should no longer be used as a means of evaluating politics: for Hume, Forbes claims, the only rule of government was the ‘established practice of the age’.46 Forbes’s story has since been adopted and adapted by a number of historians.47 This chapter, however, aims to set the History in a light that does not look especially whiggish, however ‘sceptical’ or ‘sociological’ in kind. In his philosophy and his essays, Hume had already begun to question whether the English had become free because they had democratised their monarchy—a doubt at which he had gestured in his letter to Montesquieu. The History carried Hume further down this path. Its intention was not simply destructive. Hume wanted to unpick the nature and origins of English liberty: what it was, and where it had come from. This involved critically engaging, as Forbes has suggested, with the narratives 43 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 125-92, at 139. 44 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 139-40. 45 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 249, 267, 309. 46 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 309. The ‘established practice of the age’ is taken verbatim from Hume, History, II, 525. 47 Following Forbes, Nicholas Phillipson argues that the History slashed at the continuity of English history in order to liberate the English from the ‘priestcraft of historians’, for which see Nicholas Phillipson, David Hume: the Philosopher as Historian (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989; repr. London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 71, 75, 79, 117, 132-35. James Harris, too, claims that the History, as Forbes had suggested, asserted the discontinuity of English history in order to show that the ‘past had no political significance’, and that it was the ‘present, and the future, that mattered’. See Harris, Hume, pp. 305-408, at 406; see also V.G. Wexler, David Hume and the History of England (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1979); Hicks, Neoclassical History, p. 191. Colin Kidd and John Pocock, however, have argued (for different reasons) that the History did not wreak as much havoc on the ‘ancient constitution’ as Forbes had claimed. See Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 107-23, 204-15; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 199-258. 119 we met in chapter one; but as Hume delved further into English history, he also became entangled in the net that Montesquieu had cast over feudal property, civilisation, liberty, and modernity. The chapter follows Hume as he wrote the History, beginning with his two volumes on the Stuarts. The tumults that terminated in 1688, Hume suggested here, could be explained in part by (a version of) Harrington’s thesis; but they had been driven, most of all, by the changes that Reformation and Renaissance had wrought on the ‘opinion’ of what Hume variously referred to as the ‘nation’, the ‘people’, or the ‘public’. The upshot was a Bill of Rights that circumscribed the prerogative within definite boundaries, creating a liberty that Hume described as ‘civil’. But for Hume this was the beginning of the story, not its end.48 The seventeenth-century achievements of the English, Hume went on to suggest in his history of the Tudors, were built on a deeper-lying transformation that took place across the monarchies of western Europe at the outset of the sixteenth century. It was then that their feudal nobles dropped arms in favour of luxury goods, destroying their own political authority as they did so. Without a fractious and violent nobility to contend with, the Tudors – along with other European dynasties – were able to bolster their authority; but at the same time, the English began to feel free: a liberty, Hume appeared to be suggesting, that could flourish under despotic monarchy. In the final instalment of the History, Hume described this kind of liberty as ‘personal’, and dismissed the notion that either law or representative government could create it. Laws could protect property, and monarchies could be limited by popular assemblies; but neither mattered much in face of the violence and volatility of feudal politics. Only the sixteenth-century explosion of luxury consumption had managed to neutralise this violence, creating a sense of security and carrying the English from ancient to modern as it did so. Montesquieu and Dalrymple had been wrong, it seemed, to tie the modern and the feudal together. 48 A persistent theme of the scholarship is that the Stuart volumes destroyed the ancient constitution, leaving the later volumes to simply drill home the point. Duncan Forbes’s Penguin edition of the History, for example, contained only its first volume, for which see Hume, The History of Great Britain: the reigns of James I and Charles I, ed. Duncan Forbes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Forbes also suggested that the Stuart volumes were the nucleus of the History in Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 263, 267, 309. For reiterations of Forbes’ claim, see Phillipson, Hume, pp. 101, 117; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 200, 222; Hicks, Neoclassical History, p. 191; Wexler, Hume and the History of England, p. 70; Harris, Hume, pp. 387-407. 120 Hume’s story was heterodox, and was immediately recognised as such by his contemporaries—the subject of the final chapter. The present one, however, closes with Hume worrying about what he had unearthed in England’s past. The History had narrated the decline of England’s hereditary feudal nobility: the body of land-holders that Montesquieu had relied upon to defend a monarchical constitution in crisis. But in the 1760s and 1770s, Hume began to fear that without them, modern Britain had no way of dropping anchor in a storm. The Stuart volumes Within a few pages of his history of the first two Stuarts, Hume had established that the ‘ancient constitution’ consisted simply in the strong crown that James I had inherited from Elizabeth.49 As early as March 1604, James had told the Commons that ‘all their privileges were derived from his grant’: a claim the house had already become accustomed to hearing from the ‘mouth of Elizabeth’.50 The dispensing power, the power of imprisonment, of pressing and quartering soldiers, of altering customs and duties, and of erecting monopolies had passed unaltered from Tudor to Stuart.51 The courts of high commission and star chamber were also retained by James. The former had been erected by Elizabeth to punish heresy, and it remained an ‘inquisitorial tribunal, with all its terrors and iniquities’.52 The high commissioners (officials of the crown) punished anything, including writing or reported speech, they deemed heretic; and they often acted on no more solid a foundation than hearsay or mere suspicion. The star chamber ‘possessed the same authority in civil matters; and its methods of proceeding were equally arbitrary and unlimited.’53 In 49 As indicated above, this point has been well recognised by scholars. On Hume’s recasting of the ancient constitution, and his history of the Stuarts in particular, see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 260-308; Harris, Hume, pp. 305-52; Phillipson, Hume, pp. 70-100; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 199-222; Robertson, ‘Hume, David’. 50 Hume, History, V, 14-17. 51 Hume, History, V, 126. The power of dispensing was the power to allow exceptions to the law by permitting what otherwise would be illegal. A subject could be granted a license to act as if the law dispensed did not exist. On this, see Carolyn A. Edie, ‘Revolution and the Rule of Law: The End of the Dispensing Power, 1689’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 10/4 (1977), 434-50. 52 Hume, History, V, 125. 53 Hume, History, V, 126; things did not improve beyond the Elizabethan: ‘government was equally arbitrary in Mary’s reign, in Edward’s, in Harry the eighth and seventh’s.’ History, V, 19n. 121 the shadow of such bloated prerogative, ‘monarchy, simple and unmixed, was conceived to be the government of England’; popular assemblies were but an ‘ornament of the fabric’.54 With the predictable exception of Carte, Hume had now gone further than any eighteenth-century historian in exculpating the Stuarts from blame for the civil wars; they had gone with, rather than against, the grain of the constitution.55 As the Stuart crown looked like the Tudor, Hume found responsibility for the constitution’s collapse elsewhere: in the ‘opinion’ of the collective agent Hume referred to as the ‘people’, the ‘nation’, or the ‘public’. In the Treatise, Hume had explained that ‘opinion’ consisted in the mess of habits and moral sentiments that any human society develops over time. In the History, these habits and sentiments were held and felt by the ‘nation’, or ‘public’, or ‘people’—terms Hume never conceptualised very tightly, and used interchangeably. At the turn of the seventeenth century, change was afoot; the nation was beginning to think, feel, and do different things. The revival of letters, first of all, had introduced ideas of liberty into the nation’s ‘minds’. The arrival of Europeans in the New World had driven up prices, propelled arts and manufactures to new heights, rendered the crown necessitous, and induced a shift in the pattern of property-holding. But Reformation was the most important change of all: its seventeenth-century aftereffects were what allowed these disparate developments to metastasise into violence and lead, ultimately, to regicide. Hume reached for the revival of letters in order explain why the ‘eyes’ of the commons had only been ‘opened’ to the crown’s power in 1604—the year of the parliament we have already seen Hume use to show the familiarity of James’s exalted politics.56 For it was ‘about this period’, Hume claimed, that ‘the minds of men, throughout Europe, especially in England, seem to have undergone a general, but insensible revolution.’57 Although letters had been revived in the ‘preceding age’, they were only now beginning to spread themselves among ‘men of the world’, and beyond the walls of seminaries and universities. In England especially, the ‘love 54 Hume, History, V, 127. 55 Hume did suggest, however, that the Stuarts were guilty of failing to dissimulate their own power—an idea he took from Rapin. See History, V, 17, 91-93, 236. 56 Hume, History, V, 17. 57 Hume, History, V, 17-18. 122 of freedom’ was becoming ‘more common among men of birth and education’; their acquaintance with the ‘precious remains of antiquity’, Hume claimed, was beginning to excite ‘in every generous breast a passion for a limited constitution’.58 By the parliament of 1610, a ‘spirit of liberty’ had ‘taken possession of the house’. Fuelled by the resurgence of letters, its leading members had begun to aspire less at ‘maintaining the ancient constitution, than at establishing a new one, and a freer, and a better.’59 By 1621, ‘a party, watchful of a free constitution, was regularly formed in the house of commons.’60 Once John Hampden had been prosecuted over his non-payment of ship-money in 1637, ‘the people were rouzed from their lethargy, and became sensible of the danger, to which their liberties were exposed.’61 As Hampden’s case reached the dining tables of ‘every company’, the clearer it became that ‘liberty was totally subverted, and an unusual and arbitrary authority exercised over the kingdom.’62 Hume’s second major change, the ‘discovery and conquest of the West- Indies’, was bound up less with learning than with commerce.63 As gold and silver flowed into England, ‘arts and industry of all kinds received a mighty encrease; and elegance in every enjoyment of life became better known, and more cultivated among all ranks of people.’64 As the mechanical and liberal arts flourished, the price of commodities reached a height unknown since the decline of Rome.65 But the revenues of the crown did not rise with inflation: amidst the growing riches of his subjects, James found himself ‘insensibly reduced to poverty’, and had begun to require additional funds to support the same splendour that had been maintained by his predecessors.66 Soon his own officials began to demand rewards appropriate for a high-inflation world, and the successful tax-raising enterprises of other European sovereigns served to increase the fiscal pressures upon him. Under such conditions, James ‘deemed it reasonable, that his subjects, who were generally as 58 Hume, History, V, 18-19. 59 Hume, History, V, 42. 60 This was the party of the country. On its formation, alongside the party of the court, see Hume, History, V, 85n. 61 Hume, History, V, 246-47. 62 Hume, History, V, 246-47. 63 Hume, History, V, 39. 64 Hume, History, V, 39. 65 Hume, History, V, 18, 39. 66 Hume, History, V, 39. 123 rich as theirs, should bear with patience some additional burthens and impositions.’67 But unfortunately for James, these very riches ‘bred opposite sentiments in his subjects; and begetting a spirit of freedom and independence, disposed them to pay little regard, either to the entreaties or menaces of their sovereign.’68 This ‘spirit of freedom’ came in part from changes that the arts had inflicted on the distribution of property; Harrington’s thesis helped to explain the growing opposition to the crown.69 But Hume also revised the story. Before James’s accession, he explained, ‘commerce and the arts’ had already dissipated the ‘immense fortunes of the barons’ who were rich enough to consume whilst keeping their estates (relatively) intact.70 But now improvements in luxury were finally beginning to reach ‘all men of property’, and ruined the ‘smaller proprietors of land’: those of ‘slender fortunes’ who felt obliged to imitate those above them, but were not quite wealthy enough to do so. Having bankrupted themselves, they had to sell off their estates to those who possessed riches sufficient for ‘fashionable expences; but who were not exempted from some care and attention to their domestic economy.’ It was via these means that the ‘the gentry, or that rank which composed the house of commons, enlarged their power and authority.’71 In the hands of Harrington, Bolingbroke, and Guthrie, the story of the commons’ rise followed a class of yeomen as they threw off their feudal dependence, becoming independent and consequently free. Hume himself had also glossed the story in his 1752 essay ‘Of Luxury’, arguing that where luxury nourished ‘commerce and industry, the peasants, by a proper cultivation of the land, become rich and independent; while the tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the 67 Hume, History, V, 39. 68 Hume, History, V, 40. 69 For Duncan Forbes, Hume’s version of Harrington’s story stitched the volumes together, and formed the ‘unobtrusive central theme or frame of reference of the History’, for which see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 280-81, 296-97, 312-14. For Colin Kidd, Hume’s acceptance of the thesis turned him into a central figure of the Anglicising, anti-feudal tradition of ‘sociological Whiggism’ he identifies in Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 204-15, at 212. On Harrington in Hume, see also Phillipson, Hume, pp. 76-77, 103; Harris, Hume, pp. 175-79, 319, 329, 345, 384; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, pp. 171, 202-06, 222-23; David Wootton, ‘David Hume, “the historian”’, in D.F. Norton ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 447-79. 70 Hume, History, V, 134-35. 71 Hume, History, V, 135. 124 property, and draw authority and consideration to that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty.’72 In the essay, these newly propertied peasants and merchants were the commons, and desired above all to protect themselves from ‘monarchical, as well as aristocratical tyranny’.73 But here, in the first volume of the History, the emergence of the commons was a story about aristocrats: the great and martial barons of preceding ages had been superseded by – or perhaps turned into – the lesser knights and barons whom ‘the English call the gentry’.74 Property had been transferred from one kind of noble to another, rather than from noble to yeoman; the transition was not from servitude to independence, unlike in Harrington or Bolingbroke.75 What mattered instead was a shift in perceptions. Whilst the ‘barons possessed their former immense property and extensive jurisdictions’, they were fractious, perpetually throwing government into ‘confusion’.76 But this confusion often ‘proved favourable to the monarch, and made the nation again submit to him, in order to re-establish justice and tranquillity.’ But now that commerce had ‘thrown the balance of property’ into the hands of the gentry, the ‘dispositions of men became susceptible of a more regular plan of liberty; and the laws were not supported singly by the authority of the sovereign.’77 The anarchic feudal nobility, Hume was suggesting, had been neutered by commerce, and the ‘nation’ was beginning to realise that they may no longer need the crown to impose order on feudal chaos. This was a thought, as we shall see, that would become increasingly significant as Hume ventured further back into English history. For now, however, Hume had to explain why a nation burgeoning in arts, manufactures, and a ‘spirit of liberty’ tipped from discontent into war. The answer, 72 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Essays, pp. 268-81, at 277. The essay was originally published under the title ‘Of Luxury’ in the first edition of the Political Discourses. The title was changed in the 1760 edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 4 vols (London: A. Millar, 1760). 73 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, p. 277. 74 Hume, History, II, 108. 75 Harrington’s argument, Pocock explains, pivoted on a transition from ‘dependence to independence in the arms-bearer’, and saw the yeomen’s rise from ‘dependence to become keepers of hinds and ploughmen solely as a rise from a position of servitude to one in which, being masters, they could not be servants.’ See Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, in Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 56-60, at 57. 76 Hume, History, V, 40. 77 Hume, History, V, 40. 125 Hume claimed, was religious: in order for violence to break out, the campaign for liberty had first to become tangled with the salvation of souls.78 Before his accession to the English throne, James I had already seen this happen in Scotland: the Scottish Presbyterian clergy had taken ‘a violent turn towards republicanism’ before he had united the crowns, and he soon faced the same problem in England.79 By 1621, court and country parties had coagulated around the question of liberty; but the question of liberty had already become bound to that of episcopacy. There had long been an alliance between ‘kingly power and ecclesiastical authority’, and by then it had been fully established in England.80 The prince helped the clergy to suppress heresy in exchange for their inculcating obedience to the prince; partisans of the court therefore attached themselves to the Church of England, and were comfortable with its ‘submission to episcopal jurisdiction; its attachment to ceremonies, to order, and to a decent pomp and splendor of worship; and in a word, its affinity to the same superstition of the catholics, rather than to the wild fanaticism of the puritans.’81 On the other hand, opposition to the Church was ‘sufficient to throw the puritans into the country party, and to beget political principles little favourable to the high pretensions of the sovereign.’82 The conjoining of puritanism to the politics of the country was dangerous because puritans were enthusiasts, and enthusiasts were ‘bold, daring, and uncontrouled’.83 Enthusiasm, Hume had already argued in a 1741 essay, was a species of false religion that led its victims into attributing unaccountable ‘raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy’ to divine inspiration.84 Via these imaginative experiences, enthusiasts considered themselves to be communicating directly with the Godhead, neglecting ‘all those outward ceremonies and observances, to which the assistance of the priests appears so requisite in the eyes of their superstitious votaries.’85 Having thereby consecrated themselves, reason and 78 On the impasse constitutional politics would have reached without their confessional politics, see Hume, History, V, 93-95. 79 Hume, History, V, 10-11. 80 Hume, History, V, 85n. 81 Hume, History, V, 85n. 82 Hume, History, V, 85n. 83 Hume, History, V, 85n. 84 Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in Essays, pp. 73-80, at 74. 85 Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, p. 75. 126 ‘even morality’ were soon rejected as guides to action: ‘the fanatic madman delivers himself over, blindly, and without reserve, to the supposed illapses of the spirit, and to inspiration from above.’86 That enthusiasm had found a home in the country party would therefore decide the Stuarts’ fate: by means of its ‘religious associate’, the ‘spirit of civil liberty’ soon ‘enlarged its dominion over the greater part of the kingdom’.87 Enthusiasm fuelled liberty’s empire, however, not simply because it inspired a courageous antipathy to episcopacy and, with episcopacy, to the crown. It was also barbarous and anti-social, which helped to explain both why an apparently civilizing culture had gone to war with itself, and why it was Scottish Presbyterians (rather than English puritans) who had brought tensions to a head. For Scotland, Hume argued, appeared not to have been touched by the same forces as England: ‘the Scotish [sic] nobility were still possessed of the chief power and influence over the people. Their property was extensive; their hereditary jurisdictions and the feudal tenures encreased their authority; and the attachment of the gentry to the heads of families established a kind of voluntary servitude under the chieftains.’88 Were it not for the intervention of this ‘country more turbulent, and less disposed to submission and obedience’, the English might have continued along the same track; they were glutted, after all, with peace, industry, commerce, opulence, and every other blessing of government ‘except liberty, or rather the present exercise of liberty, and its proper security.’89 James’s trip to Scotland in 1617 was a portent. Having already made the mistake of expressing sympathy to Rome, he had travelled up with the intention of ameliorating the barbarous austerity of the Presbyterians, for whom ‘all rites and ornaments, and even order of worship, were disdainfully rejected as useless burthens’. 90 They had established a mode of worship ‘the most naked and most simple imaginable; one that borrowed nothing from the senses; but reposed itself entirely on the contemplation of that divine Essence, which discovers itself to the understanding only.’ James had rightly seen that such a species of devotion was 86 Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, p. 74. 87 Hume, History, V, 85n. 88 Hume, History, V, 250. 89 Hume, History, V, 250. 90 Hume, History, V, 30-33, 66-68. 127 dangerous because it was anti-social: without the ‘aid of pomp and ceremony’, the enthusiastic mind became so occupied in its ‘inward life, that it fled from every intercourse of society, and from every chearful amusement, which could soften or humanize the character.’91 In Scotland, it was a disease that had spread. A ‘gloomy and sullen disposition’, James saw, had taken hold of the people. Dangerous and disorderly, it imbued them ‘with a contempt of authority, and a hatred to every other mode of religion, particularly to the catholic.’92 In response, James tried to ‘infuse a small tincture of ceremony into the national worship, and to introduce such rites as might, in some degree, occupy the mind, and please the senses’.93 The ‘finer arts’ were employed to adorn churches, and the king’s chapel – replete with organ, pictures, and statues – was proposed as a model for the nation. As John Pocock has shown, superstition was for Hume compatible with refinement, and could even be used to temper – or civilise – barbarous enthusiasm.94 This aligned him with the Erastian Arminianism of Archbishop Laud: a confessional politics, Pocock argues, that followed logically from his religious scepticism.95 But James’s project failed: the Scottish ecclesiastical courts retained their power of excommunication, and continued to deny his spiritual authority; when James tried to impose his supremacy through a parliamentary bill, it faced too much 91 Hume, History, V, 68. 92 Hume, History, V, 68. 93 Hume, History, V, 68-69; the rites introduced by James were ‘kneeling at the sacrament, private communion, private baptism, confirmation of children, and the observance of Christmas and other festivals. The acts, establishing these ceremonies, were afterwards known by the name of the articles of Perth, from the place where they were ratified by the assembly.’ History, V, 69. 94 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 209-15; Barbarism and Religion, VI, 331. James Harris’s claim that all manifestations of religion were for Hume ‘equally pernicious’, and ‘equally fatal to both the morals of the individual and the peace and stability of the state’, is not borne out by the History. See Harris, Hume, pp. 342-46, at 343. Harris and Pocock are in agreement, however, over the misleading and unhistorical bombast of Paul Russell’s claim that Hume was an atheist, for which see Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 95 For Hume’s account of Arminianism in England, see History, V, 211-13; on Laud, see History, V, 223-24, 227-28; on Laud’s execution, see History, V, 459-60. Laud, Hume explained here, ‘presented to the affrightened and astonished mind, some sensible, exterior observances, which might occupy it during its religious exercises, and abate the violence of its disappointed efforts … it is sufficient for his vindication to observe, that his errors were the most excusable of all those, which prevailed during that zealous period.’ For Pocock, this assessment – along with Hume’s scepticism that God could ever be known directly, and the peace he made with superstition – admitted him into an Arminian Enlightenment responsible, according to Pocock, for the rise of toleration and, ultimately, of western European liberalism. See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, I, 50- 72; Barbarism and Religion, II, 209-15; Barbarism and Religion, V, 89-137; Barbarism and Religion, VI, 65- 145. 128 opposition to pass.96 For now, the Presbyterian clergy had succeeded in standing firm against any refinement of their culture; under Charles, however, they turned violent. Since his accession, he had been working to bolster the influence of the prelates by raising them to the highest offices of the state, and encouraging them to clamp down on the authority of presbyteries, synods, and ‘other democratical courts’.97 But rather than seeking preferment through this rejuvenated episcopal ladder, the clergy had continued to distinguish themselves by the zeal and purity of their preaching, stoking up an antipathy toward Popery which, among an ‘uncultivated and uncivilized’ laity, was ‘inflamed into a higher degree of ferocity’ than that of the English.98 So when canons for establishing ecclesiastical jurisdiction began to be promulgated in 1635, dissent began to break out. That July, a stool was thrown at the Bishop of Edinburgh after a group of women had denounced him as the Antichrist.99 As tumults proliferated and the pulpits continued to resound with denunciations of episcopacy, Charles issued a proclamation exhorting obedience to the liturgy in February 1638.100 But this provoked a crisis. The Earl of Hume and Lord Lindesey issued a public protestation to the proclamation, gathered together a group of nobles, gentry, ministers, and burgesses, and erected a rebel government in which ‘the whole authority of the kingdom was placed’.101 Among their first acts was to issue a Covenant which, worryingly for Charles, contained ‘a bond of union, by which the subscribers obliged themselves to resist religious innovations, and to defend each other against all opposition whatsoever’.102 The king was left in no doubt of his inclusion within the ‘whatsoever’, and the ‘people, without distinction of rank or condition, of age or sex, flocked to the subscription of this covenant’.103 By June that year, Charles had offered to retract the liturgy. But by then it was too late: the Covenanters found themselves ‘seconded by the zeal of the whole nation’, and around 60,000 people had assembled in a ‘tumultuous’ manner in Edinburgh. By September, Charles had been pushed into allowing a general assembly to be 96 Hume, History, V, 72. 97 Hume, History, V, 252. 98 Hume, History, V, 252. 99 Hume, History, V, 255. 100 Hume, History, V, 257. 101 Hume, History, V, 257. 102 Hume, History, V, 258. 103 Hume, History, V, 258. 129 convoked. Seizing their chance, the Covenanters used it to abolish episcopacy, the high commission, the articles of Perth, the canons, and the liturgy; the covenant, meanwhile, was to be signed by everyone under the pain of excommunication.104 This amounted to a declaration that the ‘assembly, being Christ’s council, was superior, in all spiritual matters, to the parliament, which was only the king’s.’105 It had now become necessary, the Covenanters saw, to ‘maintain their religious tenets by military force, and not to trust entirely to supernatural assistance, of which, however, they held themselves well assured.’106 Charles soon responded, and in April 1640 called a parliament to raise supply. But after eleven years of recess, extra-parliamentary taxes, and persecution of puritanism, the commons were not likely to comply.107 Realising his mistake, Charles abruptly dissolved the parliament. Soon afterwards anti-episcopal violence announced itself south of the Tweed, as Archbishop Laud was attacked at his palace at Lambeth.108 By August, Charles had managed to borrow enough money from his ministers and courtiers to renew his engagement with the Scots, but a detachment of his army had also been routed at Newburn.109 By the Autumn, he had acknowledged the need to call another parliament, knowing this time that his exigencies would prevent him from dissolving it.110 The ‘progress of the Scottish malcontents’ had now ‘reduced the crown to an entire dependence for supply’, and roused ‘all latent murmurs and pretensions, which had hitherto been held in such violent constraint’.111 The commons soon seized control of the state, and the popular leaders control of the commons.112 The progress of enthusiasm through English seats and pulpits now sped up.113 By the winter of 1641, the lower house was beginning for the first time to discuss abolishing the monarchy altogether: an unthinkable possibility had it not been ‘for the passion, which seized the nation for presbyterian discipline, and for the wild 104 Hume, History, V, 261. 105 Hume, History, V, 262. 106 Hume, History, V, 262. 107 Hume, History, V, 269-76. 108 Hume, History, V, 277. 109 Hume, History, V, 279. 110 Hume, History, V, 282; on the proceedings of the first long parliament, see History, V, 285-331. 111 Hume, History, V, 284. 112 Hume, History, V, 284-300. 113 Hume, History, V, 159, 165, 177, 303. 130 enthusiasm, which at that time accompanied it.’114 By 1642, the commons had almost entirely choked off the king’s supply, leaving him too weak to ‘invade the constitution’.115 Yet the nation tilted only further into anarchy. Rather than being occupied by superstition, commerce, or the mediocrity of daily life, ‘all orders of men had drunk deep of the intoxicating poison’ of enthusiasm.116 A fanatical strain of Presbyterianism had entered every conversation, and even every commercial transaction.117 The fears which operated on people forcefully enough to lead them so ‘furiously to arms’, this led Hume to see, ‘were undoubtedly not of a civil, but of a religious nature. The distempered imaginations of men were agitated with a continual dread of popery, with a horror against prelacy, with an antipathy to ceremonies and the liturgy, and with a violent affection for whatever was most opposite to these objects of aversion.’118 Thus unleashed, enthusiasm had ‘dissolved every moral and civil obligation’.119 But it had yet to reach its confessional climax. So far, the dominant strain of puritanism in parliament and the nation had been Presbyterian. But in an ecclesiastical culture in which the enthusiastic spirit was the ‘immediate means of distinction and preferment; it was impossible to set bounds to these holy fervours, or confine, within any natural limits, what was directed towards an infinite and supernatural object.’120 As distinction was gained by arriving ‘at a higher pitch of saintship and perfection’, it was inevitable that the Presbyterians would be overrun by a sect who claimed to sing a ‘note higher’ in its purity.121 By the Autumn of 1644, a party calling themselves the Independents, led by Oliver Cromwell and Sir Harry Vane, had begun to take control of parliament. Reaching further than the Presbyterians, the Independents ‘abolished ecclesiastical government, disdained creeds and systems, neglected every ceremony, and confounded all ranks and orders.’122 Their civil politics, meanwhile, ‘kept pace’ with their ecclesiastical.123 114 Hume, History, V, 348. 115 Hume, History, V, 380. 116 Hume, History, V, 348. 117 Hume, History, V, 348. 118 Hume, History, V, 380. 119 Hume, History, V, 380. 120 Hume, History, V, 441. 121 Hume, History, V, 442. 122 Hume, History, V, 442. 123 Hume, History, V, 443. 131 Unlike the Presbyterians, who wanted to reduce the king to the rank of ‘first magistrate’, the Independents sought ‘a total abolition of the monarchy, and even of the aristocracy; and projected an entire equality of rank and order, in a republic, quite free and independent.’124 Soon the ‘soldier, the merchant, the mechanic, indulging the fervors of zeal, and guided by the illapses of the spirit’, had all been taken by the ‘inward and superior direction’ of the Godhead.125 Regicide soon followed.126 Such was the perverse power of enthusiasm, Hume concluded, that with ‘regard to the people, we can entertain no doubt, that the controversy was, on their part, entirely theological’.127 Hume was pleased with the brevity of his first foray into what, at this point, remained British (rather than English) history.128 He was also bemused at its reception. If the weekly papers were to be believed, he wrote to a friend, then ‘I am as great an atheist as Bolingbroke; as great a Jacobite as Carte.’129 His next volume, he promised his bookseller, would give ‘no farther Umbrage to the Godly’.130 Published in 1756, it took the story up to the Revolution of 1688.131 In his history of James and Charles, Hume had followed puritanical enthusiasm as it waxed, inhabiting and inflaming minds until it controlled the direction of his narrative; here he watched it wane, allowing the civil threads of his story to regain their force. But first came the regrettable episode of the Commonwealth. After the Regicide, parliament continued to be dominated by the Independents, who had soon expanded the laws of treason beyond the ‘narrow bounds’ into which they had been confined under monarchy.132 It was now illegal to merely assert parliament or its council of state to be tyrannical; the power of imprisonment, so loudly complained of when held by the king, was assumed to the council, and the jails were 124 Hume, History, V, 443. 125 Hume, History, V, 442. 126 Hume, History, V, 441-46, 449-50, 492-93. 127 Hume, History, V, 380n. 128 His first volume of quarto, he boasted to L’Abbé le Blanc, was only 470 pages long, imitating the ‘concise manner of the antient Historians’. Hume to L’Abbé le Blanc, 12 September 1754, in Hume, Letters, I, 191-94, at 193. 129 Hume to the Earl of Balcarres, 17 December 1754, in Hume, Letters, I, 213-15, at 214. 130 Hume to Andrew Millar, 12 April 1755, in Hume, Letters, I, 217-19, at 218. 131 Hume, The History of Great Britain. Vol II. Containing the Commonwealth, and the reigns of Charles II and James II (London: Andrew Millar, 1757). 132 Hume, History, VI, 13. 132 filled with ‘men whom the jealousies and fears of the ruling party had represented as dangerous’.133 Scotland and Ireland were invaded and subdued.134 And by April 1653, Cromwell had led a body of 300 soldiers to parliament, proclaiming to the assembly: ‘“You are no longer a parliament: I tell you, you are no longer a parliament. The Lord has done with you; He has chosen other instruments for carrying on his work.”’135 Cromwell was now speaking directly for Christ, and enthusiasm had almost reached its zenith.136 Soon he had declared himself Lord Protector and split the kingdom into twelve military jurisdictions ruled by as many ‘major-generals’.137 These generals acted as ‘absolute masters of the property and person of every subject’, leading many into the inescapable conclusion that ‘the very masque of liberty was thrown aside, and that the nation was for ever subjected to military and despotic government’.138 Now that it had reached such elevated heights, a despotism based on the zeal of one man could only fall. The fury of enthusiasm, Hume had written in 1741, ‘is like that of thunder and tempest, which exhaust themselves in a little time, and leave the air more calm and serene than before’; initially inhabited by a zealous fire, it was natural for sectarian fanatics to sink into a ‘coolness in sacred matters’.139 The Protectorate itself began to cool upon the death of the Protector in 1658: whilst Richard was tussling with the army, the Presbyterians and the Royalists were secretly setting aside their differences.140 After General Monk had marched on Westminster in February 1660 and issued writs for elections to a free parliament, the two parties forgot ‘all animosities, mingled in common joy and transport, and vowed never more to gratify the ambition of false and factious tyrants, by their calamitous divisions.’141 The elections ran everywhere in favour of the king, the enthusiasts were ‘disarmed of their fury’, and the ‘presbyterians, the royalists, being 133 Hume, History, VI, 13. 134 On Scotland, see Hume, History, VI, 29, 43-45, 55; on Ireland, see History, VI, 7-17. 135 Hume, History, VI, 53. 136 Hume, History, VI, 60-61. 137 Hume, History, VI, 62-64, 73. 138 Hume, History, VI, 74. 139 Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, p. 77. 140 Hume, History, VI, 112-32, 177. 141 Hume, History, VI, 132. 133 united, formed the voice of the nation, which, without noise, but with infinite ardour, called for the king’s restoration.’142 The politics of the Restoration, however, fractured along the Tweed. Before the Regicide, the enthusiasm of the Scots had fed off their barbarousness, eventually becoming aggressive enough to throw Britain into the crisis the Covenanters desired. In the aftermath of Regicide and Restoration, however, their divergence from the English began to cause problems. Immediately following Charles’s execution, the English parliament invited the Scots to model their government into a ‘republican form’; but the Scots proclaimed Charles II as their king, conditional on his observance of the Covenant.143 Although they were motivated by Presbyterian antipathy toward the Independents who had carried the Regicide, the Covenanters had also considered that ‘as the property of the kingdom lay mostly in the hands of great families, it would be difficult to establish a commonwealth, or without some chief magistrate, invested with royal authority, to preserve peace or justice in the community.’144 The sentiment survived the Commonwealth: in 1661, Charles’s commissioner to a newly summoned Scottish parliament found it compliant, and ready for the resuscitation of monarchy.145 The Scots’ ‘past resistance’, Hume argued, ‘had proceeded more from the turbulence of their aristocracy and the bigotry of their ecclesiastics than from any fixed passion towards civil liberty.’146 Or, as the duke of Lauderdale put it whilst advising Charles against retaining Cromwell’s Scottish forts, ‘a people, such as the Scots, governed by a few nobility, would more easily be reduced to submission under monarchy, than one, like the English, who breathed nothing but the spirit of democratical equality.’147 After monarchy was re-stablished ‘in its full extent’, episcopacy was quick to follow.148 Since the Reformation, most of the nation had entertained an ‘unsurmountable aversion’ to episcopal government, and its forced establishment 142 Hume, History, VI, 135-39. 143 Hume, History, VI, 6-7. 144 Hume, History, VI, 7; having brought Charles II over to Scotland, the Covenanters proceeded to reduce him to a ‘mere pageant of state’ before his eventual escape. History, VI, 25-28, 38. 145 Hume, History, VI, 168. 146 Hume, History, VI, 168. 147 Hume, History, VI, 167-68. 148 Hume, History, VI, 168. 134 was responsible for ‘all the subsequent tyranny and disorders in Scotland’.149 In the wake of the Act of Uniformity of 1662, the power of electing ministers was stripped from kirk-sessions and lay elders, and restored to royal patrons; incumbents admitted through the old route were to be re-admitted through the new.150 By 1664, the Scottish parliament had passed a law against conventicles, erected a court of high commission through which it could be executed, and then resorted to military force to enforce compliance.151 Unsurprisingly, tumults broke out across the country, initiating a cycle of repression and proselytising defiance.152 As conventicles and conventiclers continued to be persecuted with inquisitional rigour, ‘the genuine passion for liberty was at this time totally extinguished in Scotland.’153 Assembling at Edinburgh after the accession of James II, the Scottish parliament declared their abhorrence, Hume observed gloomily, ‘of all principles and positions, derogatory to the king’s sacred, supreme, sovereign, absolute power’.154 The same parliament declared it treason to defend the obligation of the Covenant, and a capital crime to attend a conventicle; they even declared that their own participation in the king’s sovereignty was commissioned by him, depending entirely on his grace.155 Nothing indigenous to Scottish history could generate liberty and tug them into modernity; it was only through Anglo-Scottish Union that they had finally ‘attained the experience of a government perfectly regular, and exempt from all violence and injustice.’156 But the English had only been able to haul the Scots out of servitude because they had taken a different route out of the Protectorate. After giving off an initially conciliatory air to the Presbyterians, the Act of Uniformity of 1662 required clergymen to be re-ordained if not previously ordained by a bishop; to declare their assent to everything contained in the book of common prayer; to take an oath of canonical obedience; to abjure the Covenant; and to renounce the principle of 149 Hume, History, VI, 225. 150 Hume, History, VI, 225. 151 Hume, History, VI, 226. 152 Hume, History, VI, 226-28, 322-23. 153 Hume, History, VI, 415-16. 154 Hume, History, VI, 466. 155 Hume, History, VI, 466. 156 Hume, History, VI, 223. 135 taking arms, on any pretence whatsoever, against the king.157 By August that year, to the court’s astonishment, 2000 clergy had relinquished their parishes.158 Unlike in Scotland, however, Charles’s measures did not lock England into a cycle of state violence and zealous puritanical resistance. Instead, people were ‘cured of that wild fanaticism, by which they had been so much agitated’.159 The ‘overstrained pretensions to piety’ of previous decades began to give way to deism, the principles of which were said to have been adopted by Shaftesbury, Halifax, Sidney, Temple, Buckingham, Essex, and Rochester—men who might previously have been lured into puritanism.160 The Restoration church had also rowed back on the Calvinist doctrine of absolute decrees, and had quietly embraced Arminian ‘tenets more suitable to the genius of her discipline and worship’.161 Manners, too, had begun to change: as austerity burnt itself out, new – but not unwelcome – vices arose: ‘licentiousness and debauchery became prevalent in the nation. The pleasures of the table were much pursued. Love was treated more as an appetite than a passion.’162 Between Restoration and Revolution, ‘commerce and riches’ increased quicker than they ever had done before, English shipping capacity was doubled, and new manufacturing industries in iron, brass, silk, hats, glass, and paper were established.163 Against this backdrop, religious strife slowly gave way to civil liberty. By 1680, the court party had begun to reproach the country party for their resemblance to Scottish conventiclers, then known by the name of whigs; the country party, meanwhile, declared courtiers to resemble Papish Irish bandits, then known by the name of tories.164 But there had been a shift, Hume claimed, in both the ‘spirit of the parties’ and the ‘genius of the prince’, by means of which Charles was able to preserve peace in the midst of the Exclusion Crisis of 1680-81.165 The cry against Popery, Hume explained, was ‘loud’. But it came less from ‘religious than from 157 Hume, History, VI, 165-76. 158 Hume, History, VI, 182. 159 Hume, History, VI, 539. 160 Hume, History, VI, 540. 161 Hume, History, V, 131-32; on this point, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 209-15. 162 Hume, History, VI, 539. 163 Hume, History, VI, 537-38. 164 Hume, History, VI, 381. 165 Hume, History, VI, 376-77. 136 party zeal’. Enthusiasm had wreaked so much havoc that it was difficult to revive it: the strained pretensions of Godly purity that had characterised previous decades had now ‘become suspicious’. Instead of calling themselves the ‘godly’ party, the partisans of liberty now called themselves ‘the good and the honest party: A sure prognostic, that their measures were not to be so furious, nor their pretensions so exorbitant.’166 Civil grievances were overcoming ecclesiastical, and ecclesiastical grievances were losing their enthusiastic courage. Meanwhile, the potential for English politics to break out into violence was falling away. This was the reason, Hume argued, that the Prince of Orange came to meddle in British politics. Long animated by the project of curbing the imperial pretensions of France, he was worried that the English of the 1680s were not the English of the 1640s; their Protestantism, he saw correctly, had lost its zealous edge: he knew that ‘men of education in England were, many of them, retained in their religion more by honour than by principle’, and that whilst no-one wanted to jump first, ‘interest would every day make considerable conversions to a communion, which was so zealously encouraged by the sovereign.’167 It was to stave off this possibility that William intervened, sending an envoy to tell the Church of his amenability toward episcopacy, and warn non-conformists not to be deceived by the ‘fallacious caresses of a Popish court’, and to wait for him instead.168 Soon all ‘orders of men [had] cast their eyes toward Holland’. The Whigs were easily induced into entering William’s design, having already attempted to exclude James from the throne; the Tories and church party agreed to drop their ‘overstrained doctrines of submission’ in the interests of settling their religion. And as William had been educated in the principles of toleration, the non-conformists viewed his overtures with less scepticism than those of James.169 Thus ‘all faction was for a time laid asleep in England’ allowing, in the convention parliament of 1689, the crown to be settled bloodlessly on the Prince and the Princess of Orange. Annexed to the Act of Settlement, too, was ‘a declaration of rights, where all the points, which had, of late years, been disputed between the king and people, were 166 Hume, History, VI, 377. 167 Hume, History, VI, 501. 168 Hume, History, VI, 501. 169 Hume, History, VI, 502-03. 137 finally determined; and the powers of royal prerogative were more narrowly circumscribed and more exactly defined, than in any former period of the English government.’170 The revolution, Hume claimed, formed a ‘new epoch in the constitution’. It may ‘justly be affirmed’, he concluded, that ‘we, in this island, have ever since enjoyed, if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind.’171 The Tudor volumes Just before he had published the second volume, Hume boasted that it would maintain ‘the same unbounded liberty’ in its politics that wreaked so much havoc in the first volume of 1754.172 But it was the problem of liberty, claimed one of Hume’s earliest and most substantial critics, that revealed the confusion at the heart of the History.173 Daniel MacQueen was the minister at Old Kirk, Edinburgh, and was unsurprisingly rattled by Hume’s treatment of Presbyterianism: Hume talked of the imagination instead of the ‘understanding and will’, and of ‘abstract speculation’ instead of the ‘rational aims, desires, and affections of the soul’; we have ‘had enough’, MacQueen barked, of his ‘confused ideas and speculations’.174 But MacQueen also noticed something else. Charles’s illegal levy of ship-money, Hume had claimed, proved that ‘liberty was totally subverted, and an unusual and arbitrary authority exercised over the kingdom.’175 But in the next paragraph (the opening of the following chapter), he had declared that the ‘grievances under which 170 Hume, History, VI, 503, 530. 171 Hume, History, VI, 531. 172 Hume to John Clephane, 20 April 1756, in Hume, Letters, I, 229-32, at 231. 173 Daniel MacQueen, Letters on Mr. Hume’s History of Great Britain (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & A. Donaldson, 1756), pp. 228-95. 174 MacQueen, Letters on Mr. Hume’s History, pp. 308, 327. MacQueen was not the only Protestant to be rankled by the History. In a review of MacQueen’s collection of missives, Tobias Smollett praised his ‘just though severe animadversions’, and confirmed their origin in a ‘man of piety and virtue, and a zealous friend to the Protestant religion.’ See Critical Review 1 (1756), pp. 248-53. Roger Flexman, a Presbyterian minister at Jamaica Row, London, shared MacQueen’s distaste: Hume wrote of Protestantism as if it ‘were rather the casual effect of enthusiasm and fanaticism, than the amiable offspring of free enquiry, and rational conviction.’ See Monthly Review 12 (1754), pp. 206-229. 175 Hume, History, V, 248; for MacQueen’s narration of Hume on ship-money, see MacQueen, Letters on Mr. Hume’s History, pp. 245-48. 138 the English laboured, when considered in themselves, scarce deserve the name’.176 ‘How?’, MacQueen exclaimed.177 It was difficult to see how Hume could be so dismissive after describing the tyranny of star chamber, high commission, and illegal taxation so indignantly. ‘Can you imagine yourself’, he asked his reader, ‘to be reading the same author?’178 MacQueen’s incredulous question had touched on something. But Hume had an answer, and it involved telling a story about modern liberty that had been (almost) absent from the volumes he had published so far. This story, however, has often been identified with the one already told by Lord Hervey. The Revolution, Hervey had claimed, marked the moment at which ‘ancient’ liberty became ‘modern’; but as ancient liberty, or the ‘Liberty of Old England’, was mythical, the transition also marked the birth of a liberty that was ‘real’.179 Hume is supposed to have agreed.180 John Pocock, in particular, has pointed to 1688 as giving birth to Hume’s modernity. After a millennium defined by excessive ecclesiastical power and ecclesiastical anarchy, Pocock argues, this was the moment at which Europe began to banish the threats of universal monarchy and religious war, emerging instead as an order of powerful states linked by treaties, commerce, and shared manners (a moment Pocock often refers to as the ‘post-Utrecht Enlightenment’).181 In the Essays and the Political Discourses, Pocock suggests, Hume began to write the history of the modern state that had been born in 1688, expanded in 1707, and secured in 1714. On this account, the History of Great Britain was its pre-history, aimed at uncovering the ecclesiastical and civil changes that had brought it – and 176 MacQueen, Letters on Mr. Hume’s History, p. 249. MacQueen was quoting from the first edition of the The History of Great Britain. Vol. I., p. 220. By the final and posthumous edition of 1778, Hume had altered the sentence in light of MacQueen’s criticisms. Tellingly, the sentence now read: the ‘grievances under which the English laboured, without regard to the constitution, scarcely deserve the name.’ Hume, History, V, 249. Emphasis added. 177 MacQueen, Letters on Mr. Hume’s History, p. 249. 178 MacQueen, Letters on Mr. Hume’s History, p. 250. 179 Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty, pp. 5, 40. 180 Hume’s purpose, argues James Harris, was that of the Court Whigs: to justify the ‘modern politics’ the Revolution had created on its own terms, without recourse to history. See Harris, Hume, p. 321, and also pp. 328-29, 374, 406. For Colin Kidd, the post-revolutionary English state ‘represented modernity’ for Hume, putting him at the vanguard of his Anglicising historiographical tradition of ‘sociological whiggism’. See Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 210. For looser associations of the ‘modern’ with the English state formed by 1688, see Phillipson, Hume, pp. 99- 102, 117; Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 310. 181 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, I, 7, 112; Barbarism and Religion, II, 12; Barbarism and Religion, IV, 206. 139 with it, modernity – into being.182 But in the Spring of 1757, Hume decided to extend his history not forwards, but backwards.183 For Pocock, this was a catastrophe. If he had gone forward to 1714 and beyond, he could have woven the flowering Arminianism and politeness of the History into the parliamentary interest, public debt, and inter-state trade of the Essays and Political Discourses—the ecclesiastical and civil innovations that enabled Britain to become modern by curtailing religious, domestic, and international war.184 By choosing to go in the opposite direction, Pocock laments, Hume lost hold of the threads that fed into modernity, and gave up on writing its history.185 The vexing question was why.186 But Hume never claimed that 1688 gave birth to either modern history or modern liberty. The word ‘modern’ appeared a handful of times in the History of Great Britain, but always as a synonym for ‘contemporary’, or ‘present’; Hume never gave it a moment of beginning.187 He did, however, when explaining his decision to go back to Henry VII to his bookseller, Andrew Millar: ‘It is properly at that Period modern History commences. America was discovered: Commerce extended: The Arts cultivated: Printing invented: Religion reform’d: And all the Governments of Europe almost chang’d.’188 I ‘wish’, he wrote a few days later, ‘I had from the first begun at that Period. It really is the commencement of modern History’.189 Although he comforted himself by remembering that Tacitus had also turned backwards from the Histories to the Annals, Hume also admitted that starting with ‘modern History’ would have allowed him to show ‘how absolute the authority was, which the English kings then possessed, and that the Stuarts did nothing or little more than continue matters in the former tract, which the people were 182 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 179, 199-221. 183 Hume To Andrew Millar, 20 May 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 248-50; Hume to William Strahan, 25 May 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 250-51. 184 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 218, 220-21. 185 Hume, Pocock claims, ‘did not write the history of modern government, which began only in 1689’. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 252, as well as 222. 