Commerce and Politics in Hume's History of England (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History) 9781783271870, 1783271876

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I
1. Commerce as an ‘Affair of State’
2. The Civilised Monarchy under the Tudors
Part II
3. The Paradox of the Constitution
4. Maritime Trade as the Pivot of Foreign Policy
5. Public Liberty in Jeopardy
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 27

COMMERCE AND POLITICS IN HUME’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

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Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University

Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

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COMMERCE AND POLITICS IN HUME’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

Jia Wei

THE BOYDELL PRESS

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© Jia Wei 2017 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Jia Wei to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2017 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 978-1-78327-187-0

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

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For my parents, whose love and devotion are much more than I can repay.

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Contents

Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Part I 1. Commerce as an ‘Affair of State’ 2. The Civilised Monarchy under the Tudors

13 45

Part II 3. The Paradox of the Constitution 4. Maritime Trade as the Pivot of Foreign Policy 5. Public Liberty in Jeopardy

79 107 139

Conclusion 171 Bibliography 177 Index 199

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Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the help of many others. My principal intellectual debts are owed to my two Ph.D supervisors at the University of Cambridge: the late Dr Istvan Hont, and Miss Sylvana Tomaselli. Dr Hont taught me a lot; I miss his penetrating ways of thinking and, above all, his unique personality. It is a great pity that I could not present this work to him, but I hope that Mrs Anna Hont will find pleasure in reading it. Miss Tomaselli has given me the best possible support with much kindness and encouragement, and has played a significant part in my intellectual and personal development. I also want to thank the two examiners of my Ph.D thesis, Professor Mark Goldie and Professor Karen O’Brien, who have been generous and encouraging. I am grateful to Professor Stephen Taylor, the editor of the modern history series at Boydell & Brewer, for his help in formulating the framework of this book. I would also like to express debts of gratitude to Dr Callum Barrell, Professor Roger Emerson, Professor Nicholas Phillipson, Professor Mikko Tolonen and Dr Felix Waldmann, who have read and commented upon significant parts of my book. My thanks also go to Professor David Stasavage, who kindly supported my research at NYU in spring 2015. My understanding of Hume’s political thought and of English history in general has been greatly enriched by conversations with Dr Doohwan Ahn, Dr Moritz Baumstark, Professor John Dunn, Professor Michael O’Brien, Professor Pasquale Pasquino, Dr Kate Peters, Professor Brendan Simms and Professor Spyridon Tego. A part of this book was presented at the 40th International Hume Society Conference in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and I thank my audience for their useful comments and questions. Part of chapter 4 has been published as ‘Maritime Trade as the Pivot of Foreign Policy in Hume’s Stuart History’ in Hume Studies (40.2). I thank the four anonymous reviewers of that article who have helped to sharpen my arguments. My special thanks are given to Mrs Ruth Körner, who has helped me to surmount linguistic barriers with kindness and encouragement for three years. I am also grateful to my college advisor, Mrs Elsa Strietman, who has been so kind to me throughout this long process, and it has been a very rewarding experience to be a member of Murray Edwards College. I would ix

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

like to thank the librarians of the following institutions for their kind help: the University of Cambridge Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, University College London Library, the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA), and Trinity College Library. In addition, the Institute for Humane Studies in Washington, DC, has provided me with generous financial support. It goes without saying that any mistakes contained within this book are entirely my own. This book is dedicated to my parents.

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Abbreviations

Essays

Hume: Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1994).

Essays MPL

David Hume: Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987).

History

David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (6 vols, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund edition, 1983).

Letters

The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (2 vols, Oxford, 2011).

Letters Eminent

Letters of Eminent Persons Addressed to David Hume, ed. J. E. Burton (Edinburgh/London, 1849).

New Letters

New Letters of David Hume, ed. R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner (Oxford, 1954).

The first two volumes of Hume’s The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 are abbreviated as Medieval History, the third and fourth volumes as Tudor History, and the fifth and sixth volumes as Stuart History. The quotations follow the order of the Liberty Fund edition, citing the specific volume with the page number(s) (i.e., Hume, History, III, 80). For the relevant passages which are omitted from the Liberty Fund edition, this book uses the first printed edition.

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Introduction

You know that there is no post of honour in the English Parnassus more vacant than that of History. Style, judgment, impartiality, care – everything is wanting to our historians; and even Rapin, during this latter period, is extremely deficient. I make my work very concise, after the manner of the Ancients. It divides into three very moderate volumes; one to end with the death of Charles the First; the second at the Revolution; the third at the Accession, for I dare come no nearer the present times. Hume to John Clephane, January 1753

In August 1770, Hume wrote to his publisher William Strahan ‘I believe this is the historical Age and this the historical Nation.’1 His own book The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1754–61) would become a best-seller and a historiographical model for other national histories of the eighteenth century.2 He wrote it during a historically critical period – through most of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a time when Britain was struggling to build a trans-Atlantic empire.3 He was an astute observer of this ‘historical age’ in which Britain underwent momentous economic development and political transformation. He saw that English history was constructed on a foundation which his contemporaries too often misunderstood, and it needed to be told from a new, impartial perspective. To fully explain the context in which Hume engaged with contemporary politics and strands of political thought would require a library. Yet the perceptive reader might with good reason be unwilling to delve into the political complexities of a distant age, and might rather ask the question: what did Hume say about those well-known events that have changed the course of English history and continue to influence the world today? J. Y. T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume (2 vols, Oxford, 2011), II, 230. Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 56–92. 3  John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA, 1988), pp. xiii–xxii. 1  2 

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The standard reading of Hume’s History remains the rich study published by Duncan Forbes in 1975.4 Forbes claimed that this work could be read as an alternative to ‘orthodox Whig history’ – ‘an establishment history: the application of a theory of political obligation designed for a post-revolutionary establishment to the events of the seventeenth century’.5 But Forbes emphasised Hume’s political context at the expense of his ambition as a historian, and assumed more knowledge of the intricacies of mid-eighteenth-century British politics than general readers are likely to possess. Since the publication of Forbes’s work, many scholars have contributed new information and valuable insights.6 Hugh Trevor-Roper, James Moore, Roger Emerson, Donald Livingston, Nicholas Phillipson, and recently Moritz Baumstark have emphasised the Scottish context in which Hume composed his history.7 Trevor-Roper argued that Hume’s philosophical approach to history revealed the early eighteenth-century Scots’ awareness of the necessity to transform the institutions and political structures of their feudal society, and to build in their place a new market mechanism through which property rights and commercial liberty could be protected.8 Phillipson has supplied an admirable brief reading of Hume’s History with a particular focus on its connection to the Scottish intellectual milieu. Linking Hume to Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele – the leading champions of the nascent coffeehouse culture at the turn of the eighteenth century – Phillipson has interpreted Hume’s History as an attempt to undermine the zealotry and prejudice of contemporary political culture. Despite all these efforts, there is still significant room to reveal Hume’s unique contribution to eighteenth-century historiography. There is no doubt that Hume’s Scottish background gives emotional breadth to his History, best exemplified by his sympathetic portrait of Mary Queen of Scots. His narrative Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975). Ibid., p. 264. 6  For instance, Victor G. Wexler, ‘David Hume’s Discovery of a New Science of Historical Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 10 (1976–77), 185–203; Eugene F. Miller, ‘Hume on Liberty in the Successive English Constitutions’, Liberty in Hume’s History of England, ed. N. Capaldi and D. Livingston (Dordrecht and Boston, 1990), pp. 53–103. 7  James Moore, ‘Hume’s Political Science and the Classical Republican Tradition’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 10 (1977), 809–39; Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago, 1984); Nicholas Phillipson, David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian (London, 2011); Moritz Baumstark, ‘David Hume: The Making of a Philosophical Historian. A Reconsideration’ (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2007); Roger L. Emerson, Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment: Industry, Knowledge and Humanity (Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945) (Aldershot, 2009); H. Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment (New and London, 2010), pp. 1–16, 20–8. For Hume’s intellectual biography, see also Henry Grey Graham, Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1908), pp. 35–59; Carey M. Roberts, ‘David Hume’, Eighteenth-Century British Historians, ed. E. J. Jenkins (Detroit and London, 2007), pp. 193–205. 8  Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, pp. 1–16, 20–8. 4  5 