186 Hume’s putative failure to write a history of ‘modern’ Britain casts a shadow over Pocock’s monograph-length treatment of him in Barbarism and Religion, II, 163-258. 187 Hume, History, V, 7, 131, 153, 220, 240, 304, 459n; History, VI, 75, 142, 143, 321, 533. 188 Hume to Andrew Millar, 20 May 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 249. Before May, Hume had been vacillating about what to do; Adam Smith had advised him to go back to Henry VII, rather than forward into Hanoverian Britain. On Hume’s vacillation, see Hume to William Mure of Caldwell, February 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 241-44; for Smith’s advice, see Hume to Adam Smith, February 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 246. 189 Hume to William Strahan, 25 May 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 250-51. 140 determined no longer to admit.’190 If he had managed this, Hume speculated, he might have been able to dodge being tarred with Jacobitism, the ‘most terrible ism of them all’.191 At the opening of his history of the reign of Henry VII, Hume filled out the sketch he had already given to Millar. In 1492, Christopher Columbus had taken advantage of improvements in navigation to venture west; a few years later, Vasquez De Gama went east, finding the Cape of Good Hope. A little earlier, in 1453, Constantinople had been taken by the Turks and the Greeks had been forced into Italy, bringing, ‘together with their admirable language, a tincture of their science and of their refined taste in poetry and eloquence.’192 Latin was revived around the same time, the study of antiquity became fashionable, and ‘the esteem for literature gradually propagated itself throughout every nation in Europe.’ As the simultaneous invention of printing expedited its advance, and the invention of gunpowder changed the art of war, ‘mighty innovations were soon after made in religion’. And thus ‘a general revolution was made in human affairs throughout this part of the world; and men gradually attained that situation, with regard to commerce, arts, science, government, police, and cultivation, in which they have ever since persevered.’ The ‘useful, as well as the more agreeable part of modern annals’ had now begun.193 So far, there was nothing especially original about this rendering of modern history, and it had not yet answered MacQueen.194 But Hume began to refine the story by explaining why The History of Great Britain had become The History of England.195 In the sixteenth century, Scotland had missed out on something more specific than a ‘universal modernisation process’ involving commercial growth, politeness, learning, a democratised distribution of property, and constitutional 190 Hume to William Strahan, 25 May 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 250-51; Hume to John Clephane, 3 September 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 263-64. 191 Hume to John Clephane, 3 September 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 263-64. 192 Hume, History, III, 81. 193 Hume, History, III, 81-82. 194 The association of the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder with the ‘moderns’ had already been made by Francis Bacon in his Novum organum, published as part of Instauratio magna (London: B. Norton, 1620). On this point, see John Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, in Wealth and Virtue, p. 148; Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 224-227; Richard Kennington, On Modern Origins (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004). 195 Hume, The History of England under the House of Tudor, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759). 141 liberty.196 The kingdom of Scotland, Hume claimed, ‘had not yet attained that state, which distinguishes a civilized monarchy, and which enables the government, by the force of its laws and institutions alone, without any extraordinary capacity in the sovereign, to maintain itself in order and tranquillity.’197 The barrier between the Scots and ‘civilized monarchy’ – this was the first appearance in the History of the category he had used in ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ – was the authority of their nobility. James III, incumbent as Henry VII took the English throne, had long found Scotland impossible to govern: if he took any of the principal nobility into his confidence, they exalted their family to such a height as ‘was dangerous to the prince’; if he raised those of ‘meaner birth’, the enraged barony entered into ‘the utmost extremities against their sovereign’.198 The barons precluded the creation of order; and as long as order was lacking, the ‘turbulent kingdom’ could only be ‘considered as a confederacy, and that not a close one, of petty princes, than a regular system of civil polity’.199 The ‘whole power’ resided in the hands of the nobility, and even the king possessed an authority ‘uncertain and precarious’.200 The world swirling underneath each ‘petty prince’ of Scotland was even worse. In each clan, ferocity paved the road to social distinction: ‘rapine and violence, when exercised on a hostile tribe, instead of making a person odious among his own clan, rather recommended him to their esteem and approbation; and by rendering him useful to the chieftain, entitled him to a preference above his fellows.’201 Although thick bonds of ‘mutual support’ subsisted among those of the same clan, the ‘spirit of revenge against enemies, and the desire of prosecuting the deadly feuds (so they were called), still appeared to be passions the most predominant among that uncultivated people.’202 These conditions continued to obtain throughout the century, meaning that Scotland had ‘little connexion with the general system of Europe’, and even less of a claim to impinge as regularly on Hume’s narrative as it had done in the History of Great Britain.203 Scotland was stuck 196 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 207-12. 197 Hume, History, III, 24. 198 Hume, History, III, 24. 199 Hume, History, III, 117. 200 Hume, History, III, 117. 201 Hume, History, III, 117. 202 Hume, History, III, 117. 203 Hume, History, III, 118-19. 142 in pre-modernity: a condition that Hume was beginning to associate with the feudal. But the same could not be said for England, where the ground was beginning to shift under people’s feet. The English nobility were beginning to avail themselves of the fruits of an increasingly bustling market in luxury goods. The political effects of this development were extraordinary, and answered MacQueen’s question; they also allowed Henry VIII to swivel his roving eye toward Rome, and open England up to the enthusiasm which would cause so much damage in the following century. There was a sense, Hume began, in which law as well as luxury had begun to transform English politics. Henry VII, as Harrington had famously pointed out, had forbidden entails and the holding of retainers. Along with the ‘beginning luxury and refinements of the age’, this induced the ‘nobility and gentry’ to alienate their estates; by these means, the ‘great fortunes of the barons were gradually dissipated, and the property of the commons increased in England.’204 The series of laws against retainers, meanwhile, made inroads into the practice by which men were ‘inlisted under some great lord, and were kept in readiness to assist him in all wars, insurrections, riots, violences, and even in bearing evidence for him in courts of justice.’205 This was the beginning of the story that we have already seen Hume tell in the History of Great Britain: the seventeenth-century gentry, he explained there, had come into property, realised they no longer needed the crown’s noxious prerogative, and then acted in their representative capacity to secure their ‘liberty by firmer barriers, than their ancestors had hitherto provided for it’.206 But here, in the history of the Tudors, Hume wanted to tease out why the crown no longer played the role that it used to—independent of any shift in the balance of property. The answer was that ‘the encrease of the arts, more effectually than all the severities of law’, had begun to change the way in which the nobility behaved. Once they could consume the produce of the increasingly refined arts, they began to lose interest in competing over the ‘number and boldness of their retainers’.207 Instead, they developed what Hume called a ‘more civilized species of 204 Hume, History, III, 77; see also Hume to Gilbert Elliot, 3rd baronet of Minto, 9 August 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 261-63, in which he explains the legal sanction Henry VII gave to the practice of fine and recovery, a legal fiction widely used in England to break entails by ‘Hocus-Pocus’. 205 Hume, History, III, 76-77. 206 Hume, History, V, 39-40, 134-35. 207 Hume, History, III, 76-77. 143 emulation’, based on ‘the splendour and elegance of their equipage, houses, and tables’. The ‘common people’, meanwhile, were released from ‘vicious idleness’, had to ‘learn some calling or industry, and became useful both to themselves and to others.’208 Previously, Hume was suggesting, the English nobility had looked Scottish, competing over the size of their private armies and necessarily precluding order. But the percolation of luxury goods into the nation had transposed their search for distinction into a different key, taking them from military to sartorial competition; retainers, meanwhile, had dropped arms and flocked to the city, taking up manufacturing industries instead. In developing a ‘taste for elegant luxury’, the nobility were leaving their ‘ancient customs’ behind. But this was to be welcomed: the nobility’s ‘new turn of expence promoted arts and industry; while the ancient hospitality was the source of vice, disorder, sedition, and idleness.’209 As the nobles traded the surplus produce of their land to fund their new addiction, ‘mechanics and merchants’ began to live ‘in an independent manner on the fruits of their own industry’.210 The manners of the nobles themselves, meanwhile, were being overhauled, and Hume’s description of the transition is worth giving in full: a nobleman, instead of that unlimited ascendant, which he was wont to assume over those who were maintained at his board, or subsisted by salaries conferred on them, [now] retained only that moderate influence, which customers have over tradesmen, and which can never be dangerous to civil government. The landed proprietors also, having a greater demand for money than for men, endeavoured to turn their lands to the best account with regard to profit, and either inclosing their fields, or joining many small farms into a few large ones, dismissed those useless hands, which formerly were always at their call in every attempt to subvert the government, or oppose a neighbouring baron.211 208 Hume, History, III, 76-77. 209 Hume, History, IV, 383. 210 Hume, History, IV, 384. 211 Hume, History, IV, 384. 144 The usual role of the greater nobility had always been to quarrel with each other and with the crown, only intermittently acquiescing to royal authority in the interests of their own safety. But now they were doing neither: the authority of the chief was morphing into the influence of the patron, and the desire for political mischief was being crowded out by the desire for profit. This was the shift in manners to which the gentry had only later awoken, and Hume was insistent that its origins had little to do with law: ‘Whatever may be commonly imagined, from the authority of lord Bacon, and from that of Harrington, and later authors, the laws of Henry VII. contributed very little towards the great revolution, which happened about this period in the English constitution.’212 The luxury-induced ‘change of manners’, Hume repeated, ‘was the chief cause of the secret revolution of government, and subverted the power of the barons.’213 For as the nobility began to civilize their means of emulation, the ‘retrenchment of the ancient hospitality, and the diminution of retainers, were favourable to the prerogative of the sovereign; and by disabling the great noblemen from resistance, promoted the execution of the laws, and extended the authority of the courts of justice.’214 So much for those, Hume jibed, who postured against ‘refinement in the arts, or what they are pleased to call luxury’.215 An industrious tradesman was both a ‘better man and a better citizen’ than the idle retainer he used to be. But more importantly, ‘the life of a modern nobleman’ was far ‘more laudable than that of an ancient baron.’216 English noblemen, it seemed, were making the transition from ‘ancient’ to ‘modern’ that their Scottish counterparts could not. This transformation, moreover, was taking place in any European monarchy with a fertile market in luxury goods. Hume’s depiction of the breadth and depth of luxury’s political impact is one of the most heterodox passages we have considered so far, and bears repeating in full: The nobles dissipated their fortunes in expensive pleasures: Men of an inferior rank both acquired a share in the landed property, and created to themselves a considerable property of a new kind, in stock, commodities, art, credit, and 212 Hume, History, IV, 384. 213 Hume, History, IV, 385; see also History, III, 80. 214 Hume, History, IV, 383-84. 215 Hume, History, III, 76-77. 216 Hume, History, III, 76-77. 145 correspondence. In some nations the privileges of the commons encreased, by this encrease of property: In most nations, the kings, finding arms to be dropped by the barons, who could no longer endure their former rude manner of life, established standing armies, and subdued the liberties of their kingdoms: But in all places, the condition of the people, from the depression of the petty tyrants, by whom they had formerly been oppressed, rather than governed, received great improvement, and they acquired, if not entire liberty, at least the most considerable advantages of it.217 This was an astonishing claim. Wherever luxury had taken hold, European monarchs had secured the authority that the feudal system had denied them; as their nobilities had been pacified, they often became despotic. But as this was happening, their peoples had also begun to feel free: the ‘considerable advantages’ of liberty could germinate, and even flourish, under the glare of absolute monarchy. This kind of liberty did not depend on free-holding and parliaments; it had no need for the people to have their hands on law-making, either directly or indirectly (by electing representatives to legislate for them in a popular assembly). This kind of liberty also provided an answer to MacQueen: the seventeenth-century English had attempted to secure liberty because there was a powerful sense in which they had already become free. The ‘considerable advantages’ of liberty had already emerged in the sixteenth century, as the English nobility had been anaesthetised; all the English lacked were ‘firmer barriers’ to protect it, explaining why Hume could indict and dismiss English tyranny in the same breath. As soon as the feudal system began to transform itself, the authority of the crown reached unprecedented heights. With the nobility dropping out of the picture, Henry VII became the ‘sole oppressor’ of the kingdom; although the power of English kings had always been ‘irregular or discretionary’, it had rarely been as ‘absolute’ as it was now.218 The king was the ‘prime mover in every thing’, parliament was rendered entirely obsequious, and by the time of Henry VIII’s accession, England – unlike Scotland – was ‘united in domestic peace’.219 The 217 Hume, History, III, 80. Emphasis added. 218 Hume, History, III, 49, 73-74. 219 Hume, History, III, 74, 79, 88. 146 clergy, secular and dignified, were the only body which continued to move independently of the crown; but by February 1533, Henry had ‘repressed the usurpations of the Roman pontiff’ by forbidding appeals to the court of Rome in ecclesiastical cases, and declaring himself supreme head of the Church.220 The acknowledgement of supremacy, Hume explained, introduced ‘a greater simplicity in the government, by uniting the spiritual with the civil power, and preventing disputes about limits, which never could be exactly determined between the contending jurisdictions.’221 After this, no ‘prince in Europe was possessed of such absolute authority as Henry, not even the pope himself, in his own capital’.222 In 1541, parliament openly declared that they ‘had no other rule, in spiritual as well as temporal concerns, than the arbitrary will of their master.’223 By 1545, the ‘prostitute spirit of the parliament’ was put beyond doubt as they declared that all ecclesiastical persons had ‘no manner of jurisdiction but by [Henry’s] royal mandate’, and that he (and his appointees) alone had the authority to correct any manner of heresy whatsoever. No mention was made of the concurrence of a convocation or a parliament; his proclamations were acknowledged to have ‘not only the force of law, but the authority of revelation’.224 Henry’s Erastianism was to be welcomed.225 Whilst he was still alive, the scope of his authority managed to retain the ‘partizans of both religions in subjection’; as the ‘magistrate took the lead in England’, the Reformation was more gradual than it had been elsewhere: ‘much of the ancient religion was still preserved; and a reasonable degree of subordination was retained in discipline, as well as some pomp, order, and ceremony in public worship.’226 But this began to change in 1547 as Edward acceded and his uncle, the earl of Hertford, was created Duke of Somerset and protector of the realm.227 For he was a ‘secret partizan of the reformers’, and intended to adopt more of their innovations than Henry had 220 On the Henrician reformation, see Hume, History, III, 186-88, 196-209. 221 Hume, History, III, 206. 222 Hume, History, III, 212. 223 Hume, History, III, 287. 224 Hume, History, III, 310-11. 225 For Hume’s argument on the civil necessity of an established church, see History, III, 134-43; for Hume’s application of this argument to the Henrician reformation, see History, III, 206-07; for commentary, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 226-29. 226 Hume, History, III, 339. 227 Hume, History, III, 333-35. 147 done.228 In 1548, he forbid the carrying of candles on Candlemas day, ashes on Ash-Wednesday, and palms on Palm-Sunday.229 Private masses were abolished, auricular confession rendered indifferent to salvation, a number of ‘gay and showy’ ceremonies banned, and all images removed from churches: an ‘innovation which was much desired by the reformers, and which alone, with regard to the populace, amounted almost to a total change of the established religion.’230 But by shifting the focus of popular worship away from the ceremonies that Henry had kept, Somerset was risking civil peace. Hume had already explained his preference for superstition over enthusiasm, as it was less dangerous to imagine the spirit in material objects than in one’s own mind. The Romish religion, Hume confirmed here, had the right idea: by ‘giving its votaries something to do, [it] freed them from the trouble of thinking’. Sermons were only delivered at particular festivals, and the practice of ‘haranguing the populace’ – ‘so powerful an incitement to faction and sedition’ – was little developed.231 But by banishing the material objects on which Catholic superstition had fixated, Somerset forced the people ‘to contract a stronger attachment to sermons’.232 Somerset’s zeal amplified the initial problem posed by the spread of Luther’s tenets in the 1520s. In this, he had been aided by the revival of learning and the invention of printing; but this was not because printing and letters had encouraged ‘reason and reflection’: Hume ridiculed the notion that ‘reason bore any considerable share, in opening men’s eyes with regard to the impostures of the Romish church’.233 Printing aided the advance of Lutheran doctrines in a different way: by allowing the ‘books of Luther and his sectaries, full of vehemence, declamation, and a rude eloquence’ to be propagated more quickly, and in greater numbers.234 Their affect mattered more than their reasonableness (or unreasonableness) because prior to Luther’s argument with the Papacy, the clergy and the laity lived in a condition of ‘profound ignorance’.235 Freedom from disputation had produced an ‘indolent’ 228 Hume, History, III, 338. 229 Hume, History, III, 354. 230 Hume, History, III, 355. 231 Hume, History, III, 355-56. 232 Hume, History, III, 355-56. 233 Hume, History, III, 140. 234 Hume, History, III, 140. Emphasis added. 235 Hume, History, III, 211. 148 attachment to received opinions; the ‘multitude’ were attached to them less because of ‘reasoning’ than a lack of alternatives. So when reformers began to ‘dispute concerning the nature of the sacraments, the operations of grace, the terms of acceptance with the Deity, men were thrown into amazement, and were, during some time, at a loss how to chuse their party.’236 As their capacity was ‘totally unfitted for such disquisitions’, reason played little part in their judgments. On this account, the ‘thinking’ that sermons required was dangerous because it was closer to feeling than reasoning, and the feelings created by haranguing – or by the violence of Luther’s prose style – were closer to sedition than obedience. Whereas sermons incited the multitude into disobedience and primed them for the virus of enthusiasm, the sacraments and ceremonies of the Romish church occupied people in more pacific ways. Elizabeth, Hume suggested, understood this, and resisted the temptation to move too decisively against the Catholics in the wake of the horrific Marian interlude.237 She began by welcoming back the Protestant exiles and, through the second bill of her first parliament in 1558, vesting the crown once again with the ‘whole spiritual power’.238 Regardless of the concurrence (or objection) of either parliament or the convocation, she could now determine and punish heresy, establish and repeal all canons, alter any point of discipline, and ordain or abolish any rite or ceremony—a luxury even popes did not possess.239 But she ‘struck out every thing that could be offensive’ to the Catholics in her new liturgy, allowing even those ‘addicted to the Romish communion’ to attend church.240 Hume applauded her inclination to seek a ‘happy medium’. She had seen that the reformers had ‘gone too far in shaking off those forms and observances, which, without distracting men of more refined apprehensions, tend, in a very innocent manner, to allure, and amuse, and engage the vulgar.’241 Somerset had not understood these qualities, and had paid the price in popular rebellion.242 236 Hume, History, III, 210-11. 237 For Mary’s reign, see Hume, History, III, 400-64; for Elizabeth’s determination to resist imitating Mary (from the opposite direction) see History, IV, 7. 238 Hume, History, IV, 10. 239 Hume, History, IV, 10-11. 240 Hume, History, IV, 13-15. 241 Hume, History, IV, 122-23. 242 Hume, History, III, 369-73. 149 But the rigour with which Elizabeth punished deviations from her via media upset the reformed exiles she had invited back. Supported by ‘many considerable persons’ in the privy council, they wanted to push the reformation further than Somerset had managed; Elizabeth’s insistence on uniformity, however, pushed them underground: those who ‘harboured a secret antipathy to the episcopal order and to the whole liturgy, were obliged, in a great measure, to conceal these sentiments’.243 But the puritanical flame was only confined, ‘not extinguished; and burning fiercer from confinement, it burst out in the succeeding reigns to the destruction of the church and monarchy.’244 The rest of Elizabeth’s reign was characterised by the game of cat and mouse between prerogative and puritanism; with the previously fractious nobility distracted by consumption, and the gentry yet to realise what this meant, there was no other source of opposition to her flourishing authority. Her treatment of the parliament of April 1571 revealed the height of the mountain the puritans had to climb: after refusing to assent to a number of bills proposing the curtailing of various ceremonial practices, it became clear that parliaments ‘were not to canvass any matters of state: Still less were they to meddle with the church.’245 If members of the Commons did have the temerity to touch on matters of state (either ecclesiastical or civil), Elizabeth was happy to imprison them, forcing them to answer for their conduct in the house.246 As her reign went on, the tendrils of her prerogative grew in number and reach: the jurisdiction of the court of star chamber extended to ‘all sorts of offences, contempts, and disorders, that lay not within the reach of the common law.’247 The legislative power of parliament was ‘mere fallacy’; in ‘reality, the crown possessed the full legislative power, by means of proclamations’.248 In the parliament of 1601, Elizabeth declared to the lower house that she might ‘set at liberty what was restrained by statute’ and ‘restrain what was otherwise at liberty’; that the prerogative was not ‘to be canvassed nor disputed nor examined’; and even that ‘absolute princes, such as the sovereigns of England, were a species of 243 Hume, History, IV, 123. 244 Hume, History, IV, 123-24. 245 Hume, History, IV, 144. 246 In 1576, she did exactly that to Peter Wentworth, for which see Hume, History, IV, 178-80. 247 Hume, History, IV, 356. 248 Hume, History, IV, 363. 150 divinity’.249 Most damagingly, she managed to raise revenue without resorting to parliamentary subsidies. Whereas Sultans sold governors of their provinces the permission to extort their inhabitants, Elizabeth erected monopolies and granted patents for exclusive trade.250 Under the cloud of such extraordinary authority, the ‘precious spark of liberty had been kindled, and was preserved, by the puritans alone’. It was to them, as we have seen already, that the English owed ‘the whole freedom of their constitution’.251 The Gothic volumes Like the two volumes of the History of Great Britain, Hume’s Tudor history pushed English historiography into new places. Neither modern history nor modern liberty had been inaugurated by the settlement of England’s parliamentary monarchy in 1688; Hume had found his axis in around 1500, as European nobilities became peaceful and the ‘considerable advantages’ of liberty emerged across Europe. This troubled his readers, as we shall see in the final chapter, because it suggested that liberty could be generated without parliaments (an idea he had already floated in ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ in 1741). But it also applied pressure on Montesquieu and Dalrymple. Before writing the Tudor volumes, Hume had read Dalrymple’s Essay closely, and thought it deserving of all the praise it received.252 But here, Hume was beginning to suggest that modern liberty was a distinctly post-feudal – rather than feudal – phenomenon. Unlike Kames, however, Hume had loosened his own notion of post-feudal liberty from its usual mooring in parliamentary monarchy; 249 Hume, History, IV, 346. 250 Hume, History, IV, 360; Hume found the scale of this practice ‘astonishing’: ‘Currants, salt, iron, powder, cards, calf-skins, fells, pouldavies, ox-shin-bones, train oil, lists of cloth, pot-ashes, anniseeds, vinegar, sea-coals, steel, aquavitae, brushes, pots, bottles, saltpetre, lead, accidences, oil, calamine stone, oil of blubber, glasses, paper, starch, tin, sulphur, new drapery, dried pilchards, transportation of Iron ordnance, of beer, of horn, of leather, importation of Spanish wool, of Irish yarn: These are but a part of the commodities, which had been appropriated to monopolists.’ History, IV, 345. 251 Hume, History, IV, 146. 252 Hume mentioned it in a letter to Andrew Millar on 4 December 1756, in Hume, Letters, I, 235- 36; for his praise, see Hume to Andrew Millar, 3 September 1757, in Hume, Letters, I, 264-67. 151 luxury-fuelled nobles, rather than free-holding commoners, seemed to be driving the story. Hume expanded on why this distinction mattered in The History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the accession of Henry VII, published in two volumes in 1761.253 Historians have often seen their purpose as indistinct from previous instalments: Hume had set out to destroy the English constitution, and was simply finishing what he had started.254 James Harris has recently suggested that Hume did so by vindicating Brady against Bolingbroke: 1066 had ruptured the constitution because William I had turned England into a feudal society in which all property and law derived from the sovereign’s will; whatever arrangements the Saxons might have had, the Conqueror rendered them moot.255 Other historians have found continuity in place of discontinuity.256 In its most sophisticated form, this argument holds that Hume became ensnared by the idea of an ancient English constitution after all.257 For John Pocock, Hume could ‘whig it with the best’ and, once in among the weeds of Anglo-Saxon history, found a natural equity and respect for property at the root of barbarian law.258 The English common law, Hume ended up confirming, was a constantly asserted set of customs traceable to Alfred and (perhaps even) beyond, making the English a ‘deeply legalistic’ people both before and after the Norman conquest.259 The English constitution may have been in a continual state of flux; but it was nevertheless an entity of which a continuous history could be written, and Hume wrote it in heterodox fashion. Hume’s final two volumes, Pocock argues, pointed to 253 Hume, The History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the accession of Henry VII, 2 vols (London: Andrew Millar, 1762). Though the title page reads 1762, it was published in 1761 (as noted above). 254 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 249, 267, 298-309; for Nicholas Phillipson, the volumes were ‘something to do’, now that the ‘umbilical cord that had hitherto tied the English historical mind to its Gothic past’ had been broken by Hume’s previous volumes. Phillipson, Hume, p. 117- 18. 255 Harris, Hume, pp. 387-405; Richard Bourke also argues that Hume’s emphasis on discontinuity and rupture influenced Burke’s Essay Towards and Abridgement of English History (1757-63). See Bourke, Empire & Revolution: the Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 181-86. 256 For Colin Kidd, Hume (among others) did not completely obliterate the shape of English whig historiography: his History remained a story of ‘continuity, based on the survival and evolution of Gothic institutions’. Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 212. 257 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 241-57, 259-61. 258 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 242-45. 259 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 245. 152 the weakness of ancient law when faced by political violence.260 This violence, he suggests, had only stopped in 1689 with the emergence of a post-ancient state strong enough to curtail the threat of aristocratic and religious war. Hume’s story of the transition from ancient to modern was therefore the story of the commons’ rise, and the story of the commons’ rise was the story of the gradual representation of boroughs (the English version of the common eighteenth-century thesis that it was the rise of incorporated towns across Latin Europe that had brokered the transition from barbarism to civilisation).261 It should be clear by now that Hume was seeking to do more than reveal the fractures (or discontinuities) in the history of England’s ‘ancient constitution’; the purpose of the History’s final volumes was rather to narrate English history before it became modern. But Hume’s modernity, as we have seen, was not what Pocock imagines it to be. It began in 1500, rather than 1688-89, and was confirmed by the temporal economy of the completed work: Hume had now dedicated two volumes of quarto to the 1500 years before Henry VII (or 55 AD – 1485), two volumes of quarto to the sixteenth century, and two volumes of quarto to the seventeenth. As the commencement of modern history had less to do with England’s parliament than with a pan-European transformation of feudal manners, its prehistory also looked different to the picture that Pocock has sketched. It can be divided into four parts, or epochs. The first two depicted the manners and government of the Anglo- Saxons and the Anglo-Normans; the third and fourth followed the ripples made by Magna Carta and the birth of a representative House of Commons. Woven throughout was a single story: that the Gothic arrangements shared by the Saxons and the Normans were so stubborn and so barbarous that until the outset of the sixteenth century, nothing could dislodge them. Hume’s first epoch of English history was organised around the Saxons, rather than the Romans or the Britons, because few conquests in history had been as ruinous as theirs, and ‘few revolutions more violent’.262 In face of such an onslaught, no aspect of Briton or Roman politics had been able to survive. The ancient inhabitants of Britannia had been massacred or enslaved, leaving the 260 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 246. 261 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 247. 262 Hume, History, I, 24. 153 Saxons with no need of ‘feudal institutions’, calculated as they were to furnish conquerors with a ‘kind of standing army’ for suppressing insurrections.263 Instead, they preserved ‘unaltered’ the civil and military institutions that had held them together in Germany.264 There, they had operated as a network of tribes who aggregated in wartime. Though the princes the tribes chose to lead them in battle were usually drawn from the ‘royal family’, they were directed ‘in every measure by the common consent of the nation’.265 In order to decide on important affairs, the tribes would assemble; the warriors of greatest authority would employ ‘persuasion’ to gain support for a particular course of action, and the people would either rattle their armour (in support) or murmur (in dismay). Even in war, princes ruled more by military example than by ‘authority’; but in peace, the ‘civil union was in a great measure dissolved’. The chieftains of each tribe would then administer justice themselves, ‘each in his particular district’. They were elected in turn by their own tribes, usually on the basis of their valour. After winning this honour, chieftains attracted the most ‘devoted affection and most unshaken constancy’ from the warriors of their tribes. Their job was to attend him ‘as his ornament in peace, as his defence in war, [and] as his council in the administration of justice.’266 To die for the honour of their tribe was their chief ambition; to survive its defeat was their greatest fear. By 827, the Saxons had erected the Heptarchy, converted to Christianity, and united the Heptarchy.267 The Saxon monarchies that followed retained their Germanic character. The king, ‘so far from being invested with arbitrary power’, was only considered as ‘the first among the citizens’; a stated price was fixed for his head, and a fine was levied on his murderer (a ‘sensible mark’, Hume observed, of his ‘subordination to the community’).268 There were no settled rules for determining his accession and succession: the monarchies were not, ‘strictly speaking, either elective or hereditary’; a people unaccustomed to the benefits of ‘fixed rule’ were liable to make ‘great leaps’ in succession. Though the prince’s 263 For the Britons and the Romans, see Hume, History, I, 1-12; on the Saxon’s avoidance of fiefs, see History, I, 181-82. 264 Hume, History, I, 161. 265 Hume, History, I, 15-16. 266 Hume, History, I, 15-16. 267 Hume, History, I, 26-32, 50. 268 Hume, History, I, 161. 154 choice was often followed, the Saxon monarchies could not be considered ‘wholly testamentary’: the ‘states by their suffrage may sometimes establish a sovereign; but they more frequently recognize the person, whom they find established’.269 The only fixed rule was the presence of the states: ‘at all times, and in all the kingdoms, there was a national council, called a Wittenagemot or assembly of the wise men, (for that is the import of the term) whose consent was requisite for enacting laws, and for ratifying the chief acts of public administration.’270 But these councils had not been the carriers of liberty that Bolingbroke had declared them to be. The native German tribes Hume had already described were small, meaning that all could assemble to direct major decisions; but when communities grew, as Saxon tribes did once settled in Britannia, ‘the national assemblies must have been more limited in their number, and composed only of the more considerable citizens.’271 These clustered into two states, ecclesiastical and civil: bishops and abbots comprised the first, having not yet decoupled themselves from the civil polity; proprietors holding between four and five thousand acres and governors of counties comprised the second. This made Saxon Wittenagemots small. There was no representation, and hence no representatives of the boroughs—‘or what we now call the commons’.272 The people, too, were of ‘little or no weight and consideration.’273 The Wittenagemot, however, was a distraction: its composition was too obscure to be ascertained with any certainty, and Hume attached greater significance to the Gothic politics underpinning it. Prior to 1066, Hume explained, the Anglo-Saxon governments were ‘extremely aristocratical’.274 It could ‘not but happen’ that the great proprietors, or chieftains, would ‘augment their authority’ in the wake of the unification of the Heptarchy.275 As kings began to live at a distance from the provinces, these men began to assume an ‘immeasurable power’ via protection rackets. Among such a ‘military and turbulent’ people as the Saxons, averse to commerce and the arts, ‘justice was commonly very ill administered’ and 269 Hume, History, I, 162. 270 Hume, History, I, 163. 271 Hume, History, I, 164. 272 Hume, History, I, 163-64. 273 Hume, History, I, 165. 274 Hume, History, I, 165, 172. 275 Hume, History, I, 166. 155 violence widespread. Unable to rely on the security of the laws, men were ‘obliged to devote themselves to the service of some chieftain, whose orders they followed even to the disturbance of the government or the injury of their fellow-citizens, and who afforded them in return protection from any insult or injustice by strangers’.276 Robert Brady’s scholarship, Hume claimed, had shown that even the inhabitants of towns had been forced to place themselves under the ‘clientship of some particular nobleman, whose patronage they purchased by annual payments, and whom they were obliged to consider as their sovereign, more than the king himself, or even the legislature.’277 A client, though a ‘freeman’, was supposed to belong to his patron— so much so that if he was murdered, the murderer had to pay a fine to the patron to compensate for his loss. Little different to the manner in which a murderer paid a ‘fine to the master for the murder of his slave’, it was impossible under this system for a ‘private man to remain altogether free and independant’.278 These protection rackets, Hume insisted, characterised the Saxons to a greater degree than the deliberative processes or sociological make-up of the Wittenagemot. Despite the ‘seeming liberty’ of their relatively democratic political arrangements, the ‘great body even of the free citizens, in those ages, really enjoyed much less true liberty, than where the execution of the laws is the most severe, and where subjects are reduced to the strictest subordination and dependance on the civil magistrate.’279 When ordinary people had to spend their time seeking protection via ‘submission to superiors’, no sense of security – what Hume referred to here as ‘true liberty’ – could emerge. This power of ‘private confederacy’ created nothing less than a kind of Gothic ‘anarchy’ which was the ‘immediate cause of tyranny’ over the people.280 Hume’s next epoch ran from the Norman conquest to John: the age in which ecclesiastics began to break out of the civil cages in which Saxon monarchies had locked them.281 The defining story of the epoch, however, was not the muddying of relations between ecclesiastical and civil authority, but the 276 Hume, History, I, 166-67. 277 Hume, History, I, 167; Hume was referring to Brady, An Historical Treatise of Cities, and Burghs or Boroughs, 2nd edn (London: J. Nutt, 1704). 278 Hume, History, I, 167, 171. 279 Hume, History, I, 168-69. 280 Hume, History, I, 168-69. 281 Hume, History, I, 215-18, 305-16, 323-34. 156 introduction of feudal tenures into England. They arrived, Hume claimed, in conjunction with William’s paranoia: he had begun to see ‘all his English subjects as inveterate and irreclaimable enemies’ and desired to pacify them.282 By 1070, various conspiracies and insurrections had involved the bulk of native English proprietors in treason. Although their lives were mostly spared, William used their crimes to confiscate their estates, producing ‘almost a total revolution in the landed property of the kingdom.’283 But unlike the Saxons upon their invasion of Britannia, William now had to keep a potentially volatile populace in check; in order to do so, he ‘introduced into England the feudal law, which he found established in France and Normandy, and which, during that age, was the foundation both of the stability and of the disorders, in most of the monarchical governments of Europe.’284 This meant dividing all the confiscated land into baronies, which he then conferred on the ‘most considerable of his adventurers’ in exchange for military service and various payments. These barons, who held immediately of the crown, then conferred a great part of their own land to other Normans, ‘denominated knights or vassals’, who in turn owed their lord ‘the same duty and submission in peace and war, which he himself owed to his sovereign.’285 Hume estimated that there were 700 baronial estates, and a further 60,215 knights-sees; any Englishman who had managed to hold on to his property had to enter into the vassalage of a Norman baron, as did the ecclesiastics (to the horror of the Papacy).286 All of a sudden, England had become a ‘feudal kingdom’.287 Given that ‘these facts are so apparent from the tenor of English history’, only the heat of faction could explain why so many – Bolingbroke most notably among them – had attempted to deny the unbridgeable rupture the Normans had torn in the fabric of the constitution.288 If 1066 had ultimately subjected all property-holders to the king, then it was absurd to look to the Saxons for an ‘ancient constitution’ the meaning of which could continue to resonate today. But this 282 Hume, History, I, 195. 283 Hume, History, I, 203. 284 Hume, History, I, 203. 285 Hume, History, I, 204. 286 Hume, History, I, 204. 287 Hume, History, I, 461. 288 Hume, History, I, 227. 157 observation did not lure Hume into Brady’s embrace.289 The attempts of both sides to extract a politics from conquest were ridiculous: ‘one party was absurdly afraid of those absurd consequences, which they saw the other party inclined to draw from this event.’290 It was equally nonsensical to extract a politics of absolute royal authority from 1066 as it was to find ‘true liberty’ under Saxon parliaments. For appearances were deceptive. Following William’s ‘total revolution’, he was in principle ‘supreme lord of the landed property: All possessors, who enjoyed the fruits or revenue of any part of it, held those privileges, either mediately or immediately, of him; and their property was conceived to be, in some degree, conditional.’291 But it was the vassals who, ‘by the natural course of things, universally, in the feudal constitutions, fell into a greater subordination under the baron, than the baron himself under his sovereign’.292 Like the ‘aristocratical’ governments of the Saxons, monarchies based on feudal property had a ‘necessary and infallible tendency to augment the power of the nobles’.293 England was no exception to the rule. English fiefs may have only arrived in the 11th century, but in the rest of Europe they dated to the barbarian inundation of the Roman empire. Norman fiefs were Germanic in origin, meaning that Anglo-Norman politics were not so far from Anglo-Saxon after all. In an appendix on the ‘Feudal and Anglo-Norman Government and Manners’, Hume took on the origin of the feudal system in order to explain what he meant.294 He began it by worrying that he was liable to repeat the observations of Montesquieu and William Robertson.295 But the explanatory payoff made iteration a risk Hume was willing to take: for several centuries, the feudal law had preserved a ‘mixture of liberty and oppression, order and anarchy, stability and revolution, as was never experienced in any other age or any other part of the world.’296 (Montesquieu, Hume was remembering, had described it as producing 289 That Hume was resuscitating Brady is the argument given by Harris, Hume, pp. 387-405, and Bourke, Empire & Revolution, pp. 181-86. 290 Hume, History, I, 227. 291 Hume, History, I, 461. 292 Hume, History, I, 462. 293 Hume, History, I, 462. 294 Hume, History, I, 455-88. 295 Hume, History, I, 455. 296 Hume, History, I, 455. 158 ‘rule with an inclination to anarchy and anarchy with a tendency to order and harmony’.)297 It emerged as Germanic tribes all over Europe had attempted to bolt down what they had looted from Rome. Via his depiction of the Saxons, Hume had already described the politics of Germanic tribes whilst at home: they were voluntary associations of independent warriors, each of which was loosely organized around a chieftain. His glory consisted in the number of his warriors, or ‘retainers’, theirs in the services they performed for him; the prince was a chieftain elected by the assembled chieftains. Once ensconced in the former provinces of the Western empire, the challenge for the tribes was to secure their acquired territory. Not wanting to stay garrisoned, they split up. A share of the territory was assigned to supporting the ‘dignity of their prince’; other parts were distributed, ‘under the title of fiefs, to the chiefs’, and the chiefs distributed their own land to their retainers. All the way down, the grants were conditional upon the performance of military service, and could (initially) be rescinded at the pleasure of the grantee.298 Uniting civil jurisdiction to military power, the grants also bestowed on their recipients the lucrative right to administer justice.299 But fiefs had not enveloped everything. Paraphrasing Dalrymple, who himself was paraphrasing Montesquieu, Hume also warned that ‘we are not to imagine that all the conquered lands were seized by the northern conquerors; or that the whole of the land thus seized was subjected to those military services.’300 Much continued to be held by an ‘allodial or free title’ (the unique conditions of the Norman conquest, perhaps, rendering it an exception).301 Allodial proprietors were judged by counts and other magistrates, who themselves were officials of the king. As long as princes could rescind fiefs from chieftains, Germanic governments retained a regal polish. But it rubbed off almost immediately. Chiefs were already powerful, the authority of the prince already weak; fiefs were soon held 297 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.1.619. 298 Hume, History, I, 456-57. 299 Hume, History, I, 460, 462-63. 300 Hume, History, I, 457; Dalrymple had put it like this: ‘we are not to imagine that the whole land of the country was so distributed, or so holden’. See Feudal Property, p. 9. Montesquieu, meanwhile, had claimed that the notion of a universal division of land upset ‘all of history’. Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 30.5.623. 301 Hume, History, I, 459. 159 annually, then for life, then in perpetuity.302 As chiefs secured their own fiefs, their vassals sought to acquire ‘stability to their subordinate ones’.303 Once he held his fief hereditarily, the chief ‘lost, in a great measure, his connexion or acquaintance with the prince’. But the same did not apply to those below him: the chief ‘added every day new force to his authority over the vassals of the barony.’ Reasons abounded for his doing so. His vassals received from him ‘education in all military exercises’; his hospitality ‘invited them to live and enjoy society in his hall’; their leisure (which was ‘great’) made them ‘perpetual retainers on his person’; in a culture devoid of commerce and the arts, they had no means of gratifying their ambition but by ‘making a figure in his train’; and, most of all, ‘they felt every moment the necessity of his protection, both in the controversies which occurred with other vassals, and what was more material, in the daily inroads and injuries which were committed by the neighbouring barons.’304 Feudal constitutions harboured a perpetual hostility between the several ‘members of the state’, and vassals found no means of securing themselves against injury but by ‘closely adhering to their chief, and falling into a submissive dependance upon him.’305 The effect on the crown was catastrophic: ‘the authority of the sovereign gradually decayed; and each noble, fortified in his own territory by the attachment of his vassals, became too powerful to be expelled by an order from the throne’.306 The tilt toward aristocratic authority only intensified over time: the feeble authority of the crown induced allodial proprietors to rush into the arms of nobles, desperate for protection. The ‘decay of political government’, Hume observed, picking up a distinction drawn by Montesquieu, ‘thus necessarily occasioned the extension of the feudal’.307 Like Saxon protection rackets, feudal clientship pulled everything into its orbit. If it inhibited the ‘true liberty’ of military vassals, ‘it was still more destructive of the independance and security of the other members of the state, or what in a 302 Hume, History, I, 458. 303 Hume, History, I, 458. 304 Hume, History, I, 462-63. 305 Hume, History, I, 463. 306 Hume, History, I, 458-59. 307 Hume, History, I, 459. Charles the Bald’s decision to allow counties to be held in perpetuity, Montesquieu had observed, ‘extinguished political government and formed feudal government.’ Spirit of Laws, 31.32.716. 160 proper sense we call the people.’308 A great many were serfs, and many more paid their rent in often arbitrary services. Neither could they expect redress for their injuries in baronial courts stuffed with men who ‘thought they had a right to oppress and tyrannize over them’. Towns, too, lay either in royal demesnes or in baronies; in each case, they were subjected to the ‘absolute will’ of whoever their master happened to be. The ‘languishing’ state of commerce kept the people poor, and feudal institutions ‘were calculated to render that poverty perpetual’. The barons lived in rustic plenty, gave no encouragement to the arts, and had no demand for manufactures. Every profession but arms was held in contempt; if any merchant had the temerity to rise to opulence, the barons would bring him to heel.309 The miserable state of commerce fed into feudal parliaments which, like Saxon Wittenagemots, continued to lack a commons. Again, clientship explained why: the commons, or ‘inhabitants of boroughs’, had not yet become prosperous enough to even ‘desire security against their prince, or to imagine, that, even if they were assembled in a representative body, they had power or rank sufficient to enforce it.’ They were too busy seeking protection from the ‘immediate violence and injustice of their fellow-citizens’, which each of them could only seek from the courts of justice or ‘from the authority of some great lord, to whom, by law or his own choice, he was attached.’310 Feudal parliaments were therefore made up of dignified clergy – archbishops, bishops, prelates, abbots – and barons, earls, and counts. Holders of knights-sees, who were the immediate vassals of either nobles or the king, were also entitled to sit; but they were too poor to bother doing so, and saw it as a burden they would rather not bear.311 Baronial courts, finally, were not the engines of liberty that Montesquieu had claimed them to be; they were the arenas in which clientship played itself out. As a baron considered himself a ‘kind of sovereign within his territory’, he maintained a ‘parade of royalty’ by creating various offices with various provinces of command.312 Delighting in this ‘image of sovereignty’, his ‘good and bad offices, 308 Hume, History, I, 463. 309 Hume, History, I, 463-64. 310 Hume, History, I, 471. 311 Hume, History, I, 466-72. 312 Nobles often established ‘a justiciary, constable, mareschal, chamberlain, seneschal, and chancellor’. Hume, History, I, 484. 161 his justice and injustice, were equally put to sale’. He had the power to tax any within his territory, and as his necessities ‘made him rapacious, his authority was usually found to be more oppressive and tyrannical than that of the sovereign.’ He was permanently engaged in wars with his neighbours, and used his courts to protect ‘desperate adventurers and criminals’ who might be turned to violent purposes.313 By combining with other ‘malcontent barons’, he could easily ‘throw the state into convulsions’; any limitations they managed to place on the authority of the monarch, meanwhile, were not derived ‘from the liberty of the people, but from the military power of many petty tyrants, who were equally dangerous to the prince and oppressive to the subject.’314 Under the Normans as under the Saxons, security depended on the ‘independant power and private connexion of each individual’.315 It was a condition incompatible with liberty of any kind. As feudal governments had a ‘necessary and infallible tendency to augment the power of the nobles’, the history of England between William and John was a story of momentarily muscular royal authority slowly reverting to the feudal, aristocratic mean.316 In 1074, eight years into William’s reign, there was a baronial revolt.317 By 1091, ‘continued intestine discord among the barons’ was the principal threat to order.318 In 1139, the insurrection in favour of empress Matilda had laid bare the unconstrained power of the nobles. Their castles had become ‘receptacles of licensed robbers, who, sallying forth day and night, committed spoil on the open country, on the villages, and even on the cities’. Even the ecclesiastics were not spared, and were eventually exposed to the ‘same outrage, which had laid waste the rest of the kingdom’.319 By the time Henry II’s reign was drawing to a close, the barons’ sentiments had hardened. Now ‘entirely incorporated with the people’, they no longer ‘thought that they needed the protection of the crown for the enjoyment of their possessions’; instead, they desired to restrain the ‘exorbitant prerogatives 313 Hume, History, I, 484. 314 Hume, History, I, 484. 315 Hume, History, I, 484. 316 Hume, History, I, 462-65. 317 Hume, History, I, 211-14. 318 Hume, History, I, 233. 319 Hume, History, I, 288; for an account of the Brabançons, who Hume sees as a symptom of the ‘loose government’ prevailing in the European feudal kingdoms, see Hume, History, I, 350. 162 and arbitrary practices, which the necessities of war and the violence of conquest had at first obliged them to indulge in their monarch.’320 Under John, this ‘secret revolution in the sentiments of men produced, first violent convulsions in the state, then an evident alteration in the maxims of government’—the reason why the Great Charter inaugurated the third ‘epoch’ into which Hume had split English history prior to Henry VII’s accession.321 The immediate motive for noble action came from the Papacy. In 1205, the arch- bishopric see had become vacant, and John had been tussling with Innocent III over who ought to fill it and, a fortiori, who had the power of investiture.322 After interdicting England, excommunicating John, and absolving his subjects from their oaths of fidelity and allegiance, Innocent had backed him into a corner. Capitulating, John passed a charter in which he agreed to hold his dominions as ‘feudatory of the church of Rome, by the annual payment of a thousand marks’.323 This enraged the nobility. John had already given ‘discontent to all ranks of men by his endless exactions and impositions’, but he now ‘appeared to all his subjects in so mean a light, that they universally thought they might with safety and honour insist upon their pretensions.’324 Having formed a confederacy, the barons insisted on a renewal of a charter Henry I had passed, and then laid waste to John’s parks and palaces after he rejected their request. The first part of the charter they finally presented to him at Runnymede concerned only the barony: they had demanded restrictions on John’s selling of rights of wardship, his levying of extortionate reliefs, and his asset stripping of fiefs in periods of wardship (among much else).325 If this was all it contained, Hume claimed, then the Great Charter would have only bolstered the power of an order of men ‘who were already too powerful, and whose yoke might have become more heavy on the people than even that of an absolute monarch.’ But after challenging John’s sovereignty so drastically, they had to extract the ‘concurrence of the people’ by taking note of ‘inferior ranks of men’ in their demands; they did so by insisting 320 Hume, History, I, 371. 321 Hume, History, I, 372, 488. 322 Hume, History, I, 422-26. 323 Hume, History, I, 432. 324 Hume, History, I, 437-38. 325 Hume, History, I, 443-44. 163 that ‘No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed of his free tenement and liberties, or outlawed, or banished, or any wise hurt or injured, unless by the legal judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land’.326 Astonishingly, they also requested that even ‘a villain or rustic shall not by any fine be bereaved of his carts, ploughs, and implements of husbandry.’ The charter may not have established new courts or new magistrates, or have changed the ‘distribution of the powers of the commonwealth’.327 But by targeting one of its articles at the people, ‘men acquired some more security for their properties and their liberties: And government approached a little nearer to that end, for which it was originally instituted, the distribution of justice, and the equal protection of the citizens.’328 Previously, any acts of violence perpetrated by the crown were deemed ‘injurious to individuals’. Now they could be regarded as ‘public injuries, and as infringements of a charter, calculated for general security.’329 Magna Carta had therefore given birth to the notion of the ‘public’ or the ‘people’ as an entity to which the crown had to address itself. As its articles ‘secured the rights of all orders of men, they were anxiously defended by all, and became the basis, in a manner, of the English monarchy, and a kind of original contract, which both limited the authority of the king, and ensured the conditional allegiance of his subjects.’330 Here was Hume whigging it with the best.331 But his apparent whiggishness served a purpose unbefitting of a Whig: to reveal the depth of the problem that only European luxury, rather than autochthonous law, could overcome.332 For the ‘original contract’ of the charter, Hume explained, soon folded under the weight of both ‘regal tyranny’ and ‘aristocratic liberty’, a noxious mixture of which characterised ‘all the ancient feudal governments’.333 After John came Henry III, 326 Hume, History, I, 444. 327 Hume, History, I, 487. 328 Hume, History, I, 488. 329 Hume, History, I, 488. 330 Hume, History, II, 6-7. 331 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 245. 332 Pocock’s reluctance to take this point, perhaps, comes from a long-held mistrust of ‘Europe’, ‘Europeanness’, and ‘European history’, for which see Pocock, ‘Deconstructing Europe’, London Review of Books 13/24 (1991), 6-10; ‘Afterword: The Machiavellian Moment: A Very Short Retrospect and Re-Introduction’, History of European Ideas 43/2 (2017), 215-21, at 221; ‘From The Ancient Constitution to Barbarism and Religion; The Machiavellian Moment, the history of political thought and the history of historiography’, History of European Ideas 43/2 (2017), 129-46, at 144. 333 Hume, History, II, 31. 164 the first king since the Norman conquest who could ‘fairly be said to lie under the restraint of law’.334 But he was also the first to use the dispensing power.335 As parliament often refused him supplies, he also regularly obliged the citizens of London to grant him money, and demanded benevolences from the nobility and the prelacy.336 Aristocratic liberty, on the other hand, derived from the position of strength into which the nobility had elevated themselves under John; and this, in turn, derived from the system of clientship on which their power was based. Henry may have put his prerogative to good use, but he was helpless in face of the nobles. His reign was stained by aristocratic disorder and civil war: different nobles combined at different points to get the jump on one another, leaving ‘sudden revolutions’ to define his reign.337 The flimsiness of Henry’s authority was pantomimic: in 1070, he turned his back on the kingdom in order to travel to the Holy Land; in response, the barons ‘oppressed the common people’ with a renewed impunity, using their estates to give shelter to the bands of robbers they employed to plunder their enemies.338 Hume’s final passage of history ran from Edward I to the Wars of the Roses: the ‘real and true epoch of the house of commons’.339 Like the age inaugurated by Magna Carta, its argument revolved around the intractability of the Gothic politics that continued to define the English constitution. It began as Edward I attempted to overcome the obstacles that a decaying feudal system had thrown into his path, the largest of which was the ironic inability of feudal tenures to ‘fix the state in a proper warlike posture’.340 As Hume had already explained, fiefs had become hereditary shortly after the Conquest, meaning that their holders could no longer be relied upon to perform the services the crown required. Before Edward, sovereigns had come ‘gradually to disuse this cumbersome and dangerous machine’ by commuting military service into cash payments, and contracting particular 334 Hume, History, II, 21. 335 Hume, History, II, 21. 336 Hume, History, II, 21. 337 Hume, History, II, 43, 73. 338 Hume, History, II, 64-65. 339 Hume, History, II, 105. 340 Hume, History, II, 99. Hume gave short shrift to the idea that the commons originated in 1265, when the Earl of Leicester summoned a parliament to London in the thick of a baronial coup. It was ‘inconceivable’, Hume claimed, ‘that a plant, set by so inauspicious a hand, could have attained so vigorous a growth’. See History, II, 57. 165 barons or mercenaries to fight their wars instead.341 But the revenue stream this had created was intermittent. Although William I had created 60,000 knights-sees, these had diminished: in violation of feudal custom, many had transferred their sees to the church, receiving it back under the tenure of frankalmoigne (which connoted no military service). The rolls of those that did exist were inaccurately kept: the king’s officers had no idea how many knights-sees each baron was responsible for mobilising, and the same applied once military service had become pecuniary.342 Short on both authority and income, Edward made two moves. His first was to summon the remaining lesser barons and knights who, threatened by the greater barons, sought ‘protection under the shadow of the throne’. As they still considered attendance at parliament as a burden, Edward indulged their absence on the condition that they send him a number of representatives from each county (the king decided the numbers, and was liable to change them).343 His second move was for money. Edward’s predecessors had already begun to fawn over the ‘industrious orders of the state’: they were obedient, and also furnished the crown with commodities. So whilst the inhabitants of the country continued to languish under the petty tyrannies of the barons, kings had begun to erect boroughs on royal demesnes. Although they were permitted to farm their own tolls and customs, and even to elect their own magistrates, Brady had shown beyond doubt that kings could still tax their inhabitants at will (though the state of thirteenth-century commerce made sure that receipts were always low). But Edward had found his ability to do so hampered by the crown’s weakness, and realized that he would struggle to raise taxes from boroughs if he did not ‘smooth the way’ for his demands. The easiest way to do so, he found, was to ‘assemble the deputies of all the boroughs, to lay before them the necessities of the state, to discuss the matter in their presence, and to require their consent to the demands of their sovereign.’344 He ordered two deputies to be sent from each borough, and for these to be invested with the power to act and speak on behalf of their communities. 341 Hume, History, II, 99-100. 342 Hume, History, II, 100-01. 343 Hume, History, II, 104. 344 Hume, History, II, 105-06. 166 Although the appearance of representatives at parliament heralded the ‘faint dawn of popular government in England’, the burgesses had no sense that they were travelling to parliament to legislate. They were there to consent to taxes, and saw little ‘profit or honour’ in the effort.345 The king’s officers had it in their power to omit certain boroughs from their summons, and as the boroughs had to fund the trips of their representatives, this was initially desired. But gradually, the ‘union’ of burgesses began to petition the king in exchange for their consent; the more he demanded, the more they asked for.346 Eventually, the burgesses began to insist that no law should be passed on the basis of a petition unless they had drafted it, and it had passed through their house in the form of a bill. Meanwhile, the lesser barons, ‘or what the English call the gentry’, had been sinking in relation to the greater nobles, and had begun to sit separately. And as the burgesses resembled the gentry in that they both represented ‘particular bodies of men’, they began to sit in the same house. And thus ‘the third estate, that of the commons, reached at last its present form’.347 It had a way to go, however, before it reached its present function. Instead of ‘checking’ the king, they were initially inclined to adhere to him as a means of countering the power of the aristocracy—‘which at once was the source of oppression to themselves, and disturbed him in the execution of the laws.’ The king, meanwhile, gave concessions to the commons for the same purpose of diminishing the power of the nobility. Via this uneasy alliance, the commons ‘rose by slow degrees to their present importance’, developing arts and commerce as they did so.348 But like the ‘original contract’ of Magna Carta, the embryonic representative House of Commons made little immediate headway against the power of the barons. Edward II found this out to his cost, meeting a violent end at the hands of Roger Mortimer, a baron of the Welsh marches.349 He had been weak 345 Hume, History, II, 107. 346 Hume, History, II, 107-08. 347 Hume, History, II, 108-09. 348 Hume, History, II, 109. 349 Mortimer’s men ‘threw him on a bed; held him down violently with a table, which they flung over him; thrust into his fundament a red-hot iron, which they inserted through a horn; and though the outward marks of violence upon his person were prevented by this expedient, the horrid deed was discovered to all the guards and attendants by the screams, with which the agonizing king filled the castle, while his bowels were consuming.’ Hume, History, II, 172. 167 and the barons had taken full advantage, wreaking havoc and tearing the government into ‘pieces with fury and violence’. If law could not protect the king, then it had no chance of sheltering the people: it was ‘in vain to look for protection from the laws, whose voice, always feeble in those times, was not heard amidst the din of arms’.350 Despite the addition of a lower house, parliament remained impotent in face of such feudal carnage. Hume’s explanation of why bears repeating in full: The parliament, during factious times, was nothing but the organ of present power. Though the persons, of whom it was chiefly composed, seemed to enjoy great independance, they really possessed no true liberty; and the security of each individual among them, was not so much derived from the general protection of law, as from his own private power and that of his confederates. The authority of the monarch, though far from absolute, was irregular, and might often reach him: The current of a faction might overwhelm him: A hundred considerations, of benefits and injuries, friendships and animosities, hopes and fears, were able to influence his conduct; and amidst these motives a regard to equity and law and justice was commonly, in those rude ages, of little moment. Nor did any man entertain thoughts of opposing present power, who did not deem himself strong enough to dispute the field with it by force, and was not prepared to give battle to the sovereign or the ruling party.351 On an individual level, security continued to flow from the protection of the great— even, or perhaps especially, for members of parliament. Finding and maintaining that protection, Hume was suggesting here, was a time-consuming struggle: if burgesses and gentry had no ‘true liberty’, they could hardly be expected to privilege the requirements of the public when acting in their representative capacity. The mere existence of parliamentary, or limited, monarchy meant very little; without a 350 Hume, History, II, 173-74. 351 Hume, History, II, 179-80. 168 system of manners in which people could feel free without the aid of a Gothic gang, the voice of a representative popular assembly was easily lost. Even Edward III, esteemed by the English as having one of the ‘most glorious’ reigns in English history, could not slice through the networks of clientship that continued to dominate politics. He flexed his prerogative often, and by gaining the ‘affections of the great’, he had managed to curb their most egregious displays of violence and usher in a ‘longer interval of domestic peace’ than the English had hitherto experienced.352 He had also managed to limit the pretensions of the Papacy, riffing off anti-papal sentiment among a laity ‘not far from the reformation’ in how they perceived its civil designs.353 But there were ‘vices in the constitution’ for which he had no antidote. The barons, ‘by their confederacies with those of their own order, and by supporting and defending their retainers in every iniquity, were the chief abettors of robbers, murderers, and ruffians of all kinds; and no law could be executed against those criminals.’354 His gaining of the affections of the great came at a cost: the ‘gratifying of a powerful nobleman continued still to be of more importance than the protection of the people’.355 The laws were therefore so feebly executed that no-one could trust in their protection: men ‘openly associated themselves, under the patronage of some great baron, for their mutual defence’, wearing badges to mark out their allegiance.356 Their baron was ‘more their sovereign’ than the king himself, their confederacy more important to them than ‘their country’. Edward may have been able to paper over the cracks, but civil wars were the norm, as was the small regard paid to ‘the opinion of the public’. The confederacies were powerful enough to extort pardons from the king for ‘the most enormous crimes’: they would simply arrive at parliament with an army, and force the king to comply.357 These associations showed that by Edward III’s accession, the ‘whole force of the feudal system was in a manner dissolved, and that the English had nearly returned in that particular to the same situation, in which they stood before the 352 Hume, History, II, 271-72. 353 Hume, History, II, 278-79. 354 Hume, History, II, 279. 355 Hume, History, II, 279. 356 Hume, History, II, 331. 357 Hume, History, II, 179, 331. 169 Norman conquest.’358 Fiefs had instilled a measure of subordination, but had fallen away to reveal a persistent – and dominant – Germanic strain to English politics. Without the discretionary powers of the crown, noble dominance would have morphed into ‘an absolute anarchy in the state’.359 But even these powers could not prevent Richard II, Edward’s successor, from being deposed; comparing his fall to 1688, Hume pointed to the ‘difference between a great and civilized nation, deliberately vindicating its established privileges, and a turbulent and barbarous aristocracy, plunging headlong from the extremes of one faction into those of another.’360 Decades later, the Wars of the Roses would engulf England, revealing its government, at best, to be a ‘barbarous monarchy, not regulated by any fixed maxims, or bounded by any certain undisputed rights, which in practice were regularly observed.’361 The king conducted himself by ‘one set of principles’, the barons by another, the commons by a third, and the clergy by a fourth. All these principles were ‘opposite and incompatible’. The people, ‘for whom chiefly government was instituted, and who chiefly deserve consideration, were the weakest of the whole.’362 With the death of Richard III in 1485, Hume had arrived at the end of the History as he wrote it. English history had now been ‘pursued’ through a ‘series of barbarous ages’; but as 1500 began to loom larger on the horizon, the ‘dawn of civility’ had been reached.363 In a set of closing remarks to both the Gothic volumes and the History as a whole, Hume confirmed that England’s ‘barbarous ages’ were characteristic of the ‘ancient state of Europe’.364 This ‘state’, or condition, began in around the fifth century AD, as Germanic tribes overran the Roman empire and erected monarchies in its western provinces. Their inhabitants, like the English, were not ‘protected by law in their lives and properties’, and had to seek the protection of the powerful. Abstracting from the narrative he had already spun, Hume described this barbarous condition afresh as one in which ‘the far greater 358 Hume, History, II, 331. 359 Hume, History, II, 331. 360 Hume, History, II, 320-21. 361 Hume, History, II, 284; on the Wars of the Roses, see History, II, 436-69. 362 Hume, History, II, 284. 363 Hume, History, II, 518. 364 Hume, History, II, 522. 170 part of the society were every where bereaved of their personal liberty, and lived entirely at the will of their masters.’365 Everyone who was not a noble was a ‘slave’, peasants were sold along with land, and the inhabitants of the towns fared little better; even the gentry, or lesser nobles, were exposed to ‘every tempest of the state’—despite living in ‘splendour’.366 As long as the feudal system remained, personal liberty – what Hume had already described as ‘true liberty’ – would remain elusive for everyone. Even monarchs could not find it: prior to Henry VII, ‘great abilities and vigour’ continued to be ‘requisite to over-awe the barons, or great caution and reserve to give them no pretence for complaints’.367 Only luxury had civilised barbarous monarchies by generating personal liberty. It ‘may appear strange’, Hume pointed out, that ‘the progress of the arts, which seems, among the Greeks and Romans, to have daily encreased the number of slaves, should, in later times, have proved so general a source of liberty’.368 But this was the difference between the ancients and the moderns. In post-Roman monarchies, as Hume had already suggested, a sixteenth-century appetite for luxury goods induced the barons to lay off their retainers—rather than ordering them to manufacture the goods they desired (as had happened among the ancients). Leaving their service as freemen, they then flocked to the cities to join the manufacturing trades. Villeins, meanwhile, used to pay rents to their barons in either corn or cattle, as well as performing menial services for them. But as barons began to need cash to fuel their new habits, ‘money-rents’ began to be substituted for services and rents- in-kind, and the practice of lease-holding spread. This, in turn, created a ‘security of possession’, and broke the ‘bonds of servitude’ that had constricted the people of barbarous monarchies for so long. By means of refinement in the arts, Hume concluded in one of the History’s most important passages, ‘personal freedom became almost general in Europe; an advantage which paved the way for the encrease of political or civil liberty, and which, even where it was not attended with this salutary 365 Hume, History, II, 522. 366 Hume, History, II, 522. 367 Hume, History, II, 29; on the distinction between barbarous and civilized monarchy, see History, III, 24. 368 Hume, History, II, 523. 171 effect, served to give the members of the community some of the most considerable advantages of it.’369 The arrival of personal liberty was the arrival of modern liberty, and the arrival of modern liberty was the pivot on which the History had now come to turn. Prior to the accession of Henry VII, the English had languished – along with the rest of Europe – in a swamp of insecurity from which neither Magna Carta nor the House of Commons had been able to pull them. With the feudal system at its zenith, the barons used their armies of retainers to attack the crown and each other. The people could only find security under the shelter of the great, and would often ‘submit’ to the prerogatives of the crown in the interest of pacifying the nobility.370 Once these same nobles had their heads turned by luxury, however, all this began to change. Freed from the volatile shackles the nobility had habitually imposed upon the crown, Henry VIII finally crushed the Papacy, deciding a contest between civil and ecclesiastical authority that had been running since the Saxons converted to Christianity. Meanwhile, the emergence of personal liberty had transformed England into a civilized and modern monarchy. As the seventeenth century approached, luxury consumption then consolidated the estates of the gentry, the lesser nobles who sat in the House of Commons alongside the representatives of the shires and boroughs. They soon began to say what the nation was thinking: that the barriers between crown and people were flimsy, and that the time for civil liberty had come. The people already felt free; but they wanted to secure their freedom from future incursions. In order to break their habitual allegiance to the crown, however, they needed the courage of the enthusiasm that Luther’s doctrines had made possible. Tipped into war by the Scots, whose fanaticism was more advanced in its barbarousness, their zeal carried them to regicide. But it failed to survive the Restoration, allowing the English to ease toward the civil liberty that the Revolution eventually ushered in. In 1755, Thomas Carte had published the final volume of a Jacobite history of England. Sovereignty, he argued there, lay naturally with monarchs; the authority of monarchs derived from the natural allegiance owed to fathers; and the 369 Hume, History, II, 523-24. 370 Hume, History, V, 40. 172 patriarchal authority of the Stuarts could be traced all the way back to Noah. But Carte was the exception. By the middle of the century, as we saw in the first chapter, it had become difficult to deny that English liberty issued from the co-ordinate sovereignty of parliament and crown. Arguments abounded over what this arrangement had looked like in the past, and what it ought to look like now. From opposition, Bolingbroke had used Saxon history to bind English liberty to an independent House of Commons, arguing that its members could not take pensions if they were to make law for the public good; from government, Lord Hervey had responded with a vision of liberty as order, and order as created by the Bill of Rights in 1689. (If this was ‘modern liberty’, he was suggesting, then office-holding could not harm it.) But on parliamentary monarchy, Hervey and Bolingbroke were not so far apart: it was the source of English liberty, and the means of securing British liberty in the future. Its history, meanwhile, followed the rise of the lower house to the prominence which the Revolution had confirmed. Even if Bolingbroke’s ancient liberty was denied, this history was about the redistribution of property precipitated by the decline of feudal government—the updated version of Harrington’s thesis that had been reified into orthodoxy by the time that Hume turned to history himself. The completed History of England told a different story. Like The Spirit of Laws, it questioned whether parliaments were needed to generate liberty. Hume’s parliament may have fought for civil liberty over the course of the seventeenth century, finally winning it in 1688-89. But this liberty supervened on a personal liberty that had already arisen. Unlike Montesquieu and Dalrymple, Hume had not found this liberty in feudal property, feudal manners, and feudal courts; it had emerged only as luxury had transformed these structures, allowing civilisation and modern history to get going. English history, modern Britain Perhaps because Hume had punctured the parochialism of English historiography – post-feudal security, or personal liberty, had emerged across the monarchies of 173 western Europe – he was soon dining out on its success in France. Having moved there in the summer of 1763, after the Earl of Hertford had unexpectedly asked him to act as his personal secretary on his embassy to Paris, he quickly found his feet.371 In Britain, Hume was hounded by what he called the ‘factious barbarians, under the appellation of Whigs’; but in Paris, children as young as five were complimenting him on his reputation as a historian.372 I ‘drink nothing but nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread on nothing but flowers’, he wrote to his friend, William Robertson.373 Swimming in praise for the History, he appeared not to miss the ‘factious barbarians of London’ at all.374 But Hume was also beginning to push some of the History’s implications a little further. In the summer of 1764, as the Faculty of Advocates were wringing their hands about entails and Dalrymple was penning his polemic, Hume anxiously awaited news of a recently published edition of his own essays.375 The edition contained some revisions to an essay on public debt that he had already published in 1752, as part of the Political Discourses.376 The new version, though, was somewhat different, and appeared to align Hume with Dalrymple’s warning that ‘a nation without families will either become unfeeling to its liberties, or abuse them.’377 Given Hume’s story about the post-feudal character of modern history, this might seem surprising; the History’s argument seemed closer to the politics of Kames, rather than his protégé.378 As personal (and modern) liberty had only been created as nobles became commercial agents, Hume was unlikely to see feudal property as anything but an anachronism in modern Britain. But as we shall see, Hume’s position was not quite so simple. He did not think, with Dalrymple, that Scotland’s 371 On Hume in Paris, see Harris, Hume, pp. 408-10, 412-18. 372 Hume to Alexander Wedderburn, 23 November 1763, in Hume, Letters, I, 414-15. 373 Hume to William Robertson, 1 December 1763, in Hume, Letters, I, 415-17, at 416. 374 Hume to Robertson, 1 December 1763, p. 417. He mentioned the ‘factious barbarians’ again in the same letter to Robertson, and again in a letter to Hugh Blair, 26 April 1764, in Hume, Letters, I, 435-38, at 436. Writing to Philip Yorke a few months later, he confessed that he was so tired of the ‘Prejudices of what is call’d the Public, that I repent heartily my ever having committed anything to Print.’ Hume to Philip Yorke, 8 August 1764, in Hume, Letters, I, 459-61, at 461. 375 Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 2 vols (London & Edinburgh: A. Millar, A. Kincaid & A. Donaldson, 1764); see Hume to Andrew Millar, 3 September 1764, in Hume, Letters, I, 465- 66. 376 For the essay, see Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, in Essays, pp. 349-66. 377 Dalrymple, Considerations, p. 59. 378 Colin Kidd, for example, sees Hume at the vanguard of a widespread (and Kamesian) rejection of Scottish history for its failure to escape feudal history by generating and protecting the ‘liberty and property of the commons’. See Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 207-12, at 209. 174 feudal estates could play a role in British politics; but he did start to worry that the History had ended up confirming Montesquieu’s warning about the fragility of English liberty. Public credit, Hume claimed in the original essay, was a modern phenomenon: the ancients had set aside treasure to pay for public exigencies as and when they arose; but modern states mortgaged their revenues, and blithely entrusted its payment to posterity.379 To European statesmen, it looked like a panacea. By issuing public debt, commercial states like Britain had created a class of men who were ‘half merchants, half stock-holders’.380 In states without debt, merchants had to plough their profits into land: a time-consuming and highly illiquid asset that quickly turned them into ‘country gentlemen’.381 But public debt gave its merchant buyers a steady income stream in the form of interest payments; the debt itself was also highly liquid, so was used to fund new commercial projects or pay for disasters. Sitting on healthy income streams and liquid assets, they then traded at lower rates of profit; lower rates of profit then decreased commodity prices and increased consumption, spreading ‘arts and industry throughout the whole society’.382 Meanwhile, states used the capital thus raised to fund wars and public services. In theory, it was a virtuous cycle. Various domestic economic ills put a dent in the good: public debt could bloat the capital, push up the price of labour, and increase taxes—harms which all fell hardest on the poorer sort.383 But the real problem arose once debts were considered as a feature of international competition between states: in this respect, it was a ‘pure and unmixed ill’.384 For states were perpetually embroiled in a toxic combination of military and commercial war akin to ‘cudgel-playing fought in a China shop’.385 Amidst such chaos, it was naïve to think that market faith in government bonds was reliable: in the near future, the British state would fail to sell off a round of debt. If this came (‘and surely it will come’) as Britain faced a foreign military threat or a domestic disturbance, or perhaps needed to channel funds to 379 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 350. 380 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 353. 381 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 354. 382 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 353. 383 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, pp. 353-54. 384 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 356. 385 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 362. 175 armies engaged abroad, there were two options.386 Government could default on its existing debts by refusing to service them, using the money saved to fund more urgent needs. Hume called this the ‘natural death’ of public credit: the property of thousands of creditors (Hume’s estimated that there were 17,000) would be sacrificed for the security of millions. If the stock-holders resisted, the ‘dignity and authority of the landed gentry and nobility’ could overcome them.387 But millions could also be sacrificed for thousands. By 1752, Hume was already doubtful that public credit could die a natural death in Britain. The problem was parliament.388 Though landed proprietors made up the bulk of both its houses, their connections to the stock-holders may ‘render them more tenacious of public faith, than prudence, policy, or even justice, strictly speaking, requires.’389 If parliament chose blindly to continue servicing their debts whilst military crises ballooned, Britain would eventually be conquered and public credit would meet a ‘violent death’.390 If Hume was anxious in 1752, the new edition of the essay found him fearful. In six new paragraphs, he speculated about a situation to which he thought Britain was hastening with ‘amazing rapidity’.391 Having over-extended itself in the Seven Years War, statesmen would soon be scrambling to find new sources of revenue. What would happen, Hume asked, if they had begun to tax land at eighteen shillings in the pound (a rate of 90%), customs and taxes had been leveraged as high as they could go, and they had failed to squeeze new revenue from the nation to act as collateral for new loans? If the crown had already become absolute, it could simply write off the debt, leaving the ‘whole income of every individual … entirely at the mercy of the sovereign: A degree of despotism, which no oriental monarchy has ever yet attained’.392 If, on the other hand, the consent of parliament were required to expropriate the stock-holders, it could never happen.393 For in such a situation, 386 On the perception of inter-state politics lurking behind Hume’s fears, see John Robertson, ‘Universal Monarchy and the liberties of Europe: David Hume’s critique of an English Whig doctrine’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 349-77. 387 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 364. 388 Hume’s anxieties about the relation of popular governments to debt date back even further, to the 1740s, for which see ‘Of Civil Liberty’, in Essays, pp. 87-96, 95-96. 389 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 365. 390 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 365. 391 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 357. 392 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 359. 393 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 359. 176 the stock-holders would be the only body of men who possessed ‘any revenue beyond the immediate effects of their industry’. They had no property in land, and therefore no connection to the state: hyper-mobile, they could enjoy their wealth in ‘any part of the globe’, and usually availed themselves of a ‘stupid and pampered luxury, without spirit, ambition, or enjoyment.’394 ‘Adieu’, Hume lamented, to all ideas of nobility, gentry, and family. The stocks can be transferred in an instant, and being in such a fluctuating state, will seldom be transmitted during three generations from father to son. Or were they to remain ever so long in one family, they convey no hereditary authority or credit to the possessor; and by this means, the several ranks of men, which form a kind of independent magistracy in a state, instituted by the hand of nature, are entirely lost; and every man in authority derives his influence from the commission alone of the sovereign. No expedient remains for preventing or suppressing insurrections, but mercenary armies: No expedient at all remains for resisting tyranny: Elections are swayed by bribery and corruption alone: And the middle power between king and people being totally removed, a grievous despotism must infallibly prevail. The landholders, despised for their poverty, and hated for their oppressions, will be utterly unable to make any opposition to it.395 This was the situation, Hume concluded, to which ‘Great Britain is visibly tending’.396 Its debts, he wrote later, would eventually bring about its ruin ‘with a Certainty which is even beyond geometrical, because it is arithmetical.’397 Hume’s revisions have been read rather implausibly as a jeremiad in the old-Whig mould: an expression of the ultimate incompatibility of virtue with civilisation, liberty with commerce.398 They have also been put down to ‘basic 394 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, pp. 357-58. 395 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, pp. 357-58. 396 Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, p. 360. 397 Hume to William Strahan, 25 June 1771, in Hume, Letters, II, 243-45, at 245. 398 John Pocock, ‘Hume and the American Revolution: the dying thoughts of a North Briton’, in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 125-142; see also Pocock, ‘The mobility of property and the rise of eighteenth-century sociology’, in Anthony Parel & Thomas Flanagan eds., Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier 177 Scottish ca’canny’: a mistrust of success and prosperity borne by centuries of poverty and disaster.399 More recently, the revisions (as well as the original essay) have been read as a reflection on the fiscal requirements of national security, and the volatile politics these requirements could produce.400 But Hume’s worries also bore a striking resemblance to Dalrymple’s: in indebted commercial states like Britain, they both appeared to be saying, liberty needed the assistance of a hereditary nobility in order to survive. Only a ‘middle power’, whose authority derived from neither the markets nor the patronage of the crown, could be relied upon to defend the constitution in moments of crisis; without it, British liberty might prove unable to carry the weight that civilisation had shovelled upon it. Put another way, both Hume and Dalrymple appeared to have little faith in the capacity of republicanised, or parliamentary, monarchies to generate a liberty that could last.401 Over the next decade or so until his death, Hume continued to run aground on parliament’s inability to deal with what he believed to be an imminent crisis. In January 1766, he returned from Paris and was back in Edinburgh by the Autumn; but early the following year, he had accepted another office as Deputy Secretary of State for the Northern Department, then being led by General Conway, the Earl of Hertford’s brother. His appointment took him again to London, and although his office expired upon Conway’s resignation from the Earl of Chatham’s ministry in January 1768, Hume stayed in the capital until the following August.402 These were exactly the months in which London fell into turmoil over the Wilkes affair.403 University Press, 1979), pp. 141-67, in addition to James Moore’s ‘A comment on Pocock’ in the same volume, pp. 167-81. 399 Forbes, ‘Politics and History in David Hume’, p. 281. 400 Istvan Hont, ‘The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary State Bankruptcy’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 325-54, originally published in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, pp. 321- 48; Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, pp. 54-95. 401 Hume’s intervention can also be contextualised in the pan-European debate surrounding the suitability of democratic monarchy for modern commercial states, for which see Sonenscher, Sans- Culottes, pp. 202-83. 402 On this period of Hume’s life, see Harris, Hume, pp. 422-38; see also Miller, Hume’s Political Thought, pp. 163-84. 403 The best narrative of the Wilkes and the politics of London remains George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: a Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). See also Lucy Sutherland, The City of London and the Opposition to Government, 1768-1774: a Study in the Rise of Metropolitan Radicalism (London: Athlone Press, 1959); John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London supporters of Revolutionary America (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987); P.D.G. Thomas, John Wilkes: a Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Arthur Cash, John Wilkes: the Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). On the radical hinterland 178 Elected member for Aylesbury in 1757, John Wilkes had set up an opposition journal, The North Briton, in June 1762 as a riposte to Tobias Smollett’s journal, The Briton—a mouthpiece for the ministry that the third earl of Bute had formed in May that year.404 On 23 April the following year, its 45th edition criticised the terms on which Bute had brought the Seven Years War to a close; but it did so by insinuating that George III was a liar. A warrant for his arrest for seditious libel was soon issued, and by Christmas that year he had fled to France; by the New Year, he had been expelled from parliament, and was declared an outlaw in November 1764.405 In February 1768, a month after the termination of Hume’s office, he returned to London and was elected as member for Middlesex the following month. Yet to be pardoned by the king, he soon found himself in the King’s Bench prison whilst his supporters began to riot, culminating in the massacre at St. George’s Fields in May. Later that year, his outlawry was reversed but he was sentenced to 22 months imprisonment and fined £1000. The following February, he was expelled from parliament; but by 20 March, he had been re-elected twice by the freeholders of Middlesex, expelled twice, then re-elected again. After another expulsion, he was elected again on 13 April, before the commons finally passed a motion declaring Henry Luttrell, Wilkes’s opponent, as member for Middlesex—despite receiving 296 votes to Wilkes’s 1,143.406 During and after the popular unrest that Wilkes (and his treatment by government) provoked, diagnoses of its cause clustered around the interface between parliament and crown. The Wilkites themselves – along with parliamentary independents, independent county MPs, and city radicals like the Alderman John Sawbridge, who had set up the Society of the Supporter of the Bill of Rights in February 1769 – argued for annual parliaments, equal representation (which, in practice, meant increasing the number of county seats, removing rotten boroughs, and enfranchising market towns), and a pension bill to remove the court to Wilkes, see Linda Colley, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981), 1-19. 404 George III had succeeded his grandfather in 1760, and Bute had long been a favourite. See H.T. Dickinson, ‘George III and Parliament’, Parliamentary History 30/3 (2011), 395-413. See also Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1929). 405 Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, pp. 17-37. 406 Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, pp. 38-56. The ‘election’ of Luttrell sparked waves of petitions to government and parliament from all over the country. See Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, pp. 104-34. 179 from the Commons completely.407 The rioting, they claimed, stemmed from disaffection bred by parliamentary corruption; the supporters of George Grenville and John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, meanwhile, blamed it on luxury and faction.408 Edmund Burke, part of the Whig group that had formed itself around Charles Watson-Wentworth, second marquess of Rockingham, rubbished both these claims.409 Three days after the massacre at St. George’s fields, he declared that in the House of Commons, the British had created what Montesquieu had referred to as an ‘intermediate’ power.410 But in order for the house to protect the people from the crown and the crown from the people, royal power had to flow through it in the form of court patronage, guided by the principles of party.411 This system had worked well under Walpole and, later on, under the Pelhams; but it had grown rusty, Burke claimed, since George III had begun to separate court from parliament and govern by means of what he called a ‘double cabinet’.412 In order to prevent further popular unrest, George III had to revert to the practices of his grandfather. But for Hume, parliament could not perform the role that Montesquieu had assigned to ‘intermediate’ and dependent powers; Britain’s problems, he indicated repeatedly, ran deeper than the Commons could fix. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, he chided the French Physiocrat, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, for his faith that printing and the spread of ‘knowledge’ were favourable to the art of government: ‘do not the late Events in this Country’, he asked, ‘appear a little contrary to your system?’413 Britain would be lucky to escape the present crisis, he told his friend, William Strahan, without ‘falling into a military government’.414 ‘I 407 John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 240-67. See also Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 195-232. 408 Bourke, Empire & Revolution, pp. 223-80, at 254. 409 Bourke, Empire & Revolution, pp. 254-67. 410 Edmund Burke, Debate on King’s Proclamation for Suppressing Riots, 13 May 1768, in Henry Cavendish ed., Debates of the House of Commons, during the thirteenth Parliament of Great Britain, 2 vols (London: Longman et al., 1841), I, 14-15. Cited in Bourke, Empire & Revolution, p. 255. 411 Burke spelled out some of this in his pamphlet on the Wilkes crisis, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (London: J. Dodsley, 1770). On the pamphlet, see Bourke, Empire & Revolution, pp. 257-67. 412 Bourke, Empire & Revolution, p. 260. 413 Hume to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, 16 June 1768, in Hume, Letters, II, 179-81, at 180. 414 With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Hume told Strahan that he hoped and expected to see ‘a public bankruptcy, the total revolt of America, the Expulsion of the English from the East Indies, the Diminution of London to no less than a half, and the Restoration of the Government to the 180 can foresee nothing but certain and speedy Ruin either to the Nation or to the public Creditors’, he wrote to Strahan later. As he had already suggested in the revisions to his essay on debt, he doubted that the creditors would ever sacrifice themselves: ‘I cannot see how it can be brought about, while these Creditors fill all the chief Offices and are the Men of greatest Authority in the Nation’.415 Landholders and stockholders had become ‘so involvd with each other by Connexions and Interest’, that the former could not persuade the latter to act in the interest of the public, or nation.416 Parliamentary reform of the kind envisaged by the Wilkites or the Rockingham Whigs would have little effect. The Commons itself was the problem: the French, Hume claimed, could always ‘throw off their Debts’; but ‘ours must for ever hang on our Shoulders, and weigh us down like a Millstone.’417 Hume made two revisions to the History that reflected the ambiguous position at which he had arrived. The first emerged in Thomas Cadell’s edition of 1773, and connected Hume’s story about personal liberty to his history of the Stuarts. In 1626, Charles I had bypassed parliament and levied a general loan on his subjects, imprisoning five gentlemen who refused to pay it. These men, the so- called ‘five Knights’, had enough ‘spirit’ to demand a trial, during the course of which it became clear that six statues and an article of the Great Charter protected ‘personal liberty’ against the kind of illegal taxation that Charles was attempting to foist on the nation.418 But monarchs had always been able to circumvent them, and the people had let them do so in the interest, as ever, of keeping the barony quiet.419 It took so long to blow the dust off these laws, Hume argued in earlier editions, because it was only in the seventeenth century that the ‘spirit of liberty’ had become ‘universally diffused’, and the ‘principles of government were nearly reduced to a King, Nobility, and Gentry of this Realm’—all before he died. Hume to William Strahan, 25 October 1769, in Hume, Letters, II, 209-11, at 210. 415 Hume to William Strahan, 11 March 1771, in Hume, Letters, II, 235-38, at 237. 416 The ‘public Force’, Hume predicted, ‘will be allowed to go to total Decay, before the violent Remedy, which is the only one, will be ventur’d on.’ Hume to William Strahan, 19 August 1771, in Hume, Letters, II, 247-48, at 248. 417 Hume to William Strahan, 25 March 1771, in Hume, Letters, II, 238-43, at 242. 418 Hume, History, V, 177-79. 419 Hume, History, V, 178. 181 system’.420 But in the edition of 1773, he preceded this explanation with the following passage: In an age and nation where the power of a turbulent nobility prevailed, and where the king had no settled military force, the only means, that could maintain public peace, was the exertion of such prompt and discretionary powers in the crown; and the public itself had become so sensible of the necessity, that those ancient laws in favour of personal liberty, while often violated, had never been challenged or revived, during the course of near three centuries.421 Public sense, or ‘opinion’, was beginning to turn on the crown for the reasons that Hume had already outlined. But in 1773, he added that the ‘tempers of men, more civilized, seemed less to require those violent exertions of prerogative’, leading the five men to ‘defend the public liberties’ in court.422 If the first revision confirmed Hume’s vision of modern liberty, the second worried about its security. Added at some point between 1773 and his death in 1776, it emerged in the posthumous edition of 1778.423 Hume had already claimed in the appendix to Elizabeth’s reign that the English had no reason to laud the liberty of their present government, ‘where the people, though guarded by multiplied laws, are totally naked, defenceless, and disarmed.’424 In the final edition, 420 ‘It was not till this age, when the spirit of liberty was universally diffused, when the principles of government were nearly reduced to a system, that these five gentlemen above-mentioned, by a noble effort, ventured, in this national cause, to bring the question to a final determination.’ Hume, History, V, 179. 421 Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols (London: Thomas Cadell, 1773), VI, 228-29. For a list of the previous editions of the History in which this passage failed to appear, see T.E. Jessop, A Bibliography of David Hume and of Scottish Philosophy from Francis Hutcheson to Lord Balfour (London: Brown & Sons, 1938), pp. 27-33. 422 ‘It was not till this age, when the spirit of liberty was universally diffused, when the principles of government were nearly reduced to a system, when the tempers of men, more civilized, seemed less to require those violent exertions of prerogative, that these five gentlemen above-mentioned, by a noble effort, ventured, in this national cause, to bring the question to a final determination.’ Hume, The History of England (1773), VI, 229. The insertion is italicised. 423 Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols (London: Thomas Cadell, 1778). This is the edition, as noted above, that has been reproduced by the Liberty Fund, and used throughout this chapter. 424 Hume, History, IV, 370. 182 he added, ‘and besides, are not secured by any middle power, or independant powerful nobility, interposed between them and the monarch.’425 Hume’s late anxieties did not amount to calls for reaction: feudal monarchy was not a viable way of organising modern government, as modern government was post- feudal; England’s own feudal monarchy had to collapse before personal liberty, civilisation, and civil liberty could all get going. To return to a government organised around a feudal nobility was to return to the pre-modern and the barbarous, and Hume never indicated that this was either possible or desirable: modern history could not, and should not, be rolled back. His anxieties were rather symptoms of his heterodox history of liberty. Many of the histories we have considered so far mapped onto a politics of reform. A story like Bolingbroke’s found liberty in Saxon free-holding and tyranny in feudal vassalage, and allowed him to admonish court pensions as resurrected fiefs; Hervey’s vision of liberty as legal order, meanwhile, gave him a politics of quiescence (the English had never had it so good). Kames had followed Bolingbroke in finding liberty – and also civilisation – in free-holding, and used his story to agitate for the destruction of Scotland’s own feudal property. Dalrymple’s history followed Montesquieu instead, and found a way of reconciling liberty to civilisation in a body of feudal nobility; his arguments for reform, as a consequence, revolved around the retention of Scotland’s feudal property. But Hume’s history, as he described it himself, had a politics of ‘unbounded liberty’.426 Civil liberty may have arrived on the back of the Bill of Rights and the legal order it created. But it was built on top of a personal liberty that had arrived much earlier, as luxury consumption had carried England – and much of Europe – from ancient to modern. This liberty had been felt by the English nation (or public, or people) as feudal manners had begun to transform into something more pacific; 425 Hume, History, IV, 370. In editions before 1778, this phrase did not appear. Unlike the first revision, this one has been picked up by scholars. Duncan Forbes distances the revision from both Montesquieu and public debt, filing it instead into Hume’s insatiable desire to puncture the complacency with which the English viewed their ‘matchless’ constitution, for which see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 178-80. Michael Sonenscher does the opposite, taking Hume’s revision as evidence that he had been brought round to something like Montesquieu’s view of English liberty, for which see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 49-52. 426 Hume to John Clephane, 20 April 1756, p. 231. 183 but it had not been felt by the Scots, who shivered in barbarous antiquity until Anglo-Scottish Union brought them in from the cold. In England, this new-found sense of security led to further gains: spurred onwards by enthusiasm, the people sought out the civil liberty that the Revolution would finally confirm. The problem was that although the public had cared enough about civil liberty to create it, there was no guarantee that they would protect it in future; their concern could easily be overtaken by something else, like the money its members and representatives had lent to the state.427 (The people ‘never tire of Folly’, Hume explained wearily to Strahan, ‘but they tire of the same Folly’.)428 As the public was erratic and parliament was part of the public, Hume came to wonder whether modern Britain needed a safeguard: a means of defending the constitution when the public could not do so itself.429 It was a role well suited to a feudal nobility, as Montesquieu had pointed out; but it was a role that the commercialised English nobility could no longer play. By resting civil liberty on personal liberty, and personal liberty on the mutable sentiments, or ‘opinion’, of the public, Hume had backed himself into a political corner. This was well understood by some of his Scottish contemporaries who, as we shall see, tried to unravel the connections Hume had made between liberty, civilisation, and modernity. 427 By the end of the war of the Spanish Succession, the largest proportion of long-term government stock was held by individuals, in the form of fixed term annuities. By 1756, around 60,000 people owned public debt. See Brewer, The Sinews of Power, pp. 122-26. 428 Hume to William Strahan, 2 January 1772, in Hume, Letters, II, 251-52 429 Hume was more anxious about the consequences of his ‘internal conception of rational agency’ than John Dunn imagines him to be. See Dunn, ‘From applied theology to social analysis: the break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Wealth and Virtue, pp. 119-135, at 134. But he was not as sanguine about the infallibility of the ‘opinion of mankind’ as Paul Sagar has recently argued. See Sagar, The Opinion of Mankind, pp. 103-39. 