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also conforms to a cosmopolitan vision of modern Europe, which his Scottish friends supported unswervingly. Nevertheless, Hume’s History did not make him the ‘cultural spokesman’ of the Scottish intellectuals.9 After all, it was England that exemplified the European approach to modern commercial society, and his homeland lagged far behind in carrying the same logic into its collective memory. No less important was Hume’s apparently distinctive approach to historiography, which set him apart from his Scottish friends who more or less believed in the stadial progress of society in macro-history. He understood that chance was too important a factor in history that the foundations of a macro-narrative should not be purely metaphysical. He elaborated on the unforeseen consequences of history and therefore in the concluding remarks of his medieval history: ‘the balance of power [in the English constitution] has extremely shifted among the several orders of the state; and this fabric has experienced the same mutability, that has attended all human institutions’.10 He clearly had a sense of the interplay between historical trends and human volition in the formation of history that his Scottish contemporaries did not possess. Among recent readings of Hume’s History, much emphasis has been laid on the intellectual and political context in which Hume composed this work, but little has been said about the singular ways in which he narrated the process of modern England in the making and drew important lessons for his readers. This book is therefore intended to place Hume’s History in a new light. It contends that some general perceptions of Hume as a historical and political thinker have been vague and inaccurate. A more systematic study is required to determine the relationship between the three Humes: Hume the political thinker, Hume the historian, and Hume the political economist. More specifically, this book pays greater attention to broad social, economic, and institutional changes which Hume wove into an entirely innovative fabric of causation. This becomes evident by examining three aspects of Hume’s History: first, his championship of modernity, which he integrated into a historical narrative of England’s development as a trading nation; second, his emphasis on maritime trade, which took place against the backdrop of commercial revolution; and third, his endorsement of both liberty and authority. Hume’s immediate historiographical starting point is best represented by the following question: given the uniformity of human nature, how is one to conceptualise the unique way in which England formed its own identity? For him, the essence of man is embedded in a multitude of passions and desires which in turn determine the principles of government and the whole organisation of society.11 Although he discarded the climatic factor in his formula O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 93. Hume, History, II, 524. 11  For two divergent views regarding how Hume employed his concept of human nature in his History, see David H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical 9 

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of a national character, he went rather close to the historiography of CharlesLouis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu.12 The impact of eighteenth-century French historiography on Hume’s writing can be traced to his formative years in the Jesuit college at La Flèche.13 Like Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, and William Robertson, Hume learned from Montesquieu that the esprit of a nation could be defined by its approach to the operation of law, the form of government, and manners.14 In 1759, Hume suggested to William Robertson that he should write about modern lives in the Greek manner, which did not ‘enter into a detail of the actions’, but which marked the ‘manners of the great personages, by domestic stories, by remarkable sayings, and by a general sketch of their lives and adventures’.15 This captured perfectly Hume’s own approach to historical writing.16 As Gibbon observed, Hume’s History was characterised by ‘calm philosophy’ and ‘careless inimitable beauties’, as distinct from ‘the perfect Thought (London, 1971), pp. 203–6, and Spencer K. Wertz, Between Hume’s Philosophy and History: Historical Theory and Practice (Lanham, 2000), pp. 19–34. Against Fischer’s view that Hume applied a universal concept of human nature to his historical narrative, Wertz has argued that ‘Hume’s view of human nature and its use in historical inquiry is more diversified and complex than the standard interpretation has made it out to be’, p. 33. 12  Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller and H. S. Stone (Cambridge, 1989). For Montesquieu’s influence on Hume, see Roger B. Oake, ‘Montesquieu and Hume’, Modern Language Quarterly 2 (1941), 25–41; Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, pp. 4–6; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (5 vols, Cambridge, 2001–11), II, 258–61. 13  William Hunt, ‘David Hume: Influences on his Historical Work’, The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (18 vols, Cambridge, 1907– 21 edn), X, 282. 14  Voltaire, Essai sur l’Histoire Générale, et sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations, depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à nos jours (Geneva, 1761–3); 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, Dublin, 1778 edn), I, particularly 15–17. For a discussion of another source of influence on Hume in this type of thinking, see John P. Wright, ‘Butler and Hume on Habit and Moral Character’, Hume and Hume’s Connexions, ed. M. A. Stewart and J. P. Wright (University Park, PA, 1995), pp. 105–18. For Hume’s Scottish intellectual context, see Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945), pp. 78–113; Frank E. Manuel, ‘Edward Gibbon: Historien-Philosophe’, Daedalus 105 (1976), 231–45; Paul Cartledge, ‘The Enlightened Historiography of Edward Gibbon, Esq.: A Bicentennial Celebration’, Maynooth Review 3 (1977), 67–93; Emerson, Medical Men, pp. 119–20; Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, pp. 4–16; James Harris, Hume’s Intellectual Development: An Overview (Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 19–23. 15  Hume’s letter to William Robertson in 1759, Letters, I, 316. Giovanna Ceserani, ‘Modern Histories of Ancient Greece: Genealogies, Contexts, and Eighteenth Century Narrative Historiography’, The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts, ed. A. Lianeri (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 138–55. 16  For an analysis of Hume’s style of writing history, see Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction (Princeton, 1970), pp. 31–90. For Mr Macaulay’s review of the tone of Hume’s History, see John Hill Burton, Life and Correspondence of David Hume (2 vols, New York and London, 1983), I, 404–5. 4

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composition, the nervous language, [and] the well-turned periods’ of William Robertson.17 Notwithstanding their differences in focus, style, and interest, the eighteenth-century philosophical historians all believed that the mœurs and the esprit were the driving forces of history since it was through them that the human mind developed and bore ideas.18 Hume originally planned to produce a contemporary history of England from the Stuart age onwards, since he was ‘frightened with the notion of continuing a narrative through a period of 1700 years’. Yet after publishing the two volumes of Stuart history in 1757, he took a different direction: by delving first into the Tudor period and then into medieval times. It is true that in his letter to the Countess de Boufflers in 1767 Hume was still playing with the idea of writing a post-Revolutionary history, but he never, as he had originally planned, completed this project.19 His complete narrative covers the period from Julius Caesar’s conquest to the seventeenth-century constitutional struggle between Crown and Parliament and ends with the reconciliation of both causes in the Revolution of 1688. Hume’s contemporary Richard Hurd satirised this approach to historiography by commenting that ‘for having undertaken to conjure up the spirit of absolute power, he [sc. Hume] 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’.20 Indeed, the reverse order of Hume’s historical investigation shifted the balance of interest further in the direction of the historical cause, rather than the consequences, of the midseventeenth-century constitutional crisis. Thus, the most important question which he answered in his History is how did England develop its unique Quoted in James Westfall Thompson, A History of Historical Writing: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2 vols, New York, 1942 edn), II, 71, 80. For an overview of William Robertson’s approach to history, see D. J. Womersley, ‘The Historical Writings of William Robertson’, Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986), 497–506. 18  There is a huge literature on Hume’s philosophical thinking on this aspect; see, for example, J. B. Black, The Art of History: A Study of Four Great Historians of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1965), pp. 1–28; Daniele Francesconi, ‘William Robertson on Historical and Unintended Consequences’, Cromohs – Cyber Review of Modern Historiography 4 (1999), 1–18; John P. Wright, ‘Ideas of Habit and Custom in Early Modern Philosophy’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42 (2011), 24–7. 19  Hume to the Countess de Boufflers on 27 November 1767, Private Correspondence of David Hume with Several Distinguished Persons between the Years 1761 and 1776, etc. (London, 1820), pp. 249–52. See also Hume’s letter to Andrew Millar on 17 July 1767, Letters, II, 151. In the latter letter, which was dated several months earlier, Hume had already decided not to continue his History. The disparity between these two letters showed that he was in two minds about the idea. 20  Quoted in Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1980), p. 302. Richard Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues: Being the Substance of Several Conversations between divers Eminent Persons of the Past and Present Age; Digested by the Parties Themselves, and Now first Published from the Original Mss with Critical and Explanatory Notes by the Editor (London, 1759), p. 304. 17 

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system of liberty? Or, in other words, what was the historical origin of the extensive freedoms – civil, religious, and economic – which the English were able to achieve? From the perspective of the mid eighteenth century, the English were the only people in the world who could proudly call themselves ‘free’. And they owed such extensive political, economic, and social freedom to the ancient constitution, which had been designed by the Saxon fathers and passed through generations. By looking backwards, Hume turned his critical gaze towards the ambiguous nature of this ancient constitution, which he identified as the true origin of ‘faction’. He revealed its inconsistency and ambiguity, and the incompatibility between modern English liberty and the organising principles of ancient and medieval government.21 As a philosophical historian, Hume’s ambition was not simply to construct a grand narrative of how England formed its unique identity and perspectives over a millennium, but also to draw, with a sense of critical distance, lessons about how England should position itself and cope with contemporary challenges in several political spheres. In his narrative of England’s peculiar path towards commercial wealth and historical changes in the subsequent decades, he concentrated upon the country’s failure to develop balanced post-feudal institutions and the English people’s failure to fully understand the real historical reason behind this failure. His goal was therefore to project a political awareness as a corrective to the entrenched Whig habits of thought, which he considered not only outdated but also dangerous.22 Hume saw that the insular mind of the English rendered the task of maintaining hard-won liberty in the fierce struggle for power in eighteenthcentury Europe more difficult. He needed to convince his readers that it was not the ancient constitution of England but the European heritage that enabled England to carve an important trans-Atlantic position and achieve extensive liberty in a modern world. More particularly, England’s endorsement of naval enterprises and maritime trade from the fifteenth century onwards opened the way to a mercantile spirit of freedom, with an agrarian society being gradually transformed into a commercial one. This resulted in a shift of power from the landed elites to the middling rank (or ‘the people’), from the country to the city, and from the gradually impoverished Crown to the increasingly formidable Parliament. This is an important thesis in Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade (2012).23 Although Hont focused more attention on Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political In this regard, J. G. A. Pocock’s comprehensive study reveals Hume’s debts to the seventeenth-century historians of English feudal history, especially Henry Spelman, John Selden, and Robert Brady. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987); Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 163–257. 22  Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York and London, 1965). 23  Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 325–53. See also Istvan Hont, ‘Commercial 21 