184 Chapter Four Hume and his critics Hume’s History made him rich, and after the expiry of his office with Conway, George III had even offered him a pension to extend the story beyond 1688.1 But commercial success and royal patronage failed to issue in widespread acceptance of the History’s arguments. Hume’s heterodoxy unnerved his English and Scottish contemporaries, and this chapter tries to unpick some of the sources of their unease. The scholarship we have on Hume’s reception has for too long focused on the first few decades of the nineteenth century; there is remarkably little on the character of contemporary responses to his historical writing.2 The following attempt to correct this imbalance begins in England, with two attempts to restore parliament to the historiographical pedestal that Hume had kicked away. The Leicestershire clergyman, Richard Hurd, and the London radical, Catharine Macaulay, detected the virus of Jacobitism in the History. In attempting to exorcise it from English history, they articulated very different visions of liberty and parliamentary monarchy; but they agreed that Hume was troubling because of the legislative agency he had stripped from the House of Commons. In Scotland, responses were more complicated, and reveal the disagreements – and questions – that are hidden by the label of ‘sociological 1 Harris, Hume, pp. 408-10. On the King’s offer, made via Hertford, see Hume to the Comtesse de Boufflers, 26 April 1768, in Hume, Letters, II, 174-76, at 174. 2 On Hume and the nineteenth century, see the various chapters of Collini, Winch, and Burrow eds., That Noble Science of Politics, as well as Burrow’s A Liberal Descent and Whigs and Liberals. The final chapter of Forbes’s Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 308-23, attempts to sketch the relation of Hume’s historical thinking to Smith and Millar, but has been dated by his insistence that Hume flirted with a cyclical vision of history, and was cut off from the social and economic theory of Smith and Millar. Kidd is alive to the distinctions between Scottish historians, but Hume nevertheless appears as a spearhead of his broader story about ‘sociological whiggism’, for which see Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 107-23, 204-15. 185 whiggism’. In Hume, Hurd and Macaulay saw a partisan of absolute monarchy; but the four Scots who will concern us here were troubled in various ways by the web that Hume had spun between civilisation, personal liberty, and modern history. In his history of sixteenth-century Scotland, William Robertson ran a narrative of English liberty that pivoted – as Hume’s did not – on the republicanisation of its monarchy in the seventeenth century. Scotland had only been able to access this liberty, as Hume had pointed out, through Anglo-Scottish Union. But this did not lead Robertson to Hume’s conclusion that Scotland’s feudal history could not be written. The Scots had needed their feudal nobility to institute a Presbyterian – rather than Episcopalian – version of Protestantism; and Presbyterian Christianity was required, Robertson suggested, to initiate the shift from ancient to modern civilisation. From Robertson, the chapter then moves on to Adam Ferguson and John Millar, each of whom sought to reformat the connection Hume had made between liberty and civilisation. Ferguson reversed the link Hume had made between liberty and luxury, leading him to worry about the future of Britain’s republicanised monarchy under the conditions of modern commerce. Millar, as well as Sir James Steuart, tried to restore the compatibility between luxury and parliamentary monarchy that Hume and Ferguson had both, in very different ways, denied. For Millar, luxury did not generate liberty because it transformed Gothic manners; it generated liberty because it democratised property-holding, and returned England’s parliamentary monarchy to its original Saxon condition. Despite the various priorities of these three Scots, one aim was shared. For Robertson, Ferguson, and Millar, it was imperative to restore free-holding, liberty, and parliament to the spine of English history. In the Conclusion, we will consider Smith’s recognition that Hume had taken another path, leaving us with a new frame for understanding the Scottish historical enterprise as a whole. 186 Richard Hurd On 4 May 1759, Richard Hurd, the rector of Thurcaston, Leicestershire, informed a friend that he was preparing to attack Hume.3 He had just finished a series of dialogues on the English constitution and a dissertation on the origin of chivalry, and the sheets were already with his bookseller, Andrew Millar. But the appearance of Hume’s history of the Tudors induced him to change his plans. Pulling the dissertation on chivalry from the work, he decided to insert a postscript on Hume instead.4 Having already ‘undertaken to conjure up the spirit of absolute power’ in his History of Great Britain, Hurd proclaimed derisively, Hume had now ‘judged it necessary to the charm to reverse the order of things, and to evoke this frightful spectre by writing (as witches use to say their prayers) backwards.’5 Fixated on his sorcery, he had failed to see that ‘the English constitution was formed and even fixed on immovable principles of public freedom long before the accession of the house of Tudor.’6 Hurd spelled out what he meant by this in the fifth of his Dialogues, on the subject of the English constitution. Comprised of a (fictional) discussion between Sir John Maynard, Lord John Somers, and Gilbert Burnet in the immediate aftermath of 1688, the dialogue attempted to push Hume’s moment of modernity backwards, from 1500 to 1066. Doing so, Hurd thought, would be a coup. His worry, voiced through Somers, was that Brady’s view of English history remained widely held: too many thought that the Norman Conquest had invested William I with ‘absolute dominion’, that parliaments were ‘the creatures of his will; that their privileges were derived from the sovereign’s grant; and that they made no part in the original frame and texture of the English government.’7 Those who saw history in this way tended to ‘speak of the Conqueror, as proprietary of the whole kingdom; which 3 Richard Hurd to William Mason, 4 May 1759, in The Early Letters of Bishop Richard Hurd, ed. Sarah Brewer, Church of England Record Society (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995), pp. 335-36. In 1781, Hurd was nominated by George III to the bishopric of Worcester. For his biography, see G.M Ditchfield and Sarah Brewer, ‘Hurd, Richard (1720-1808)’, ODNB, online edn, January 2008 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14249, accessed 14 August 2018]. 4 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues (London: A. Millar, 1759), pp. 304-11. For commentary on the Dialogues, see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 258-60. 5 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 304. 6 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 309. 7 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 185. 187 accordingly, they say, he parcelled out, as he saw fit, in grants to his Norman and English subjects’.8 They also spoke of law as ‘the will of the prince declared in parliament, or rather solemnly received and attested there, for the better information and more entire obedience of the subject.’9 To overcome the partisans of this view, Maynard suggested, the Saxons must be set aside: liberty – and with liberty, modernity – must be found in the feudal constitution itself.10 Through the voice of Maynard, Hurd then suggested that Montesquieu’s history of the Franks showed why the feudal system was organised around ‘the principles of liberty’.11 But rather than telling a story about feudal courts, feudal custom, and feudal property, Hurd found the origins of Britain’s representative popular assembly in the feudal council of William I. Immediately following the Conquest, all lords who held immediately of the king attended him in council. No laws could be enacted ‘without their consent’, and as they held the ‘whole property of the kingdom’ they were ‘representative of the nation’.12 At first there were around 700 lords. But the number of representatives soon began to increase. As the crusades plunged many of the nobility into debt, Henry II allowed them to alienate their fiefs, driving up the number of knights who, ‘of right and duty’, were to attend the king’s council. Many of these, however, were too poor to manage the cost of attendance: it was found ‘convenient’, Maynard explained, ‘to give them leave, to appear in the 8 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 186. 9 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 186. 10 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 192. 11 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, pp. 196-205, at 204-205. Besides the proximity of Maynard’s account of French feudal history to Montesquieu’s, there is other evidence that Hurd was familiar with the Spirit of Laws. On 11 July 1751, William Warburton wrote to Hurd and thanked him for a letter detailing an encounter with Bolingbroke. Hurd had caught him deriding The Spirit of Laws as a ‘dishonour to the French genius’—a claim Warburton found amusing: Bolingbroke’s ‘perpetual railing against Montesquieu’s book’, he observed, had only arisen from ‘his having spoke slightly of Bol.’s genius and writings’. Warburton to Hurd, 11 July 1751, in Warburton, Letters from a late Eminent Prelate to one of his Friends (Kidderminster: George Gower, 1809), pp. 60-61. In the following year, Hurd wrote to a friend to say he had not yet had the chance to look at the new edition of Montesquieu’s book, ‘which is well spoken of here’. Hurd to William Bowyer, 14 February 1752, in Letters of Bishop Richard Hurd, pp. 407-08. In a note on women in his commonplace book, Hurd also admired Lycurgus for seeing that the virtue of both public and private life depended on forbidding them from inheriting property. This was especially important in a republic, for whenever women are put at the ‘head of things, it is a certain sign that the government is despotic, or will soon become so. See the complaints of Montesquieu on this head’. See Francis Kilvert, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Rev. Richard Hurd, D.D., Lord Bishop of Worcester (London: Richard Bentley, 1860), pp. 309-11. 12 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 209. 188 way of representation.’13 This was the origin of the knights of the shires, and by the fourteenth century, the growing wealth of trading towns allowed them to send burgesses – ‘that is, representatives’ – to parliament too.14 Under Edward III, these new representatives formed the lower house, and ‘by this addition, the glorious edifice of English liberty was completed.’15 But as the principle of representative government had been inscribed into the feudal constitution from the beginning, it had always been free: ‘liberty having been always the informing principle, time and experience have rather completed the old system, than created a new one: and we may account the present and Norman establishment all one’.16 We may say with ‘great truth’, Maynard concluded, ‘not that the house of commons violated the [feudal] constitution, but on the contrary, that the constitution itself demanded, or rather generated, the house of commons.’17 It was unnecessary to search for the origins of liberty among the Saxons: the ‘principles of freedom’ on which the constitution was based were ‘those of the feudal law’.18 By declaring the ‘present and Norman establishment all one’, Hurd was claiming liberty to derive from representative government, and representative government to derive from the feudal constitution. His equation of the two also allowed him to date the birth of modern history; writing to Charles Yorke three years later, just after his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) had been published, Hurd thanked him for sending his own ‘elegant deduction of the origin of Chivalry & Romance, arising out of [his] comprehensive ideas of the modern, that is Feudal history.’19 A year earlier, Hume had published the feudal volumes of the History, and Hurd applauded them as ‘by far the best’.20 But he did not notice – or affected not to notice – that they militated against the argument that the Moral and Political 13 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 209. 14 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 211. 15 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 212. 16 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 213. 17 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 217. 18 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, p. 177n. 19 Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: A. Millar, 1762); Hurd to Charles Yorke, 10 December 1762, in Letters of Bishop Richard Hurd, pp. 403-06. In the same letter, Hurd quoted the passage of Virgil with which Montesquieu opened the feudal books of The Spirit of Laws. 20 Hurd to Dr. Thomas Balguy, 20 October 1763, in Kilvert, Memoirs, pp. 90-91, at 91. 189 Dialogues were trying to push. Hume, he wrote to another friend, ‘says a great deal, & very pertinently on the feudal System; but nothing that contradicts me’.21 Catharine Macaulay Like some of the modern historians we discussed in the last chapter, Hurd had figured Hume as an eighteenth-century Robert Brady, and his dating of Britain’s representative popular assembly to the Norman Conquest was designed to undercut the politics he saw Brady (and Hume) to represent. Catharine Macaulay, however, cut a great deal deeper than Hurd: among those troubled by Hume’s History, she was the most radical.22 She was born in 1731 at Olantigh, her father’s Kent estate.23 Her grandfather, the stock-jobber Jacob Sawbridge, was MP for Cricklade from 1715 and a director (and protagonist) of the South Sea Company’s spectacular rise and fall in 1719-20.24 Her younger brother, John, was returned as MP for the cinque port of Hythe in 1768 and became one of the most prominent supporters of John Wilkes, founding the Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights (SSBR) in 1769 as a means of paying off his enormous debts.25 Catharine gained her own notoriety by writing history.26 Lacking a formal education, she claimed to have spent her ‘early 21 Hurd to William Mason, 27 November 1761, in Letters of Bishop Richard Hurd, pp. 380-82, at 381. 22 For her biography, see Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: the Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); for sketches of Macaulay’s life and thought, see Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: the Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth- Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 152-72. 23 Hill, The Republican Virago, pp. 1-25; see also Hill, ‘Macaulay, Catharine (1731-1791)’, ODNB, online edn, May 2012 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17344, accessed 14 August 2018]. 24 Richard Kleer, ‘“The folly of particulars”: the political economy of the South Sea Bubble’, Financial History Review 19 (2002), 175-97; Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Daniel Defoe skewered Sawbridge’s role in the crash in his pamphlet, The anatomy of Exchange-Alley: or, a system of stock-jobbing. (London: E. Smith, 1719). 25 On Wilkes, Sawbridge, and the politics of the 1760s, see Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics, pp. 163-99, 240-67. On Macaulay’s relation to this world, see John Pocock, ‘Catharine Macaulay: patriot historian’, in Hilda Smith ed., Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 243-58. 26 Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols (London: J. Nourse, 1763-83), henceforward History; The History of England from the Revolution to the present time, in a series of letters to a friend (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1778). The scholarship on Macaulay’s historical writing is patchy. The most perceptive readings of the multi-volume History of England can be found in Hill, ‘Reinterpreting the “Glorious Revolution”: Catharine Macaulay and Radical Response,’ in Gerald MacLean ed., Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History 190 youth’ engrossed in the annals of the Grecian states and Rome—the histories which, above any other, showed ‘Liberty in its most exalted state’.27 She most likely found translations of these texts in her father’s library at Olantigh, reading whatever and whenever she could in the 1740s and 1750s.28 By 1760, she had married the physician George Macaulay, relocating to St. James Place, London; from here, she embarked on her History of England.29 Though her husband died in 1766, she stayed at St. James Place until 1769, at which point she moved northwards, to Berners Street.30 As London became gripped by Wilkes, Macaulay reached the zenith of her fame; but the political fallout soon took its toll on her health, and by 1774 she had retreated to Bath to live with Thomas Wilson, a founder – along with her brother – of the SSBR, and rector of St. Stephen’s, Walbrook.31 By 1783, she had completed the History, two decades after its first volume had been published. Macaulay saw Hume as her main adversary. As he remarked to her after reading the History’s first volume, she had kept him in her ‘eye’ throughout.32 Eschewing Hume’s drift into English antiquity, she kept to the seventeenth century. The first volume of her narrative, published in 1763, began with James VI and I and ran to 1628. She published the next volume two years later, and carried the story as far as the Earl of Strafford’s execution in 1641. In 1767 came the third, advancing the narrative only two years, to 1643. Her fourth arrived a year later, as London was seething; it took the story up to Charles’s execution. In 1771 she published the fifth, taking care of the interregnum. The sixth and seventh were (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 267-85, and Philip Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 41 (2002), 170-98. Karen Green’s attempt to pit Macaulay and Hume against each other in a quixotic search for ‘real’ Enlightenment historiography, however, can safely be ignored. See Green, ‘Will the real enlightenment historian please stand up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume’, in Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle eds., Hume and the Enlightenment (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), pp. 39-53. 27 Macaulay, History, I, vii. 28 Hill, The Republican Virago, pp. 9-10. 29 On Macaulay in the 1760s, see Davies, Macaulay and Warren, pp. 37-72. 30 At one point, Wilkes was considering moving to Berners street and buying the adjacent house to Macaulay’s. See Hill, The Republican Virago, p. 18. 31 By the summer of 1768, she was famous enough for Samuel Foote to satirise her as Margaret Maxwell in his play, The Devil Upon Two Sticks, which ran at the Theatre-Royal in June. See Foote, The Devil Upon Two Sticks (London: T. Cadell, 1778), pp. 1-7; on Foote, see Ian Kelly, Mr Foote’s Other Leg (London: Picador, 2012); see also Barbara Schnorrenberg, ‘The Brood Hen of Faction: Mrs Macaulay and Radical Politics, 1765-1775’, Albion 11 (1979), 33-45. 32 Hume to Catharine Macaulay, 29 March 1764, in New Letters of David Hume, eds. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 80-82. 191 published together, ten years later, and moved from 1660 to the execution of Sidney in 1683. She published her eighth and final volume in 1783, terminating in the accession of William of Orange to the throne. In eight volumes quarto, she had ranged across less than a century; in six, Hume had covered almost two millennia. In a preface to her sixth volume, she explained why. England, she argued, was so deeply riven by faction that it had never been in any historian’s interest to write impartially (even if they had wanted to). Histories that pampered the ‘vanities of the great’ issued in emoluments, preferment, and popularity, whilst histories that attempted to skirt the fray would always be pulled back in: upon production of a truthful history, unaligned with faction, the ‘imperfect sons of earth among the living would [continue to] clamour in behalf of the guilty dead.’33 This was why English historiography had been factious for so long. Even Hume, though possessed of the ‘genius and profound sagacity’ necessary to resist the lustre of party, had succumbed.34 Whether seeing that an impartial history would rob him of reward, or simply – ‘as I am more inclined to believe’ – because he was prejudiced, Hume’s History had succeeded only in fanning the Jacobite ‘opinions and principles which were so justly decried by the nation towards the middle of this century.’35 Macaulay’s solution was to become ‘partial to the leaders of the republican party’.36 As republican ‘principles’ had always been too unpopular to drive a ‘rational scheme of interest or ambition’, the conduct of their exponents had also always been ‘diametrically opposite to their interest, and even their safety’.37 Whigs and Tories triumphed alternately throughout English history; but having bound themselves to the salus populi over faction, the republicans had only ever met with death, banishment, and ruin.38 Their motives therefore had ‘integrity’, and the History of England was intended to rehabilitate their memory whilst ‘exposing to the public’ the evils of faction and the rage of party—whether Whig or Tory in origin.39 Her history, she explained, was designed as a ‘literary tribunal’; the protagonists of 33 Macaulay, History, VI, v. 34 Macaulay, History, VI, vi. 35 Macaulay, History, VI, vii. 36 Macaulay, History, VI, viii. 37 Macaulay, History, VI, viii. 38 Macaulay, History, VI, viii. 39 Macaulay, History, VI, vii. 192 English history could, and should, be put on trial.40 As Macaulay put it in a manuscript draft of the History’s first volume: ‘The societys of the modern ages of the world are not constituted with powers to bring to an impartial tribunal men trusted in the higher offices of the state. An historian is the only person that can preside at such a tribunal.’41 By laundering or soiling the reputations of historical agents, she hoped to prey on the pride of the men on whom politics depended. Forever glancing at posterity, their desire to avoid defamation could guide them toward virtuous action and turn them away from vice. Instruction was Macaulay’s purpose, and the politics of the seventeenth century provided the perfect site on which her tribunal could be erected; as the nature and origins of English liberty were not at issue, she had little need to tunnel – as Hume had done – into Gothic antiquity. Though Macaulay began her narrative in 1603, she gestured at the sixteenth-century hinterland from which it had come: the world depicted in Hume’s history of the Tudors, but deliberately stripped of its argument about the compatibility of personal liberty with despotic monarchy. Prior to the seventeenth century, Macaulay explained, government was ‘very arbitrary’, and the ‘liberties of the subject were neither accurately defined, nor apparently defended.’42 The emergence of reformed opinions at the beginning of the century allowed the Tudors, by uniting spiritual with civil power, to ‘make pernicious encroachments on the legal rights of the subjects, stipulated by Magna Charta’.43 As a simplicity in manners prevailed, people ‘put a dangerous confidence in their princes’ and accepted the addition of prerogative.44 The tumults of the following years and the horrors of Mary’s reign led Protestants, once Elizabeth had acceded, to ‘arm her with full powers to suppress opposition’.45 Citing Hume, Macaulay described the powers of the high commission court Elizabeth had erected, along with the usual prerogatives of star chamber. By the time James acceded – again Macaulay cited 40 Macaulay, History, VI, xiii. 41 Quoted in Davies, Macaulay and Warren, pp. 39-40. 42 Macaulay, History, I, 270. 43 Macaulay, History, I, 270-71. 44 Macaulay, History, I, 271. 45 Macaulay, History, I, 272. 193 Hume – the authority of the crown was ‘extensive’; it was little wonder that James ‘united his darling idea of government to circumstances so conformable to it.’46 The Tudor and Stuart crowns looked much the same; it was the minds of the English that had now begun to change. The revival of letters created an ‘alteration in the modes of thinking of the English nation’: histories of Greece and Rome had infused English minds with notions of glory and liberty, and the sight of the Dutch Revolt gave hope of putting ‘theory into practice’.47 Literature was also beginning to dispel the cloud of ‘gross superstition’ that had hung over Europe, and the fear of religious persecution was beginning to mutate into the ‘dread of sinking into civil slavery’.48 The ‘lights’ which men had obtained from letters had enabled them to ‘judge more rationally of the nature and end of civil subordination’. As soon as passive obedience, the glue that had held European monarchies together, began to be treated with scepticism, an ‘entire revolution in the opinions of the intelligent’ was produced.49 Noble principles began to take root: soon the ‘progress of a more enlightened reason would bring these to perfection, and the harvest of such fruit must infallibly produce an important change in the manner and constitution of the government.’50 But the flourishing of a lettered reason, Macaulay acknowledged, needed a ‘means of redress, arising from a pre-existing cause’. Otherwise it would have created nothing but a ‘vexation of spirit’.51 These means were provided to her by Harrington, filtered through Bolingbroke. Since the Norman conquest, Macaulay explained, ‘all but the great landholders, who held their estates from father to son, by feodal entail, were in a state of abject and impassable vassalage, excluded from any voice in the legislature, or property in the soil.’52 Though the shires began to send representatives to parliament under Henry III, it was only the ‘crafty policy’ of Henry VII that finally allowed the nobility to alienate and mortgage their estates. Ruined by the Wars of the Roses, the barons leapt at the opportunity: with an ‘extravagance, dissipation, and idleness which ever attends hereditary fortune’, they 46 Macaulay, History, I, 273. 47 Macaulay, History, I, 275. 48 Macaulay, History, I, 276, 274. 49 Macaulay, History, I, 274. 50 Macaulay, History, I, 274-75. 51 Macaulay, History, V, 380. 52 Macaulay, History, V, 380. 194 assented to the law that was to prove the ‘great Magna Charta of the Commons of England.’53 The floodgates had been opened, and the growth of industry and commerce only increased the speed at which the commons poured into property. Returning to the ‘old channel’, soon the ‘balance of power against the crown visibly leaned towards the Commons.’54 Though Elizabeth managed to hold everything together, the commons began to gain ‘knowledge of their weight and importance’ under James.55 Under Charles, the ‘appetite for Liberty which had been occasioned by an high cultivation of their mental faculties, was, in the people of England, every day increasing, with the means to procure that invaluable blessing.’56 From a ‘state of politic lethargy, the Commons almost suddenly roused to a spirit of free enquiry and high independence’.57 The shift in the balance of property-holding had given new life to English parliaments—a ‘precious privilege, which the people had yet preserved from the ruins of the Gothic constitution’, and which contained ‘latent resources to preserve liberty which had given way, though not entirely yielded, to the encroachments of successful tyranny.’58 Macaulay’s explanation of the rebellion, as Karen O’Brien has pointed out, shared much of the same architecture as Hume’s.59 But O’Brien pushes too hard at similarities that cannot overwhelm the entirely different purposes driving their narratives. Searching for the foundations of English liberty, Hume found the axis of his history in the luxury-fuelled emergence of modern liberty in around 1500; searching for the best site of lettered and virtuous action, Macaulay found her own axis in the short-lived republic erected in the wake of the Regicide.60 By 1628, Charles had begun to rule England despotically: ‘that is, had exercised by his single authority every act of legislation.’61 Around ten years later, he attempted – through 53 Macaulay, History, V, 382. 54 Macaulay, History, V, 382. 55 Macaulay, History, V, 382-83. 56 Macaulay, History, V, 383. 57 Macaulay, History, V, 383. 58 Macaulay, History, I, 273. For an implausible attempt to use this reference to the ‘Gothic’ past to depict Macaulay as an Anglo-Saxon constitutionalist, see Lynne Withey, ‘Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda’, The Journal of British Studies 16 (1976), 59-83. 59 O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, pp. 155-59. 60 On 1650-51 acting as the apex of Macaulay’s History, see also Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War’, pp. 171-72. 61 Macaulay, History, II, 133. 195 ship money – to ‘graft on to the subverted constitution a right to levy money on the people, and thus entirely exclude parliaments’.62 His motives were interested, and aimed only at funding the prodigality of his court.63 But he met with some determined resistance: despite the law – ‘conveyed through the polluted channel of corrupt gown-men’ – becoming an instrument of despotism, John Hampden stood forward to ‘combat this new state-monster’.64 Refusing to be cowed by the yoke that Charles and his ministers had placed over the ‘neck of their helpless country’, he stood up for the salus populi. But the evidence produced by his lawyers could not save him: after his trial, the ‘prostituted bench of judges’ pronounced in favour of the crown.65 Such an obvious clash between vice and virtue, Macaulay claimed, woke the people from their slumber. Through peace and commerce, and the riches and luxury attendant upon them, the ‘public’ had fallen into an ‘effeminate passiveness’. But the virtuous Hampden cut through their apathy: the fruits of their industry were now under threat; the ‘old constitution’ had been subverted, and tyranny erected in its place.66 And yet the patriot party in parliament struggled to ‘rouse the heavy multitude to action’ until, as Hume had argued, the Scots intervened.67 Having broken the ‘chain of passive obedience’ that had hampered the English constitution for so long, it finally ‘broke through regal restraint, and the people with one voice demanded a parliament.’68 Meeting in November 1640, it was packed with patriots whose ‘number, virtues, and abilities, were greater than had ever been convened together in any age or country.’ Liberty, Macaulay exclaimed, ‘had begun her triumphant course’.69 By 1644, a republican party was beginning to form in parliament: slowly, this group of men were beginning to vocalise their desire for a ‘reformation of the 62 Macaulay, History, II, 197. 63 ‘Idleness, servility, and their concomitant vices’, Macaulay explained, ‘were, in these happy days, only to be found among the servants and followers of the court. Candour, valour, integrity, a spirit of independence, and every other masculine virtue, were possessed in a high degree by the Commons of England, viz. of the male sex; whilst chastity, modesty, and industry, were the general characteristics of the females.’ Macaulay, History, I, 277. 64 Macaulay, History, II, 220. 65 Macaulay, History, II, 221. 66 Macaulay, History, II, 224. 67 Macaulay, History, II, 380. 68 Macaulay, History, II, 380. 69 Macaulay, History, II, 390. 196 principles, as well as the executive, of the government’.70 Due to a ‘natural connection between civil and religious policy’, they had soon joined themselves to the Independents.71 Unlike the ‘bigotted’ Presbyterians, who were intolerant, the Independents thought that ‘every man had a right to direct his religious conscience, and interpret the scriptures, according to his own lights and apprehensions.’72 Their doctrine was founded on the ‘authority of the gospel and the dictates of reason’, and the principle of toleration, ‘in these enlightened ages adopted by the liberal of almost all persuasions’, owed its origins to them.73 After the Regicide, legitimated via extensive reference to Locke, the republican Independents took control of parliament; the golden age of English history had begun.74 Before the embryonic Commonwealth could get down to the business of government, they had to quell the resistance of the Scots. Macaulay was uncompromising: in Scotland, the ‘rank weed of aristocracy had taken too deep root to implant in the envenomed soil the generous principles of popular government’.75 Their conduct in pronouncing Charles II king was ‘preposterous’, and by 1651 they had been crushed: Dundee was put to the sword, and a ‘general terror struck the kingdom’.76 No government in history had been so newly established, yet so formidable. England had become a ‘matchless republic’, but its necessary militarism did not distract parliament, ‘actuated with the true spirit of heroic patriotism’, from domestic government.77 Laws were passed to preserve religious freedom and the ‘purity’ of religious sentiment; the ‘morals and the manners of the people’ were corrected; the poor were guarded from ‘undeserved poverty’; society was protected from the fraud and rapacity of individuals; commerce was secured and extended; and an act was even passed to translate all law-books into the vernacular.78 Never in ‘all the annals of recorded time’, Macaulay enthused, ‘had Fortune reared so tall 70 Macaulay, History, IV, 160-61. 71 Macaulay, History, IV, 270. 72 Macaulay, History, IV, 268-69. 73 Macaulay, History, IV, 268; on Macaulay’s Unitarianism, see Karen Green, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s enlightenment faith and radical politics’, History of European Ideas 44/1 (2018), 35-48; O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, pp. 166-72. 74 For the Regicide and Macaulay’s defence of it, see Macaulay, History, IV, 432-34. 75 Macaulay, History, V, 32. 76 Macaulay, History, V, 75. 77 Macaulay, History, V, 79. 78 Macaulay, History, V, 79-80. 197 a monument of human virtue as were the atchievements of this assembly.’79 All ‘iniquitous distinction, all opposition to the powers of democracy, were totally annihilated and subdued’; with government in the hands of ‘illustrious patriots’, England had arrived at the ‘meridian of its glory’.80 But vice could bring down what virtue had created. As parliament had understood that ‘true love of liberty’ was founded in virtue, they had moved fast to reform the morals of the people.81 But they failed to move fast enough to balance Cromwell’s power with an ‘equal military command in the hands of the brave and honest Ludlow.’82 In 1653, just as the English were on the brink of ‘attaining a fuller measure of happiness than had ever been the portion of human society’, the ‘base and wicked selfishness’ of one man deprived them of their hopes.83 By dissolving parliament, Cromwell closed off the opening in English history that the Regicide had created. Up to then, the contest for power had pitted the people against the crown; now the Stuarts were pitted against the Cromwells, and the ‘success of either pretender must be equally attended with the misery and slavery of the people.’84 Courtly politics found its feet once again, infecting ‘the morals of the army and the whole nation’. Though Cromwell’s death presented the English with an opportunity for deliverance, it was too late: his reign, though short, ‘was sufficiently long to make a perpetual entail of those evils his wicked ambition had occasioned’.85 The Protector’s example had inspired too much vice for the ‘honest endeavours’ of parliament to have any effect, and Charles II was soon restored to the throne; in taking him back, Macaulay lamented, the English had received as a royal favour what, ‘according to the lowest principle of Freedom, ought to have been established by the authority of its representatives.’86 In a ‘fit of passion and despair’, the nation plunged itself once again ‘into a state of hopeless servitude’.87 79 Macaulay, History, V, 94. 80 Macaulay, History, V, 384-85. 81 Macaulay, History, V, 386. 82 Macaulay, History, V, 386. 83 Macaulay, History, V, 95. 84 Macaulay, History, V, 387. 85 Macaulay, History, V, 388-89. 86 Macaulay, History, V, 390. 87 Macaulay, History, V, 390. 198 Macaulay’s History tailed off from here; the glory of the Commonwealth had been and gone, leaving English history to descend into 1688. Unmoved by the machinations behind the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution was a historically unprecedented disaster.88 Though it was ‘universally celebrated’, partisans of the revolution showered ‘panegyrical compliments’ on the very cause of their problems.89 For the Whigs had settled the crown ‘without adding any new trophies to the altar of liberty’.90 The constitution had been deformed by ministers, kings, and usurpers for decades; without a repeal of the disenfranchising statute of Henry VI, the establishment of annual parliaments, and a pension bill, the Bill of Rights opened ‘a wider field for more corrupt abuses, than ever were produced by all the monarchical, oligarchical, and aristocratical tyrannies in the world’.91 Under the ‘specious appearance of democratical privilege’, the people were in reality enslaved to a ‘small part of the community’, their votes bought and sold.92 Combined with the failure to reform parliament, the settlement of the crown’s patrimony led to an ‘endless variety of successive ills’, all of which tended ‘to the ruin of public virtue’.93 Revolutionary panegyric consisted only of what Macaulay called ‘empty sounds’: it was ‘delusional’ to see 1688 as anything but an infection of parliament by the bloated prerogative of the crown.94 Macaulay’s lament closed the final volume of her History, published in 1783. But she had revealed her heterodoxy as early as 1770.95 In a retort to Burke’s diagnosis of the uproar over Wilkes – what he called the ‘present discontents’ – Macaulay had accused the ‘Revolution system’ of having introduced the ‘undermining and irresistible hydra, court influence, in the room of the more terrifying, yet less formidable monster, prerogative.’96 Its dangers outran those of 88 Macaulay, History, VII, 187-88, 260-72. 89 Macaulay, History, VIII, 329. 90 Macaulay, History, VIII, 329-30. 91 Macaulay, History, VIII, 330. 92 Macaulay, History, VIII, 330. 93 Macaulay, History, VIII, 331. 94 Macaulay, History, VIII, 337. 95 John Brewer observes that the otherwise fragmented cluster of Chathamites, Rockinghams, London radicals, and independents agreed on one thing: that England’s political malaise was post- revolutionary, and that the Revolution itself had enshrined the ‘true principles of the constitution’. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics, p. 262. 96 Macaulay, Observations on a pamphlet, entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 4th edn (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1770), pp. 12-13. 199 prerogative because they masqueraded as democracy; in reality, Whig oligarchy had turned parliament into a carapace without a body, or a ‘form’ lacking a ‘spirit’.97 By the conclusion of the Seven Years War, the result was public debts of over £140m, a standing army, and placemen and pensioners clogging the arteries of the Commons.98 Instead of becoming the ‘paymasters’ of the crown, as the Revolution had promised, the people had turned into its creditors; as a result, taxes had been raised only for the ‘advantage and emolument’ of individuals, and all notions of the public good had been lost.99 Like Hume, Macaulay was sceptical of the extent to which the English relied on 1688 in order to defend the security of their liberty; pressed by its debts and a disintegrating empire, there was little reason to believe that England’s revolutionary constitution would last. But their different visions of history gave them different diagnoses of the problem, leaving their solutions – if solutions could be envisaged at all – to part ways. For Hume’s scepticism derived from his history of Europe’s exit from antiquity, and the fragility of the modern liberty this exit had created: without a hereditary, non-commercial nobility to defend the constitution in moments of acute political crisis, a credit-soaked parliament could no longer be relied upon to determine Britain’s public interest. To trumpet the superiority of Britain’s republicanised monarchy over France was to beg the question. As he put it to Macaulay, ‘I look upon all kinds of subdivision of power, from the monarchy of France to the freest democracy of some Swiss Cantons, to be equally legal, if established by custom and authority’.100 If liberty did not necessarily come from parliaments, then it could not necessarily be protected by parliamentary reform; on Hume’s account, Britain’s problems ran deeper. The Wilkites had been arguing for the incorporation and representation of market towns, annual parliaments, and a pension bill; but none of these measures, Hume worried, could simulate the constitutional safeguard that had gone missing in the sixteenth century.101 97 Macaulay, Observations, p. 13; the Tories, Macaulay pointed out, were less ‘concealed’ than the Whigs, who were for that reason the true ‘enemies of public liberty’. Macaulay, Observations, p. 17. 98 Macaulay, Observations, p. 14. 99 Macaulay, Observations, p. 14. 100 Hume to Catharine Macaulay, 29 March 1764, in Hume, New Letters, p. 81. 101 On the Wilkites and their demands, see Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics, pp. 240-67. 200 Macaulay’s own scepticism about the stability of English politics derived from how far she thought it had fallen since reaching the dizzying heights of 1651— what Macaulay called the ‘meridian’ of its glory.102 Courtly politics had returned with Cromwell; but since the revolution, it had taken on a new and monstrous form. Parliamentary representatives had become financiers, cooking up new modes of ‘pecuniary oppression’ and destroying the ‘independence in parliament on which the security and safety of the people necessarily depend’.103 Parliament’s members had begun to seek contracts from a bloated state, and no longer acted for themselves and the free-holders they represented. Without parliamentary independence, ‘national virtue’ had no hope. In the wake of the Seven Years War, Macaulay saw only one way to restore it: a Bolingbrokian patriot king and a patriot ministry capable of erecting annual parliaments, extending the franchise, defaulting on Britain’s debts, defending its colonies, and banishing peculation from the Commons.104 William Robertson By departing London for Robertson’s Edinburgh, we can shake off Hurd and Macaulay’s suspicion that Hume was a Jacobite. But as we have already seen in Daniel MacQueen, the city’s churches had suspicions of their own. Roger Flexman, a Presbyterian minister at Jamaica Row, London, shared MacQueen’s particular distaste: Hume wrote of Protestantism as if it ‘were rather the casual effect of enthusiasm and fanaticism, than the amiable offspring of free enquiry, and rational 102 Macaulay, History, V, 384-85. 103 Macaulay, History, VIII, 334. 104 Macaulay acknowledged, however, that this would constitute a ‘perfect miracle in political history’, for which see History, VIII, 334-36. On Bolingbroke, see his essay, ‘On the Idea of a Patriot King’, in Political Writings, pp. 217-94. Though written in MS in 1738, it was first published as part of Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism: on the Idea of a Patriot King: and on the State of Parties, at the Accession of King George the First (London: A. Millar, 1749). Millar published another edition in 1752, and in 1767, a further was published by Thomas Cadell. For Corsica as a model of a democratic republic ushered in by a patriot king, see Macaulay, Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes’s philosophical rudiments of government and society. With a short sketch of a democratical form of government, in a letter to Signior Paoli (London: T. Cadell, 1767); on Corsica and Paoli, see Dorothy Carrington, ‘The Corsican Constitution of Pasquale Paoli (1755-1769), English Historical Review 88 (1973), 481-503. 201 conviction.’105 But William Robertson had something different and distinctive to say. Whilst Hume was publishing his history of the Stuarts, Robertson was a minister at Gladsmuir, a small rural parish near Edinburgh, and had begun work on a history of Scotland in 1753; he had also joined the Select Society in June 1754, where he would have met Hume (if he had not already).106 By the time Robertson published his History of Scotland at the end of January 1759, just over two months before Hume published the Tudor volumes of the History, the two were friends.107 Hume, Robertson knew, was preparing to drop Scotland from his story, turning the History of Great Britain into the History of England; in his history of the Stuarts, he had also claimed that seventeenth-century Scotland was plagued by sociopathic enthusiasm, and trapped by the system of feudal oligarchy that only the English had managed to overcome. Robertson signalled different priorities by deciding to narrate a history of Scotland from 1542 to 1603—a period in which he admitted that the ‘feudal Aristocracy, which had been subverted in most nations of Europe by the policy of their Princes, or had been undermined by the progress of commerce, still subsisted with full force in Scotland.’108 But in a short coda running from 1603 to the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions in 1747, Robertson also suggested – as Hume had done – that the Scots needed Anglo-Scottish Union to become post-feudal and free.109 There appears to be a conflict here. But it is one which has been papered over by the scholarship: although Robertson’s account of Union only occupies a few paragraphs of a ten page coda, historians have taken it to align him with Hume. It shows, they tend to claim, that 1707 had introduced the amorphous triad of liberty, civilisation, and modernity into Scotland. The Scottish feudal system, according to Karen O’Brien, was for Robertson ‘pre-’ or even ‘anti-modern’, as it held back the 105 See Flexman’s review of the History’s first volume, Monthly Review 12 (1754), 206-229; see also William Rose’s review of Hume’s second Stuart volume, Monthly Review 16 (1757), 36-50. 106 Jeffrey Smitten, The Life of William Robertson: Minister, Historian, and Principal (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 103. On the Select Society, see McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement, pp. 48-67. 107 Robertson had asked Andrew Millar, the bookseller he shared with Hume, to delay the publication of Hume’s history of the Tudors in order to lessen the competition—a proposal to which Hume readily agreed. A complimentary, if unilluminating, review of Robertson’s history in the Critical Review 7 (1759), pp. 89-103, has also been attributed to Hume. See David Raynor, ‘Hume and Robertson’s History of Scotland’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 10/1 (1987), 59-63. 108 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 249. 109 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 249-60. 202 ‘onset of modernity’.110 Union was a cosmopolitan act which allowed Scotland to join a ‘modern balanced’ constitution and, somewhat obscurely, a ‘neoclassical community of cultural and political aesthetics’.111 For Colin Kidd, Robertson was a ‘sociological whig’ who, like Hume, saw 1707 and 1747 as enabling the Scots to leap into an ‘Anglicised modernity’, exchanging a stagnant ‘medieval’ monarchy for a ‘modern’ mixed monarchy as they did so.112 Union had therefore led Scotland to civil liberty, modernity, and the ‘new Europe of commerce and refinement’—or, in other words, civilisation.113 Following Kidd and O’Brien, John Pocock explains that eighteenth-century historical writing, what he calls ‘enlightened historiography’, entailed a search for the origins of ‘post-feudal and post- ecclesiastical modernity’.114 But unlike the English, who had Henry VII and Henry VIII, the Scots found it difficult to ‘discover in their past the agents of their own modernisation.’115 Robertson’s own search therefore terminated in 1688, 1707, and 1747.116 These were moments far from autochthonous to Scottish history which, in and of itself, was a ‘flat screen without tensions’, incapable of generating distinctions between ancient, medieval, and modern.117 But if Scottish modernity was an eighteenth-century, post-feudal phenomenon (or imposition), why write a history of a deeply feudal sixteenth century? It is a question to which a variety of answers have been glued. For Pocock, there is no answer: Robertson had simply failed to write Scottish history as an ‘Enlightened narrative’ that depicted the emergence of the ‘modern’.118 O’Brien’s answer is that Robertson saw ‘pre-modern’ history as a means of instructing Scots in citizenship: Buchananite historiography could be refurbished to assuage ‘civic moralist anxieties’ about the selfishness of modern, polite culture.119 Others, 110 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 93-129, at 111-13. 111 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 103-04, 109-10, 122; see also O’Brien, ‘Between enlightenment and stadial history’, p. 57. 112 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 180-84, 207-08; idem., ‘The ideological significance of Robertson’s History of Scotland’, in Stewart Brown ed., William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 122-45, at 132-33. 113 Kidd, ‘Robertson’s History of Scotland’, p. 132. 114 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 264-65. 115 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 256-67, at 264. 116 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 268-75. 117 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 271-72; this is an articulation of the central thesis of Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, on which Pocock acknowledges he leans heavily. 118 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 258-305, at 299. 119 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 104-08. 203 including his only modern biographer, see the sixteenth century as the habitat of Mary Queen of Scots: a perfect historical site for a demonstration of Robertson’s ‘moderatism’. By popping the balloon of highly charged confessional politics surrounding her life, these historians claim, Robertson was able to display the judicious, temperate, and impartial character he was hoping to impart into his polite reading public.120 Colin Kidd is alone in emphasising that the Reformation took place inside the confines of the History’s narrative.121 But Robertson narrated it, Kidd insists, only to sever the commonly posited connection between Scottish Presbyterianism and liberty: as the latter only arrived once Scotland had become conjoined to an Episcopalian Protestant state, the former could no longer be used to furnish Scotland with a whig historiography of its own.122 In stripping the reformation of its ‘totemic authority’, Robertson was one of many – including Hume – who rendered Scotland a ‘historyless’ nation.123 Thomas Ahnert has given us good reason to pause over this picture, and gives clues as to how Robertson’s tricky relation to Hume might be clarified.124 Robertson, Ahnert suggests, was concerned above all with what he has identified as ‘moral culture’—the process by which human beings were turned into properly (and sustainably) virtuous agents.125 He was one of a number of heterodox eighteenth- century Presbyterians, Ahnert explains, who had become anxious that solfideism, or faith alone, failed to encourage good works. First among them was John Simson, professor of divinity at Glasgow from 1708 until his suspension for Arianism in 1729, who had begun to claim that virtuous conduct was necessary (if not sufficient) to salvation.126 The question was how to cultivate it. Francis Hutcheson, a pupil of Simson’s and professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1730 to 1746, had a 120 Sher, Church and University, pp. 99-106; Smitten, Life of William Robertson, pp. 119-22. 121 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 185-204; idem., ‘Subscription, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Moderate Interpretation of History’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55/3 (2004), 502-19. 122 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 191-98. 123 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 209. 124 Thomas Ahnert, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690-1805 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 125 Ahnert, Moral Culture, pp. 11-12; on Robertson more specifically, see Ahnert’s earlier article, ‘Fortschrittgeschichte und Religiöse Aufklärung. William Robertson und die Deutung außereuropäischer Kulturen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23 (2010), 101-22, at 105-06. 126 On Simson’s struggles with the Presbytery of Glasgow, see Ahnert, Moral Culture, pp. 30-33. The group of theologians and ministers who followed in his wake included Archibald Campbell and Francis Hutcheson, both of whom were taught by Simson, as well as George Wishart, George Turnbull, Robert Wallace, and William Hamilton. Ahnert, Moral Culture, pp. 33-40, 51-66. 204 clear answer: the promise of future punishments was the best way to initiate the process, and would allow naturally virtuous dispositions to function and solidify without interference from the baser passions.127 Though pneumatics could prove the possibility of the soul’s immortality, only divine revelation provided the certainty required to motivate action.128 The simple truths of the gospel were uniquely useful for moral reform, and moral reform – or moral culture – was necessary for salvation.129 By turning their backs on the fullness of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, Hutcheson and the heterodox group around him were followed by the odour of Arminianism, and the same went for Robertson and the ‘moderate’ party of clergymen that formed around him in the 1750s.130 Unlike Hutcheson, however, Robertson never went as far as suggesting that moral culture led to salvation. But in 1755, a year after Hume had published the first volume of his history, he gave a sermon that confirmed Hutcheson’s insight about the revealed truth of the soul’s immortality: it was uniquely useful, Robertson agreed, for motivating people to act virtuously by loving God and their neighbours more than themselves.131 As we shall see, the sermon also explained why sixteenth-century Scottish history might be worth narrating. Speaking to the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, set up in 1700 to preach to remote communities in the Highlands, Robertson’s central claim was that history pivoted around Christ and the reception of his word, as recorded in the sacred history of the gospels. His aim was to relate this history to the civil history of Europe which, in its earliest ages, was ‘divided into small independent states, differing from each other in language, manners, laws, and religion.’132 As yet ‘unbroken by the refinements of luxury’, the peoples of these 127 Ahnert, Moral Culture, pp. 60-61. 128 Ahnert, Moral Culture, p. 62. 129 Ahnert, Moral Culture, pp. 62-65. 130 On the theology of Robertson and the other clergymen with whom he formed the ‘moderate’ party of the Scottish Scottish, see Ahnert, Moral Culture, pp. 78-86, 100-03, 108; for older work on ‘moderatism’, which sees it as a project designed to reconcile Presbyterian Christianity with Stoic morality, see Sher, Church and University, passim; on the moderates and Arminianism, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 270. 131 William Robertson, The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance, and its Connexion with the Success of his Religion, considered (Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour & Neill, 1755). 132 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 11. 205 states had been given ‘equal and happy governments’ by lawgivers like Moses, Lycurgus, and Solon.133 ‘Temperance, frugality, decency, public spirit, love to their fellow-citizens, magnanimity’ were the ‘virtues which flourished under such wise institutions.’134 But the maintenance of virtue, as Montesquieu had pointed out, required either citizens’ self-abnegation or government regulation; every aspect of citizens’ conduct was ‘subjected to the eye of the magistrate’, who had to ‘inspect their manners, with severity.’135 In this sense, there was ‘alliance betwixt morals and government.’136 But without the assistance of divine revelation, civic virtue – however self- abnegating the citizens, however repressive the state – could only ever remain imperfect. ‘We cannot expect to find pure and undefiled virtue’, Robertson warned, ‘among those people who were destitute of the instructions, the promises, and assistance of divine revelation. Unenlightened reason often errs: Undirected virtue always deviates from the right path’.137 The Jews had deviated, as had the Sadducees: the former preferred ceremonies over ‘moral precepts’, and by ‘denying the immortality of the soul, [the Sadducees] wounded religion in a vital part; and overturned the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, which hath been, and must ever be, the chief foundation of virtuous obedience’.138 The heathen nations, meanwhile, were superstitious in a way that precluded the possibility of moral reform: ‘No repentance of past crimes, no future amendment of conduct, are ever prescribed by [heathen superstition], as a proper means of appeasing the offended deities.’139 Whilst the heathen commonwealths remained small, virtuous, and free, superstition could not make much progress; but they ‘were the works of men, and mortal like their authors’, and proved unable to resist the ‘torrent of Roman power’ that overcome them shortly before Christ’s birth.140 But in conquering the world, the Romans ‘lost their own liberty’, becoming tyrants and breaking the ‘alliance’ between morals and government. Only then did 133 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 16. 134 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, pp. 16-17. 135 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 17. 136 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 18. 137 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 18. 138 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 22. 139 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 24. 140 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, pp. 25, 18. 206 superstition make its ‘advances’ as it helped to ‘break the spirit, and prepare it for servitude’; tyranny, he observed, ‘encourages superstition, and employs it as a useful auxiliary to illegal power.’141 Only once the Romans had thrown the world into ‘universal corruption’ did the wisdom of God manifest the Christian revelation to the world. In doing so, he rescued virtue from the ‘insecure foundation of civil government’, and erected it instead ‘upon the eternal and immovable basis of a religion, which teacheth righteousness by the authority of God.’142 The historical significance of Christ’s teaching, independently of human laws or institutions, was that it explained the ‘principles of morals with admirable perspicuity’, and enforced the practice of them ‘by most persuasive arguments.’143 The most powerful of these, and the primary agent in triggering the cultivation of virtue, was the proof of the soul’s immortality: Christ’s word ‘not only sanctifies our souls, but refines our manners; and while it gives the promises of the next life, it improves and adorns the present’.144 Only Christ’s promise of future rewards and punishments could refine temporal human manners: wherever it had been established ‘with purity’, Christianity therefore cultivated ‘kindness, long-suffering, meekness, bowels of mercies, charity’.145 The gospel, Robertson claimed in direct opposition to Hume, was capable of ‘civilizing the fiercest and most barbarous nations, and inspiring a gentleness of disposition, unknown to any other religion’.146 This, in turn, permitted an extraordinary conclusion about the transition from ancient to modern that is worth repeating in full: It hath become a fashionable topic among political reasoners, to celebrate the mildness and humanity of modern manners, and to prefer the character of present times before the ancient: To what cause shall we ascribe this important revolution, in the sentiments and dispositions of mankind? Not to the influence of better instituted governments, for in legislative wisdom the antients far excelled us: Not to the effects of a better-directed education; that 141 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 25. 142 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 19. 143 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 19. 144 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, pp. 40-41. 145 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, pp. 40-41. 146 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, p. 40. 207 duty, shamefully neglected by us, was among them an object of chief attention: Not to our superior refinements in elegant and polite arts; there we must be content to equal, without pretending to surpass the antients. The Christian religion, hid from ages, but now manifested to the world, is the only cause capable to produce so great an effect.147 In hinging the arrival of modernity upon Christ, Robertson pushed himself away from Hume, for whom history was about liberty: either the civil liberty achieved by parliamentary representatives in the 17th century, or the personal (and modern) liberty achieved by the spread of luxury consumption – or civilisation – across Europe at the turn of the 16th century. Hume’s intention – one shared by Montesquieu, Dalrymple, and Kames – was to understand what liberty was and where it had come from, in order to work out whether (or how) it could be protected in the present. But for Robertson, history appeared to revolve around the cultivation of virtue, or ‘moral culture’—a process triggered by the revelation of the soul’s immortality, and culminating in a system of refined manners that constituted both civilisation and modernity. Liberty had been given to early Greco-Roman states by lawgivers; but it needed virtue in order to survive, just as virtue needed Christianity in order to rest on an ‘eternal and immovable’ foundation. If history had higher stakes than liberty, then the two volumes of Hume’s History of Great Britain made for grim reading. ‘Disputes concerning religious forms’, Hume had explained with a smirk, were the ‘most frivolous of any; and merit attention only so far as they have influence on the peace and order of civil society.’148 For Robertson, the ecclesiastical implications of this approach were catastrophic. Hume’s seventeenth-century Englishmen had left their bellicose Gothic manners behind them, only to be incited to civil violence by the barbarous and anti-social fanaticism of the Scottish Presbyterians. They were to blame, Hume had claimed with no little relish, for the ‘gloomy and sullen’ disposition that had come to characterise the Scots, and thus for triggering the great rebellion.149 James I and Laud had earlier tried to stave off this calamity by re-introducing various rites and 147 Robertson, Christ’s Appearance, pp. 39-40. 148 Hume, History, VI, 171. 149 Hume, History, V, 68. 208 ceremonies into the Scottish church; they were to be praised, unlike the Presbyterians, for understanding the placatory qualities of superstition.150 Reflecting on why absolute monarchy was so easily imposed on the Scots in 1661, Hume had dismissed their past resistance as proceeding ‘more from the turbulence of their aristocracy and the bigotry of their ecclesiastics than from any fixed passion towards civil liberty.’151 Robertson’s problem was not just that Hume had refused to evaluate the religious motivations of his narrative’s agents on the basis of their proximity to scriptural truth. By rendering the Scottish Presbyterians as barbarous, Hume had also failed to acknowledge the Word as the broker of the transition from ancient to modern. In the two volumes of the History of Great Britain, Hume was already beginning to find his own engine of civilisation in luxury consumption—even if the engine had not yet driven Hume’s English from ancient to modern. But Robertson had already seen enough. He needed to answer Hume, and he did so by telling two stories. The first explored the feudal system that continued to define Scottish history deep into the eighteenth century, and challenged Hume by suggesting that luxury was not the proper agent for destroying it. His second story followed on from the sermon. Christ’s teaching was the pivot on which the history of civilisation turned; and primitive Christianity had been restored to sixteenth-century Scotland with the birth of the Presbyterian church. Knowing he was about to openly defy Hume, Robertson admitted to Gilbert Elliot, third baron of Minto, that he felt the ‘utmost anxiety about the reception I shall meet with’.152 But ‘like a true desperado’, he went on, ‘I shut my eyes, think as little as I can, and rush forward.’153 Writing off history prior to the tenth-century monarch Kenneth II as ‘pure fable and conjecture’ and the following two centuries as unworthy of ‘laborious enquiry’, Robertson began his account of the feudal system with Alexander III. Only then did Scottish history become ‘authentic’, and its ‘feudal system’ become clear.154 Even more so than Dalrymple, Robertson ridiculed the pyramidical 150 Hume, History, V, 68-69. 151 Hume, History, VI, 168. 152 Robertson to Gilbert Elliot, third baron of Minto, 4 January 1759. National Library of Scotland, Minto Papers, MS 11008, fols. 80-81. 153 Robertson to Gilbert Elliot, 4 January 1759, fols. 80-81. 154 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 5. 209 structure so beloved by the English antiquarians. If they were to be believed – if the king really is ‘the sole proprietor of all the lands within his dominions’; if ‘all his subjects derive their possessions from him’; if all titles and marks of distinction ‘flow from him as the only fountain of honour’; if the peers’ oaths of fealty to their ‘Liege Lord’ are to be trusted – then a feudal king should be pronounced a ‘powerful, nay an absolute Monarch’.155 But doing so would be ridiculous. Following Montesquieu and Dalrymple, Robertson claimed feudal government to be ‘purely aristocratical’: a feudal monarch had ‘ensigns of royalty’ and the occasional illusion of ‘despotic power’, but was in fact ‘the most limited of all Princes.’156 In terms that Hume would later draw upon, Robertson explained the aristocratic character of feudal governments by reference to their Germanic origins.157 Before they overran the Roman empire, the tribes comprising the northern nations were not subjected to kings.158 When they ventured west, the tribes elected generals to lead them to war; when they attempted to settle, dangerous conditions ensured that the governments they established were initially military. The general continued as ‘head of the colony’, taking some of the conquered land; the rest was allotted to his principal men in exchange for military service. These principal men, in turn, allotted their own land to their followers on the same basis. These allotments were called ‘fiefs’, and were initially granted at the general’s (or principal’s) pleasure. The generals, meanwhile, remained elective.159 After they had settled, generals became kings and kings became hereditary.160 But even this could not shake the aristocratic foundations of feudal government. Fiefs had also become hereditary, and feudal kings laboured under under too many burdens. The first was their poverty: they could not levy a fixed tax on land, and commerce was too undeveloped for a tax on trade to be viable; only their demesnes provided them with revenue. They had some rights of wardship and marriage over their own vassals, and managed to extract various small emoluments. But they were scanty enough for kings to be mired in ‘continual indigence, anxiety, 155 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 12. 156 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 12. 157 Along with Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, Robertson’s prefatory essay was quoted by Hume as providing the best modern account of feudal government. See Hume, History, I, 455. 158 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 12-13. 159 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 13-14. 160 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 14. 210 and dependence.’161 Just as damagingly, a feudal king’s own principal men, or barons, could not be trusted: the army they were obliged to provide, ‘far from being an engine at the king’s disposal, was often no less formidable to him, than to his enemies.’162 Feudal kings also had no judicial power. Citing the chapter of Montesquieu’s first feudal book on the ‘justices of the lords’, Robertson explained how they had arrogated the administration of justice from kings.163 As barons were obliged to protect their vassals from injury, they soon developed informal courts to do so. But these were vehicles for the pursuit of aristocratic power, rather than justice: ‘rapine, murder, and disorder of all kinds prevailed in every kingdom of Europe, to a degree almost incredible, and scarce compatible with the subsistence of civil society. Every offender sheltered himself under the protection of some powerful chieftain, who screened him from the pursuits of justice.’164 Informal courts soon reified into the right of lords to administer justice on their own domains, and that right soon became hereditary.165 After securing hereditary fiefs and justices, barons introduced entails. Such was the scale of their ‘preposterous ambition’, and so successful were their attempts to ‘aggrandize themselves’, that they soon arrogated the offices of state to particular families. These were soon held hereditarily too, making the nobility both ‘turbulent and formidable’.166 Vassals were as loyal as barons were hospitable; often, the hall of an ambitious baron was ‘more crowded’ than the court of the king.167 Feudal kingdoms were therefore loose aggregates of ‘many small principalities, almost independent, and held together by a feeble and commonly an imperceptible bond of union.’168 The problem was more acute in Scotland than elsewhere.169 Flat countries were designed for servitude, but Scotland was covered by mountains.170 Cities could 161 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 15. 162 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 16. 163 This differed to Montesquieu, though Robertson drew on him for evidence of the king’s impotence. For Montesquieu, the lords had administered justice from the beginning. 164 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 17; like Montesquieu, Robertson opposed ‘feudal’ to ‘civil’, or political. See Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.32.716. 165 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 18. 166 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 20. 167 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 20. 168 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 18. 169 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 20-28. 170 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 21. 211 generate regal authority, but Scotland had very few.171 Clanship bolstered the power of the nobility, as their inferiors had begun to serve them ‘not only with the fidelity of vassals, but with the affection of friends.’172 The small number of Scottish nobles also made them more powerful, and constant wars with England sharpened their tools.173 But the catastrophic problem was minority government. Ten princes ruled between Robert the Bruce and James VI; seven were called to throne as minors. As the regents were always drawn from the most powerful noble families, the ‘prerogatives of the crown, naturally inconsiderable, were reduced almost to nothing; and the aristocratical power gradually rose upon the ruins of the monarchical.’174 Nothing intrinsic to Scottish history appeared capable of breaking the power of the nobility. Once they emerged from their minorities, each king from Robert the Bruce to James V had attempted to tie down their barons.175 Though each had failed, two promising (though ultimately futile) vehicles for regal authority had appeared: the Church and Parliament. Neither usually provided succour to feudal monarchs. But Scotland was unusual. As in other kingdoms, superstition and ignorance had bequeathed riches and authority to the Church; but unlike other kingdoms, Scotland had been neglected by the Papacy. Despite their consistent desire to ‘extend their usurpations’, Popes had tended to write off Scotland as a ‘distant and poor’ kingdom, leaving their kings free to nominate candidates to vacant bishoprics and abbeys.176 This contingent fact of Scottish history would shape the reformed religion that emerged in the sixteenth century. But for now, Robertson sought to assess whether this unusual power of patronage had enabled Scottish kings to curtail their nobilities. Not all kings made good use of the power.177 But as abbots and bishops sat in parliament, patronage left a mark nevertheless. In its first iteration, the 171 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 23. 172 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 23. 173 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 26. 174 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 27; see also History of Scotland, I, 28-32. 175 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 39-64. 176 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 56-57. 177 James V, according to Robertson, was the most effective at doing so: his plan to strangle the nobility was ‘more profound, more systematic, and pursued with greater constancy’ than any of his predecessors. Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 56-57. 212 assembly was the court in which the king judged disputes between his barons. As well as meting out judgement, the court was also used to grant supplies to the king and to pass various ‘regulations’ tending to the ‘welfare’ of the state.178 (The barons’ own courts were ‘miniature’ versions of parliament; the principles on which they operated were identical.) Attendance was not a ‘privilege, but a service’, and barons, abbots, and bishops were all subjected to the burden. After cities acquired wealth, the king then enfranchised burgesses. But as it was considered ‘absurd’ to impose such a burden on whole communities, ‘every burrough was permitted to chuse one or two of its citizens to appear in the name of the corporation; and the idea of representation was first introduced in this manner.’179 Alienation then produced a new underclass of lesser barons too poor to attend who, like the burgers, began to send representatives (the knights of the shires).180 This happened earlier in England than in Scotland: burgesses were admitted by Robert the Bruce, and representatives from the shires were allowed only in 1427. Citing Dalrymple and Kames, Robertson pointed out that the knights of the shires rarely attended.181 This allowed the ecclesiastics to equal the number of great barons, stacking parliament in favour of the king to whom they owed their preferment. But none of it mattered. If the king used an obsequious parliament to pass laws that favoured his prerogative, the barons ‘trusted either to elude, or to contemn them’.182 A statute that attempted to annex alienated baronial territory to the crown, ‘repeated in every reign, and violated and despised as often, is a standing proof of the impotence of laws, when opposed to power.’183 Laws derived their force not from the power of the monarch to execute them, but from the ‘voluntary submission of the nobles’.184 Hume would later point out the impotence of law when faced with a boisterous nobility; his vision of Gothic clientship, as he had acknowledged, owed a great deal to Robertson’s essay, which in turn owed a great deal to Montesquieu. But they each took a different route out of the feudal past. For Hume, luxury had allowed personal liberty to sprout across Europe, turning Gothic kingdoms into 178 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 65. 179 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 66. 180 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 67. 181 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 67. 182 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 69. 183 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 69. 184 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 249. 213 civilised monarchies. In his essay on the feudal system, Robertson yearned more simply for a Scottish Henry VII.185 By allowing his barons to sell off their land, he had ‘enriched the commons, and gave them a weight in the legislature unknown to their predecessors’.186 But in Scotland, the king ‘neither extended his own prerogative, nor enabled the commons to encroach upon the aristocracy’; the foundations of that ‘ancient fabric remained firm and untouched’.187 In the History’s coda, Robertson explained that by itself, a strong crown was not enough to haul the Scots out of their feudal past; they needed a powerful representative assembly too. The Union of the Crowns showed why, as well as shutting down Hume’s argument about the transformative effects of luxury consumption. For by uniting the crowns, James VI had acquired an ‘immense’ quantity ‘of wealth, of power, and of splendour’.188 His pockets bulging, he had then showered his nobility with riches, honours, and the hope of receiving both. Their spirits tamed, the ‘will of the prince became the supreme law in Scotland’, and the nobles strove to ‘obey’.189 This led, however, to a deterioration in the lives of their vassals. Whilst the ‘military genius’ of feudal government remained, Robertson argued, crown and baronial vassals were ‘courted by their superiors, whose power and importance were founded on their attachment and love.’190 But this all changed once the king’s newly flush court had relocated to England. Now desperate for favour, the nobles had to dedicate all their wealth to shuttling to and from London, imitating the ‘manners and luxury of their more wealthy neighbours’ as they did so. In order to keep up appearances, they squeezed their vassals for all they were worth: they ‘multiplied exactions upon the people, who durst scarce utter complaints which they knew would never reach the ear of their sovereign, nor move him to grant any redress.’191 As luxury had made Scotland’s nobility more violent, Robertson was also suggesting that Hume’s 185 On this point, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 264-65. 186 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 33; Louis XI of France was another monarch Robertson thought deserving of praise, and one of the many European princes who attacked their nobilities at the turn of the 16th century ‘as if by concert’. History of Scotland, I, 32. 187 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 33, 32. 188 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 250. 189 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 250. 190 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 250. 191 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 251. 214 association of liberty and luxury did not hold; luxurious habits did not have the civilising effects that Hume had supposed.192 The Scots oscillated between baronial and regal despotism for the rest of the century, until 1688 began to republicanise the Scottish monarchy.193 Before the Revolution, securing either the prerogative of the crown or the privileges of the nobility had been the ‘sole object’ of Scottish law. After the bill of rights, this no was no longer possible: attention began to be paid to the ‘welfare of the people’, they increased their number of representatives in parliament, and their ‘liberties were secured’. But the ‘aristocratical spirit’ remained, and clouded the ‘improvement and happiness of the nation’ until 1707: the point at which the Scottish nobility were finally subordinated to the English constitution. They formed only an insignificant part of the House of Lords and, more importantly, were ‘excluded absolutely from the house of Commons’.194 After losing ‘political authority’, they did not manage to keep hold of their feudal privileges for long: in 1747, their jurisdictions were abolished. As the nobles finally fell, the ‘people acquired liberty’. By joining a constitution ‘whose genius and laws were more liberal than their own’, the Scots had ‘extended their commerce, refined their manners, made improvements in the elegancies of life, and cultivated the arts and sciences.’195 In Hume’s History of Great Britain, Scottish liberty had also only announced its arrival in 1707. But Hume had doubted whether English liberty was especially secure and, a fortiori, whether the benefits of Union would last. As a result, the History of England was fixated upon liberty. Unable to trust in the civil liberty enshrined by 1688, Hume scratched away at its origins and revealed its brittleness. England’s emergence from its Gothic past, he found, had come at a cost: luxury had created a liberty incapable of protection, leaving modern Britain without a safeguard. But without this history of liberty, Robertson was free from Hume’s fears. For him, luxury consumption had not incubated a liberty that was personal, modern, and 192 Nicholas Phillipson’s suggestion that Robertson’s historical thinking was geared, above all, to recognising the ‘transformational effects of commerce on civilisation’ cannot make sense of Robertson’s attempt, in both the sermon and the History of Scotland, to articulate a totally different vision of history to Hume’s. See Phillipson, ‘Providence and progress: an introduction to the historical thought of William Robertson’, in Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, pp. 55-74, at 71. 193 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 251-52. 194 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 253. 195 Robertson, History of Scotland, II, 253-54. 215 fragile; Scottish nobles had become luxurious in the seventeenth century, but only ‘multiplied’ their depredations on the people. English civil liberty, meanwhile, had derived simply from a combination of royal power (Henry VII’s laws) and a powerful representative assembly (the seventeenth-century lower house); the balance between the two had been settled in 1688, and Revolution’s benefits had reached Scotland in 1707. The Heritable Jurisdictions Act of 1747 signalled the resilience of the (Anglicised) constitutional solution to Scotland’s feudal problem. Like Dalrymple and Hume, Robertson had built his feudal history out of the materials provided by Montesquieu; unlike them, he sought to reaffirm the orthodox history of English liberty. But Robertson’s challenge to Hume did not end there. Whilst telling this story about Scottish and English liberty, he had also been telling another: between 1542 and 1603, the poles of his narrative, Scotland had escaped the clutches of the Papal see. As we saw in the sermon, Christianity initiated the transition from ancient to modern by civilising the places it touched in primitive form. This gave the Scottish reformation especial significance. The power of sixteenth-century Scottish nobles may have prevented the emergence of liberty; but liberty and modernity ran on different tracks. The feudal system was pre-modern only as long as it remained Catholic, as the Catholic Church was built around the superstitious practices of pagan antiquity: to ‘the pure and simple worship of the primitive Christians, there succeeded a species of splendid idolatry, nearly resembling those pagan originals, whence it had been copied.’196 As Robertson had explained in his sermon, Christ’s civilising force lay in his revelation of the simple truth of future rewards and punishments. But the Papal church had covered his teaching with a cloud of superstition, plunging Europe back into ancient paganism. The form of Popery that took root in Scotland was ‘of the most bigoted and illiberal kind’: full of absurd ceremonies the ‘truth’ or ‘reasonableness’ of which were never questioned by an ignorant and barbarous population.197 Scottish ecclesiastics were seen by a ‘credulous laity as beings of a superior species’, and went to great lengths to ensure their power, their possessions, and their persons were regarded as ‘equally 196 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 159. 197 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 120. 216 sacred’.198 As superstition was calculated to buttress authority, the wealth of the Church proliferated with its idols and saints.199 The clergy ‘haunted the weak and the credulous’ and ‘besieged the beds of the sick and of the dying’, promising atonement in exchange for possessions and property.200 Whoever died intestate was ‘presumed’ to have dedicated their possessions to pious use, and by the middle of the sixteenth century, Robertson estimated that the Church owned half of Scottish land (with many more estates holding of it).201 Though there was a widespread ‘corruption of morals’ across Europe, Scotland had the ‘most open and scandalous dissolution of manners’: their clergy, secular and dignified, barely attempted to hide their illegitimate children.202 As the nobility were ‘unacquainted with the arts’ and ‘unimproved by science’, the clergy had engrossed all learning and arrogated all the king’s offices to themselves.203 All this began to change once the Renaissance had roused the world from its lethargy, allowing the ‘human mind’ to feel its own strength and break the ‘fetters of authority by which it had been so long restrained’.204 As soon as mankind had recovered their capacity to reason, they turned to religion. The Italians were wary of taking on the character of reformers, concluding that truth was the preserve of the wise; Luther, however, ‘boldly erected the standard of truth, and upheld it with an unconquerable intrepidity’.205 His opinions soon began to spread, endangering pagan superstition wherever they took hold. Colin Kidd has suggested that Robertson sought to deny that reformed principles created Scottish liberty (as that role had to be played by Union).206 But the stakes of Robertson’s history of the Reformation did not lie in liberty: as reformed doctrines rescued the gospel from the obscurity into which the Catholics had thrown it, they were calculated – like Christ’s teaching itself – to ‘rectify the opinions, and to reform the manners of mankind’.207 198 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 122. 199 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 120. 200 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 124. 201 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 121-22. 202 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 126. 203 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 123. 204 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 119. 205 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 119. 206 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 193. 207 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 118-19. Emphasis added. 217 In Scotland, a few doctrines had begun to be preached under James V. But those disseminating them were crude, and had only been educated in England; they were more zealous than learned.208 But truth ‘needed only a fair hearing to be an over-match for error’, and by 1542 controversial tracts were ‘eagerly read by men of every rank’.209 As the means of ‘acquiring and spreading knowledge’ had become more common, the ‘spirit of innovation, peculiar to that period, grew every day bolder and more universal.’210 The doctrines of foreign reformers were becoming generally known, the ‘inquisitive genius of the age pressed forward in quest of truth’, and the ‘whole fabric which ignorance and superstition had erected in times of darkness, began to totter’.211 Robertson pointed out that in teaching and conduct, the reformers resembled the ‘first propagators of Christianity’ he had discussed in his sermon; this was the second coming of primitive Christianity.212 In face of their onslaught, the Papal clergy had no answers: making no attempt to reaffirm the basis of their doctrines in Scripture or to ‘reconcile them to reason’, they sought protection instead in the authority of the Church and the decrees of its councils.213 Their neglect of preaching ensured reformers were attended by ‘crowded and admiring audiences’, whilst Popish preachers were ‘universally deserted, or listened to with scorn’.214 Even their deployment of ‘false miracles’ was beginning to lose its grip: those ‘lying wonders, which were beheld with unsuspicious admiration, or heard with implicit faith, in times of darkness and of ignorance, met with a very different reception, in a more enlightened period.’215 Scotland was beginning to escape from (Catholic) paganism, and a spirit had been raised that would soon ‘burst out, at last, with irresistible violence.’216 Robertson was contesting Hume, and he was explicit about doing so: he had represented the reformation, Robertson protested, as little more than a ‘wild and enthusiastic frenzy in the human mind’.217 In Hume’s hands, the barbarous, 208 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 111. 209 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 89. 210 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 112. 211 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 111. 212 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 126-27. 213 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 127. 214 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 127. 215 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 127. 216 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 127. 217 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 128. 218 enthusiastic, and anti-social Scots had objected to the refined, superstitious, and sociable Episcopalianism favoured by James and Laud. Robertson restored truth to the story and reversed Hume’s confessional politics. The Catholics had surrounded themselves with the same superstitious falsities that characterised heathen antiquity; the progress of reformed doctrines, fuelled by the Renaissance, heralded the restoration of truth and modern manners to Europe. Robertson insisted that religious considerations would have been enough to rouse the spirit of reformation: the disagreements with Rome were ‘of so much importance to the happiness of mankind, and so essential to the nature of true Christianity’, that they could explain the reformation’s history without further assistance.218 But in Scotland, there was a political story to be told too: one that put a different gloss on its feudal history, and explains how Robertson managed to narrate it. For as reformed doctrines made greater headway, several ‘noblemen of greatest distinction’ began to profess their allegiances more openly, and to act with greater boldness. The reformers had instilled in them a zeal for the ‘knowledge of truth’; but they also gave the nobles an opportunity to satisfy their long-running desire to curtail the power of the ecclesiastics, recover possession of church revenues, and check the ‘pride and luxury’ of the clergy.219 The feudal nobility may have been a barrier to liberty, preventing the emergence of the powerful state that constitutes Pocock’s ‘post-Utrecht Enlightenment’. But on Robertson’s terms, this did not mean that Scotland was lacking the agents of its own modernisation.220 As the nobility were agents of reformation, they were also the agents of modernity, and allowed the Scots to model their church in a form that had eluded their Protestant neighbours. The nobility’s discontent began to break out into rebellion in 1558, the year that Elizabeth acceded to the English throne and John Knox published The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.221 Having begun his 218 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 128-29. 219 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 128. 220 The suggestion of John Pocock, for which see Barbarism and Religion, II, 272. 221 John Knox, First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva: [J. Poullain,]1558). On England under Henry VIII, who ‘loosed the chains, and lightened the yoke of Popery’; Edward VI, whose ministers ‘cast them off altogether’; and Mary Tudor, whose reign failed to ‘abate the warmth and zeal’ of English indignation against Popery, see Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 112, 118. 219 ministry at St. Andrews in 1547, he had since been forced into exile. But he was the ‘daring and active leader’ the barons needed, who instead of ‘amusing himself with lopping the branches’, struck ‘directly at the root of Popery’.222 Like many of the most eminent reformers, Knox had mastered ancient learning, and had ‘eagerly adopted’ the ‘exquisite models of free government’ beloved by the Greeks and Romans.223 His admiration of ‘ancient policy’ had prompted the First Blast, just as Buchanan’s had given rise to De jure regni apud Scotos (1579); both men showed that together ‘with more enlarged notions in religion, the Reformation filled the human mind with more liberal and generous sentiments concerning civil government.’224 Wherever it had been embraced, the Protestant religion ‘rouzed an independent spirit, which rendered men attentive to their privileges as subjects, and jealous of the incroachments of their sovereigns.’225 In Scotland, it was Knox who ‘infused’ these sentiments into the minds of the Scottish barons after he returned from Geneva in the spring of 1559.226 In May that year, reformers had begun openly to preach in Perth, and Mary of Guise (the Queen Regent) had summoned all the kingdom’s preachers to court at Stirling. By then, the loose union of Scottish Protestants had begun to be known as the ‘congregation’, and the congregation did not desert the preachers to whom they were indebted ‘for the most valuable of all blessings, the knowledge of truth’.227 Accompanying the preachers to Stirling, the massed ranks of the congregation spooked the Regent into calling off the trial. But as soon as they had dispersed, she declared the preachers outlaws on account of their non-appearance. Having arrived in Perth a few days before the aborted trial at Stirling, Knox was well placed to lambast the Regent’s treachery. In a ‘vehement harangue against idolatry’, he whipped the multitude into a ‘rage’: across the city, altars were overturned, images defaced, and monasteries razed to the ground.228 Scotland was lurching into civil war, and by June 1559, the congregation had taken hold of Edinburgh.229 By the 222 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 111. 223 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 156-57. 224 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 156. 225 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 156-57. 226 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 157. 227 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 149. 228 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 151. 229 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 160. 220 autumn, a group of the most powerful barons had begun to lead the congregation, and had remonstrated with the Regent to stop building fortifications at Leith. Her imperious refusal brought matters to a head, and the confederate nobles – possessing, ‘under an aristocratical form of government, such a share of power as equalled, at all times, and often controlled that of the Sovereign’ – called a convention of all the barons and representatives of burroughs that adhered to the congregation’s cause.230 Unsure of whether to strip Mary of her regency, they called in Knox to address them. Without hesitation, he instructed them that on the basis of scripture, ‘it was lawful for subjects not only to resist tyrannical princes, but to deprive them of that authority, which, in their hands, becomes an instrument for destroying those, whom the Almighty ordained them to protect.’231 Without a single dissenting voice, the convention agreed to deprive Mary of her regency; by November 1559, only two nobles had failed to join the congregation.232 Still no match for Mary and her French troops, the congregation eventually had to be saved by the English, who laid siege to Leith in April 1560.233 By June, Mary was dead; by July, the Treaty of Edinburgh had transferred the ‘whole sovereign authority’ into the hands of the congregation. That ‘limited prerogative, which the Crown had hitherto possessed’, Robertson explained, ‘was almost entirely annihilated; and the aristocratical power, which always predominated in the Scotch government, became supreme and incontroulable.’234 More importantly, the reformers could now hope to model the church how they pleased.235 After the treaty, the congregation called a parliament. It met on 1 August 1559, and even the lesser barons attended. (The nation had been gripped, Robertson explained, by a ‘universal passion’ for civil and religious liberty, and few wished to remain ‘unconcerned spectators’.)236 Seeking to strike a blow at the ‘whole fabric of popery’, the parliament gave its approbation to a new Confession of Faith 230 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 175. 231 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 176. 232 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 183. 233 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 183-92. 234 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 201-02. 235 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 201-02. 236 Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 201-03. 221 and prohibited any worship conforming to the rites of the Romish church.237 In just a few days, the parliament had succeeded in overturning the ‘ancient system of religion, which had been established so many ages.’238 Following its assembly, the Protestant church finally began to assume a ‘regular form’. Here, Scotland was unique. It was natural, Robertson suggested, to expect the Reformation to have extended beyond doctrine to the government of the Romish church: righteous disgust at the vices of the ecclesiastics should have spread to their persons, and from there to the offices they held. But it did not always work this way. In Germany, England, and the northern kingdoms, the reformation’s ‘operations were checked by the power and policy of their Princes; and the ancient Episcopal jurisdiction, under a few limitations, was still continued’.239 By keeping bishops, these princes had preserved a civil hierarchy that had only arisen once Christianity became the established religion of the Roman empire: the ‘ecclesiastical government was, at that time, plainly copied from the civil; the first not only borrowed its form, but derived its authority from the latter’.240 There was no basis for Episcopacy in scripture, and Europe’s princes had only kept it for the powers of investiture it provided (Henry VIII being a perfect example). But in the small republics of the low countries and Switzerland, the story was different: all pre-eminence of order in the church was destroyed, and an equality established more suitable to the spirit of republican policy. The situation of the primitive church suggested the idea, and furnished the model of the latter system, which has since been called Presbyterian. The first Christians, oppressed by continual persecutions, and obliged to hold their religious assemblies by stealth, and in corners, were contented with a form of government extremely simple. The influence of religion concurred, with the sense of danger, in extinguishing among them, the spirit of ambition, and in preserving a parity of rank, the effect of their sufferings, and the cause of many of their virtues. Calvin, whose decisions were received, among the Protestants of that age, 237 The first offence was punishable by forfeiture of the perpetrator’s goods; the second by banishment from the kingdom; the third by death. Robertson, History of Scotland, I, 204-06. 238 History of Scotland, I, 206. 239 History of Scotland, I, 212. Emphasis added. 240 History of Scotland, I, 213. 222 with incredible submission, was the patron and restorer of this scheme of ecclesiastical policy. The church of Geneva, formed under his eye, and by his direction, was esteemed the most perfect model of this government.241 Knox had just returned from Geneva and, having ‘studied and admired’ its church, immediately and successfully recommended it to the Scots.242 Though he never went so far as to compare Scotland’s aristocracy with the city-states and republics of the low countries, the birth of the Presbyterian church would have been inconceivable without it: among the Scottish nobles, ‘some hated the persons, and others coveted the wealth of the dignified clergy; and by abolishing that order of men, the former indulged their resentment, and the latter hoped to gratify their avarice.’243 The benefits of their doing so were limitless: the Presbyterian system was based on the practices of primitive Christians, and primitive Christians had begun to generate modern manners by disseminating the simple truths of the gospel (though they were soon waylaid by the Papists). With the advent of the Presbyterian church, the pagan remnants of the Romish church had been banished from the kingdom; the clergy could now hope to preach the word without fear, creating the ‘moral culture’ that constituted modern history. But the birth of the church had also come at a cost. Haunted by the spectres of Henry VIII’s despotism and the bloated power of the pre-Reformation Scottish church, the nobles were chary of allowing too much ecclesiastical property to fall into the hands of either crown or clergy.244 The feudal system that had created the Presbyterian church was now threatening the settlement of its patrimony, and from 1560 onwards, the church’s search for stability provided the dynamic of Robertson’s narrative. In August that year, the same parliament that approved a Presbyterian Confession of Faith refused a proposal to use the revenues of the monasteries to pay ministers, educate the young, and support the poor.245 Throughout the next year, the nobles ‘held fast the prey’ that they had seized, refusing the Presbyterians’ pleas 241 History of Scotland, I, 213. 242 History of Scotland, I, 213. 243 History of Scotland, I, 214. 244 History of Scotland, I, 238-39. 245 History of Scotland, I, 207. 223 for funding.246 The problems continued throughout the 1560s: the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots was fraught with danger and the threat of Episcopacy’s return.247 By the time she had fled to England, the number of Presbyterian clergy had increased whilst funds had become ever more scarce: ‘fair words, and liberal promises, were all they were able to obtain’.248 Although the dignified clergy had been stripped of both ecclesiastical and civil office, they had often kept their temporal benefices (in many cases, siphoning off part of the revenue they produced to various Scottish nobles). In 1572, the fourth earl of Morton infuriated the clergy by arrogating the benefice of the archbishopric of St. Andrews to himself; but they could do little to the noblemen ‘on whom the very existence of the Protestant Church in Scotland depended.’249 With James VI’s emergence from minority, the threat of Episcopacy returned; scrambling to stave it off, the General Assembly declared in 1581 that it had ‘neither foundation nor warrant in the word of God’.250 The king disagreed. But after going to Denmark to court Anne in 1589, the clergy’s success in preserving peace in his absence reconciled him to the ‘Presbyterian form of government’.251 By 1592, James had given it the ‘sanction of law’ by allowing parliament to confirm ‘the Presbyterian government, its General Assemblies, Provincial synods, Presbyteries and Kirk sessions, with all the different branches of their discipline and jurisdiction, in the most ample manner.’252 Although James had later backtracked by introducing Episcopacy once again, Charles’s overzealous attempt to impose the English liturgy on the Scots resulted in its overthrow: following the Convention of 1638, as Hume had explained, ‘Presbyterian government and discipline were re-established with new vigour.’ After the torrid Episcopalian interlude of the Restoration, during which the ‘aversion of the nation was insurmountable’, Presbyterian government was re-established at the Revolution and confirmed by Union.253 246 History of Scotland, I, 216-18. 247 History of Scotland, I, 230-31, 236-39, 336-37, 351-52. 248 History of Scotland, I, 433-34. 249 History of Scotland, II, 34. 250 History of Scotland, II, 73-75. 251 History of Scotland, II, 173. 252 History of Scotland, II, 177. 253 History of Scotland, II, 254-55. 224 The nobility’s role in bringing this about was lined with ambiguity: having planted the seed of Presbyterian government in Scotland, they had cut off the light it needed to grow. But Robertson followed the church’s struggle with its noble patrons for patrimony in the same way that Dalrymple had followed feudal property, or Hume had followed civil and then personal liberty. This variety of foci betrayed their disagreements about how to characterise the distinction between the ancients and the moderns. Dalrymple had followed Montesquieu in seeing the feudal settlements of the barbarians as constitutive of modern government, reversing the usual appraisal of Scotland’s slovenliness in eradicating its feudal property. Hume thought modern history was formed by a liberty that luxury had created but could not protect, leaving Scotland without a history and Britain with an uncertain future. For Robertson, the distinction lay in primitive Christianity and the virtue it cultivated. The Papal church may then have strangled the preaching of the Word for a millennium, but the arrival of reformation and Presbyterianism into sixteenth-century Scotland heralded the second coming of the modern; like Dalrymple, Robertson had seen something in Scotland’s feudal history that was irreducible to ‘nostalgia’.254 Faced by Hume’s History of Great Britain, Robertson thought it imperative to rebuild history around his own vision of Christianity—what Hume would later describe as his ‘Godly Strain’.255 But as he did so whilst burnishing the foundation narrative of English history, his reading of Scottish history left him caught between two places. The nobility had to go in order for Scotland to be free; but if they had gone before the eighteenth century, the Scots would never have created a Presbyterian church. Adam Ferguson Just before The History of Scotland was published, Adam Ferguson began working on an essay he eventually published in 1767.256 Like Robertson’s history, his Essay on 254 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 110. 255 Hume to Hugh Blair, 27 March 1766, in Hume, Letters, II, 31. 256 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh and London: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, and A. Millar & T. Caddel, 1767), which is the version reproduced in Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger. ‘I have begun to revise the Paper you saw’, 225 the History of Civil Society dismissed the new foundations that Hume had attached to the history of English liberty: the English had become free, he reconfirmed, because they had republicanised their monarchy in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century, and they had republicanised their monarchy because of the impact of Henry VII’s laws on an already-existing representative popular assembly. Robertson’s concerns, though, lay elsewhere, leaving him free of any anxieties over the English story he had only very briefly spelled out; but Ferguson reconstructed the story more carefully, and worried about its implications for modern Britain. Born to a Gaelic speaking parish minister in Logierait, Perthshire, Ferguson had studied at St. Leonard’s College, St. Andrews, before moving to Edinburgh to take up divinity in 1743.257 Unusually, he was ordained by 1745, and was rushed into a deputy-chaplaincy for the 43rd Highland Regiment. By the summer of 1756, he had returned to Edinburgh and had been elected to the Select Society; he had also applied for a living in Haddington, East Lothian, though he never ended up taking it. After a short-lived tenancy as a successor to Hume at the library of the Faculty of Advocates, he took up a position as tutor to the sons of John Stuart, third earl of Bute, in 1758, before being appointed to the chair in Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1759 (thanks, in large part, to the agitation of William Robertson, David Hume, and John Home—Bute’s Scottish secretary). By 1764, he had been shuttled into the chair in Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy that had eluded Hume (thanks, once again, to Robertson, Hume, and Home). But he never left the church. In 1766, he was elected as an elder of the Presbytery of Dunkeld, for which he sat in the church’s General Assembly until at least 1780; in 1783, he published a History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic.258 Ferguson remarked to a friend in 1758, and ‘am changing it to a Dissertation on the Vicissitudes incident to human society’. Ferguson to Gilbert Elliot, third baron of Minto, 19 March 1758, in Vincenzo Merolle ed., The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, 2 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995), I, 27. By 1759, he had also shown it to Hume. See Hume to Adam Smith, 12 April 1759, in Hume, Letters, I, 303-306. 257 For this and other details, see Jane Fagg’s excellent biographical introduction to Merolle’s edition of Ferguson’s Correspondence, I, xx-cxvii; see also Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘Ferguson, Adam (1723-1816), ODNB, online edn, October 2009 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/9315, accessed 14 August 2018]. 258 Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 3 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1783). Ferguson began working on it in 1769; on the History and its inception, see Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 119-55. 226 Due to this focus on Rome, historians have tended to place him in republican or ‘civic’ lineages of thinking.259 But given the account of Montesquieu’s Scottish reception this thesis has been building, Ferguson’s own account of his intellectual debts might appear surprising. ‘When I recollect what the President Montesquieu has written’, he reflected in the first part of the Essay, ‘I am at a loss to tell, why I should treat of human affairs’.260 Careful readers, Ferguson admitted, could find the ‘original’ of his own work in Montesquieu, as well as numerous observations which, ‘under the belief of invention’, he may have repeated without attribution.261 He explicitly took up Montesquieu’s tripartite typology of government, and aped his prose style throughout the Essay: like the Spirit of Laws, it was gnomic, axiomatic, and apocalyptic. No-one we have encountered so far wrote so effusively of Montesquieu, or gave him the high praise of stylistic mimesis. But unlike Dalrymple, Hume, and Robertson, Ferguson did not appear to read The Spirit of Laws as a history of feudal government in France. The best recent work on Ferguson has attempted to take his connection to Montesquieu seriously.262 For Iain McDaniel, Montesquieu’s generally sanguine description of the English constitution had a darker side: as England was a ‘nation where the republic hides under the form of monarchy’, it was vulnerable to the despotic fate that had greeted Rome.263 Ferguson, McDaniel argues, was the Scot who grasped on to Montesquieu’s warning, and was led by him into seeing Britain’s future in a ‘Roman mirror’.264 Dalrymple, Hume, Smith, and Robertson shared an optimism, McDaniel suggests, about the moral and political foundations of modern Britain, so had turned their backs on the ancients; but Ferguson was incisive enough 259 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 499-505; Barbarism and Religion, II, 330-69; Barbarism and Religion, III, 399-419; see also Duncan Forbes’s editorial introduction to his edition of Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), pp. xiii-xli; Marco Geuna, ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner eds., Republicanism: a shared European Heritage, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), II, 177-97; Lisa Hill, The Passionate Society: the Social, Political, and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). 