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(1741–42) and Political Discourses (1752) than on the History, his research has yielded a framework within which Hume’s views of the origin and nature of English liberty can be understood. This book pushes Hont’s thinking further. It argues that if we are to properly understand Hume’s views of the origin and nature of English liberty, we need to examine the ways in which he explained the changing contours of English society and government through the transformative role of maritime trade. For Hume, the rise of commerce was instrumental to the decline of feudalism and its ultimate displacement by the rule of law. The advent of a new commercial age increased demands for the legal protection of life and private property, replacing the continual warfare and intermittent anarchy of the feudal age with the order of regular government.24 This explained why English liberty owed its very existence to European naval discoveries and its subsequent endorsement of maritime trade. This book combines a thematic with a chronological approach to Hume’s political thought. It starts with Hume’s account of medieval history and then proceeds to his account of the Tudors and Stuarts, even though he wrote them in the reverse order. This approach is different to that adopted by other Hume scholars such as Forbes, Pocock, and Phillipson. It demonstrates that Hume’s emphasis on the importance of commerce in the establishment of English mixed government is best illuminated by the successive phases of the English constitution. This thematic approach is supplemented by a study of Hume’s intellectual development over time. Each chapter traces his writings on various aspects of the economy and European politics from the 1740s onwards, including his emendations to the History after its publication. Hume’s goal, it will be shown, was to neutralise the party prejudices of his age and to articulate a philosophy of history which would encompass the past, the present, and the future. By examining the fundamental role of commerce in Hume’s account of the evolution of English government, this book enhances our understanding of his view of the complex interplay between economy and politics. Hume’s History underlined the primacy of maritime trade in the development of the English constitution. More emphasis is placed here on his history of the Stuart age, since this was the period that he singled out for its innovative development of maritime trade. The wider aim of this book is to show how Hume endeavoured to defend and justify his idea of the nature and origin of English liberty. It situates this idea within contemporary debates about the extent of governmental authority and the limits of parliamentary liberty. Moreover, it explores the overlapping relationship between Hume’s view of the nature and origins of English mixed government and his attitudes towards contemporary politics.

Society and Political Theory in the Eighteenth Century: The Problem of Authority in David Hume and Adam Smith’, Main Trends in Cultural History: Ten Essays, ed. W. Melching and W. Velema (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 54–94. 24  Hume, History, V, 557. 7

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This book is divided into two parts. The first part, including chapters 1 and 2, is concerned with Hume’s account of the fundamental rationale of maritime trade, as well as England’s singular path to liberty in the modern era. A sustained intention throughout is to highlight the connection he makes between trade and liberty. Part II (chapters 3, 4, and 5) explores Hume’s views concerning the profound implications of maritime trade for English politics. The analysis of the first part of this book recovers the perspectives from which Hume differentiated good and bad policies. The second part illuminates Hume’s vision of how trading interests were inextricably linked to a wide range of fundamental political issues. Part I examines Hume’s argument that commerce had fundamentally transformed English society and consequently the nature of its government. It is important that we account for the historical provenance of this idea. Debates on government policies in the mid eighteenth century were closely linked to questions of where English liberty came from; what it rested on; and whether its foundations were secure. Although Hume’s political thinking is usually placed within the Scottish Enlightenment, his unique role in the philosophy of history has not been given enough scholarly attention. Unlike the work of many of his intellectual associates in Scotland, Hume’s History did not rest on an enthusiasm for progress or an obsession with a theoretical model of history. Believing that real human history was full of uncertainties and unexpected challenges, he maintained that it would be an intellectual fallacy to construct a history of civilisation out of a theory of societal progress. Underlying Hume’s notion of a modern commercial society was an understanding of the logic of trade common among some Enlightenment thinkers, which he contrasted with feudal bondage and tyranny. For him, the strengthening ambition to pursue material gain, as well as the freedom to perform social and political actions, epitomised the commercial society.25 More importantly, he observed that perceptions of early modern capitalism were accompanied by a new ‘spirit of liberty’ which prepared the way for far-reaching political changes. Hume’s interpretation of the seventeenth-century constitutional crisis amounted to a radical denunciation of the party ideologies prevalent in his time. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that his historical account of the evolution of English government is much more radical than any of the Whig or Tory histories of his time. Hume understood that the formation of the English state was owed largely to a particular approach to colonial trade, which was essentially a modern phenomenon that had nothing in common with the Saxon political Much has been written on Hume’s science of human nature, particularly regarding his discussion of the ‘self’ and the mind; see, for instance, John P. Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Manchester, 1983), pp. 187–233; Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), pp. 129–51; Ian Ross, ‘Philosophy and Fiction: The Challenge of David Hume’, Hume and the Enlightenment: Essays Presented to Ernest Campbell Mossner, ed. W. B. Todd (Bristol, 1990), pp. 60–71.

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architecture. English government had been fundamentally transformed by the increasing momentum of commerce, with the replacement of feudal duties by the increasing equality of social, economic, and political interactions. The political struggle over the nature of the English constitution in the seventeenth century stemmed from the tension between the rising middling rank and the old landed elite. The former were motivated by the new ‘spirit of liberty’, while the latter hoped to maintain their authority. The distinctive feature of Hume’s political economy lies in his investigation into the theoretical solutions to the problem of balancing these two opposite interests. For him, this was not merely a matter of the inherent reciprocity between landed and commercial interests in the national economy. Rather, it entailed a profound reconsideration of the foundation of a political state. Therefore, the essence of Hume’s History lies in his attempt to reinstate governmental authority as the guardian of political and economic liberty. This was the most important thesis in his account of the Tudor government. He shifted the seventeenth-century question of how sovereignty could be justified (either by divine providence or by the united will of individual subjects) to the question which fundamentally influenced eighteenth-century political thinking: given the de facto unifying powers of the sovereign, how may one define the long-term interests of a particular society and how are the rules and policies of a sovereign useful and beneficial to this society? This central question of Hume’s science of politics has not yet been satisfactorily investigated. Part II explores Hume’s analysis of foreign, financial, and domestic policies by connecting his views on contemporary politics to his account of the seventeenth-century constitutional crisis in the Stuart History. It suggests that, as a historian, Hume was very much concerned with the long-term preservation of English liberty. His analysis of the constitutional crisis was in many ways linked to his understanding of eighteenth-century politics. He saw that the balance of English government was so delicate that it required a single unified decision-making power in order to survive in the European contest for power. He pointed out that the most serious obstacle to strengthening the sovereign power in his own time was the deficit economy, which had persisted in England for almost a century. Moreover, Hume explained the causes of the constitutional struggle by the difficulties of the Stuarts in maintaining state finance, which was not a new problem but one that had started in the Tudor era. In his view, tax administration was not simply a technical question, since it gradually became the decisive issue on which the interests of Crown and Parliament diverged. One of Hume’s objectives in his History was to emphasise the need to accommodate authority and liberty because both were intrinsically linked to England’s role as a maritime trading power. He warned that it was extremely risky for the government to fail in domestic and foreign policy, since mistakes of this kind would pose a very real threat to the viability of England’s commercial power and hard-won liberty. This book shows that Hume’s emphasis in 9

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the History was not only European, as most Hume scholars have believed, but also, and crucially, trans-Atlantic. His views of the trans-Atlantic world were centred upon England’s colonial trade in America and the West Indies, which, for him, had tied England’s fortunes to uncertain imperial politics. This had important implications not only for the English constitution and England’s role within the European state system, but also for the relationship between Britain and its American colonies and the resulting contest of European powers around the world. A guiding theme in Hume’s analysis of the seventeenth-century constitutional crisis is the divergent paths of civil and public liberty from the seventeenth century onwards. He elaborated the process through which the Commons used law as an instrument to encroach upon royal power, thereby securing the civil liberties of the people. However, this process jeopardised increasingly public liberty, which depended ultimately on a stable political order as well as regular and precise boundaries between Crown and Parliament. Hume gave a much more profound significance to the necessity of curbing the zeal of liberty. He saw that such zeal had reawakened the perennial conflict between Court and Country. It gave rise to a whole range of political problems that persisted even into his own time.