260 Ferguson, Essay, p. 66. 261 Ferguson, Essay, p. 66. 262 Montesquieu is the presiding spirit of Iain McDaniel’s book, the first chapter of which is entirely dedicated to him, and the second chapter of which unpicks his impact on Ferguson and others. See McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, pp. 12-64; see also Anna Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 125-57. 263 Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 5.19.70; McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, pp. 39-64. 264 McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, p. 119. 227 to be more pessimistic, and to point – with greater urgency and accuracy than the others – at military government as a plausible future for modern European states, and especially Britain.265 McDaniel’s account of Ferguson’s political and historical thought has shown that he was no nostalgist, and used Roman history to think about how modern states had to adapt to the advent of large-scale commerce. But it struggles to capture the extent to which Ferguson’s reading of Montesquieu led him back to the foundations of English historiography, and departed from the Scottish reception of Montesquieu we have been developing thus far.266 For Dalrymple and Hume, and to a lesser degree Robertson, saw Montesquieu as applying pressure to established narratives of English liberty. In the final books of The Spirit of Laws, Robertson had found a history of fiefs that stripped off the regal gloss of the English antiquarians. Dalrymple and Hume, meanwhile, had found a history of the ancients and the moderns that cut into one of the foundational claims of English historiography: that the English owed their freedom – and its future security – to the republicanisation of their monarchy in the seventeenth century. A mixture of feudal property, custom, and parlements had given the French their own liberty; parliaments were nowhere to be seen. Without the constitutional package boasted by the French, they raised questions over how long British liberty would last. Absorbing Montesquieu’s distinction between ancient and modern, Dalrymple asked whether British liberty might be secured by bringing feudal Scotland into the picture: if parliament was no longer the critical site of politics in a modern, commercial state, then Scotland’s apparent backwardness could be given a new function. Hume took Montesquieu’s argument a step further, showing that modern history was inaugurated by the transformation of Gothic nobles into commercial agents, rather than their irruption into Rome. The shift had inaugurated modern history because it had created personal liberty, or that sense of security, that had preoccupied Montesquieu; but it had also removed the only safeguard that, on Montesquieu’s account, could protect this liberty in moments of 265 McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, pp. 8-9, 40, 50, 159-60. 266 Montesquieu’s account of Rome’s transition from republic to empire, McDaniel goes as far as suggesting, lay not only at the heart of Ferguson’s project, but also at ‘the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment debate about modernity’s prospects’ as a whole. McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, p. 217. 228 crisis. Hume thought that a feudal nobility should neither be restored, recreated, nor protected – as Dalrymple had wanted – in Scotland. But he agreed with Dalrymple – and with Montesquieu – that if liberty did not necessarily come from parliaments, then parliamentary reform might be incidental to securing it from the depredations of commerce and war. Montesquieu had pushed them into taking positions on the English – and latterly British – constitution that did not sit easily with its historiography. Having decoupled liberty’s origins from parliament’s rise, they had begun to look elsewhere for ways of protecting it. Ferguson, however, did not read Montesquieu as a historian of feudal monarchy, and set to work rebuilding English history from the rubble left by Hume. After reiterating Montesquieu’s typology in the Essay, he accused it of stasis: Montesquieu’s ‘varieties’, he explained, were ‘but steps in the history of mankind, and mark the fleeting and transient situations through which they have passed’.267 Different circumstances had allowed human polities to ‘blend and unite’ different forms, exhibiting a ‘medley of all’.268 Modern England was one such ‘medley’, and Ferguson stitched its history together in what should, by now, be a familiar way. One of the ‘great monarchies’ that had grown out of the colonies of the Roman empire, it had begun life as a Germanic barbarian settlement. Modelled on Tacitus’s Germania, Ferguson’s barbarians were equal, vigorous, and honorific: their glory consisted in the scale of their retinue, and they only elected leaders in times of war.269 Usually, they did not bestow their military chieftains with any civil authority in peacetime; but finding themselves scattered over Roman provinces they could not hope to secure without union, Germanic tribes invested their leaders – for the first time – with civil authority. Citing the first book of Robertson’s history of Scotland, Ferguson explained that under each leader was a cluster of subordinate chiefs, who were each given a fief to provide for their own subsistence (as well as that of their followers). The ‘model of government was taken from that of a military subordination, and a fief was the temporary pay of an officer proportioned to his rank.’270 267 Ferguson, Essay, p. 72. 268 Ferguson, Essay, p. 125. 269 Ferguson, Essay, pp. 98-99. 270 Ferguson, Essay, p. 127. 229 Soon these chiefs had extended the temporary character of their fiefs, and began to hold them for life. After that, they became ‘hereditary in every quarter, and formed a powerful and permanent order of men in every state.’271 Across Europe, the story was the same: a rank of nobility formed a ‘strong and insurmountable barrier against a general despotism in the state’. But by means of their gangs of retainers, they were also the ‘tyrants of every little district, and prevented the establishment of order, or any regular applications of law’.272 They limited the operation of royal authority wherever they could; in the Holy Roman Empire, the prerogatives of the crown had even been reduced to a ‘mere title’.273 But in other states, the feudal nobility were gradually stripped of their powers, and ‘obliged to hold their honours, and exercise their jurisdictions, in a dependence on the prince.’ Under the pretence of rescuing the ‘labourer and dependent’ from their immediate superiors, princes extended their authority.274 This ‘paved the way for despotism in the state’. Citing Hume’s History, Ferguson pointed to the Tudors as an example of the barbarian despotisms that had ‘threatened Europe for ages, under the conquest and settlement of its new inhabitants.275 England, however, proved an exception to the rule: there, the people ‘had by the constitution a representative in the government, and a head, under which they could avail themselves of the new wealth they had acquired, and of the sense of their personal importance’. As a result, Tudor policy had soon been turned against the crown, and the newly empowered commons had ‘formed a new power to restrain the prerogative, to establish the government of law, and to exhibit a spectacle new in the history of mankind; monarchy mixed with republic’.276 Ferguson was returning Harrington’s thesis to the picture. The shift, Ferguson went on, had allowed England to carry the ‘authority and government of law to a point of perfection’ that had never been reached in human history (what Ferguson called ‘the history of mankind’).277 Governments ‘of law’, according to Ferguson, were governments of liberty, as liberty could only be 271 Ferguson, Essay, p. 127. 272 Ferguson, Essay, p. 127. 273 Ferguson, Essay, p. 128. 274 Ferguson, Essay, p. 128. 275 Ferguson, Essay, p. 102. 276 Ferguson, Essay, p. 128. 277 Ferguson, Essay, p. 159. 230 generated by the statutory protection of persons and property: where a ‘citizen is supposed to have rights of property and of station’, he explained, ‘and is protected in the exercise of them, he is said to be free’.278 The monarchies that had managed to secure – and protect – the liberty of their subjects were those who had ‘admitted every order of the people, by representation or otherwise, to an actual share of the legislature.’279 If a monarchy was buttressed by a powerful representative assembly, law became a ‘treaty’ to which sovereign and subjects both agreed; those who were to be affected by laws were consulted – through their representatives – in the process of their construction, and suggested amendments or additions of their own.280 After the upheavals of the seventeenth century, this was the kind of (free and mixed) government the English had won for themselves.281 Through the vehicle of parliament, the representatives of the English people had agitated for a ‘new power to restrain the prerogative’ and, in doing so, had written laws coterminous with liberty. But because of liberty’s nature and origins, the English had been left with a particular problem: it was not just in ‘mere laws’, Ferguson warned, that ‘we are to look for the securities to justice’; only the ‘powers by which those laws have been obtained’ could secure them.282 The ‘powers’, in this case, came from the love of country emitting from England’s parliamentary representatives—what Ferguson referred to as their ‘virtue’.283 The history of England was littered with statutes enacted by its representative assembly, but never executed because the crown had been ‘left to itself’. It was therefore imperative that the virtue of the people and their representatives protected what it had created. The ‘estate may be saved’, Ferguson pointed out, by ‘the forms of a civil procedure; but the rights of the mind cannot be sustained by any other force but its own.284 Liberty was therefore ‘a right which every individual must be ready to vindicate for 278 Ferguson, Essay, p. 150. 279 Ferguson, Essay, p. 159. 280 Ferguson, Essay, p. 159; see also Essay, pp. 124-25. 281 As both McDaniel and Plassart point out, Ferguson’s preference for mixed government hived him off from purer strains of republican or democratic politics. See McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, pp. 183-213; Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 125-57. 282 Ferguson, Essay, p. 160. 283 Ferguson’s conception of virtue was similar to Montesquieu’s notion of political virtue, or love of country. See Montesquieu, Persian Letters, letters 11-14, as well as Spirit of Laws, 3.3.22-24, 5.3.43- 44. 284 Ferguson, Essay, pp. 160-61. 231 himself’.285 It was not enough for governments – however mixed, however representative of the people – to ‘secure the person and property of the subject’; without paying attention to ‘political character, the constitution indeed may be free, but its members may likewise become unworthy of the freedom they possess, and unfit to preserve it.’286 Only virtue could sustain liberty, and Ferguson confirmed that Montesquieu’s feudal history had made little impression by insisting that liberty’s protection could not be outsourced to judges: armed with the discretionary authority of an Asiatic basha, the ‘corrupt magistrate’ could evade the statutes of the law-books at will.287 The influence of laws on the preservation of liberty, Ferguson instructed, ‘is not any magic power descending from shelves that are loaded with books, but is, in reality, the influence of men resolved to be free’.288 Men who, having ushered the terms of their relation to the state into being, were now determined to make sure these terms were observed.289 Due to this vision of the nature and origins of English liberty, the spectre haunting the Essay was political apathy—what Ferguson often called ‘remissness’, or ‘national debility’.290 Apathy was liberty’s greatest threat; but it had emerged from the tranquillity that liberty itself had created. Polished nations like the English had managed to repress civil disorder. But they failed to value their tranquillity as they should, and use it to cultivate ‘zeal for those laws, and that constitution of government, to which they owe their protection’. Instead, they had begun to practice the ‘several arts of personal advancement, or profit, which their political establishments may enable them to pursue with success.’291 Liberty was endangered wherever ‘calm’ prevailed, because calm allowed the wheels of ambition – or ‘personal advancement’ – to begin turning.292 If ambition got going, the individual would become ‘every thing, the public nothing’; and if the public became nothing, liberty would be lost.293 Because it had created tranquillity, the ‘perfection’ of 285 Ferguson, Essay, p. 250. 286 Ferguson, Essay, p. 210. 287 Ferguson, Essay, p. 249. 288 Ferguson, Essay, p. 249. 289 Ferguson, Essay, p. 249. 290 Ferguson, Essay, p. 212; see also Essay, pp. 242, 247. 291 Ferguson, Essay, p. 58. 292 Ferguson, Essay, p. 255. 293 Ferguson, Essay, p. 57. 232 English government was at risk of proving short-lived.294 The problem was that its ‘commercial and political arts’ had developed together.295 The commons had come into property and wealth due to Tudor policy, building a ‘project of emancipation’ out of their new sense of importance.296 But it was futile to expect, ‘in one age, from the possession of wealth, the fruit which it is said to have borne in a former.’297 Once liberty had been achieved, people could turn back to the ‘resorts of commerce’ that they had now won the security to pursue.298 In and of itself, commerce was not a problem.299 But it made England, like other ‘polished’ nations, liable to corruption from two sources: luxury and the division of labour. From different directions, both could generate the remissness that would terminate in ‘political slavery’.300 Luxury was a problem for the higher orders because it turned them away from politics. Neatly inverting the story that Hume had told in the Tudor volumes of his History, Ferguson argued that in a ‘rude state of the arts’, the opulent could only amass the ‘simple means of subsistence’. All they could do is fill up their granaries and drive their herds over larger pastures; they could not use their surplus produce to buy refined goods, because a market for refined goods did not exist. In order to ‘enjoy their magnificence, they must live in a croud; and to secure their possessions, they must be surrounded with friends that espouse their quarrels.’301 Like the Gothic nobles that Hume had described, the honour and security of Ferguson’s higher orders consisted in the number and force of their retinue, whilst their ‘personal distinction’ consisted in rustic generosity. For Hume, such systems of clientship precluded the emergence of personal liberty; but Ferguson deliberately set off in the opposite direction. Under rude conditions, ‘the possession of riches serves only to make the owner assume a character of magnanimity’. Once the produce of the soil could be exchanged for the ‘mere 294 Ferguson, Essay, p. 182. 295 ‘All over Europe’, Ferguson explained, their histories had been ‘interwoven’, though it was impossible to ‘determine which were prior in the order of time, or derived most advantage from the mutual influences with which they act and re-act upon one another.’ Ferguson, Essay, p. 247. 296 Ferguson, Essay, p. 247. 297 Ferguson, Essay, p. 247. 298 Ferguson, Essay, p. 182. 299 On the benign and malign aspects of commercial activity in Ferguson’s thought, see McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, pp. 92-119. 300 Ferguson, Essay, pp. 247, 255. 301 Ferguson, Essay, p. 238. 233 decoration’ of luxury goods, however, land-holders began to ‘employ the materials of generosity to feed a personal vanity, or to indulge a sickly and effeminate fancy, which has learned to enumerate the trappings of weakness or folly among the necessaries of life.’302 For Hume, the mutation of hospitality into luxury generated the personal liberty on which the rise of English civil liberty had depended; for Ferguson, it had triggered only moral decay. Wealth may have driven the commons into extracting legal guarantees for their property; but luxury threatened their achievements. If the order of men who were meant to populate parliament relieved themselves from the ‘pressure of great occasions’, and turned instead to such ‘trifles’ as ‘sensibility’ and ‘delicacy’, their minds would become sick and ‘enfeebled’. This was the condition, Ferguson remarked derisively, to which mankind had assigned the ‘name of politeness’.303 Its denizens claimed that ‘arduous virtue’ belonged to a bygone age, and looked to sports, gambling, dogs, horses, and wine to ‘fill up the blank of a listless and unprofitable life’.304 But if these higher orders of men ‘relinquished the state’, Ferguson warned, they would soon ‘become the refuse of that society of which they were once the ornament.’305 This could happen, he warned, if patrician inattention was combined with plebeian disaffection. For the progress of commerce was built on a ‘continued subdivision of the mechanical arts’ that was fraught with moral risk.306 Most mechanical arts failed to exercise the reason of their practitioners; but worse still, they functioned most efficiently when ‘the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.’307 The suppression of the ‘sentiment and reason’ of the lower orders of the state threatened to create a ‘nation of tradesmen’ ignorant of public affairs.308 When churning underneath a distracted representative assembly, the division of labour therefore left the lower orders open to demagogues: the vehicle through which apathy could terminate in ‘slavery’. This was why the history 302 Ferguson, Essay, pp. 238-39. 303 Ferguson, Essay, p. 242. 304 Ferguson, Essay, pp. 243, 246. 305 Ferguson, Essay, p. 246. 306 Ferguson, Essay, p. 173. 307 Ferguson, Essay, p. 174. 308 Ferguson, Essay, p. 174. 234 of the ancients seemed so relevant to modern Britain. Infected by luxury, the ‘sovereignty’ of Greeks and the Romans ‘was at every moment ready to drop from their hands’; all they needed was a leader ‘who flattered their passions, and wrought on their fears’: ‘Pericles possessed a species of princely authority at Athens; Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar, either jointly or successively, possessed for a considerable period the sovereign direction at Rome.’309 Ferguson had no interest in grafting the politics of the ancients onto the politics of the moderns.310 But the fate of Rome’s mixed government, in particular, gave clues as to what might happen to the British.311 Unlike Macaulay, Ferguson was not unduly worried by the crown and its power of patronage: it was demagogues who he feared. But like Macaulay, he had repaired the connections between free-holding, parliament, and liberty that Hume had damaged. For her, the commons had only managed to generate liberty in the immediate aftermath of the Regicide—the moment of glory in which the house had taken on the form of a republic. For Ferguson, the story was about representation, rather than republicanism. As he put it to his friend William Pulteney, a Scottish advocate and, from 1768, MP for Cromarty, the lower house was ‘bone of our Bone & flesh of our flesh’.312 Defending the right of the house to expel Wilkes, he assuaged Pulteney’s fears about its discretionary power by claiming that ‘they cannot tear a bit of our flesh without tearing their own with it. This is what The Constitution means when it says we are safe under the Protection of our own Representatives.’313 The representatives who sat in the lower house had created English liberty; they would not, and could not, destroy it themselves. Ferguson nevertheless worried about the extra-parliamentary threat of Wilkes and the mob; but he continued to see Britain’s republicanised monarchy as the source of its strength and stability.314 309 Ferguson, Essay, p. 178. 310 Ferguson, Essay, pp. 184-90; this is a point both Iain McDaniel and Anna Plassart are keen to stress. See McDaniel, Adam Ferguson, pp. 12-39; Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment, p. 140. 311 For the comparison, see, especially, Ferguson, Essay, p. 130. 312 Ferguson to William Pulteney, 7 November 1769, in Ferguson, Correspondence, I, 81. 313 Ferguson to William Pulteney, 7 November 1769, in Ferguson, Correspondence, I, 81; see also Ferguson to Pulteney, 1 December 1769, in which he argues that Britain’s government is ‘well constituted’ because it commits discretionary power to king, lords, and commons, rather than to the king alone (as in France). Ferguson to Pulteney, 1 December 1769, in Ferguson, Correspondence, I, 85-89. 314 The Middlesex faction, Ferguson wrote to Pulteney, had ‘employed the Populace of London to Intimidate the King and his adherents. A Practice which if continued must in my opinion end in 235 At the same time, Hume was beginning to call the whole edifice of Britain’s parliamentary monarchy into question. Everything in Ferguson’s Essay, Hume had fumed in 1766, was ‘exceptionable’; Ferguson had inverted the History’s central argument, leading him – Hume thought – to misunderstand the foundations of modern British liberty.315 John Millar For very different reasons, the historians this chapter has been considering so far each sought to rescue the history of England’s parliamentary monarchy from the scepticism that Hume had shovelled upon it. John Millar was no different. But unlike Hurd, Macaulay, Robertson, and Ferguson, he attempted to do so whilst keeping Hume’s story about the transformative effects of luxury consumption on European monarchies. After completing his arts degree at Glasgow in around 1750, Millar was meant to follow his father into the church; instead, he chose law, becoming a protégé of Adam Smith’s as he studied at Glasgow in the 1750s.316 After spending two years in Kames’s house, as a tutor to his sons, he was admitted to the bar in 1760; in 1761, thanks to the patronage of Kames and Smith, he was appointed to the chair in Civil Law at Glasgow.317 Millar has usually been read by historians as a ‘scientific’, ‘sceptical’, or ‘sociological’ Whig in the putative mould of Hume, bent on subjecting the vulgar parochialism of English historiography to the Military Government.’ Ferguson to Pulteney, 4 January 1770, in Ferguson, Correspondence, I, 90-93. On Ferguson, party, and the mob, see Max Skjönsberg, ‘Adam Ferguson on Partisanship, Party Conflict, and Popular Participation’, Modern Intellectual History, online edn, April 2017 [https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000099, accessed 4 August 2018]. 315 Hume to Hugh Blair, 11 February 1766, in Hume, Letters, II, 11-13, at 12. 316 Millar audited Smith’s classes on logic and moral philosophy, as well as attending his lectures. See Phillipson, Adam Smith, pp. 132-35; for Millar’s biography, see William Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735-1801: His Life and Thought and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 7-89; John Cairns and Knud Haakonssen, ‘Millar, John (1735-1801)’, ODNB, online edn, September 2004 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18716, accessed 14 August 2018]; see also John Craig’s biographical introduction, ‘Account of the life and writings of John Millar, esq.’, to Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, an Enquiry into the Circumstances which give rise to Influence and Authority, in the different Members of Society, 4th edn (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1806), pp. i-cxxxiv. 317 Craig suggested that Millar’s residency in Kames’s house allowed him to strike up a friendship with Hume. Craig, ‘Account of John Millar’, pp. viii-ix. 236 general laws of society.318 Though his most perceptive readers have emphasised his whiggism as much as his sociology, the picture of Millar as invested in a ‘highly generalized social science’ occludes the extent to which his reading of English history was directed against Hume—another apparent Whig whose approach to history Millar is supposed to have shared.319 For Millar was troubled by Hume’s history of the Tudors, and voiced his discontent in three places: his Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), a series of lectures on government he delivered in 1787-88, and his Historical View of the English Government (1787).320 Like Ferguson in his Essay, Millar claimed in his Observations to be writing a universal history—what he called a ‘natural history of mankind’.321 As Kames and Dalrymple had explained, this history was based on subsistence and applied to all societies: it began at the moment a number of hunters banded together for survival, and ended once they had morphed sequentially into shepherds, farmers, artificers and traders. Millar’s aim was to take a variety of relationships – those between women and men; father and children; chief and village; sovereign and subject; master and slave – and show how they changed in relation to the ‘natural progress of human society’.322 But in explaining how politics – the relation between sovereign and subject – changed between the stages of agriculture and commerce, Millar left 318 Duncan Forbes, ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, pp. 651, 661, 663, 666; William Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, pp. 112, 358-70; Michael Ignatieff, ‘John Millar and Individualism’, p. 326; Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 208-09, 212. 319 For a recognition that Millar acknowledged a ‘vein of continuity’ in English history, see Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, pp. 125, 212; for Millar’s ‘social science’, see Forbes, ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, p. 651; Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, p. 112. Mark Salber Phillips, however, has noted that, in his historical work at least, Millar appeared to have Hume in his sights. See Phillips’s introduction to his edition of Millar, Historical View, pp. xv-xviii. 320 John Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks; we have a set of student notes, taken by Millar’s son, James, on his ‘Lectures on Government’, 3 vols, University of Glasgow Special Collections, MS Gen 289-91; An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the accession of the House of Stewart (London: A. Strachan and T. Cadell, 1787). This volume was split into two books. After Millar’s death, his nephew John Craig discovered a third book which took the story from 1603 to 1688, as well as a series of dissertations that were meant for a fourth book. All this was published by Craig as An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688, 4 vols (London: J. Mawman, 1803). This is the edition reproduced in Mark Phillips and Dale Smith’s modern edition. All references are to the volume numerals of the 1803 edition, and the page numbers of the modern edition. 321 Millar, Observations, p. vi. 322 On Millar’s view of the family, see Nicholas Miller’s recent book, John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017). 237 natural history for civil. For it was the fate of the Gothic barbarians who had invaded Rome, he claimed, that best illustrated the transition.323 Their history, he began, could be divided into three phases he would later come to call ‘feudal aristocracy’, ‘feudal monarchy’, and ‘commercial government’.324 Initially, each monarchy was formed by the settlement of a tribe. Each of these were comprised of leading men who held their property allodially (or independently), and their vassals who held their property feudally (or dependently).325 Most property was allodial, and these proprietors united for mutual defence under a king or general; but in order to make war or peace, or decide on anything pertaining to the community, he needed the consent of his assembled allods—the origin, Millar explained, of the ‘ancient Parliaments of France, the Cortes in Spain, and the Wittenagemote in England.’326 This was ‘feudal aristocracy’, in Montesquieu’s sense of the term ‘aristocracy’: a species of republic in which the legislative power was held by a body of the people.327 But unlike the early Grecian states, barbarian monarchies were huge; the allods had a great degree of independence, as well as power (through the vassals, or military tenants, they employed). Each kingdom was therefore made up of a ‘great variety of parts, loosely combined together’, rather than a ‘great political community’.328 As a result, the state could not provide protection to its smallest allodial proprietors who, in the interest of security, soon had to exchange their allods for fiefs.329 But whenever an ‘independent proprietor had resigned his property, and agreed to hold his land by a feudal tenure, he was no longer entitled to a voice in the national assembly’; he now had to follow the direction of his superior, so was unable to legislate for the community.330 Gradually, as allodial property was concentrated into fewer hands, national assemblies became smaller.331 But soon, 323 Millar, Observations, pp. 156-60. 324 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fol. 21. 325 Millar, Observations, p. 161. 326 Millar, Observations, p. 162. 327 When legislative power resides in one hand, Millar explained, government is despotic. When it resides in many hands, government is republican—either ‘aristocratical or democratical’. See Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fols. 112-13. 328 Millar, Observations, p. 165. 329 Millar, Observations, p. 166; at this point, Millar cites Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 31.8.682-84. 330 Millar, Observations, p. 168. 331 Millar, Observations, pp. 169-70. 238 even the remaining allodial proprietors became insecure in face of more powerful neighbours. This time, however, they could only secure protection by entering into the vassalage of the king, who thereby ‘established his superiority over the barons by the same means which they themselves had formerly employed for subjecting the proprietors of smaller estates’.332 By tilting authority toward the king, the ‘feudal system was completed in most of Europe’, and had begun to match what Spelman and Brady had described: the ‘whole of a kingdom came to be united in one great fief, of which the king was the superior, or lord paramount, having in some measure the property of all the land within his dominions.’333 The great barons (or remaining allodial proprietors) had become vassals of the king, and were now subject to his jurisdiction. This was ‘feudal monarchy’. In France, it had emerged under Hugh Capet; in England, the remaining Saxon allods had been converted into fiefs by William the Conqueror.334 Until the fifteenth century, and the accession of Louis XI in France and Henry VII in England, the authority of these monarchs only grew: they even began to make laws independently of parliament or the convention of estates.335 This was the period of untrammelled royal authority in Europe, and it had been created by the logic of the feudal system, rather than luxury; Millar was beginning to apply pressure to Hume’s argument. Feudal monarchy began to mutate with what Millar called the ‘improvement of arts and manufactures’. But the transition to ‘commercial government’ could cut two ways.336 By introducing luxury, such commercial improvements could ‘enervate the minds of men’, turning nobles away from the hardships and dangers of military life; by creating lucrative employment in the city, they could also create ranks of artificers and traders who could not leave their business for war. Standing armies could thereby become necessary and, if successfully created, buttress the authority of the crown.337 But refinement in the arts could also prove ‘favourable to liberty, and conducive to a popular form of government.’338 For when manufactures lay undeveloped, the lower orders had no 332 Millar, Observations, pp. 171-72. 333 Millar, Observations, p. 171. 334 Millar, Observations, pp. 172-73. 335 Millar, Observations, pp. 173-74. 336 Millar, Observations, p. 180. 337 Millar, Observations, pp. 180-81. 338 Millar, Observations, p. 184. 239 way of raising themselves to ‘superior stations’; instead, they had to seek preferment in the train of their feudal superior, or provide him with either military or agricultural service. This, Millar insisted, was a state of ‘dependence’.339 But as soon as the arts began to be cultivated, the lower orders started to find it ‘profitable to work at their own charges, and to vend the product of their labour.’340 Their profits derived from a variety of ‘customers’, and they no longer had anything to fear from a single person. Releasing themselves from the ‘patronage of the great’, they became ‘independent in their circumstances’ and began to exhibit ‘sentiments of liberty’.341 Meanwhile, the great families were reduced to poverty by attempting to ‘surpass one another in the elegance and refinement of their living’; as the typical landed gentleman became ‘addicted’ to the game of luxury, his ‘estate, being more and more encumbered with debts, is at length alienated, and brought into the possession of the frugal and industrious merchant’.342 As such fluctuations in property-holding necessarily erode the authority of the ‘higher ranks’, Millar concluded, ‘power, the usual attendant of wealth, will be in some measure diffused over all the members of the community’; the ‘privileges of the people’ will grow.343 Arts and manufactures therefore created a conflict between sovereign and subject; their improvement created standing armies on the one hand, whilst necessarily inspiring the people with ‘notions of liberty and independence’ on the other.344 Historical accidents could tip the balance in either direction. In France, Spain, and ‘most of the great kingdoms of Europe’, it was royal authority that had been ‘extended by the progress of civilization’.345 But in Britain, Charles I had yielded to the ‘growing power of the commons’: the love of liberty inspired by refinement in the arts had been ‘cherished and spread’, and had produced ‘the most popular government that ever was established in a country of the same extent’.346 Millar suggested two reasons for the divergence. English – and latterly British – monarchs had seen no need for a standing armies, as they were protected from their 339 Millar, Observations, p. 184. 340 Millar, Observations, p. 185. 341 Millar, Observations, p. 185. 342 Millar, Observations, p. 187. 343 Millar, Observations, p. 188. 344 Millar, Observations, p. 188. 345 Millar, Observations, p. 190. 346 Millar, Observations, p. 191. 240 enemies by the seas: a geographical quirk that proved fatal to the Stuarts. And in kingdoms as big as France and Spain, it was harder for the newly empowered commons to associate around instances of injustice; ‘encroachments of government’ had been too frequently overlooked.347 Take away these historical accidents, however, and the experience of ‘civilisation’ had been the same. Every Gothic government had passed through three phases: feudal aristocracy, feudal monarchy, and commercial government. Each phase had its necessary characteristics. Feudal aristocracies had weak monarchs and powerful popular assemblies; feudal monarchies had extraordinarily powerful crowns; and commercial governments held contests between wealthy commoners and monarchs with standing armies. Millar was beginning to set up an alternative to Hume. In the History of England, he had given the history of barbarian monarchies a dyadic shape: from their irruption into the empire until the turn of the sixteenth century, they had been characterised by networks of clientship that precluded the emergence of powerful monarchs. In England, even conquest and its spoils proved only a temporary boon to the crown: the subordination imposed by the Normans soon reverted to Gothic chaos. But as soon as luxury began to grip, everything changed: monarchs became absolute and peoples found personal liberty. The transition had been made by England and France alike, and comprised the axis around which the History spun. England may have arrived at civil liberty much later; but this now seemed a luxury, supervening on the personal liberty that mattered most. Millar’s history, however, was triadic: aristocratic, monarchical, commercial. The Observations sought to play down the link between luxury and absolute monarchy that Hume had established: after a period of aristocracy, feudal governments had tilted decisively toward the crown due to the insecurity of allodial proprietors; luxury had not been required to initiate the shift. This meant that when arts and manufactures did improve, they had a different effect: with the authority of feudal crowns already elevated, they created the conditions for popular government instead—even if standing armies, another of their effects, could often get in the way. The opening chapter of Millar’s attempt to shut down Hume ploughed a similar furrow to Sir James Steuart, a Scottish advocate who, on the grand tour he 347 Millar, Observations, pp. 189-90. 241 took in the late 1730s, had fallen in with the Duke of Ormonde and George Keith, then styling himself as the tenth Earl Marischal. This won him entry to the Old Pretender’s court, and his role in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 implicated him under the Act of Indemnity (though he escaped attainder).348 A lengthy period of exile followed before he returned to Scotland in 1763, before being officially pardoned in 1771. In 1767, he had published his major work, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy; but his critique of Hume could be found in a set of manuscript notes on Hume’s history of the Tudors.349 It was in these volumes that Hume had observed luxury consumption eradicating the holding of retainers and dissipating noble property—an insight with which Steuart explicitly agreed.350 But for Steuart, the shift had buttressed the authority of the commons, rather than the crown. After luxury had induced the nobles to dissipate their fortunes, their ‘solid property’ fell ‘into the pockets of the industrious, and rendered them powerful in place of the nobles: and power in the hands of the people, became more formidable to the crown, than ever the aristocracy had been.’351 Hume, Steuart observed, would have retorted that in the gap between the decline of the nobles and the rise of the industrious, the crown’s authority rose. But Steuart moved to close off even this possibility: the introduction of an ‘industrious’ turn in the people, he claimed, had made the crown necessitous. As the commons developed manufactures to feed the luxurious habits of the nobility, the crown’s expenses had ballooned.352 Short of revenue, monarchs turned immediately to the commons. This, Steuart explained, made them powerful: newly flush with taxable revenue, their parliamentary representatives now possessed something the crown desired.353 Under Charles I, the use parliament ‘made of their new gotten power, was to overturn the Constitution.’354 Previous reverence to the crown was a product of poverty; the 348 On Steuart, see Andrew Skinner’s biographical introduction to James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, eds. Andrew Skinner, Noboru Kobayashi, Hiroshi Mizuta, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), I, xi-lxix; see also Skinner, ‘Steuart, Sir James, of Coltness and Westshield, third baronet (1713-1780)’, ODNB, online edn, May 2006 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7478, accessed 14 August 2018]. 349 James Steuart, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’ (n.d.), National Library of Scotland, MS 9376. 350 Steuart, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’, fol. 93. 351 Steuart, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’, fol. 93. 352 Steuart, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’, fols. 94-95. 353 Steuart, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’, fol. 95. 354 Steuart, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’, fol. 96. 242 commons had become restless as they had become rich.355 The beggaring of the lords, Steuart insisted, had rendered the crown dependent, rather than absolute.356 Although similar, Millar’s Observations had gone further than Steuart by claiming that Gothic governments had begun their lives as republicanised monarchies—the phase he had described as ‘feudal aristocracy’. In a series of lectures he begun to deliver at Glasgow in 1787, and again in his Historical View, Millar expanded on its implications as the first node of his triadic history. As we shall see, it meant that he could cast luxury – after the episode of feudal monarchy – as returning feudal government to its original, republicanised, form. The lectures originated as a course in public law that Millar had begun to offer by 1767, before renaming it as a course on government.357 According to notes taken by his son, James Millar, he was continuing in 1787 to rehearse the triadic history of Gothic government that he had outlined in print in 1771.358 But this time, he was more insistent on the degree to which the early stages of ‘feudal aristocracy’ had been democratic. The barbarians had settled in the western provinces of the Roman empire as tribes of allodial proprietors, some of whom granted fiefs to their inferiors.359 In order to secure their settlements from their enemies, these tribes usually elected a ‘great chief, or king’; but his authority, whether in peace or war, was ‘far from being great’. When the allod-holders followed him into war, it was because they had consented to do so: in all ‘matters of moment, in which the public was concerned, the king acted with concurrence of an assembly composed of those allodial proprietors’; in the margin, James scribbled that ‘parliament met’.360 These governments were ‘aristocratical’, as we have seen above, because legislative power was held by an ‘assembly of the barons’; but initially, barons were only ‘moderate [and allodial] proprietors’, comprising a great proportion of the people.361 Over time, however, the assembly became less democratic as weaker allodial proprietors sacrificed independence for the sake of ‘personal security’; all the ‘small proprietors’ 355 Steuart, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’, fol. 95. 356 Steuart, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’, fol. 96; on taxable wealth conferring power, rather than a potential for servitude, see Steuart, Political Oeconomy, IV, 135-290. 357 Cairns and Haakonssen, ‘Millar, John’. 358 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fols. 99-125; ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fols. 1-21. 359 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fols. 1-5. 360 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fol. 7. 361 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fols. 7, 13. 243 became vassals of a ‘few great barons’, giving up their voice in parliament as they did so.362 Via the same process, the remaining barons eventually entered into the vassalage of the king, who thereby became ‘superior or lord paramount of all the nobility’.363 In France, ‘feudal aristocracy’ ran from the invasion of the Franks to Hugh Capet, and ‘feudal monarchy’ from Capet to Louis XIII.364 In Germany, aristocracy ran from Charlemagne to Otto the Great, and monarchy henceforward to Charles V.365 Scotland’s aristocracy began upon the flight of the Romans, and terminated in Malcolm II; its monarchy ran from here to James VI.366 Millar was running a story about the ‘completion’ of the feudal system in Europe, and here he claimed it to offer a democratic version of Montesquieu’s critique of Boulainvilliers: it had been commonly supposed, he argued, that the feudal system was established ‘immediately upon the conquests made by the barbarians, by the king seizing upon the whole conquered territory, and bestowing portions of land upon his great officers’.367 As Montesquieu had initially protested, such a story gave feudal kings ‘despotical power’ from the outset.368 But whereas Montesquieu went on to make a case for the constraints of feudal property and feudal courts, Millar limited his feudal monarchs by restoring the sovereignty of (initially) democratic parliaments to the story. As Millar had already explained in Observations, democratic parliaments became increasingly aristocratic over time, as allods were converted into fiefs. Once the final allodial proprietors had entered into the vassalage of kings (initiating ‘feudal monarchy’), it was only ‘commerce, manufactures, and the arts’ that could begin to eat into their authority (initiating ‘commercial government’).369 As nobles grew profligate, commoners grew rich, and cities grew bloated, the ‘hereditary influence of family’ went to rot: political power was now likely ‘to be acquired by the great body of the people, who are by their condition enabled to acquire wealth, 362 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fols. 9-13. Emphasis added. 363 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fol. 15. 364 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fols. 31-59. 365 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fols. 59-85. 366 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fols. 149-85. 367 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fol. 14. 368 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fol. 16. 369 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fols. 99-125. 244 and who are, at any rate placed in independent circumstances.’370 In larger continental states, as Millar had also explained in the Observations, newly flush commoners tended to struggle in their attempts to make political headway: in France, for example, the estates-general had been neglected since Louis II, a practice that was only reinforced by the rise of arts and mercenary armies in the reign of Louis XIII; by 1614, the last convention of estates had been called, and the king had become ‘accustomed to govern by his own authority, and to exercise in a great measure, the legislative, executive, and judicial powers.’371 But the same desire for civil liberty, what Millar called a ‘spirit of independence’, had managed to return a ‘democratic form of government’ to some of the Greek states, Carthage, Marseilles, Holland, and England—though in England, a ‘middle course has been followed, and the monarch has been allowed to retain the executive power, but under the controul of the legislature in the exercise of it.’372 In the Historical View, Millar expanded on the significance of England’s ‘middle course’. Published in one volume quarto in 1787, and subdivided into two books, his history of England ran from the invasion of the Saxons to 1603. After Millar’s death, his nephew found and published two further books that he had found among his papers: one which carried the story up to 1688, and another comprised of dissertations intended to serve as an appendix.373 But the edition Millar chose to publish himself culminated in a point-by-point refutation of Hume’s account of the Tudors. In the Observations and his lectures, he had already attempted to deny that luxury consumption had given birth to absolute monarchy across Europe. The Historical View made the grounds of his objection explicit: if personal liberty had blossomed whilst the Tudor monarchs had arrogated the legislative power of parliament to themselves, then Hume had turned his back on law-making as the engine of liberty. Millar wanted to restore it to the picture, and did so by tracking English parliaments as they mutated with changes to property-holding. He found that across the three phases of English history – ‘feudal aristocracy’, ‘feudal monarchy’, and ‘commercial government’ – parliament had never relinquished its 370 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fol. 104. 371 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, II, fols. 45-49. 372 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fols. 105, 125. 373 See above, note 320. 245 grip on legislative power. What had changed, however, was the number of people who had their hands on it—either directly, by sitting in parliament, or indirectly, through the means of representatives. In their earliest days, Saxon parliaments, or wittenagemotes, had been democratic, meaning that most people sat in the assembly itself.374 Millar acknowledged that opinion had been split on the question of who attended. The ‘supporters of the prerogative’, among whom Millar numbered Hume, only found places for lawyers, judges, and office-holders of the king; supporters of the ‘rights of the people’, meanwhile, claimed that wittenagemotes were filled with the nation’s representatives, much like parliaments were now. Millar indicted both positions as implausible: from the unification of the Heptarchy at least, parliament had been a ‘very numerous assembly’ comprised of all the independent (or allodial) proprietors of the kingdom.375 When the Saxons had settled in Britain, very few were in a position to occupy large estates: those of the ‘greater part of individuals extended to no more than a hide of land, or what could be cultivated by a single plough’—the minimum property requirement for attending the wittenagemot.376 Because parliament was comprised of allodial proprietors, rather than vassals or office- holders of the king, it had the power of declaring war and peace; it also had a ‘legislative power over the whole kingdom’, as well as having the power to levy taxes—insofar as taxes existed.377 To this power, finally, was added that of ‘directing and controlling the exercise of the royal prerogative.’378 This meant that the crown’s demesnes were considered as the ‘property of the public’, so kings needed parliament’s permission to alienate them.379 Duncan Forbes and Michael Ignatieff have each pitted the Historical View against the very notion of an ancient English constitution.380 But the Saxon wittenagemot, Millar claimed, comprised ‘the original English constitution’, and its range of powers showed just how far it was from 374 Millar, Historical View, I, 108-21. 375 Millar, Historical View, I, 117; see also Historical View, I, 111. 376 Millar, Historical View, I, 117. 377 Millar, Historical View, I, 119-20. 378 Millar, Historical View, I, 120. 379 Millar, Historical View, I, 120. 380 Forbes, ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, p. 663; Ignatieff, ‘John Millar and Individualism’, p. 326. 246 ‘absolute monarchy’.381 The assembly, moreover, ‘was composed, not of a small junto of nobles, but of all the landed proprietors, comprehending a great proportion of the whole people.’382 In this, the Saxons were not unique: such democratic governments were established in all the Gothic monarchies before hides had been turned into acres, and individuals had accrued enough property to ‘domineer over their inferiors’.383 This began to happen, as Millar had already explained in Observations, as allods were exchanged for fiefs. But here he focused on the corresponding impact on the wittenagemot: whenever an owner of a hide sought protection in the vassalage of his neighbour, the assembly shrank.384 By the eleventh century, it had become narrowly aristocratic, turning into a vehicle through which a small ‘junto’ of nobles could pursue their separate interests.385 The invasion of the Normans, however, soon turned the junto’s own weapons on themselves.386 As William forced the remaining Saxon allod-holders into vassalage, the wittenagemot was ‘annihilated’; as the Saxon nobles had ceased to hold their property independently, the assembly could no longer meet.387 But as they had become vassals of the crown, they were incorporated into the king’s baronial court—just as their own vassals had been incorporated into theirs.388 As all Saxon property-holders were now the vassals of the king, this court had a ‘jurisdiction and authority over the whole kingdom’, and was given the name of ‘parliament’.389 As the members of the assembly were now obliged to bear arms for the king, it transferred its power of declaring war and peace to the king (leading England into taking the ‘middle course’ to which Millar referred in his lectures).390 But in other respects, its power was ‘little inferior’ to what had been held by the wittenagemot: as ‘the national council, composed of the nobility or great proprietors of land, was invested with the legislative power, including that of imposing taxes, and with the power of distributing justice in the last resort’, it 381 Millar, Historical View, I, 123. 382 Millar, Historical View, I, 123. 383 Millar, Historical View, I, 123. 384 Millar, Historical View, I, 144-46, 184-85. 385 Millar, Historical View, I, 184-85. 386 Millar, Historical View, II, 199-238. 387 Millar, Historical View, II, 239. 388 Millar, Historical View, II, 240. 389 Millar, Historical View, II, 240. 390 Millar, Historical View, II, 243. 247 continued to control and direct the ‘most important’ branches of the constitution.391 The arrival of ‘feudal monarchy’ in England had exalted the crown’s prerogative. But it had been unable to take law-making from the hands of parliament, the assembly that had replaced the wittenagemot. There was, then, little truth to the idea that the Conqueror had ‘overturned altogether the ancient constitution’.392 But parliament remained aristocratic until arts and manufactures began to flourish, at which point its doors swayed open once again. This part of the story was built around two moments. The first ‘rude footsteps’ of manufactures, Millar claimed, had been heard in Italy, France, and the Low Countries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, before being transmitted to England by the Normans.393 After the conquest, ‘tradesmen and mercantile people were gradually multiplied’, foreign artisans came to settle in England, and towns hugging coasts and rivers began to ‘extend their commerce’.394 The result was the ‘variation of manners’ that Hume had introduced far later, in the sixteenth century.395 As towns grew, rural proprietors availed themselves of the goods their industry had created: their ‘ancient plainness and simplicity, with respect to the accommodations of life, were more and more deserted; a mode of living more expensive, and somewhat more elegant, began to take place’.396 But luxury not only turned the heads of those with deep enough pockets to pay for it: many fell deep into debt, and eventually had to sell off their estates.397 As ever, ‘changes in the state of landed property had necessarily an extensive influence upon the government’, and this dismembering of estates multiplied the number of crown vassals entitled to attend parliament. Too poor to attend, they began to send representatives (the knights of the shires), as too did newly incorporated towns (whose representatives were called burgesses).398 Obviously different from the greater nobility, these new members of parliament formed the lower house, and arrogated to themselves the 391 Millar, Historical View, II, 247, as well as 243-44. 392 Millar, Historical View, II, 203. 393 Millar, Historical View, II, 290-91. 394 Millar, Historical View, II, 291. 395 Millar, Historical View, II, 291. 396 Millar, Historical View, II, 291. 397 Millar, Historical View, II, 291-92. 398 Millar, Historical View, II, 293-96 248 power to either assent to or veto taxation.399 By Edward I, ‘All the independent property in the kingdom was, according to this constitution, represented in parliament’.400 Via representation triggered by refinement in the arts, parliament was beginning to re-assume its democratic and Saxon form. The second moment in the story arrived in the sixteenth century. The invention of the compass, the European discovery of the New World, and the Dutch Revolt produced a total ‘revolution upon the state of trade and manufactures’, which in turn stimulated the development of husbandry.401 As demand for provisions grew in line with the population of towns, the price of agricultural produce increased. This allowed tenants to pay higher rents in exchange for longer leases—an offer that nobles were happy to accept, as they now needed cash more than authority.402 Over time, long leases mutated into property, villeins became freeholders, and the independence of the artisans ‘was, in some measure, communicated to the peasantry’.403 Via these further changes to property-holding, peasants were released from their dependence on the arbitrary will of their masters, becoming farmers and merchants instead. This, in turn, created ‘that spirit of independence which is so favourable to civil liberty, and which, in after times, exerted itself in opposition to the power of the crown.’404 Hume, however, had also traced a growing (and arts-fuelled) clamour for civil liberty in the seventeenth century—what Millar referred to as ‘after times’. But for Hume, it was the preceding century that had changed Europe: after a millennium of Gothic chaos, this was the age in which luxury had taken hold, nobilities had disarmed, monarchs had become absolute, people had become (personally) free, and modern history had begun. But this was the story on which Millar then proceeded to stamp his foot. Millar began by admitting that Henry VII did indeed benefit from an increase in the ‘influence and authority of the crown.’405 The Wars of the Roses had weakened the nobility, Henry’s abolition of entails had helped – along with luxury 399 Millar, Historical View, II, 311. 400 Millar, Historical View, II, 318; on the lack of an equivalent to the knights of the shires in France, see Millar, Historical View, II, 301-02. 401 Millar, Historical View, II, 379. 402 Millar, Historical View, II, 382-83. 403 Millar, Historical View, II, 382. 404 Millar, Historical View, II, 386. 405 Millar, Historical View, II, 386. 249 – to transfer their wealth to the commons, and their military retainers had been laid off. The ‘ultimate consequences’ of this tectonic shift may have been democratic; but ‘its immediate effects’, Millar acknowledged, ‘were undoubtedly advantageous to the monarch’.406 Henry had also found support, he pointed out, from the representatives of the counties and the shires—the numbers of which increased throughout his reign. Since their arrival in parliament, they had used the crown’s protection as leverage against the power of the barons, and this had not yet begun to change.407 But this was as far as Millar was willing to go. Hume, he bristled, had made the ‘gross error’ of describing the legislative power of Tudor English parliaments as a ‘mere fallacy’.408 No ‘material variation’, however, had been produced under Henry VII: in ‘conformity with the ancient constitution’, the legislative power remained vested in parliament; the executive power remained lodged in the crown.409 The king’s authority was ‘entirely subordinate to that of the national assembly’, and remained so under his son: it was by acts of parliament that Henry VIII had suppressed the monasteries, become head of the church, and abolished the civil authority of the Pope.410 But it was on Elizabeth that Hume, the ‘great historian of England’, had really lost his way.411 His account of her reign, Millar thought, deserved a point-by- point refutation. Convinced of her despotism, Hume had written often of her recourse to the dispensing power, especially with regards to religion; Millar retorted that Elizabeth had in fact prohibited ‘all innovations, until the matters in dispute should be finally determined by parliament.’412 Hume had claimed her to possess a ‘full legislative power’ by means of her proclamations; Millar objected that ‘anciently the crown possessed no legislative power’, and that only Henry VIII had declared proclamations to have the force of laws—a prerogative of which he never availed himself, and which Elizabeth abolished in the earliest days of her reign.413 Decades before Charles had levied ship-money, Hume claimed Elizabeth to have 406 Millar, Historical View, II, 388-92. 407 Millar, Historical View, II, 386-88. 408 Millar, Historical View, II, 401, 429. 409 Millar, Historical View, II, 401. 410 Millar, Historical View, II, 401, 410-11. 411 Millar, Historical View, II, 418. 412 Millar, Historical View, II, 419. 413 Millar, Historical View, II, 419. 250 done the same thing; but this tax, Millar responded, had been levied on the maritime towns only, in conditions of ‘extraordinary necessity’ (whereas Charles’s tax had been ‘regular’ and unnecessary).414 She was far from the Turkish sultan to whom Hume had compared her: Millar insisted that she neither interfered with the legislative power of parliament, nor questioned its exclusive power to impose ordinary taxation.415 Instead of allowing the crown to seize legislative power, the second coming of the arts restored parliament to its democratic Saxon beginnings. Although parliament had never relaxed its hold on the law, it had often been narrowly aristocratic; many of the legal limitations it placed on the crown – the Great Charter chief among them – were designed only to protect the interests of its nobles.416 But the ‘revolution upon manufactures’, Millar explained, allowed the ‘whole community’ to benefit without redistributing the powers of government: The outlines of the English constitution are not very different, at this day, from what they were in the reign of William the Conqueror; but the powers which were then universally acknowledged, have been since more minutely applied to the detail of administration; and the variations, that have occurred in the modes of living, and in the condition of individuals, have been gradually accommodated to the spirit of the old institutions. The experience of the nation has led them to fill up the picture, of which a rude sketch was delineated in that early period.417 The ‘spirit of the old institutions’ was democratic, and luxury had unshackled it by allowing the lower orders to ‘exercise of the same privileges which had been claimed by men of independent fortunes’.418 The first steps had been taken as representation locked into place under Edward I; but the great strides came under the Tudors and Stuarts, as commoners grew wealthy enough to pay an increasing amount of tax. As Steuart had pointed out, the expenses of the crown grew as luxury began to grip, 414 Millar, Historical View, II, 421. 415 Millar, Historical View, II, 414, 423. 416 Millar, Historical View, II, 249. 417 Millar, Historical View, II, 248-49. 418 Millar, Historical View, II, 237-38. 251 turning monarchs to parliament for supply; eventually, Charles’s fiscal needs allowed parliament to ‘extort from him such concessions as experience had shown to be requisite for securing the rights and privileges of the people.’419 Fuelled by refinement in the arts, Millar concluded, taxation was the ‘great means of establishing that happy mixture of monarchy and democracy which we at present enjoy’.420 The Historical View thereby ended by re-asserting what Hume had undermined: the compatibility of Britain’s democratic monarchy with civilisation. For the History, Millar knew, had taken him somewhere else. Hume’s own excavation of England’s Gothic history may have appeared to unearth the same artefacts as Millar’s: among the Saxons, he had found wittenagemots whose consent was required for the enacting of law (although his were far less democratic); in the Great Charter, he discovered laws that protected the property of nobles, freemen, villeins and cottagers (in other words: the whole ‘people’); under Edward I, representation had brought the House of Commons into being. But his point was that none of it mattered. However much the law appeared to approximate civil liberty, and whoever controlled its creation, its observance depended on what the people (or nation, or public) were doing, feeling, and thinking. Before the sixteenth century, people were seeking safety; but the crown was too weak to provide it, so powerful men offered it in exchange for service or loyalty. As long as clientship prevailed – as long as even members of parliament derived their safety from their ‘own private power’ – there could be no personal liberty: people could never feel free.421 England remained barbarous and pre-modern, becoming modern – alongside France – only as luxury transformed Gothic gangs into commercial networks, allowing crowns to rise and personal liberty to emerge. But personal liberty, as we have seen, was fragile, and Hume had seen no way of getting around Montesquieu’s warning. Millar’s response was to cut personal liberty and errant publics out of the story, contesting Hume’s division of ancient and modern as he did so. Following the collective agent of the public, as Hume had done in the History, would lead to a 419 Millar, Historical View, II, 422. 420 Millar, Historical View, II, 423-24. 421 Hume, History, II, 179-80. 252 political cul-de-sac; in the Historical View, Millar followed property-holding and parliaments instead. If they were democratic enough – if enough people held property and thereby controlled the creation of the law – then government could both generate and protect liberty; putting law-making in as many hands as possible, he explained in his lectures, was the best way to protect people from ‘oppression’.422 Millar began with the inception of modern Europe, constituted as it had been by democratic parliaments; wherever the Germans settled across the Roman empire, a great proportion of the people had made the law.423 Montesquieu had drawn his line between ancient and modern in the same place, but for different reasons: his Germans were notable for their feudal property, whereas Millar’s were distinguished by democratic monarchies.424 This was the move that allowed Millar to read the rise of feudal tenures as constricting the democratic element of the English constitution, leading it away from its original – and modern – form. By increasing and democratising independent property-holding, the arts could then be depicted as restoring England to the ‘happy mixture of monarchy and democracy which we at present enjoy’, and which had also been enjoyed under the Saxons.425 As democratic monarchy was compatible with civilisation after all, Millar had a less anxious vision of Britain’s future.426 Shorn of Hume’s focus on the vagaries of public opinion, his lectures professed little concern over the national debt.427 The problem lay rather in keeping the house of commons democratic. This could be achieved, first of all, through ‘more equal representation’, although Millar was wary of going too far. Suffrage, he argued, should be kept away from the ‘dregs of the people’, who would only sell their votes.428 But it could safely be opened up to a labouring income of between £20 and £25 per year; pitched at this level, an 422 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fol. 113; on the plausibility of democratic politics in large states, see also ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fols. 115-23. 423 Millar, Historical View, I, 108, 141; see also Historical View, III, 445, and Historical View, IV, 750. 424 It is therefore unsurprising that Millar referred to the Spirit of Laws as a ‘natural history of government’, whilst referring to his own Historical View as a ‘constitutional history’ of England. For the first comment, see Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fol. 9. For the second, see Millar, Historical View, I, 5. 425 Millar, Historical View, II, 423-24; see also Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, III, fols. 43-44. 426 A fuller study than that attempted here would go beyond 1787, into Scottish perceptions of the French Revolution and Millar’s anonymously published Letters of Crito, on the Causes, Objects, and Consequences of the Present War (Edinburgh: J. Johnstone, 1796). For a way in, see Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 112-24. 427 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, III, fols. 25-30. 428 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, III, fol. 44. 253 extension of the franchise would allow new voters to ‘protect also the rights of such as were excluded from that privilege’.429 The mechanical arts, he warned, must also consistently improve so as to keep property-holding – which could consist in a wage – independent: any decline ‘must render the lower people dependent upon rich individuals’, allowing the ‘great men’ to become totally independent, and government to become ‘aristocratical’.430 In England, this had happened between the arrivals of the Saxons and the Normans, as allods were slowly converted into fiefs. It had also happened to Rome, and was the fate that Britain must avoid.431 Millar had not targeted Hume because he thought he was a Tory. He had seen that the History was doing something else, and had run with Hume’s story about the ancients and the moderns in his own Observations.432 Ancient states may have been lauded for their freedom, Millar had claimed in its chapter on the relationship between master and slave, but their mechanics and labourers were slaves, the number of which only grew in proportion to their opulence and refinement.433 But modern states were different: all over Europe, the improvement of the arts had communicated ‘domestic freedom’, ‘personal liberty’, or the ‘advantages of liberty’ to their inhabitants.434 In the ‘most despotic European government’ in which domestic slavery had been abolished, ‘more freedom is really enjoyed by the people, than in any of the admired republics’.435 Here, Millar was using Hume’s language to make Hume’s point. But in both the Observations and the Historical View, he was unwilling to follow its implications into English historiography, and from there into modern British politics. Hume’s decision to do so had left him politically stranded, and unable to conceive of the future of Britain’s parliamentary monarchy without picturing doom. Like Robertson and Ferguson, Millar re-established the viability of English history by re-attaching liberty to free-holding and parliament. In doing so, he equipped himself with a language of parliamentary reform. 429 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, III, fol. 18. 430 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fol. 159. 431 Millar, ‘Lectures on Government’, I, fols. 195-227; Millar, Observations, pp. 177-78. 432 For the claim that Millar saw Hume’s politics as ‘royalist’, see Phillips’s introduction to Millar, Historical View, p. xv. 433 Millar, Observations, p. 233. 434 Millar, Observations, pp. 220-24, 233-34. 435 Millar, Observations, p. 234. 254 Conclusion In a series of lectures that began in the winter of 1762, his final year in the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, Adam Smith started to reckon with Hume’s History.1 As part of a broader history of government in western Europe, he told his students that ‘the nobility necessarily fell to ruin as soon as luxury and arts were introduced’ into the countryside of sixteenth-century monarchies, and that ‘their fall everywhere gave occasion to the absolute power of the king.’2 The shift was to be welcomed. Under an absolute monarchy like that of the Tudors, the ‘greatest part of the nation’ had little to fear from the crown, whereas everyone had been oppressed by ‘petty lords’.3 The people, Smith explained, could never have ‘security in person or estate’ until the power of the nobility had been curtailed.4 Unlike any of the historians we considered in the last chapter, Smith was immediately receptive to the central argument of Hume’s History: that English liberty had only arrived after the luxury- fuelled emergence of modern liberty and absolute government across Europe. After resigning from his chair in the autumn of 1763, Smith took up a role as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch; in 1767, he settled back into his home town of Kirkcaldy and began working on the manuscript he published in 1776 as an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.5 By then, Millar had published his 1 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ‘Report of 1762-3’, pp. 5-394, at 244-64. Henceforward LJ (A). On Smith’s final years in the chair, see Phillipson, Adam Smith, pp. 159-80. 2 Smith, LJ (A), pp. 244-64, at 264. On the lectures’ history of Rome and its succession by barbarian monarchies in the fifth century, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 319-29, as well as Barbarism and Religion, III, 387-99; Hont, ‘Adam Smith’s history of law and government’, pp. 150- 71. 3 Smith, LJ (A), p. 264. 4 Smith, LJ (A), p. 264. 5 On this period of Smith’s life, see Phillipson, Adam Smith, pp. 180-214. The richest discussion of the political stakes of the Wealth of Nations can be found in Hont and Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in 255 Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks. But in the historical third book of the Wealth of Nations, Smith departed from his former pupil by positioning himself – as he had done in his lectures – behind Hume.6 There was a ‘natural’ order, Smith explained in the book’s first chapter, to the sequence in which nations developed commercially: they began with agriculture, moved on to manufactures, and then expanded into foreign trade.7 But something else had happened after the collapse of the Roman empire. The Germanic barbarians who overran its western provinces had also destroyed its commerce: ‘towns were deserted’, ‘the country was left uncultivated’, and everything sunk into ‘poverty and barbarism’.8 Over the course of the millennium that followed, however, the towns developed before the country; manufacturing advanced before agriculture.9 The barbarians had erected monarchies, and their chief men, or barons, controlled most of the country; the kings of these monarchies, meanwhile, had allowed towns to incorporate, build walls, elect town-councils, and collect revenue in order to generate leverage against the barons.10 Free from the ‘oppression of the lords’, the inhabitants of the towns had security enough to ‘better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life.’11 By offering a market for the rude produce of the country, the commerce of the towns incentivised agricultural production; the ‘unnatural’ path taken by Europe’s monarchies had distorted – but not prevented – the growth of opulence.12 Istvan Hont has shown that Smith’s history was in part aimed at Turgot and the French économistes, who wished to roll back on the industrial development they associated with Louis XIV and his chief economic minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert.13 the Wealth of Nations’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 389-443. For historically sensitive treatments of Smith and his contexts, see also Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics; Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith; Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: a Philosophical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 6 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, book III. 7 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III, chapter i, paragraphs 1-9. 8 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.ii.1-21, at 1. 9 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iii.1-20. 10 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iii.6-8. 11 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iii.12. 12 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.1-3. 13 Hont, ‘The Political Economy of the “Unnatural and Retrograde” Order: Adam Smith and Natural Liberty’, in Französische Revolution und Politische Ökonomie, Schriften aus dem Karl-Marx-Haus, vol. 41 (Trier: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 1989), pp. 122-149, reprinted as ‘Adam Smith and the Political Economy of the “Unnatural and Retrograde” Order’, in idem., Jealousy of Trade, pp. 354-89. 256 But Smith’s explanation of the political effects of Europe’s unusual commercial history also intervened in the debate we have been following, and draws out some of its implications. For the ‘commerce and manufactures’ of the towns, Smith pointed out, gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects. Mr. Hume is the only writer who, so far as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.14 This remark has puzzled historians. Roy Campbell and Andrew Skinner, the book’s modern editors, wondered why Smith had not mentioned Ferguson, Kames, Millar, or Robertson, all of whom had made a connection between commerce and liberty; Duncan Forbes thought Smith was being a little ‘unfair’ to Millar.15 But the story Smith proceeded to tell was lifted from the Gothic and Tudor volumes of Hume’s History. Smith’s claim that this story belonged to Hume alone was pointed: no-one else had managed to re-write the history of English liberty in light of the development of modern commerce, and no-one else had grasped that this is what Hume had done. Before the fine manufactures of the towns made their way into the country, Smith began, Gothic nobles spent the produce of their estates on feeding themselves and their armies of retainers; the tenants of their land, meanwhile, were as ‘dependent on the great proprietor as his retainers’.16 As Hume had indicated, the power of the barons was immense: they administrated justice in their own courts, and used their retainers to keep order in their own domains whilst inflicting damage on those of others; in these ‘ancient times’ the king was ‘little more than the greatest proprietor’, to whom the barons only deferred for the sake of keeping order amongst 14 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.4. 15 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.4n; Forbes, ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty’, p. 193. 16 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.6. 257 themselves.17 In England, this system had arrived with the Saxons, and although the feudal subordination imposed by the Normans had temporarily buttressed the authority of the crown, it had failed to generate ‘order and good government’ in the country.18 As Hume had argued, English government continued to be ‘too weak in the head and too strong in the inferior members, and the excessive strength of the inferior members was the cause of the weakness of the head.’ As feudal tenures did not alter the ‘state of property and manners’ from which the disorder arose, the disorder simply rolled on.19 Only the ‘silent and insensible’ operation of commerce and manufactures, Smith claimed, was capable of breaking the nobles’ power.20 Once the goods of the towns had found their way into the country, nobles could use the rude produce of their estates to buy ‘a pair of diamond buckles’, rather than maintain a thousand men a year.21 This was the moment at which Adam Ferguson began to mourn a decline in Gothic ‘magnanimity’: after centuries feeding thousands at their tables, luxury goods had finally allowed the nobility to squander their wealth on themselves.22 But for Smith, luxury allowed nobles to maintain more people than they had been able to do via the ‘ancient method’ of Gothic hospitality.23 The nobles shed their retainers as they began to exchange the rude produce of their land for luxury goods, but the number of workmen and artisans employed in ‘collecting and preparing’ these goods was as high as their price—which, in turn, arose ‘from the wages of their labour, and the profits of all their immediate employers.’24 Just as important as the increased productivity of this system was the transformation of the political relationship between the noble and those his consumption maintained: he had exchanged his ‘unlimited ascendant’, as Hume had put it, for nothing but ‘moderate influence’.25 As each tradesman or artificer 17 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.7. 18 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.9. 19 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.9. 20 On this aspect of Smith’s story, see Hont, ‘Adam Smith’s history of law and government’, pp. 165-68, who reads it as an account of political change grounded the ‘self-destruction of elites’, rather than revolution, and therefore as an advancement on the political theory of Locke. 21 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.10. 22 Ferguson, Essay, pp. 238-39. 23 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.11. 24 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.11. 25 Hume, History, IV, 384. 258 derived his subsistence from the employment of ‘a hundred or a thousand different customers’, he was not ‘absolutely dependent’ upon any one of them.26 The same security accrued to the tenants occupying noble estates, who managed to extract longer leases in exchange for higher rents; equipped with a lease for a ‘long term of years’, Smith argued, the tenant became ‘altogether independent’ of his landlord.27 Meanwhile, as the barons were no longer interested in ‘interrupting’ the administration of justice, a ‘regular government was established in the country as well as in the city’; the percolation of luxury goods into many of the monarchies of western Europe had generated a ‘revolution of the greatest importance to publick happiness’.28 By singling out Hume and re-narrating his story so carefully, Smith recognised what the History had achieved. Hume, he saw, had undercut the idea that luxury affected government because it diffused – or democratised – property- holding, thereby enfranchising ‘the people’ and handing them a political voice. Hume’s ‘people’, or ‘public’, or ‘nation’ was more mutable than that, and was not simply constituted by a community of free-holders who could vote.29 The nation that emerged in sixteenth-century England included nobles who were beginning to change their manners, as well as enfranchised property-holders and the gentry who 26 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.12. 27 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.14. Smith followed his own recommendation in his dealings with the Duke of Buccleuch, who he advised to agitate for what became the ‘Act to Encourage the Improvement of Lands . . . held under the settlements of strict Entail’ of 1770 (10 Geo. III. C. 51), which allowed him to lease parts of his estate for longer amounts of time. See Brian Bonnyman, The Third Duke of Buccleuch and Adam Smith: Estate Management and Improvement in Enlightenment Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 68-72. 28 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, III.iv.15-17. 29 Allan Ramsay, the painter who founded the Select Society with Hume and Smith in 1754, claimed that what Hume referred to as the ‘nation’ was really the ‘constituent power’ of English government. See [Allan Ramsay], An Essay on the Constitution of England (London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hont, 1765), pp. 5-8. For the attribution of the pamphlet to Ramsay, see Iain Gordon Brown, ‘The pamphlets of Allan Ramsay the Younger’, The Book Collector 37 (1988), 55-85. For Ramsay’s biography, see John Ingamells, ‘Ramsay, Allan, of Kinkell (1713-1784)’, ODNB, online edn, September 2015 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23073, accessed 12 August 2018]. Hume complained to William Strahan that the Essay was ‘nothing but an Abridgement of my History’, and had failed to acknowledge its debts, for which see Hume to William Strahan, 26 January 1765, in Hume, Letters, I, 492-93. But as Michael Sonenscher has pointed out, Ramsay’s essay too often elided ‘constituents’ with property-holders to get close to the History’s central argument. See Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes, pp. 308-12. The idea of ‘constituent power’, as distinct from sovereignty, has recently begun to be investigated as a category in eighteenth-century political thought. See Lucia Rubinelli, ‘How to think beyond sovereignty: On Sieyès and constituent power’, European Journal of Political Theory, online edn, April 2016 [https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885116642170, accessed 12 August 2018]; see also Sonenscher’s introduction to Sieyès, Political Writings, pp. vii- lxiv. 259 sat in the lower house; but it also included the retainers who had flocked to the towns: the artisans and the mechanics who manufactured the goods that the nobles had begun to consume, and who earned wages instead of holding property.30 Due to luxury, this ‘people’ – as well as other peoples across Europe – had become free not because they had found a political voice in parliament, but because they had become safe enough to go about their daily business. On Hume’s account, this liberty was what made the moderns ‘modern’, and in the Wealth of Nations, Smith concurred. His own ‘publick’, or nation, was comprised of improving aristocrats, free-holders, ‘independent’ tenants with long leases, and the waged of the towns; commerce had not generated liberty because it had diffused – or redistributed – property-holding, but because it had changed the way that nobles behaved, unlocking the productivity of the country.31 Unlike Millar, Smith did not write a history of England as a history of property-holding and enfranchisement; he wrote a book about how the propertied and property-less of a modern nation like Britain could sustain themselves without coming into conflict. Istvan Hont describes Smith’s problem as that of reconciling liberty with inequality, and has found its intellectual origins in seventeenth-century Protestant natural jurisprudence.32 But its origins can also be found here, in the Scottish debate over the viability of English history and the parliamentary monarchy with which this history was associated. Most of the scholarship that carries this debate into the nineteenth century, however, has yet to reflect the disagreements that this thesis has tried to reveal.33 30 Michel Foucault detected something similar in Boulainvilliers, who he credited with tunnelling underneath ‘institutions, events, [and] kings’ in order to render a fractured ‘nation’ or ‘people’ as the subject of history. Boulainvilliers’s ‘political historicism’, Foucault suggests, offered an alternative to the juridical discourse of sovereignty, and ultimately produced the nineteenth- century notions of ‘race’, ‘class’, and ‘nation’. See Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, pp. 134, 162, 167. 31 Istvan Hont has explained that Smith’s history of government in Europe did not pivot on a redistribution in property-holding as he wished to show – contra Jean-Jacques Rousseau – that the unequal property relations that characterised modern commercial states could paradoxically maintain more people than egalitarian patterns of distribution. See Hont’s explanation of Smith’s famous metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ in Politics in Commercial Society, pp. 92-94. For the metaphor itself, see Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759], ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), part IV, chapter I, paragraph 10. 32 Smith’s problem is one of the dominant themes of the essays collected in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, and runs throughout his posthumously published Politics in Commercial Society. See also ‘The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury’, pp. 379-418. 33 Anna Plassart, for example, has recently suggested that Hume, Smith, Robertson, Ferguson, and Millar shared the ‘ambition to give a “scientific” foundation to the Whig myth of English exceptionalism’. See Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 30-31. 260 The vehicle for the transmission of the debate was Dugald Stewart, the philosopher and jurist who succeeded Ferguson in the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1785, and held it until 1809.34 He taught Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, and Henry Brougham, the three young Scots who, along with the Oxford-educated clergyman Sydney Smith, formed the Edinburgh Review in 1802.35 The journal provided a literary home to James Mill (another of Stewart’s pupils), Thomas Babington Macaulay, and James Mackintosh (as well as its founders), and came to be associated with the patronage of Henry Fox, third baron Holland.36 It was shot through with eighteenth-century Scottish ideas, but our understanding of their development has been limited by what historians have taken these ideas to look like. If there is a consensus, it is that Kames, Hume, Smith, and Millar turned their backs on questions of constitutional form, or ‘polity’, in favour of writing histories of ‘society’, and that these histories – above all – were about the way in which commerce diffused and diversified property-holding, allowing the ‘middling ranks’ to grow.37 The Edinburgh reviewers accordingly saw the rise of these ranks, the story goes, as the ‘dominant feature of modern British society’.38 The question was how to accommodate them to the constitution; the reviewers’ answer – articulated with increasing urgency in the debates preceding the First Reform Bill of 1832 – was to extend the franchise.39 Commerce had created new ranks of urban property- 34 Donald Winch, ‘The system of the North: Dugald Stewart and his pupils’, in That Noble Science of Politics, pp. 23-63. 35 Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: the Edinburgh Review, 1802-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); idem., ‘Whigs and Liberals: the Edinburgh Review and the “liberal movement” in nineteenth-century Britain’, in Richard Bellamy ed., Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 42-58. 36 Leslie Mitchell, Holland House (London: Duckworth, 1980), pp. 172-96. 37 On the putative Scottish turn away from constitutions, see the second chapter, ‘Polity and Society’, of John Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, pp. 21-50. For explanations of the Scottish historical enterprise as circling the rise of the ‘middling ranks’, many of which quote from Millar in order to explain the historical thinking of Smith, see Winch, ‘The system of the North’, p. 28; idem., Riches and Poverty: an Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 75; idem., Adam Smith’s Politics, pp. 70-102, at 72-75, 99-102; Andrew Skinner, ‘Adam Smith: an Economic Interpretation of History’, in Essays on Adam Smith, pp. 154- 78, at 178; Forbes, ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty’, pp. 200-201; idem., Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 296-97; Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society, pp. 17-18, 108; idem., ‘Whigs and Liberals’, p. 44. 38 Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society, p. 43. 39 Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society, pp. 147-80, at 155-57; see also Burrow, A Liberal Descent, p. 87. 261 holders that continued to stagnate in pocket boroughs, and it was imperative that they find their political personality. Of the historians this thesis has considered so far, however, only Millar would have seen enfranchisement as a viable way of easing the pressures of civilisation on British politics; for him, luxury had already broken up noble estates, tipping property-holding into the hands of the people and equipping them – through their representatives in parliament – with a political voice. But despite their disagreements about feudal government, Montesquieu, Dalrymple, Hume, and Smith had each doubted whether the enfranchised property-holder was a viable basis of political order in modern, commercial states. Montesquieu and Dalrymple had suggested that only hereditary nobilities – rather than anything to do with enfranchisement or parliament – could stabilise monarchies organised around the production and consumption of luxury goods. Hume had pointed out that an enfranchised creditor posed a greater threat to liberty than a creditor with no political personality at all; his late glances at Montesquieu recognised that parliamentary monarchy might not be capable of reconciling liberty to civilisation. Smith saw that Hume’s vision of modern liberty applied to the waged artisan as much as enfranchised proprietor, and alighted on productivity as the means through which this kind of liberty could be maintained. But all the while, free- holding and parliamentary monarchy never lost its appeal; Kames, Robertson, Ferguson, and Millar each attempted to revive what Montesquieu, Dalrymple, Hume, and Smith had begun to undermine. Although this fracture has yet to be followed into the Edinburgh Review, historians are beginning to use it as a way of moving beyond hoary debates about the relationship between ‘liberalism’ and ‘republicanism’ in the nineteenth century.40 Jocelyn Betts has found the Victorian travel writer and translator, Samuel 40 For depictions of these two idioms as conflicting and incommensurate, as they were based on different concepts of liberty, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For a recent attempt to show rather that liberalism ‘burst from the shell of a republican chrysalis’, see Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 5; for an attempt to elide the idioms of liberalism and republicanism, see Eugenio Biagini, ‘Neo-roman liberalism: “republican” values and British liberalism, ca. 1860-1875’, History of European Ideas 29 (2003), 55- 72. 262 Laing, worrying about how to secure the material independence of the waged in the face of new forms of hierarchy, instability, and exploitation; but he has also found Laing toying with independent proprietorship as the only way of shielding the waged from the uncertainties of global markets—by the middle of the nineteenth century, a distant hope.41 In Hume’s enquiry into the historical conditions that had allowed modern liberty to flourish, Michael Sonenscher has found the intellectual resources from which the concept of ‘autonomy’ developed in post-Revolutionary France and Germany.42 Book III of the Wealth of Nations, meanwhile, provided the Genevan historian and political economist, Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, with a point of departure.43 Luxury had allowed modern liberty to develop in post-feudal European monarchies without the introduction of the political liberty – achieved via enfranchisement – that tended to be associated with the ancients.44 Modern liberty, however, could not survive without ancient; the question was how to combine the two.45 In Laing and Sismondi, the attraction of English whiggism remained. This did not mean it had triumphed; for most of the nineteenth century, it thrived as one of the dominant political traditions of the British state—just as it had done in the eighteenth century, as we have seen in Kames, Ferguson, Robertson and Millar.46 But the more 41 Jocelyn Betts, ‘After the Freeholder: Republican and Liberal Themes in the Works of Samuel Laing’, Modern Intellectual History, online edn, May 2017 [https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000154, accessed 9 August 2018]. 42 In France, the concept became important to the debate about the ancients and the moderns conducted between, among others, Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël, and François Guizot; in Germany, it become associated with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. See Sonenscher, ‘Liberty, Autonomy, and Republican Historiography: Civic Humanism in Context’, in Markets, Morals, Politics, pp. 161-211, at 166-67. On ‘autonomy’ more generally, see Jerome Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For an attempt to join the German debate to the French, and the French debate, in turn, to eighteenth-century Scotland, see Lucian Robinson, ‘Religion, Morality, and History in the Political Thought of François Guizot’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (2016), pp. 15-18, 21-90. 43 On Sismondi’s engagement with Smith, see Thomas Hopkins, ‘Say and Sismondi on the Political Economy of Post-Revolutionary Europe’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (2011), pp. 103-107, 161-69; on Sismondi more generally, see Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (London: Profile, 2004), pp. 110-62. 44 Sonenscher, ‘Liberty, Autonomy, and Republican Historiography’, pp. 184-85. 45 Sonenscher, ‘Liberty, Autonomy, and Republican Historiography’, pp. 189-210. This is also the question underpinning the survival of what John Dunn has referred to as the modern ‘bourgeois liberal republic’, for which see Dunn, ‘The identity of the bourgeois liberal republic’, in Biancamaria Fontana ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 206-226, at 207. On the nineteenth-century emergence of the ‘modern representative republic’, see also Hont, ‘Introduction’, in Jealousy of Trade, pp. 125-56, at 133. 46 On this point, see Peter Ghosh, ‘Macaulay and the Heritage of the Enlightenment’, p. 395. 263 sceptical among the Scots had thrown new problems into the idiom, and the history of what their nineteenth-century interlocutors did with these problems has yet to be written. 264 Bibliography Primary manuscript sources Hardwicke Papers, British Library, Add MS 35635. [Millar, John,] ‘Lectures on Government’, 3 vols, University of Glasgow Special Collections, MS Gen 289-91. Minto Papers, National Library of Scotland, MS 11008. Minto Papers, National Library of Scotland, MS 11014. Saltoun Papers, National Library of Scotland, MS 16609. Steuart, James, ‘Notes upon Hume’s Elizabeth’, National Library of Scotland, MS 9376. Primary printed sources An Ample Disquisition into the Nature of Regalities and Other Heretable Jurisdictions (London: M. Cooper, 1747). Atwood, William, Jus anglorum ab antiquo: or, a confutation of an impotent libel against the government of Kings, Lords, and Commons (London: E. Berry, 1681). Bacon, Francis, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ––––––. Instauratio magna (London: B. Norton, 1620). Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism: on the Idea of a Patriot King: and on the State of Parties, at the Accession of King George the First (London: A. Millar, 1749). 265 –––––. Political Writings, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). –––––. Remarks on the History of England (London: R. Francklin, 1743). Boulainvilliers, Comte de, An Historical Account of the Antient Parliaments of France, or States-General of the Kingdom. In Fourteen Letters., trans. Charles Forman, 2 vols (London: J. Brindley, 1739). –––––. Histoire de l'ancien gouvernement de la France, 3 vols (The Hague & Amsterdam, 1727). Brady, Robert, A complete history of England, from the first entrance of the Romans under the conduct of Julius Caesar, unto the end of the reign of King Henry III (London: T. Newcomb & S. Lowndes, 1685). –––––. A full and clear answer to a book, written by William Pettit Esq; printed in the year 1680: by which it appears, that he hath mistaken the meaning of the histories and records he hath cited, and misapplyed them (London: S Lowndes, 1681). –––––. An Historical Treatise of Cities, and Burghs or Boroughs, 2nd edn (London: J. Nutt, 1704). –––––. An introduction to the old English history (London: S. Lowndes, 1684). Buchanan, George, Buchanan’s History of Scotland, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: D. Midwinter, A. Ward et al, 1733). –––––. De iure regni apud Scotos (Edinburgh: J. Ross, 1579). –––––. Rerum Scoticarum historia (Edinburgh: A. Arbuthnot, 1582). Carte, Thomas, A Defence of English History against the Misrepresentations of M. de Rapin Thoyras (London: J. Wilford, 1734). –––––. A General History of England, 4 vols (London: J. Hodges, 1747-55). Craig, John, ‘Account of the life and writings of John Millar, esq.’, in John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, an Enquiry into the Circumstances which give rise to Influence and Authority, in the different Members of Society, ed. John Craig, 4th edn (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1806), i-cxxxiv. Dalrymple, Sir John, An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (London: Andrew Millar, 1757). –––––. An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain, 2nd edn (London: A. Millar, 1758). 266 –––––. Considerations upon the Policy of Entails in Great Britain (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1764). –––––. Considerations upon the Polity of Entails in a Nation (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1765). –––––. Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland from the dissolution of the last parliament of Charles II until the sea battle of La Hogue (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1771). Defoe, Daniel, The anatomy of Exchange-Alley: or, a system of stock-jobbing. (London: E. Smith, 1719). Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, L’abbé, Histoire critique de l’établissement de la monarchie françoise dans le Gaules, 3 vols (Paris: Osmont, 1734). Echard, Laurence, The History of England. From the First Entrance of Julius Caesar and the Romans, To the End of the Reign of King James the First, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Jacob Tonson, 1718). Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh and London: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, and A. Millar & T. Caddel, 1767). –––––. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966). –––––. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). –––––. The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, 2 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995). –––––. The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 3 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1783). Filmer, Robert, The Freeholder’s Grand Inquest (London: [n.p.], 1679). –––––. Patriarcha and other Political Works of Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949). –––––. Patriarcha, or, the natural power of kings (London: Walter Davis, 1680). Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, Two discourses concerning the affairs of Scotland; written in the year 1698 (Edinburgh: [n.p.], 1698). Fleury, L’abbé The History of the Origine of the French Laws, trans. J. Beaver (London: D. Browne, 1724). 267 Foote, Samuel, The Devil Upon Two Sticks (London: T. Cadell, 1778). Gordon, Thomas, and John Trenchard, Cato’s Letters, 4 vols (London: W. Wilkins et al., 1724). Guthrie, William, A General History of England: from the Invasion of the Romans under Julius Caesar, to the late Revolution in 1688, 3 vols (London: T. Waller, 1744- 51). Hamilton, William, Contemplation: or, the Triumph of Love (Edinburgh: Hamilton & Balfour, 1747). Harrington, James, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. John Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Hénault, Charles-Jean-François, A New Chronological Abridgement of the History of France, 5th edn, trans. Thomas Nugent, 2 vols (London: J. Nourse, 1762). Hervey, Lord John, Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compar’d (London: J. Roberts, 1734). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). –––––. On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Home, Henry, Lord Kames, ‘Considerations upon the state of Scotland with respect to Entails: addressed to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, with accompanying letter. Edinburgh, 29 August 1759.’, in W.C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 327-31. –––––. The Decisions of the Court of Session from its first institution to the present time, 2 vols (Edinburgh: R. Watkins, 1741). –––––. Elements of Criticism, 3 vols (Edinburgh: A. Millar, 1762). –––––. Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid et al., 1751). –––––. Essays upon Several Subjects in Law (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, 1732). –––––. Historical Law-Tracts, 2 vols (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1758). –––––. Loose Hints upon Education, chiefly concerning the Culture of the Heart (Edinburgh: J. Bell, 1781). 268 –––––. Remarkable Decisions of the Court of Session, from 1716 to 1728 (Edinburgh: T. Ruddiman, 1728). –––––. Sketches of the History of Man, ed. James Harris, 3 vols (Indianapolis, IN.: Liberty Fund, 2007). Hughes, John, and White Kennett eds., A complete history of England: with the lives of all the kings and queens thereof; from the earliest account of time, to the death of His late Majesty King William III, 3 vols (London: Aylmer et al., 1706). Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. D.F. Norton and M.J. Norton, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). –––––. A Treatise of Human Nature: being an Attempt to introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, vol. I (London: J. Noon, 1739). –––––. A Treatise of Human Nature: being an Attempt to introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, vol. II (London: T. Longman, 1740). –––––. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (London: A. Millar, 1751). –––––. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 2 vols (London & Edinburgh: A. Millar, A. Kincaid & A. Donaldson, 1764). –––––. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 2 vols (London & Edinburgh: A. Millar, A. Kincaid & A. Donaldson, 1764). –––––. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 4 vols (London: A. Millar, 1760). –––––. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987). –––––. Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1741). –––––. Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn (London: A. Millar, 1748). –––––. Essays, Moral and Political: volume II (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1742). –––––. The History of England under the House of Tudor, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759). –––––. The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1773). –––––. The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1778). –––––. The History of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the accession of Henry VII, 2 vols (London: Andrew Millar, 1762). 269 –––––. The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols (London: Andrew Millar, 1762). –––––. The History of England: from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, ed. William Todd, 6 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983). –––––. The History of Great Britain: the reigns of James I and Charles I, ed. Duncan Forbes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). –––––. The History of Great Britain. Vol II. Containing the Commonwealth, and the reigns of Charles II and James II (London: Andrew Millar, 1757). –––––. The History of Great Britain. Vol. I. Containing the Reigns of James I. and Charles I. (Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill, 1754). –––––. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Grieg, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932). –––––. New Letters of David Hume, eds. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). –––––. Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (London: A. Millar, 1748). –––––. Political Discourses (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, R. Fleming, and A. Donaldson, 1752). Hurd, Richard, The Early Letters of Bishop Richard Hurd, 1739-1762, ed. Sarah Brewer (Reading: Boydell Press, 1995). –––––. Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: A. Millar, 1762). –––––. Moral and Political Dialogues (London: A. Millar, 1759). Hutcheson, Francis, ‘On the Natural Sociability of Mankind’, in James Moore and Michael Silverthorne eds., Francis Hutcheson: Logic, Metaphysics and Natural Sociability (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 191-217. Knox, John, First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva: [J. Poullain,]1558). Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; repr. 1988). Macaulay, Catharine, Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes’s philosophical rudiments of government and society. With a short sketch of a democratical form of government, in a letter to Signior Paoli (London: T. Cadell, 1767). –––––. Observations on a pamphlet, entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 4th edn (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1770). 270 –––––. The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols (London: J. Nourse, 1763-83). –––––. The History of England from the Revolution to the present time, in a series of letters to a friend (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1778). MacQueen, Daniel, Letters on Mr. Hume’s History of Great Britain (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & A. Donaldson, 1756). Madox, Thomas, Firma Burgi: or, an historical essay concerning the cities, towns and buroughs of England (London: William Bowyer, 1726). Maitland, Frederic William, Why the History of English Law is not written: an inaugural lecture delivered in the Arts School at Cambridge on 13th October, 1888 (London: C.J. Clay & Sons, 1888). The manuscripts of the House of Lords, 1689-1690; The manuscripts of S.H. le Fleming, Esq., of Rydal Hall; The manuscripts of the Duke of Athole, K.T., and of the Earl of Home, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 12th report (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889-91). Millar, John, An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688, 4 vols (London: J. Mawman, 1803). –––––. An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the accession of the House of Stewart (London: A. Strachan and T. Cadell, 1787). –––––. An Historical View of the English government: from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688, eds. Mark Phillips and Dale Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006). –––––. Letters of Crito, on the Causes, Objects, and Consequences of the Present War (Edinburgh: J. Johnstone, 1796). –––––. Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (London: W. and J. Richardson, 1771). The Minute Book of the Faculty of Advocates, vol. 3, Stair Society vol. 46 (Edinburgh: Stair Society, 1999). Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, ed. David Lowenthal (New York: The Free Press, 1965; repr. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). 271 –––––. Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains, et de leur decadence (Edinburgh: Balfour & Neill, 1751). –––––. De l'esprit des loix: ou Du rapport que les loix doivent avoir avec la constitution de chaque gouvernement, les moeurs, le climat, la religion, le commerce, &c., à quoi l'auteur a ajouté, des recherches nouvelles sur les loix romaines touchant les successions, sur les loix françoises, & sur les loix féodales, 2 vols (Geneva: Barillot & Sons, 1748). –––––. De l’esprit des loix (Edinburgh: G. Hamilton & J. Balfour, 1750). –––––. Le temple de Gnide (Paris: Simart, 1725). –––––. Oeuvres complètes, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1949-51). –––––. Persian Letters, trans. C.J. Betts (London: Penguin, 1973; repr. 2004). –––––. Persian Letters. Translated from the French of M. de secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Author of the Spirit of Laws (Glasgow: R. Urie, 1751). –––––. Reflections on the causes of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire (Glasgow: R. Urie, 1752). –––––. The Spirit of Laws. Translated from the French of M. de secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, trans. Thomas Nugent, 2 vols (London: J. Nourse, 1750). –––––. The Spirit of Laws. Written originally in French by M. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu: and translated from the edition published at Edinburgh in 1750, with the author’s latest corrections and illustrations (Aberdeen: F. Douglass and W. Murray, 1756). –––––. The Spirit of the Laws, eds. A.M. Cohler, B.C. Miller and H.S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). –––––. Two Chapters of A celebrated French Work, entitled, De l’Esprit des loix, Translated into English. One, Treating of the Constitution of England; Another Of the Character and Manners which result from this Constitution (Edinburgh: Hamilton & Balfour, 1750). Murray, Patrick, Lord Elibank, Queries relating to the Proposed Plan for Altering the Entails in Scotland (Edinburgh: [n.p.], 1765). Oldmixon, John, The Critical History of England, Ecclesiastical and Civil (London: J. Pemberton, 1724). –––––. The History of England, during the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I (London: Cox, Ford, and Hett, 1735). 272 –––––. The History of England, during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (London: J. Pemberton, 1730). Petyt, William, The antient right of the Commons of England asserted (London: T. Bassett, 1680). Pezron, L’abbé Paul-Yves, L’antiquité de la nation et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appellez Gaulois (Paris: P. Marchand and G. Martin, 1703). Pufendorf, Samuel, The Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennett, 5th edn (London: J. and J. Bonwicke et al., 1749). –––––. On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). [Ramsay, Allan,] An Essay on the Constitution of England (London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hont, 1765). Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de, Histoire d’Angleterre, 8 vols (The Hauge: A. de Rogissart, 1724). –––––. Histoire d’Angleterre, 10 vols (The Hauge: A. de Rogissart, 1724-27). –––––. The History of England, trans. J. Templeman, 2 vols (London: E. Rider, 1734). –––––. The History of England, trans. Tindal, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: J., J., and P. Knapton, 1732-33). –––––. The History of England: as well ecclesiastical as civil, trans. John Kelly, 3 vols (London: J. Mechell, 1732). –––––. The history of England: as well ecclesiastical as civil, trans. Nicholas Tindal, 15 vols (London: J. Knapton, 1726-31). ‘The Reason of the Progress of Liberty in England’, The Daily Gazetteer 30 (2 August 1735). Robertson, William, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, with a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, 3 vols (London: W. Strahan, 1769). –––––. The History of Scotland, during the reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI. till his Accession to the Crown of England, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759). –––––. ‘Reasons of Dissent from the judgment and resolution of the commission, March 11, 1752, resolving to inflict no censure on the Presbytery of 273 Dunfermline for their disobedience in relation to the settlement of Inverkeithing’, in Annals of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh: J. Johnstone, 1807), I, 231-42. –––––. The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance, and its Connexion with the Success of his Religion, considered (Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour & Neill, 1755). Scobell, Henry, ed., A Collection of Acts and Ordinances of General Use, made in the Parliament (London: H. Hills & J. Field, 1658). The Scots Magazine, vol. IX (Edinburgh: W. Sands et al., 1747). The Scots Magazine, vol. XXVII (Edinburgh: W. Sands et al., 1765). Scott, William, Francis Hutcheson: his Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900). Shaw, Samuel, An accurate alphabetical index of the registered entails in Scotland (Edinburgh: self-published, 1784). Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981). –––––. Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, P.G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982). –––––. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Smollett, Tobias, A Complete History of England, 4 vols (London: J. Rivington & J. Fletcher, 1757-58). Spelman, Henry, Archaeologus (London: J. Beale, 1626). Steuart Denham, Sir James, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, 2 vols (London: Andrew Millar, 1767). –––––. An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, eds. Andrew Skinner, Noboru Kobayashi, Hiroshi Mizuta, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998). Stephen, Leslie, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, & co., 1876). 274 Stewart, Dugald, Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe, in Sir William Hamilton ed., The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, 11 vols (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co., 1854-60; repr. Bristol: Thommes Press, 1994), I, 189-97. Superiorities display’d: or, Scotland’s grievance, by reason of the slavish dependence of the people upon their great men (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, 1746). Swinton, John, A Free Disquisition Concerning the law of Entails in Scotland (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1765). Tacitus, De origine et situ Germanorum, in E.H. Warmington ed., Agricola; Germania; Dialogus (Cambridge, MA.: Loeb Classical Library, 1970), 127-215. Tacitus, The Works of Tacitus, trans. Thomas Gordon, 2 vols (London: J. Peele, 1728-31). Temple, Sir William, Introduction to the History of England (London: R. and R. Simson, 1708). Tyrrell, James, Bibliotheca politica: or An enquiry into the ancient constitution of the English government: both in respect to the just extent of regal power, and the rights and liberties of the subject (London: R. Baldwin, 1694). –––––. Patriarcha non monarcha: The patriarch unmonarch’d: being observations on a late treatise and divers other miscellanies, published under the name of Sir Robert Filmer Baronet. In which the falseness of those opinions that would make monarchy jure divino are laid open: and the true principles of government and property (especially in our kingdom) asserted by a lover of truth and of his country. (London: R. Janeway, 1681). Tytler, Alexander Fraser, of Woodhouselee, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, 2 vols (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1807). Virgil, Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid I-VI, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA.: Loeb Classical Library, 1916; rev. ed., 1999). Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, trans. John Lockman (London: C. Davis & A. Lyon, 1733). Warburton, William, Letters from a late Eminent Prelate to one of his Friends (Kidderminster: George Gower, 1809). 275 Secondary manuscript sources Baumstark, Moritz, ‘David Hume: The Making of a Philosophical Historian: a Reconsideration’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh (2007). Hopkins, Thomas, ‘Say and Sismondi on the Political Economy of Post- Revolutionary Europe’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (2011). Pocock, John, ‘Cambridge Beyond Cambridge: Political Thought and History’, unpublished paper delivered to the Cambridge Seminar in Political Thought and Intellectual History, 12 May 2008. –––––. ‘The Controversy over the Origin of the Commons, 1675-88: A Chapter in the History of English Historical and Political Thought’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (1952). Robinson, Lucian, ‘Religion, Morality, and History in the Political Thought of François Guizot’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (2016). Secondary printed sources Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972). –––––. Dialektik der Aufklärung: philosophische Fragmente, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947). Ahnert, Thomas, ‘Fortschrittgeschichte und Religiöse Aufklärung. William Robertson und die Deutung außereuropäischer Kulturen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23 (2010), 101-22. –––––. The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690-1805 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). D’Albassin, Nelly Girard, Un précurseur de Montesquieu: Rapin-Thoyras (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969). Allan, David, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). 276 Armitage, David, ‘The Scottish vision of empire: intellectual origins of the Darien venture’, in John Robertson ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 97- 201. Baier, Annette, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflection on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Bailyn, B., and J. Clive, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America”, William and Mary Quarterly 11 (1954), 200-13. Bentley, Michael, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). –––––. Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870- 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Berry, Christopher, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Betts, Jocelyn, ‘After the Freeholder: Republican and Liberal Themes in the Works of Samuel Laing’, Modern Intellectual History, online edn, May 2017 [https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000154, accessed 9 August 2018]. Biagini, Eugenio, ‘Neo-roman liberalism: “republican” values and British liberalism, ca. 1860-1875’, History of European Ideas 29 (2003), 55-72. Binoche, Bertrand, Introduction à De l’esprit des lois de Montesquieu (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015). –––––. ed., Les équivoques de la civilisation (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005). –––––. Les trois sources des philosophies de l’histoire (1764-1798) (Quebec: Presses de l’université Laval, 2008). Blaas, Piet, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). Black, Jeremy, Jacobitism and British Foreign Policy under the First two Georges, 1714- 1760, Royal Stuart Papers 32 (Huntingdon: Royal Stuart Society, 1988). –––––. Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Macmillan, 1990). 277 Bongie, Laurence, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Bonnyman, Brian, The Third Duke of Buccleuch and Adam Smith: Estate Management and Improvement in Enlightenment Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Bourke, Richard, Empire & Revolution: the Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Breisach, Ernst, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Brett, Annabel, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). –––––. ‘“The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth”: Thomas Hobbes and and Late Renaissance Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics’, Hobbes Studies 23 (2010), 72-102. Brewer, John, Party, Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). –––––. The Sinews of Power: War and the English State, 1688-1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Brewer, Sarah, and G.M. Ditchfield, ‘Hurd, Richard (1720-1808)’, ODNB, online edn, January 2008 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14249, accessed 14 August 2018]. Brooks, Christopher, and Kevin Sharpe, ‘Debate: History, English Law and the Renaissance’, Past and Present 72 (1976), 133-42. Brown, Iain Gordon, ‘The pamphlets of Allan Ramsay the Younger’, The Book Collector 37 (1988), 55-85. Brown, M., ‘Creating a Canon: Dugald Stewart’s Construction of the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Universities 16 (2000), 135-54. Browning, Reed, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 175-210. Bryson, Gladys, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945). 278 –––––. ‘Sociology considered as moral philosophy’, Sociological Review 24 (1932), 26-36. –––––. ‘Some eighteenth century conceptions of society’, Sociological Review 31 (1939), 401-21. Burgess, Glenn, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). –––––. The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: an introduction to English Political Thought, 1603-1642 (London: Macmillan, 1992). Burrow, John, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and their English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). –––––. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). –––––. with Donald Winch and Stefan Collini eds., That Noble Science of Politics: a Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). –––––. Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Butterfield, Herbert, The Englishman and his History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944). –––––. Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949). –––––. Christianity in European History, Riddell Memorial Lectures 23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951). –––––. The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931). Cairns, John, ‘Historical Introduction’, in Kenneth Reid and Reinhard Zimmermann eds., A History of Scots Private Law, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 14-184. –––––. with Knud Haakonssen, ‘Millar, John (1735-1801)’, ODNB, online edn, September 2004 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18716, accessed 14 August 2018]. Cannon, John, ‘Yorke, Charles (1722-1770)’, ODNB, online edn, September 2004 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30237, accessed 4 August 2018]. 279 Carcassonne, Elie, Montesquieu et le probleme de la constitution francaise au xviiie siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1927). Carrington, Dorothy, ‘The Corsican Constitution of Pasquale Paoli (1755-1769), English Historical Review 88 (1973), 481-503. Carter, J., and J. Pittock eds., Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987). Cash, Arthur, John Wilkes: the Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Cazenove, M. Raoul de, Rapin-Thoyras: sa famille, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Aubry, 1866). Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: from Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Christianson, Paul, ‘Political Thought in Early Stuart England’, Historical Journal 30 (1987), 955-70. Clark, J.C.D., English Society, 1660-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Clive, John, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802-1815 (London: Faber & Faber, 1957). –––––. ‘The Social Background of the Scottish Renaissance’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison eds., Scotland in the Age of Improvement: Essays in Scottish History in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), 225-45. Colley, Linda, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981), 1-19. –––––. In Defiance of Oligarchy: the Tory Party 1714-60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Collini, Stefan, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). –––––. English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). –––––. ‘Whigissimo’, London Review of Books 27/14 (2005), 24-27. 280 Cooper, J.P., ‘Patterns of inheritance and settlement by great landowners from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries’, in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E.P. Thompson eds., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200- 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 192-328. Courtney, C.P., ‘Montesquieu and English Liberty’, in David Carrithers, Michael Mosher, and Paul Rahe eds., Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of Laws (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 273-91. Cox, Iris, Montesquieu and the History of French Laws (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). –––––. ‘Montesquieu and the History of Laws’, in Montesquieu’s Science of Politics, 409-31. Cromartie, Alan, The Constitutionalist Revolution: an Essay on the History of England, 1450-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Cruickshanks, Eveline, ‘Lord North, Christopher Layer and the Atterbury Plot: 1720-23’, in idem. and Jeremy Black eds., The Jacobite Challenge (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 92-106. –––––. ‘The political Management of Sir Robert Walpole, 1720-42’, in Jeremy Black ed., Britain in the Age of Walpole (London: Macmillan, 1984), 23-45. –––––. Political Untouchables: the Tories and the ’45 (London: Duckworth, 1979). Daiches, David, The Paradox of Scottish Culture: the Eighteenth-Century Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). Dale, Richard, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Daly, James, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). Davie, G.E., The Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961). Davies, Kate, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: the Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). de Dijn, Annelien, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). –––––. “Montesquieu’s Controversial Context: The Spirit of the Laws as a Monarchist Tract,” History of Political Thought 34 (2013), 66–88. 281 –––––. ‘Was Montesquieu a Liberal Republican?’, The Review of Politics 76 (2014), 21–41. Dedieu, Joseph, Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France: les sources anglaises de “l’esprit des lois” (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1909). Desserud, D., ‘Commerce and Political Participation in Montesquieu’s letter to Domville’, History of European Ideas 25:3 (1999), 135-51. Devine, Tom, The Transformation of Rural Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). –––––. and R. Mitchison eds., People and Society in Scotland, Vol I, 1760-1830 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988). Dickinson, H.T., Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970). –––––. ‘The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the “Glorious Revolution”’, History 61:201 (1976), 28-45. –––––. ‘George III and Parliament’, Parliamentary History 30/3 (2011), 395-413. –––––. Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977). –––––. Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London: English Universities Press, 1973). Dickson, Peter, The Financial Revolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit (London: Macmillan, 1967). Donovan, Robert K., ‘Sir John Dalrymple and the Origins of Roman Catholic Relief, 1775-1778’, Recusant History 17/2 (1984), 188-196. Douglas, David, English Scholars 2nd edn (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950). Dunn, John, ‘The identity of the bourgeois liberal republic’, in Biancamaria Fontana ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 206-226. Earl, W.L., ‘Procrustean Feudalism: An Interpretative Dilemma in English Historical Narration, 1700-1725’, Historical Journal 19 (1976), 33-52. Edelstein, Dan, The Enlightenment: a Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). –––––. and Biliana Kassabova, ‘How England fell off the Map of Voltaire’s Enlightenment’, Modern Intellectual History, online edn, April 2018 282 [https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924431800015X, accessed 3 August 2018]. Edie, Carolyn, ‘Revolution and the Rule of Law: The End of the Dispensing Power, 1689’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 10/4 (1977), 434-50. Ellis, H.A., Boulainvilliers and the French monarchy: aristocratic politics in early eighteenth- century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Emerson, R.L., Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). –––––. ‘Hume’s Intellectual Development: Part II’, in Emerson, Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 103-126. –––––. Professors, Patronage and Politics: the Aberdeen Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1992). Ferguson, William, ‘A reply to Professor Colin Kidd on Lord Dacre’s contribution to the study of Scottish history and the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Scottish Historical Review 86/221 (2007), 96-107. Fink, Zera, The Classical Republicans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945). Fleischacker, Samuel, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: a Philosophical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Fletcher, F.T.H., Montesquieu and English Politics, 1750-1800 (London: E. Arnold, 1939). Fontana, Biancamaria, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review, 1802-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). –––––. ‘Whigs and Liberals: the Edinburgh Review and the “liberal movement” in nineteenth-century Britain’, in Richard Bellamy ed., Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice (London: Routledge, 1990), 42- 58. Forbes, Duncan, ‘The European, or Cosmopolitan, Dimension in Hume’s Science of Politics’, The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 1/1 (1978), 57-61. –––––. ‘“Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, The Cambridge Journal 7/11 (1954), 643-71. 283 –––––. ‘Historismus in England’, The Cambridge Journal 4/7 (1951), 387-401. –––––. Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). –––––. ‘James Mill and India’, The Cambridge Journal 5/1 (1951), 19-34. –––––. ‘Natural Law and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner eds., The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 186-204. –––––. ‘Politics and History in David Hume’, The Historical Journal 6/2 (1963), 280-295. –––––. ‘The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott’, The Cambridge Journal 7/1 (1953), 20- 36. –––––. ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty’, in Andrew Skinner and Thomas Wilson eds., Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 179-202. Force, Pierre, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith: a Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Foucault, Michel, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003). Furet, Francois and Mona Ozouf, ‘Deux légitimations historiques de la société française au XVIIIe siècle: Mably et Boulainvilliers’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations (1979), 438-50. Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols (New York: Knopf, 1966-69). Gerrard, C., The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725- 42 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Ghosh, Peter, ‘Macaulay and the Heritage of the Enlightenment’, English Historical Review 112 (1997), 358-95. –––––. ‘Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870– 1970, by Michael Bentley’, The English Historical Review 121/494 (2006), 1509-12. Geuna, Marco, ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner eds., Republicanism: a shared European Heritage, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), II, 177-97. 284 Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, David Hume politico e storico (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1962). Goldgar, Bertrand, Walpole and the Wits: the Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-42 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1976). Goldie, Mark, ‘The English System of Liberty’, in idem. and Robert Wokler eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 40-78. Gonthier, Ursula Haskins, Montesquieu and England: Enlightened Exchanges, 1689-1755 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). Goodman, Dena, The Republic of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Gordon, Daniel, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Green, Karen, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s enlightenment faith and radical politics’, History of European Ideas 44/1 (2018), 35-48. –––––. ‘Will the real enlightenment historian please stand up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume’, in Craig Taylor and Stephen Buckle eds., Hume and the Enlightenment (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 39-53. Greenberg, Janelle Renfrow, and Corinne Comstock Weston, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Haakonssen, Knud. ‘Natural jurisprudence and the identity of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Ruth Savage ed., Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 258-79. –––––. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). –––––. The Science of a Legislator: the Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Hammersley, Rachel, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Halévy, Elie, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (London: Faber & Faber, 1934). 285 Handley, Stuart, ‘Carte, Thomas (1686-1754)’, ODNB, online edn, May 2015 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4780, accessed 3 August 2018]. Harris, James, Hume: an Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Harris, Michael, ‘Print and Politics in the Age of Walpole’, in Black ed., Britain in the Age of Walpole, 189-211. Harris, Tim, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660-1685 (London: Penguin, 2006). Hay, Denys, ‘The Historiographers Royal in England and Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review 30 (1951), 15-29. Hazard, Paul, The European Mind, the Critical Years, 1680-1715, trans. J. Lewis May (London: Hollis & Carter, 1953). –––––. La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715 (Paris: Boivin, 1934). Hicks, Philip, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 41 (2002), 170- 98. –––––. Neoclassical History and English Culture: from Clarendon to Hume (London: Macmillan, 1996). Hill, Bridget, ‘Macaulay, Catharine (1731-1791)’, ODNB, online edn, May 2012 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17344, accessed 14 August 2018]. –––––. ‘Reinterpreting the “Glorious Revolution”: Catharine Macaulay and Radical Response,’ in Gerald MacLean ed., Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 267-85. –––––. The Republican Virago: the Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Hill, Lisa, The Passionate Society: the Social, Political, and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). Hoekstra, Kinch, ‘Hobbes on the Natural condition of Mankind’, in Patricia Springborg ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 109-27. 286 Hochstrasser, Tim, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hont, Istvan, ‘Adam Smith’s history of law and government as political theory’, in Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss eds., Political Judgement: essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 131-72. –––––. ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory in the Eighteenth Century: the Problem of Authority in David Hume and Adam Smith’, in Willem Melching and Wyger Velema eds., Main Trends in Cultural History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 54-95. –––––. ‘The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, 379-418. –––––. ‘Irishmen, Scots, Jews and the Interest of England’s Commerce: The Politics of Minorities in a Modern Composite State’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi ed., Il roulo economico delle minoranze in Europa seccoli XIII-XVIII (Florence and Prato: Le Monnier, 2000), 81-112. –––––. Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2005). –––––. Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, eds. Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2015). –––––. ‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate Revisited: The Irish Origins and French Reception of the Hume Paradox’, in Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas eds., David Hume’s Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2008), 243-323. –––––. and Michael Ignatieff eds., Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hook, Andrew, and Richard Sher eds., The Glasgow Enlightenment (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1995). Hoppit, Julian, A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Howard, Alison K., ‘Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau in eighteenth century Scotland’, The Bibliotheck 2/2 (1959), 40-63. 287 Hundert, E.J., The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Ignatieff, Michael, ‘John Millar and Individualism’, in Wealth and Virtue, 317-45. Ingamells, John, ‘Ramsay, Allan, of Kinkell (1713-1784)’, ODNB, online edn, September 2015 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23073, accessed 12 August 2018]. James, Samuel, ‘J.G.A. Pocock and the idea of the “Cambridge School” in the history of political thought’, History of European Ideas, online edn, July 2018 [https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1498011, accessed 13 August 2018]. Jessop, T.E., A Bibliography of David Hume and of Scottish Philosophy from Francis Hutcheson to Lord Balfour (London: Brown & Sons, 1938). Jones, Gareth Stedman, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (London: Profile, 2004). Kaiser, Thomas E., ‘The Abbé Dubos and the Historical Defence of Monarchy in Early Eighteenth-Century France’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 267 (1989), 77-102. Kalyvas, Andreas, and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Kapossy, Béla, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Richard Whatmore eds., Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Kelley, Donald, ‘De origine feudorum: The Beginnings of an Historical Problem’, Speculum 39:2 (1964), 207-28. –––––. Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). –––––. ‘History, English Law and the Renaissance’, Past and Present 65 (1974), 24- 51. Kelly, Ian, Mr Foote’s Other Leg (London: Picador, 2012). Kendrick, Thomas, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950). Kennington, Richard, On Modern Origins (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004). Keohane, Nannerl, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 288 Kidd, Colin, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). –––––. ‘Conditional Britons: The Scots Covenanting Tradition and the Eighteenth-century British State’, English Historical Review 117 (2002), 1149- 76. –––––. ‘Eighteenth-Century Scotland and the Three Unions’, in T.C. Smout ed., Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900, Proceedings of the British Academy 127 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 171-89. –––––. ‘The ideological significance of Robertson’s History of Scotland’, in Stewart Brown ed., William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 122-45. –––––. ‘Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Scottish Historical Review 84/218 (2005), 202-220. –––––. ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship and Demonology in Scottish Historiography: A Reply to Dr. Ferguson’, The Scottish Historical Review 86/221 (2007), 108- 12. –––––. ‘The Rehabilitation of Scottish Jacobitism’, The Scottish Historical Review 77/203 (1998), 58-76. –––––. ‘Scotland's Invisible Enlightenment: Subscription and Heterodoxy in the Eighteenth-Century Kirk’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 30 (2000), 28-59. –––––. ‘Subscription, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Moderate Interpretation of History’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55/3 (2004), 502-19. –––––. Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo- British Identity, 1689 c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Kilvert, Francis, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Rev. Richard Hurd, D.D., Lord Bishop of Worcester (London: Richard Bentley, 1860). Kingston, Rebecca, Montesquieu and the Parlement of Bordeaux (Geneva: Droz, 1996). Kleer, Richard, ‘“The folly of particulars”: the political economy of the South Sea Bubble’, Financial History Review 19 (2002), 175-97. 289 Kliger, Samuel, The Goths in England: a Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1952). Koselleck, Reinhart, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1988). Kramnick, Isaac, ‘Augustan Politics and English Historiography: The Debate on The English Past, 1730-35’, History and Theory 6 (1967), 33-56. –––––. Bolingbroke and his Circle: the Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1968). Krause, Sharon, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002). –––––. ‘The Spirit of Separate Powers in Montesquieu’, Review of Politics 62/2 (2000), 231-65. Langford, Paul, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Lehmann, William C., Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930). –––––. Henry Home, Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). –––––. ‘John Millar—Historical Sociologist’, British Journal of Sociology 3 (1952), 30- 46. –––––. John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and His Contribution to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Lenman, Bruce, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689-1746 (London: Methuen, 1980). Levine, Joseph, ‘Ancients, Moderns, and History: the Continuity of English Historical Writing in the later Seventeenth Century’, in Paul Korshin ed., Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History, 1640-1800 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), 43-77. –––––. Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 290 –––––. The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Lieberman, David, ‘The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: the Jurisprudence of Lord Kames’, in Wealth and Virtue, 203-35. –––––. The Providence of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Livingston, Donald, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Lombard, Alfred, L’abbé Dubos, un initiateur de la pensée moderne (Paris: Hachette, 1913). Lukowski, Jerzy, Disorderly Liberty: the Political Culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century (London: Continuum, 2010). Macfie, A.L., The Individual in Society: Papers on Adam Smith (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967). Macinnes, Allan, Clanship, Commerce, and the House of Stuart, 1603-1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996). –––––. Union and Empire: the Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Mandelbrote, Scott, ‘The bible and national identity in the British Isles, c.1650- c.1750’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride eds., Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650-c.1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 157-82. McDaniel, Iain, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2013). McElroy, D., Scotland’s Age of Improvement: a Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Washington, D.C.: Washington State University Press, 1969). McIlwain, Charles Howard, The Growth of Political Thought in the West: from the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1932). McIntire, C.T., Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 291 McKendrick, Neil, ed., Historical Perspectives. Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London: Europa, 1974). Medick, Hans, Naturzustand und Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft: die Ursprünge der bürgerlichen Sozialtheorie als Geschichtsphilosophie und Sozialwissenschaft bei Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke und Adam Smith (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1973). Meek, Ronald, “The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology”, in J. Saville, ed., Democracy and the Labour movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), 84-102. –––––. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). –––––. ‘Smith, Turgot, and the “Four Stages” Theory’, in Smith, Marx, and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1977), 18-33. Meinecke, Friedrich, Historism: the Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J.E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1972). Menary, George, The Life and Letters of Duncan Forbes of Culloden (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1936). Miller, David, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Miller, Nicholas, John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017). Miller, Peter, ‘Marx and Material Culture: Istvan Hont and the History of Scholarship’, in Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Sophus Reinert, and Richard Whatmore eds., Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 23-53. Mitchell, Leslie, Holland House (London: Duckworth, 1980). Momigliano, Arnaldo, Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966). Monod, Paul, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 292 –––––. ‘Thomas Carte, the Druids and British National Identity’, in idem., Murray Pittock, and Daniel Szechi eds., Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 131-48. Moore, James, ‘Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Rebecca Kingston ed., Montesquieu and his Legacy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), 179-195. –––––. ‘Natural Rights in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, 291-316. Moore, James, and Michael Silverthorne, ‘Gershom Carmichael and the natural jurisprudence tradition in eighteenth-century Scotland’, in Wealth and Virtue, 73-89. –––––. ‘Natural sociability and natural rights in the moral philosophy of Gershom Carmichael’, in V. Hope ed., Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 1-12. Morgan, P., ‘The Abbé Pezron and the Celts’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 2 (1965), 286-95. Mornet, D., Les origines intellectuelles de la révolution française, 1715-1787 (Paris: Colin, 1933). Mossner, Ernest Campbell, The Life of David Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1954). Murdoch, Alexander, ‘The People Above’: Politics and Administration in Mid-Eighteenth- Century Scotland (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1980). –––––. and Richard Sher, ‘Patronage and Party in the Church of Scotland, 1750- 1800’, in Norman Macdougall ed., Politics and Society: Scotland 1408-1929 (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1983), 197-220. Murray, C.B., Duncan Forbes of Culloden (London: International Publishing Company, 1936). Namier, Lewis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1929). Nelson, Eric, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 293 O’Brien, Karen, ‘Between enlightenment and stadial history: William Robertson on the history of Europe’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 16/1 (1993), 53-64. –––––. Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). –––––. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Okie, Laird, Augustan Historical Writing: Histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991). Oz-Salzberger, Fania, ‘Ferguson, Adam (1723-1816), ODNB, online edn, October 2009 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/9315, accessed 14 August 2018]. Palladini, Fiametta, “Pufendorf Disciple of Hobbes: The Nature of Man and the State of Nature: The Doctrine of Socialitas,” History of European Ideas, 34/1 (2008), 26-60. Pangle, Thomas, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on the “Spirit of the Laws” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). –––––. The Theological Basis of Modernity in Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Parry, Jonathan, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830-1866 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pascal, Roy, “Property and Society: The Scottish Historical School of the Eighteenth Century”, Modern Quarterly 1 (1938), 167-79. Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Phillips, Mark, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). –––––. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Phillipson, Nicholas, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Allen Lane, 2010). –––––. ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Lawrence Stone ed., The University in Society, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), II, 407-48. 294 –––––. ‘Dalrymple, Sir John, of Cousland (1726-1810)’, ODNB, online edn, October 2013 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7055, accessed 4 August 2018]. –––––. ‘Lawyers, Landowners, and the Civic Leadership of Post-Union Scotland’, Juridical Review 21 (1976), 97-120. –––––. David Hume: the Philosopher as Historian (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989; repr. London: Penguin, 2011). –––––. ‘Providence and progress: an introduction to the historical thought of William Robertson’, in Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, 55-74. –––––. ‘Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in P. Fritz and D. Williams eds., City and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), 125-47. Piirimäe, Eva, and Alexander Schmidt, ‘Between Morality and Anthropology— Sociability in Enlightenment Thought’, History of European Ideas 41/5 (2015), 571-88. Pincus, Steven, 1688: the first Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Pittock, Murray, Jacobitism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). Plassart, Anna, The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Plumb, Jack, Sir Robert Walpole, 2 vols (London: Cresset Press, 1956-60). –––––. The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967). Pocock, John, ‘Afterword: The Machiavellian Moment: A Very Short Retrospect and Re-Introduction’, History of European Ideas 43/2 (2017), 215-21. –––––. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; repr. 1987, with a Retrospect). –––––. Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999-2015). –––––. ‘Catharine Macaulay: patriot historian’, in Hilda Smith ed., Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 243-58. 295 –––––. ‘Classical and Civil History: the Transformation of Humanism’, Cromohs 1, online edn, 1996 [http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/1_96/pocock.html, accessed 10 August 2018]. –––––. ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello, M. Firpo, L. Guerci, and G. Ricuperati eds., L’età dei lumi: studi storici sul Settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, 2 vols (Naples: Jovene, 1985), I, 523-62. –––––. ‘Commerce, Credit, and Sovereignty: The Nation-State as Historical Critique’, in Markets, Morals, Politics, 265-85. –––––. ‘Deconstructing Europe’, London Review of Books 13/24 (1991), 6-10. –––––. ‘From The Ancient Constitution to Barbarism and Religion; The Machiavellian Moment, the history of political thought and the history of historiography’, History of European Ideas 43/2 (2017), 129-46. –––––. ‘Historical Introduction’ in idem. ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 1-155. –––––. ‘Historiography and Enlightenment: A View of Their History’, Modern Intellectual History 5 (2008), 83-96. –––––. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975; repr. 2003). –––––. ‘The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: a Study in History and Ideology’, Journal of Modern History 53 (1981), 49-72. –––––. ‘The mobility of property and the rise of eighteenth-century sociology’, in Anthony Parel & Thomas Flanagan eds., Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1979), 141-67. –––––. ‘Modes of Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 5 (1976), 91-102. –––––. ‘Perceptions of Modernity in Early Modern Historical Thinking’, Intellectual History Review 17 (2007), 79-92. –––––. Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). –––––. ‘The Politics of Historiography’, Institute of Historical Research 78 (2005), 1- 14. 296 –––––. ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). –––––. Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Pye, Tom, ‘David Hume the Polymath’, History of European Ideas 43/6 (2016), 683- 86. –––––. ‘Property, Space, and Sacred History in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government’, Modern Intellectual History 15/2 (2018), 327-52. Raab, Felix, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge, 1964). Rahe, Paul, ‘The Book That Never Was: Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Romans in Historical Context’, History of Political Thought 26 (2005), 43-89. –––––. Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). –––––. Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Raynor, David, ‘Hume and Robertson’s History of Scotland’, Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies 10/1 (1987), 59-63. Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge: MA.: Harvard University Press, 1959). Robertson, John, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). –––––. The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1740 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). –––––. The Enlightenment: a very short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). –––––. ‘Hume, David (1711-1776)’, ODNB, online edn, January 2009 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14141, accessed 7 August 2018]. –––––. ‘Political Economy and the “feudal system” in Enlightenment Naples: outline of a problem’, in Richard Davies and Simon Butterwick eds., Peripheries of Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), 65-86. 297 –––––. The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, in Wealth and Virtue, 137-179. –––––. ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’. Rivista Storica Italiana 108 (1996), 792-829. –––––. ‘Universal Monarchy and the liberties of Europe: David Hume’s critique of an English Whig doctrine’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 349-77. Rogers, Pat, ‘Oldmixon, John (1672/3-1742)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, January 2008 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20695, accessed 3 August 2018]. Ross, Ian Simpson, Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Rothschild, Emma, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Rubinelli, Lucia, ‘How to think beyond sovereignty: On Sieyès and constituent power’, European Journal of Political Theory, online edn, April 2016 [https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885116642170, accessed 12 August 2018]. Rudé, George, Wilkes and Liberty: a Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Runciman, David, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Russell, Paul, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Sagar, Paul, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Sainsbury, John, Disaffected Patriots: London supporters of Revolutionary America (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987). Schneewind, Jerome, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 298 Schnorrenberg, Barbara, ‘The Brood Hen of Faction: Mrs Macaulay and Radical Politics, 1765-1775’, Albion 11 (1979), 33-45. Scott, H.M., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1995). Sebastiani, Silvia, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Sewell, Keith, ‘The “Herbert Butterfield problem” and its Resolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64/4 (2003), 599-618. Shackleton, Robert, Essays on Montesquieu and the Enlightenment, eds. David Gilson and Martin Smith (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988). –––––. Montesquieu: a Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). –––––. ‘Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, and the Separation of Powers’, French Studies 3 (1949), 25-38. Shaw, John Stuart, The Management of Scottish Society 1707-1764 (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1983). Sher, Richard, ‘1688 and 1788: William Robertson on revolution in Britain and France’, in P. Dukes and J. Dunkley eds., Culture and revolution (London: Pinter, 1990), 98-109. –––––. Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: the Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985). –––––. ‘From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue and Commerce’ in David Wootton ed., Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 368-402. –––––. The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth- Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Rodgers, C.P., ‘Humanism, History and the Common Law’, Journal of Legal History 6 (1985), 129-56. Simpson, A.W.B., ‘Entails and Perpetuities’, The Juridical Review 24 (1979), 1-20. 299 Skinner, Andrew, ‘A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology?’, in Ian Bradley & Michael Howard eds., Classical and Marxian Political Economy: Essays in Honour of Ronald L. Meek (London: Macmillan, 1982), 79-115. –––––. ‘Adam Smith: an Economic Interpretation of History’, in Essays on Adam Smith, 154-79. –––––. ‘Economics and History: The Scottish Enlightenment’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 12 (1965), 1-22. –––––. and Roy Campbell eds., The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982). –––––. ‘Steuart, Sir James, of Coltness and Westshield, third baronet (1713- 1780)’, ODNB, online edn, May 2006 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7478, accessed 14 August 2018]. Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). –––––. ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 8/2 (1964), 151-78. –––––. Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). –––––. ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in Neil McKendrick ed., Historical Perspectives. Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London: Europa, 1974), 93-112. –––––. ‘The State’, in Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russel Hanson eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 90-132. Skjönsberg, Max, ‘Adam Ferguson on Partisanship, Party Conflict, and Popular Participation’, Modern Intellectual History, online edn, April 2017 [https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000099, accessed 4 August 2018]. –––––. ‘Lord Bolingbroke’s Theory of Party and Opposition’, Historical Journal 59/4 (2016), 947-973. Small, Albion, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology: a Study in the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Clifton: A.M. Kelley, 1972). 300 Smith, R.J., The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Smitten, Jeffrey, The Life of William Robertson: Minister, Historian, and Principal (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Smout, T.C., A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830 (London: Collins, 1969). –––––. Scottish Trade on the eve of Union, 1660-1707 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963). Sonenscher, Michael, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). –––––. ‘Introduction’, in Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings, ed. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), vii-lxiv. –––––. ‘Liberty, Autonomy, and Republican Historiography: Civic Humanism in Context’, in Markets, Morals, Politics, 161-211. –––––. Sans-Culottes: an Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). –––––. Work & Wages: Natural law, politics, and the eighteenth-century French trades, 2nd paperback edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Spector, Céline, Montesquieu: liberté, droit et histoire (Paris: Michalon, 2010). –––––. Montesquieu: Pouvoirs, richesses et sociétés (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004). –––––. ‘Was Montesquieu liberal? The Spirit of the Laws in the History of liberalism’, in R. Geenans and H. Rosenblatt eds., French Liberalism: from Montesquieu to the present day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 57-73. Starobinski, Jean, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). Stein, Peter, Legal Evolution: the Story of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Stewart, John B., The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 301 Stewart, M.A., ‘Hume’s Intellectual Development, 1711-1752’, in M. Frasca- Spada and P. J.E. Kail eds., Impressions of Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 11-58. Strauss, Leo, What is Political Philosophy? (New York: Free Press, 1959). Sullivan, M.G., ‘Rapin de Thoyras, Paul (1661-1725)’, ODNB, online edn, September 2004 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23145, accessed 3 August 2018]. –––––. ‘Rapin, Hume, and the Identity of the Historian in Eighteenth Century England’, History of European Ideas 28 (2002), 145-62. Sutherland, Lucy, The City of London and the Opposition to Government, 1768-1774: a Study in the Rise of Metropolitan Radicalism (London: Athlone Press, 1959). Szechi, Daniel, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688-1788 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Tapsell, Grant, ed., The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in honour of John Morrill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013). Thirsk, Joan, ‘The European debate on customs of inheritance, 1500-1700’, in Family and Inheritance, 177-192. Thomas, P.D.G., John Wilkes: a Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Tierney, Brian, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150-1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). Timperley, L., ‘The Pattern of Landholding in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in M.L. Parry and T.R. Slater eds., The Making of the Scottish Countryside (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980), 137-155. Tomaselli, Sylvana, ‘The Spirit of Nations’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Political Thought, 7-39. Trevor-Roper, Hugh, History and the Enlightenment, ed. John Robertson (Yale: Yale University Press, 2010). –––––. ‘Our First Whig Historian: Paul de Rapin-Thoyras’, in Irene Scouloudi ed., Huguenots in Britain and their French Background, 1550-1800 (London: Macmillan, 1987), 3-19. 302 –––––. ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in idem., Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967), 1-45. Tuck, Richard, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). –––––. The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). –––––. The Sleeping Sovereign: the Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Venturi, Franco, Il populismo russo, 2 vols (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1952). –––––. Saggi sull’Europa illuminista I: Alberto Radicati di Passerano (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1954). Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine, Montesquieu (Paris: Gallimard, 2017). –––––. Tacite et Montesquieu, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 232 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985). Walker, D.M., A Legal History of Scotland, 5 vols (Edinburgh: W. Green & Son, 1988-98). –––––. The Scottish Legal System (Edinburgh: W. Green & Son, 1981). Ward, Lee, ‘Montesquieu on Federalism and Anglo-Gothic Constitutionalism’, Publius: the Journal of Federalism 37/4 (2007), 551-77. Watley, Christopher, ‘Economic Causes and Consequences of the Union of 1707: A Survey’, The Scottish Historical Review 68/186 (1989), 150-181. Wexler, V.G., David Hume and the History of England (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1979). Whatmore, Richard, ‘French Perspectives on British Politics, 1688-1734’, in Jean- Phillipe Genet and François-Joseph Ruggiu eds., Les idées passent-elles la Manche? (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), 83-99. Whelan, Frederick G., Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Wiles, R.M., Serial Publication in England Before 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). 303 Winch, Donald, Adam Smith’s Politics: an essay in historiographic revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). –––––. Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750- 1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Withey, Lynne, ‘Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda’, The Journal of British Studies 16 (1976), 59- 83. Wolin, Sheldon, ‘Hume and Conservatism’, American Political Science Review 48/4 (1954), 999-1016. Womersley, David, ‘Lord Bolingbroke and Eighteenth-Century Historiography’, The Eighteenth Century 28/3 (1987), 217-34. Wood, Paul, The Aberdeen Enlightenment: The Arts Curriculum in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1993). –––––. ‘The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Science 27 (1989), 29-123. Wootton, David, ‘David Hume, “the historian”’, in D.F. Norton ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 447- 79. Wright, Johnson, ‘Montesquieuean Moments: The Spirit of the Laws and Republicanism,’ Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 35 (2007), 149-69. Young, Brian, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debates from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Zagorin, Perez, Francis Bacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).