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Part I

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Commerce as an ‘Affair of State’

After the power of alienations, as well as the encrease of commerce, had thrown the ballance of property into the hands of the commons, the situation of affairs and 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. Hume, The History of Great Britain, under the House of Stuart: containing the Reign of James I and Charles I, 1754

In Book III of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith made the striking claim that ‘commerce and manufactures 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’.1 To this Smith added, ‘Mr Hume is the only writer who, so far as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.’2 Hume’s originality, Smith recognised, lay in his identification of commerce as the driving force of personal and political freedom in modern Europe.3 Although many writers have discussed the transformative role of commerce in the historiography of the Enlightenment, Hume’s political thought has usually been considered as less ground-breaking than that of his seventeenth-century counterparts. For example, John Dunn has claimed that Hume failed to develop Locke’s idea of the origin of government beyond what Locke originally argued.4 Countering this view, Hont argued that Hume and Smith sought to supply an entirely new theory of the foundation Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Indianapolis, 1976), III. iv. 4, p. 412. 2  Ibid. 3  For Hume’s influence on Smith in this respect, see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 130. 4  John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 116–19. See also John Dunn, ‘From Applied Theology to Social Analysis: The Break between John Locke and the 1 

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of the state, namely ‘a dualistic theory in which both liberty and authority play a significant role’.5 Hont maintained that Hume and Smith had shifted the foundation of political theory from the seventeenth-century idea of Christian sociability, which denoted a God-ordained social hierarchy, to the eighteenth-century language of a commercial society, which placed a novel emphasis on the role of commerce in social relationships.6 In Hont’s view, Hume’s moral interpretation of history was crafted through a comprehensive critique of Christianity. Hume observed that the emergence of a commercial ethos served to challenge the social relationships of the ancien régime, and that the principles of politics and law ought to be re-established on the basis of the market economy.7 Hont’s analysis gave rise to a unique perspective on Hume’s intellectual contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment. In a recent study, Chris Berry brought new insights to bear on Hume’s idea of commercial society.8 This idea, Berry argued, was an integral part of the attempt by Scottish scholars to find new terms to describe the advent of European modernity.9 Valuable though these studies have been, Hume’s historical analysis of modern commercial society has not been linked to his account of the origin of European liberty. This link is a point of departure for this book, and I will examine the ways in which Hume explained the ground-breaking impact of commerce on the course of English history. Hume attached great significance to the role of commerce in the transformation of European society, from its rude ancient beginnings to commercial modernity. The latter gradually replaced the arbitrary rule of local magnates with the regular legal protection of person and property. He argued against the basic premises of Whig historiography by demonstrating that modern English liberty was owed primarily to England’s adoption of the European methods of market economy, rather than to the legacy of the ancient Saxon system.

Scottish Enlightenment’, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 119–36. 5  Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, p. 60. 6  Ibid., p. 57. A comparative study sheds important light on philosophical historians’ critique of Christianity: see Stephen Paul Foster, Melancholy Duty: The Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity (Dordrecht, 1997), particularly pp. 55–91. See also J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the Primitive Church’, History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. S. Collini, R. Whatmore and B. Young (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 48–68. For a review of the Christian view of history in the eighteenth century, see David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London, 1990), pp. 85–132. 7  Ibid. 8  Chris Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 50–8. 9  Ibid. See also Joseph Cropsey, ‘Adam Smith and Political Philosophy’, Essays on Adam Smith, ed. A. Skinner and T. Wilson (Oxford, 1975), pp. 132–53. 14

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Commercial Society It was no coincidence that Hume’s investigation into the nature and structure of the English path towards liberty prompted his Scottish contemporaries to seek a new language of economic liberty.10 This conversation took place during a time when the social, economic, and intellectual orders were undergoing a profound transformation, particularly after the Union of England and Scotland in 1707.11 According to James Moore, the traditional curriculum of moral philosophy in the form of Aristotelian scholasticism gradually fell out of favour in Scotland due to its close association with ‘the persistence of patriarchal and feudal institutions’ as well as with the Jacobites’ ‘recurrent challenges to Scottish moralists’.12 Furthermore, the curriculum did not leave room for an explanation of the new sciences and the new psychology heralded by Descartes and Locke.13 During this time, the civil lawyers in Scotland contended that the state needed to make structural changes to the law in order to reflect changes in society, economy, and religion. This belief had been disseminated in civil law classes since the 1560s.14 Scottish thinkers of the early eighteenth century, led by Hume and Smith, reformulated the idioms of political theory in order to set them apart from the broad theoretical spectrum covered by the language of classical political thought.15 Unlike Smith and others, who were cautious about the rise of commerce, Hume formulated a pioneering argument centred on the role of commerce in destroying the feudal system.16 He argued that the development of commerce had helped safeguard men’s property and life, regardless of the

Frank D. Balog, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment and the Liberal Political Tradition’, Confronting the Constitution: The Challenge to Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and the Federalists from Utilitarianism, Historicism, Marxism, Freudianism, Pragmatism, Existentialism …, ed. A. Bloom (Washington, DC, 1979), pp. 191–208. 11  Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Lawyers, Landowners, and the Civic Leadership of Post-Union Scotland: An Essay on the Social Role of the Faculty of Advocates 1661–1830 in 18th Century Scottish Society’, Lawyers in their Social Setting, ed. D. N. MacCormick (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 182–4; Roger Emerson, ‘The Contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. A. Broadie (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 9–30. 12  James Moore, ‘Natural Rights in the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge, 2012), p. 292. 13  Ibid. 14  Emerson, Medical Men, p. 72. 15  Moore, ‘Hume’s Political Science’, 809–39; Duncan Forbes, ‘“Scientific” Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty’, Essays on Adam Smith, ed. A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson (Oxford, 1975), 179–201. 16  Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), pp. 100–13. 10 

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form of government. The rise of commerce became not just an economic issue; it was increasingly linked to the moral foundation of the state.17 Hume’s analysis of commercial society first appeared in his essay ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ (1741, later titled ‘Of Civil Liberty’).18 He challenged the assumption, upheld by Machiavelli and many of Hume’s contemporaries, that liberty stimulated commerce. Hume began with the observation that ‘if we trace commerce in its progress through TYRE, ATHENS, SYRACUSE, CARTHAGE, VENICE, FLORENCE, GENOA, ANTWERP, HOLLAND, ENGLAND, &c. we shall always find it to have fixed its seat in free governments’.19 However, he went on to contest this claim by citing the recent experience of France, which had combined an absolutist government with international trade. He observed that, since the seventeenth century, territorial states such as Spain and France had also supported commerce as participants in the international competition for commercial wealth.20 To Hume, the fact that France – an absolute monarchy, after all – had become a threat to Britain’s dominance in international commerce was sufficient proof that commerce had become a major factor in modern European polities, irrespective of the size of the state and its form of government. In Hume’s view, both the monarchical and republican forms of government contained sources of both ‘improvement’ and ‘degeneration’, which would eventually ‘bring these species of civil polity still nearer [to] an equality’.21 In particular, a monarchical government based on the preservation of fixed social hierarchies had a natural disadvantage in promoting commerce. Unlike republican governments, honorific employment in such a government carried much more weight than economic gain. For its part, the financial administration of a ‘virtue’-based republican government was more difficult to deal with because of its usual ‘practice of contracting debt, and mortgaging the public revenues’.22 Clearly, Hume was echoing Sir William Temple’s claim that trade was no longer the exclusive business of commonwealths.23 The problem of redefining the terms and principles of modern politics had caught the attention of Temple and other neo-Harringtonians several decades earlier, since England’s I am grateful to Roger Emerson for pointing out to me that ancient Rome resembled modern societies in this respect. 18  For a discussion of Hume’s concept of commercial society in his political philosophy, see Carl Wennerlind, ‘David Hume’s Political Philosophy: A Theory of Commercial Modernization’, Hume Studies 28 (2002), 247–70. 19  Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, p. 54. 20  Ibid. For Fernand Braudel’s detailed review of the two patterns of empire-building, namely the ‘city-centered’ and the ‘national-market’ economies, see his Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (3 vols, London, 1982 edn), III, 175–276, 352–85. 21  Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, p. 56. 22  Ibid., p. 57. 23  William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, ed. G. Clark (Oxford, 1972), pp. 216–18. 17 

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economy had become commercialised earlier than that of Scotland.24 According to Temple, ‘Arbitrary and Tyrannical Power’ discouraged industry and threatened private property, whereas commerce thrived in territorial states like France, as well as under ‘good Princes and legal Monarchies’.25 ‘In short’, Temple concluded, the Kingdoms and Principalities were in the world like the Noblemen and Gentlemen in a Countrey; The Free-States and Cities, like the Merchants and Traders: These at first despised by the others; The other serv’d and rever’d by them; till by the various course of Events in the World … Which made the Traders begin to take upon them [sc. war and luxury], and carry it like Gentlemen; and the Gentlemen begin to take a fancy of falling to Trade.26

These analogies tapped into a commonplace understanding, which had persisted from the late seventeenth century onwards, that the dominance of competitive trade in the European economy had blurred the lines between territorial states and free states.27 Such considerations prompted the neoHarringtonians to investigate a number of important and interrelated questions about the nature and principles of government. The most significant question in this inquiry, as Hont explained, was how to integrate the demands of international trade into different forms of government, whether monarchical or republican.28 In Hume’s time, such concerns still prevailed in parliamentary and press debates, with a particular focus on the origin of English liberty and its implications for contemporary policies, and the answers to these questions were largely divided along the lines of the Court and Country camps. As Pocock has argued, the Walpolean government was based on a theory and rhetoric which prised trade, whereas the Country platform had an intellectual foundation in the principles of revolution which emphasised an original contract and the importance of virtue.29 For a detailed discussion of the economic and geographical conditions of eighteenth-century Scotland and their influence on the scholarly debates, see Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, 2013), especially pp. 11–42. See also Charles W. J. Withers, ‘Towards a Historical Geography of Enlightenment in Scotland’, The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation, ed. P. Wood (Rochester, 2000), pp. 63–97. 25  Temple, Observations, pp. 189–90. 26  Ibid., p. 217. 27  Andrew Fletcher held a similar view in An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind (London, 1704), pp. 40–1. As Fletcher wrote, ‘trade is now becoming the golden ball, for which all nations of the world are contending, and the occasion of so great partialities, that not only every nation is endeavouring to possess the trade of the whole world, but every city to draw all to itself; and that the English are no less guilty of these partialities than any other trading nation’. 28  Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 185–266. 29  J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago and London, 1989), p. 140. See also Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of Negative 24 

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For Court Whigs, it was crucial to maintain a parliamentary hegemony dominated by the gentry, and the consolidation of such an oligarchical rule naturally required the exclusion of Tories, Jacobites, and ‘Old Whigs’.30 Their debate on the modern origin of English liberty was, therefore, aimed at defending Whig-dominated politics against the Country Opposition. For its part, the Opposition targeted corruption and patronage, as well as Robert Walpole’s mercantilist policy against free trade. As Nicholas Rogers has observed, the Country or ‘Patriot’ party in alliance with London merchants, bankers, and manufacturers formed ‘a broadly-based anti-ministerial coalition’ against the so-called plutocratic elites’ dominance of economic policies.31 In this Court–Country argument, it was commonly assumed that English liberty owed its existence to the peculiar structure of its government, and therefore the only way to maintain such liberty was to support the continuance of such a structure. Hume had been the first, as Smith had emphasised, to challenge this assumption.32 For Hume, focusing upon the structure of government was to miss the point that English liberty relied chiefly upon a commercial society with a large portion of its population engaged in trade and manufacturing. He believed that the Court–Country debate on the nature of the ancient constitution failed to take into account the fact that the key to the English system of liberty was determining how to accommodate accelerated commercialisation into the principles of government.33 He saw that the neo-Machiavellian underpinnings of English political thinking were irrelevant to a new, commerce-based society.34 Hume took as his point of departure the fundamental importance of commerce, and maintained that the search for the right policies, particularly in relation to the maintenance of a mixed government, was inevitably linked to the pursuit of commercial supremacy. Notwithstanding Hume’s support of the Court Whigs in relation to most government policies, he was deeply dissatisfied with their theoretical framework for managing a property-based society.35 For him, it was commerce, Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 193–221. 30  Quentin Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. N. McKendrick (London, 1975), pp. 93–128; Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), pp. 175–209. 31  Nicholas Rogers, ‘Resistance to Oligarchy: The City Opposition to Walpole and His Successors, 1725–47’, London in the Age of Reform, ed. J. Stevenson (Oxford, 1977), pp. 1–29. See also Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), especially pp. 13–129. 32  Smith, Wealth of Nations, III. iv. 4, p. 412. 33  Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 186. 34  J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), pp. 493–9. 35  H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), pp. 132–9. 18

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rather than the Whig party, that had brought about the English system of mixed government. When discussing the origin of the Civil War in the History, he wrote that ‘the new splendor and glory of the Dutch commonwealth, where liberty so happily supported industry, made the commercial part of the nation desire to see a like form of government established in England’.36 England transformed itself from a nearly absolutist monarchy to a mixed government by adopting and incorporating Dutch principles of commercial gain. With regard to the arguments of the Country gentlemen, Hume saw that the new market economy rendered it impossible to return to the ancient Anglo-Saxon mode of government because it was incompatible with the rule of law. The rule of law was incompatible with Gothic liberty because the latter was based on the extensive rights of the nobility. This view led, in 1749, to Hume’s endorsement of Montesquieu’s claim that England was a ‘republic hid[ing] under the form of monarchy’, but at the same time he rejected the latter’s view that England’s post-revolutionary regime reinstated Gothic liberty without restoring the nobility to all its former powers.37 If the peculiar nature of modern liberty was only hinted at throughout Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political (1741), it received a fuller analysis eleven years later in his Political Discourses (1752). In the latter work, he constructed a constellation of significant arguments relating to how commerce exercised more leverage on politics in the modern age, which in turn brought about more economic and political freedom. His first argument was that commerce brought about a restructuring of the relationship between town and country. He claimed that commerce and trade diversified employment because the advance of ‘manufactures and mechanic arts’ resulted in higher agricultural productivity through mechanisation. This allowed the same population to be supported by a less labour-intensive agricultural system.38 Increased productivity in agriculture naturally led to a larger population, which could be used as a workforce for manufacturing or for military service.39 It followed that, in Hume, History, V, 387. Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 105. For Montesquieu’s description of the German system of government, see his The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI, Chapter VIII, pp. 167–8. 38  Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, Essays, p. 98. 39  Hume, ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, Essays MPL, pp. 377–464. In developing this idea, Hume had several exchanges with Robert Wallace who argued the opposite, namely that the population in the modern world had declined rather than increased. See F. H. Heinemann, David Hume. The Man and his Science of Man. Containing some unpublished Letters of Hume (Paris, 1940), pp. 7–22. Hume’s response was originally made towards Robert Wallace’s manuscript study of the same subject, which was perhaps circulated in the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh. Later, Wallace published it under the title of A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Antient and Modern Times (Edinburgh, 1753). Montesquieu discussed this issue in letters 117–22, Lettres Persanes, ed. R. L. Cru (New York, 1914), pp. 175–84; and The Spirit of the Laws, Book XXIII, pp. 427–56. For a detailed review of this argument in the eighteenth century, see Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Moral Philosophy and Population Questions in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Population and Development Review 14, Supplement: Population and Resources in Western Intellectual 36  37 

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the short-term at least, the rise of commerce could promote the happiness of the people by increasing ‘the ease and convenience of private persons’, and could also augment the sovereign’s power and glory through increased military spending and more developed public services.40 For Hume, these two scenarios were by no means mutually exclusive: ‘the greatness of the sovereign and the happiness of the state are, in great measure, united with regard to trade and manufactures’.41 In the long run, the rise of commerce would lead to a dismantling of the old feudal system through new methods of production and consumption, thus changing men’s economic and social aspirations. Moreover, the enrichment of a prosperous few enabled economic resources to be channelled towards useful employment. As Hume explained, ‘without commerce, the state must consist chiefly of landed gentry, whose prodigality and expence [sic] make a continual demand for borrowing; and of peasants, who have no sums to supply that demand’.42 A less active level of commerce would lead naturally to either ‘idle show and magnificence’ or ‘the purchase of the common necessaries of life’.43 Hume highlighted the role of commerce in facilitating industry and promoting frugality, by channelling monetary and labour resources into commodity production and thus into a new vision of economic life. Hume’s second argument was to introduce a moral dimension to his vision of a commercial society. This involved building a connection between ‘commerce and manufacture’ on the one hand and ‘industry, knowledge, and humanity’ on the other.44 In his view, the rise of a commercial society diversified men’s employment and enabled them to develop individual capabilities.45 The emergence of competitive trade in Europe paved the way for emancipation from the bondage of Roman Catholicism and feudal morals: ‘the same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and ship-carpenters’.46 Increased aspirations and artisanal skills were, therefore, intimately bound to the successful pursuit of commerce.47 Traditions (1988), pp. 9–20. See also David Wootton, ‘David Hume, ‘the historian’’, The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. D. F. Norton (Cambridge, 1993), p. 288. Hume’s argument on population, according to Wootton, illustrates a cautious use of historical sources which could also be seen in his History. 40  Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, Essays, pp. 95–6. 41  Ibid., p. 98. 42  Hume, ‘Of Interest’, Essays, p. 131. 43  Ibid. 44  Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, Essays, pp. 105–14. 45  Richard Bellamy, ‘From Feudalism to Capitalism: History and Politics in the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Promise of History: Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. A. Moulakis (Berlin, 1986), p. 44. 46  Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, p. 107. 47  Ibid. Terence Hutchison has argued that Hume drew the conclusion from somewhere between the ‘libertine principles’ of Mandeville and the ‘severe morals’ of Hutcheson and 20

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In his essay ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (1742), Hume wrote that ‘the emulation, which naturally arises among those neighbouring states, is an obvious source of improvement’.48 Later, in ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ (1758), he attributed the greatness of Great Britain to its ability to learn ‘all the arts both of agriculture and manufactures’ from its continental neighbours.49 As a significant consequence of maritime trade, the transfer of knowledge enabled poor countries to imitate rich ones to share the benefits of commerce.50 The connection Hume made between commercialisation and civilisation would become a recurring theme in Scottish Enlightenment thinking: the progress of society from its ‘rude’ and ‘barbarous’ past to a civilised age was perceived as a process driven by commerce and the pursuit of luxury.51 Hume’s third argument was that luxury – a by-product of maritime trade – led to an increase in sociability: ‘the more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become […] They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture. Curiosity allures the wise; vanity the foolish; and pleasure both.’52 A full recognition of the role of luxury in society was an important feature in eighteenth-century Scottish thinking on politeness.53 In his The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), Bernard Mandeville defended luxury for its beneficial economic impact: ‘for how excessive soever the Plenty and Luxury of a Nation may be, some Body must do the Work, Houses and Ships must be built, Merchandizes must be remov’d, and the Ground till’d’.54 In Mandeville’s view, a new large workforce was brought into being as a result of the redundancy of feudal retainers, who could be used in manufacturing and readily enlisted in the army. Hume clearly followed the same line of reasoning. He maintained that the demand for luxury goods and the dwindling impediment of entails were by-products of the development of commerce and led to the decline of the power of the nobility; this, in turn, lent a mantle of authority to sovereign princes and, Berkeley, and closer to the former: Before Adam Smith: the Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 202–3. 48  Hume, ‘Rise and Progress of Arts and Sciences’, Essays, p. 64. 49  Hume, ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’, Essays, p. 150. 50  Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 269. 51  Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983); Bellamy, ‘From Feudalism to Capitalism’, pp. 42–7; C. George Caffentzis, ‘Civilizing the Highlands: Hume, Money and the Annexing Act’, Historical Reflections 31 (2005), 169–94, particularly 183–8. 52  Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, p. 107. 53  Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Politeness and Politics in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians’, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 211–45. 54  Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (London, 1989), p. 145. 21

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consequently, to the ascendance of a centralised legal system. His emphasis on the role of luxury in facilitating the dissolution of feudal institutions revealed the extent of his intellectual debts to Mandeville.55 Hume’s final argument, which was by no means the least, addressed the causal connection between commerce and liberty. This argument prepared the way for his methodological innovation in the History, in which he established the core principles of society and politics through a description of the revolutionary changes to society brought about by commerce. He maintained that the rise of the yeomanry and the gentry in the country was directly caused by commercial expansion in the cities.56 The increasingly ‘rich and independent’ peasants – together with tradesmen, merchants, and the gentry – constituted a new ‘middling rank’, which gradually became ‘the best and firmest basis of public liberty’.57 Hume’s concept of ‘public liberty’ denoted the independence of the law from the arbitrary will of the sovereign. Echoing James Harrington, Hume argued that the middling rank’s increasing possession of economic wealth gave rise to a demand for the legal protection of property rights and, by extension, for a complex system of moral norms and laws.58 As he maintained, the members of this new middling rank ‘covet equal laws, which may secure their property, and preserve them from monarchical, as well as aristocratical tyranny’.59 Thus, it was on the basis of the middling rank’s support for the rule of law, rather than on the basis of Gothic government, that English liberty rose to an unprecedented height. The Decline of the Feudal System Hume’s analysis of the decline of feudalism underpinned his argument that the ancient constitution was incompatible with modern liberty. His view of commercial society provided a framework within which he could explain the decline of the feudal system.60 In his Medieval History, Hume described the way in which the evolution of tenure had brought about so much change during the reigns of the Plantagenet kings. Although he acknowledged that E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 75–96. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 465–75. 56  David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1988), p. 171. McNally has pointed out that Smith held a similar view, p. 171. 57  Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, p. 112. 58  J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 1–152; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 462–505. 59  Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, p. 112. 60  Hume, History, II, 522. See also Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 375. As Pocock has contended, ‘it is not anything he [sc. Hume] wrote about 1066 and 1265 which makes him an important historian of the ancient constitution or the feudal law; it is what he wrote about the emergence of the society which replaced them’. 55 

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the rebellion of Simon de Montfort in 1265 triggered the decline of the feudal system, he also argued that it was ultimately caused by a fundamental incompatibility between feudal tenure and the new market economy.61 Commerce broke the hold of feudal habits and mores, thus paving the way for the increased freedom of the newly propertied social groups. Hume never lost sight of the European context in which English institutions had evolved. He charted tenure’s gradual fall into disuse through the European practice of ‘erecting communities and corporations’, to its eventual disappearance through the granting of leases to peasants.62 Noting that the practice of establishing ‘communities and corporations’ had been originally adopted in Italy, and later imitated by France and England, he felt that England had followed behind the rest of Europe in curbing feudalism.63 The above practice, he believed, had effectively checked the tyranny of the barons, as well as the arbitrary powers of princes, through ‘an execution somewhat stricter, of the public law’.64 Hume noted that replacing feudal services with monetary rents gradually became a prevailing practice in Europe.65 He drew a comparison between the slaves of classical antiquity and the villeins in feudal England.66 Among the ancients, slaves were ‘domestic servants’ or ‘manufacturers’, whereas villeins ‘were entirely occupied in the cultivation of their master’s land, and they paid their rents either in corn, cattle and other produce of the farm, or in servile offices, which they performed about the baron’s family, and upon the farms which he retained in his own possession’.67 Hume went on to explain that the progress of the arts and sciences, which had reinforced slavery in ancient times, emancipated villeins from total dependence on their feudal lords. Since slaves in ancient Greece and Rome did not participate directly in the production of material goods, slaveowners and the state lacked an incentive to grant them their independence. In contrast, villeins were responsible for the entire agricultural economy. Therefore, from the thirteenth century onwards, the demand for economic

Hume, History, II, 49. See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 247. Hume, History, II, 522–4. 63  Ibid., 522. 64  Ibid., 522–33. 65  Ibid., 523–4. 66  Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London, 2012), p. 235. For a discussion of the eighteenth-century approach to ancient history, see Ian Mcgregor Morris and James Moore, ‘History in Revolution: Approaches to the Ancient World in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Reinventing History: The Enlightenment Origins of Ancient History, ed. J. Moore, I. M. Morris and A. J. Bayliss (London, 2008), pp. 3–29. One example is Adam Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (5 vols, Edinburgh, 1813 edn). 67  Hume, History, II, 523. 61  62 

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efficiency in agriculture created a parallel demand to abolish villeinage.68 ‘In proportion as agriculture improved, and money increased,’ he observed, ‘it was found, that these [sc. feudal] services, though extremely burdensome to the villain [sic], were of little advantage to the master.’69 Moreover, the practice of granting leases to peasants allowed them to finally break ‘the bond of servitude’.70 As Hume observed, ‘the most civilized parts of Europe’, including England, abandoned the system of villeinage and adopted ‘the practice of granting leases to the peasant’.71 By granting the peasants economic and social independence, landowners could increase and thus benefit from the productivity of their labour. Despite Henry VII’s attempts to reinforce the servitude of villeins through law, the distinction between villein and freeman gradually disappeared. Hume observed that before the end of Elizabeth’s reign, ‘no person remained in the state, to whom the former laws [of villeinage] could be applied’.72 Hume commented that the English assimilated continental practices into their own ways of organising agricultural production. The ‘subdivisions and conjunctions of property’ had been the fundamental reason why the ‘nature and extent’ of tenure had become increasingly ambiguous.73 According to him, changes to the ways in which property was owned had led to the dissolution of personal ties between the lord and the tenant, which diminished the obligations of the tenant. Hume explained that When the great feudal baronies were first erected, the lord lived in opulence in the midst of his vassals: he was in a situation to protect and cherish and defend them: The quality of patron naturally united itself to that of superior: And these two principles of authority mutually supported each other. But when, by the various divisions and mixtures of property, a man’s superior came to live at a distance from him, and could no longer give him shelter or countenance; the tie gradually became more fictitious than real: New connexions from vicinity or other causes were formed: Protection was sought by voluntary services and attachment […]74

This passage reveals Hume’s belief that the political authority of the feudal nobility was based on reciprocal associative relationships with their vassals and tenants. In other words, it was not the nobility’s material possession of land but rather their local patronage that had consolidated their power over their tenants. Therefore, as landed property passed through successive generations, and as the nobility lived at an increasing distance from their tenants, their authority declined accordingly. ‘It is easy to observe’, Hume claimed, Ibid. Ibid. 70  Ibid., 524. 71  Ibid. 72  Ibid. Hume was probably referring to Henry VII’s two acts regulating ‘feoffees’, namely 3 Hen. 7 c. 16 and 19 Hen. 7 c. 15. 73  Hume, History, II, 100. 74  Ibid., 332. 68  69 

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‘from these voluntary associations among the people, that 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 Norman Conquest.’75 Since the feudal system relied chiefly upon local patronage, it could not ‘long subsist under the perpetual revolutions, to which landed property is everywhere subject’.76 Hume’s description of the decline of feudalism concentrated on the gradual weakening of tenure. He explained that the numbers of both military fees and pecuniary scutages (payment to buy-out military service) had diminished. The abandonment of military fees was the result primarily of an emerging practice among vassals in which they transferred their land to the Church, thereby turning their military tenure to frankalmoigne.77 Hume observed that since frankalmoigne was a type of tenure held by the clergy without obligation to undertake any military service, this practice increased the power of the nobility at the expense of the Crown. The number of pecuniary scutages reduced due to the poor management of the rolls of knights’ fees: ‘no care was taken to correct them before the armies were summoned into the field; it was then too late to think of examining records and charters; and the service was accepted on the footing which the vassal himself was pleased to acknowledge, after all the various subdivisions and conjunctions of property had thrown an obscurity on the nature and extent of his tenure’.78 Furthermore, Hume argued that the political consequences of tenure – mainly magisterial authority and local jurisdiction – were gradually diluted: ‘the relaxation of the feudal tenures, and an execution somewhat stricter, of the public law bestowed an independence of vassals’ and, in the following age, allowed peasants to make ‘their escape from those bonds of villeinage or slavery, in which they had formerly been retained’.79 The right to participate in the Great Council was originally associated with tenure to the king, and this right was abolished because of the increasing number of immediate vassals of the Crown. As Hume explained, ‘the landed property [conferred by the Norman kings] was gradually shared out into more hands; and those immense baronies were divided, either by provisions to younger children, by partitions among co-heirs, by sale, or by escheating to the king, who gratified a great number of his courtiers, by dealing them out among them in smaller portions’.80 The emergence of a new rank of knights and small barons thus diluted the importance of tenure, and writ gradually replaced tenure as the basis of the right to take a seat in the Great Council: ‘the barons by

75  76  77  78  79  80 

Ibid., 331–2. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 100–1. Ibid., 523. Ibid., 101. 25

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Writ, therefore, began gradually to intermix themselves with the barons by Tenure’.81 Hume paid particular attention to the fact that the decline in the privileges of the nobility, including local jurisdiction attached to the ownership of land, was linked to the increasing representation of boroughs in the country.82 He maintained that the institution of boroughs was again a European invention, which was possibly introduced to England by the Normans in imitation of the French.83 This claim relied heavily on the authority of Robert Brady.84 In his A Historical Treatise of Cities, and Burghs or Boroughs: shewing their original, and whence, and from whom, they received their Liberties, Privileges, and Immunities; what they were, and what made and constituted a free Burgh, & free Burgesses (1690), Brady noted that the term ‘burg’ was of either French or German origin.85 Following Brady, Hume maintained that the establishment of boroughs encouraged and protected the lower order of the state.86 He treated the representation of boroughs in Parliament as a sign of the consolidation of democratic principles, remarking that this new group ‘soon proved, when summoned by the legal princes, one of the most useful, and in process of time, one of the most powerful members of the national constitution; and gradually rescued the kingdom from aristocratical as well as from regal tyranny’.87 For Hume, the kings in feudal England played a significant role in the transfer of power from earls to sheriffs. The sheriffs were ‘the vice-gerents of the earls’ and yet entirely dependent on the king for their appointment; therefore, the medieval kings adopted the policy of promoting the sheriffs’ power in local jurisdiction. The increase in the judicial and fiscal powers of the sheriffs in turn rendered the earls’ dignity ‘personal and titular’.88 The Crown, with the support of the borough representatives in Parliament, was able to break the prevailing tyranny of the nobility. The feudal judicial system, which had been characterised by multi-polar local jurisdiction, was now on the path to a centralised system of justice. Hume observed that English kings adopted the policy of other European princes, which promoted the interests of ‘the lower and more industrious orders of the state’ because these orders were ‘well disposed to obey the laws and civil magistrate, and whose ingenuity and labour furnished commodities, requisite for the ornament of peace and support of war’.89 As he explained: Ibid., 102. Ibid., 56. Smith had a similar view in Wealth of Nations, III. iv. 4, p. 412. 83  Hume, History, I, 470–1; II, 105. 84  For a detailed analysis of Brady’s views on boroughs, see Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 182–228. 85  Robert Brady, An Historical Treatise of Cities and Burghs (London, 1690), p. 2. 86  Hume, History, I, 105–6. Brady, Historical Treatise, pp. 3–5. 87  Hume, History, I, 57. 88  Ibid., 102–3. 89  Ibid., 105. 81  82 

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Boroughs were erected by royal patent within the demesne lands: Liberty of trade was conferred upon them: The inhabitants were allowed to farm at a fixed rent their own tolls and customs: They were permitted to elect their own magistrates: Justice was administrated to them by these magistrates, without obliging them to attend the sheriff or country court: And some shadow of independence, by means of these equitable privileges, was gradually acquired by the people.90

The increasing financial needs of the Crown demanded more talliages and taxes, but the poverty of the lower orders made it hard to levy from them. Although the king had the power to make a levy at his pleasure, it was difficult to ‘enforce his edicts’, and ‘it was necessary, before he imposed taxes, to smooth the way for his demand, and to obtain the previous consent of the boroughs, by solicitations, remonstrances, and authority’.91 Hume noted that the lack of institutional representation for the boroughs made it difficult for the king to levy taxes, since he had to obtain the consent of each particular borough.92 In order to maintain the flow of taxes, Edward I decided ‘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’.93 This was the origin of the House of Commons, which was composed of two knights of each shire and two deputies from each borough.94 Presenting the power of the Commons as a force ‘totally incompatible’ with the feudal system, Hume claimed that ‘both the king and the commonalty, who felt its [sc. the feudal system’s] inconveniences, contributed to favour this new power, which was more submissive than the barons to the regular authority of the crown, and at the same time afforded protection to the inferior orders of the state’.95 Given that local jurisdiction constituted the main obstacle to justice in the feudal age, the establishment of this new unifying judicial system amounted to a significant step towards uniform justice.96 Pocock has made it clear that Hume developed Brady’s argument by stressing the importance of the growth of towns.97 While the towns had no representatives in Parliament, which meant that they exerted a limited degree of influence there, their interests were unified with shires and boroughs. This demonstrated Hume’s belief that the later struggle between Crown and Ibid., 105–6. Ibid., 106. 92  Ibid. Hume cited Robert Brady as the main source in his claim that the boroughs had not existed before 1295. See Robert Brady, A Historical Treatise of Cities, and Burghs or Boroughs: shewing their original, and whence, and from whom, they received their Liberties, Privileges, and Immunities; what they were, and what made and constituted a free Burgh, & free Burgesses (London, 1704), pp. 25, 33. 93  Hume, History, II, 106. 94  Ibid. 95  Ibid., 57. 96  Ibid., 383–5. 97  Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 247. 90  91 

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Parliament was not a struggle between land and commercial interests, but rather between the rising middling rank and the old landed elite. Hume stressed that the landlords, by the introduction of luxury, voluntarily exchanged their economic and juridical control of the land for money.98 According to him: The habits of luxury dissipated the immense fortunes of the ancient barons; and as the new methods of expence gave subsistence to mechanics and merchants, who lived in an independent manner on the fruits of their own industry, 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, retained only that moderate influence, which customers have over tradesman, and which can never be dangerous to civil government.99

For Hume, this change was not a disaster, but rather an opportunity for the nobility to profit from the dynamics of a market economy.100 He saw the destruction of the old institution of entails as an index of social and economic freedom, which provided a stimulus to the agricultural and various other sectors of economy. This was later echoed by Smith, who in his lectures on jurisprudence taught that entails, like other types of land engrossment, such as the right of primogeniture, hindered ‘the progress of agriculture’.101 To provide a vivid picture of the rude manners of life in the feudal age, Hume took the unusual step of employing first-hand accounts of the household of the fifth earl of Northumberland in Yorkshire.102 Hume observed that the progress of agricultural economy required land proprietors, namely freeholders, to enclose their fields or merge small farms into larger ones.103 This precipitated the dismissal of tenants who had been

Hume, History, III, 77. Ibid., IV, 384. See also Richard Whatmore, ‘Luxury, Commerce, and the Rise of Political Economy’, The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. J. A. Harris (Oxford, 2013), pp. 581–8. 100  This would become a commonplace argument among Scottish literati half a century later. E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Scottish Reformers of the Eighteenth Century and Capitalist Agriculture’, Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm (Calcutta and Oxford, 1980), pp. 10–12. 101  Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1976), p. 524. Smith discussed this in detail in both of the 1762–63 and 1766 sessions of his lecture. 102  Hume, History, III, 469–72. Henry Algernon Percy, The Regulations and Establishment of the Household of Henry Algernon Percy, the Fifth Earl of Northumberland, at his Castles of Wresill and Lekinfield in Yorkshire, begun Anno Domini MDXII, ed. T. Percy (London, 1827). Bishop Thomas Percy, who lent these materials to Hume in the hope of them being used in a more positive light, was very disappointed and complained to Hume. See his letters to Hume on 5 and 22 January 1773, Letters Eminent, pp. 317–24. Hume replied on 16 January 1773 with a polite apology, but never deleted the passage. 103  Hume, History, IV, 384. 98  99 

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idle and made necessary provisions for labour in trade and manufacturing.104 Hume contended that, in England, ‘the love of freedom, which, unless checked, flourishes extremely in all liberal natures, acquired new force, and was regulated by more enlarged views, suitably to that cultivated understanding, which became, every day, more common, among men of birth and education’.105 Hume also noted that the gradual decline of the feudal militia and the diminishing revenues of the Crown rendered military conquests unfeasible.106 He contended that one of the disadvantages of the feudal system was its inadequacy in national defence: ‘that system was never able to fix the state in a proper warlike posture, or give it the full exertion of its power for defence, and still less for offence, against a public enemy’.107 This was, according to him, due to the rebellious propensities and inexperience of military tenants, whose offices were based on ‘birth’ rather than ‘merits’ or ‘services’.108 He explained that this was the reason why ‘the sovereigns came gradually to disuse this cumbersome and dangerous machine’ and exchanged ‘the military service for pecuniary supplies’.109 Drawing a comparison with the Italian practice of Condottieri, he observed that Plantagenet kings had adopted the system of enlisting military officers ‘by means of a contract’ during the war only.110 This had downplayed the role of the feudal government in military matters – so much so that the barons had been transformed from military officers to courtiers. The barons’ new social position eventually brought about an increasing need to spend their fortune as a way of exercising authority. Two decades later, Smith reiterated Hume’s argument on the role of luxury in his Wealth of Nations. Smith argued that the barons’ habit of luxury was a kind of prestige consumption that could only be found within certain types of economy.111 According to Smith, shepherd nations ‘are always strangers to every sort of luxury, and great wealth can scarce ever be dissipated among them by improvident profusion’.112 However, Hume never subscribed to this view, which presupposed a causal link between economy and moral habits. He drove home the point that the emergence of commercial society depended on new rules of conduct tailored to emerging modes of association and social exchange, rather than to economic production.113

104  105  106  107  108  109  110  111  112  113 

Ibid. Ibid., V, 18. Ibid., II, 104–5. Ibid., I, 99. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Smith, Wealth of Nations, V. i. b. 10, p. 714. Ibid. Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, pp. 60–72. 29

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The Driving Force of Maritime Trade In his essay ‘Of Money’ (1752), Hume argued that transformations of society were social rather than material in character.114 When a simple and uncultivated manner prevailed, everyone lived in close proximity to the fields and consumed only the commodities produced by farmers and local artisans. This way of living was profoundly altered by the rise of arts and luxury, which stimulated the demand for commodities in both quality and quantity. Not only did men choose to live far away from their land, but they also developed myriad desires that could no longer be satisfied by produce from their locality. This, Hume contended, led to a replacement of commodities with specie as the medium of exchange. Since only specie could be used in the international market for foreign goods, men needed their income to be paid in money rather than in kind. Mining in America in the sixteenth century provided a convenient solution, since those mines offered Europe with a continuous and large supply of gold and silver. With the new measures of exchange – which could be applied universally to all economic transactions and freely converted in the international market – rent, capital gains, and wages were all paid in either guineas (in the case of gold) or shillings (in the case of silver).115 However, Hume did not see the inflow of specie as an index of the economic power of European states, or as a demonstration of their commercialisation. He believed that the wealth of a state was not determined by the stock of money supply; rather, it depended upon the extent of commodities produced by its aggregated labour. Since prices were determined by the ratio of circulating money to the commodities in the market, the inflow of gold and silver, with no proper engagement in commerce and industry, would only increase the prices of commodities without increasing national wealth. Nevertheless, a continuous inflow of specie could sustain the spirit of industry because it stimulated an incessant demand for manufactured goods.116 Charles Davenant had proposed a similar view in Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England (1698). Observing that there had been ‘a considerable Rise in the Value of Land, and Fall in Interest’ from 1600 to 1666, Davenant argued that this ‘proceed[ed] from a greater quantity of Money got some way or other into the Kingdom: Since, in all rising Nations in the World, the Price of Land is high, and Interest is low’.117 Hume, ‘Of Money’, Essays, p. 121. See C. George Caffentzis, ‘Hume, Money, and Civilization; or, Why was Hume a Metalist?’, Hume Studies 27 (2001), 301–36; Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind, ‘Hume on Money, Commerce, and the Science of Economics’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 25 (2011), 217–29. 115  Hume, ‘Of Interest’, p. 126. 116  Hume, ‘Of Money’, p. 120. 117  Charles Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England. Which more immediately Treat of the Foreign Traffick of this Kingdom (2 vols, London, 1698), II, 23. 114 

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In Hume’s view, the increased concentration of money in the hands of the few would be used either in consumption or production, both of which raised the demand for manufacturing. What mattered was not a large stock of money, but rather an increasing inflow of circulated gold and silver.118 Money was, therefore, ‘none of the wheels of trade’, but ‘the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy’.119 The men who had acquired a large amount of specie in Europe would create a demand for manufactured products, the demand for which would then facilitate economic development. As Hume argued, ‘in every kingdom, into which money begins to flow in greater abundance than formerly, every thing takes a new face: labour and industry gain life; the merchant becomes more enterprising, the manufacturer more diligent and skillful, and even the farmer follows his plough with greater alacrity and attention’.120 Hume gave a more rounded analysis of how money stimulated industry in his Stuart History. He explained how domestic industry had arisen as a consequence of maritime trade; how the development of agriculture had followed suit; and how both industry and agriculture had become bound to the international market. Following ‘the discovery of the West-Indies’, an increasing supply of specie to Europe created a growing demand for commodities in both international and domestic markets.121 Citing Davenant as his source, Hume noted that in England £19,832,476 had been coined in gold and silver between 1558 and 1659.122 Prices rose as a result. The commoners, finding themselves no longer able to survive by their old habits of indolence, had to increase their ‘toil and application’ to gain subsistence.123 The habits of industry were henceforth established, which made it possible to retain prices at a certain level. As Hume observed, after a period of high inflation during the Elizabethan era, prices had stagnated until his own time. This was because ‘industry, during that intermediate period [sc. between the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the mid eighteenth century], encreased as fast as gold and silver, and kept commodities nearly at a par with money’.124 The exceptions to price stagnation were those commodities where productivity had increased significantly. Hume illustrated this with the example of wool: ‘the best wool, during the greater part of James’s reign, was at thirty-three shillings a tod: At present, it is not above two-thirds This point was later reiterated by the French economist Jacques Necker in his A Treatise on the Administration of Finances of France (3 vols, London, 1785 edn), III, 274–5. For a detailed review of Necker’s ideas, see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007), pp. 302–11. 119  Hume, ‘Of Money’, p. 115. 120  Ibid., p. 118. 121  Hume, History, III, 39. 122  Ibid., VI, 148. 123  Ibid., III, 370; V, 39. 124  Ibid., IV, 381. 118 

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of that value; though it is to be presumed, that our exports in woollen goods are somewhat encreased’.125 He furthered this argument by observing that, notwithstanding the large increase in available money, the prices of finer industrial products in England had fallen.126 The only plausible reason for this, Hume argued, was that this branch of industry had progressed faster than the inflow of specie. He left us in no doubt as to his belief that market prices were determined by the ratio of supply and demand. This was the only point on which Smith diverged from Hume in political economy.127 Hume’s emphasis on commerce and industry as the sources of national wealth, rather than on the stock of money specie, reflected his neoHarringtonian heritage.128 Not only did he cite Davenant and Temple as sources in support of this idea, but he also adapted neo-Harringtonian thinking on how international trade had affected domestic politics. This was a perennial issue that had been treated at length within the neo-Harringtonian tradition, which stressed the importance of maintaining free maritime trade if universal monarchy was to be avoided. For the neo-Harringtonians, this threat was encapsulated by the rise of territorial monarchies as trading polities. As we have already seen, this theme struck a chord with Hume in his political essays. Echoing the neo-Harringtonians, he declared that maritime trade was crucial to England’s capacity to defend its government and religion amidst fierce competition for power among European states. Following the neo-Harringtonians, Hume charted the development of modern European liberty by examining the effects of navigation and exploration: ‘the enlargement of commerce and navigation encreased industry and the arts every where: 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 correspondence’.129 Hume’s emphasis on emerging forms of property implied that, in nascent commercial societies, the role of land in forming social relations diminished gradually over time. Freed from their original boundaries, which had been circumscribed by their ties to land, men were now prepared to engage in trade further afield. Moreover, navigation greatly expanded men’s horizons by making travel and the spread of ideas easier.130 ‘In consequence of this universal fermentation,’ Hume wrote, ‘the ideas of men enlarged themselves on all sides; and the several constituent parts of the gothic governments, which seem to have lain long unactive, began, every where, to operate and encroach on each other.’131 By the time of Charles Ibid., V, 139. Ibid. 127  Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York, 1954), p. 316. 128  Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 493–8. 129  Hume, History, III, 80. 130  Ibid., V, 18. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 495–6. 131  Hume, History, V, 18. 125  126 

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I, Hume observed that the king found that ‘he could not preserve the old claims of the crown without assuming new ones: A principle similar to that which many of his subjects seem to have formed with regard to the people’.132 Hume stressed the fact that navigation had significantly extended maritime trade by allowing Europeans to establish colonies, and that free international trade had helped to promote domestic industry. He noted that Britain’s development of industry had reached unprecedented heights after the Restoration as a result of the expansion of trade with its colonies, including the East Indies, Guinea, Spain, and Turkey.133 In addition, he attached great importance to Charles II’s suspension of the Navigation Acts, which had prohibited the importing into England of any commodity which was not grown or manufactured in the trading country. This effectively prevented trade with the Dutch, who were ‘the general carriers and factors of Europe’ rather than the actual producers.134 Hume maintained that maritime trade had allowed English merchants to emerge as supporters of liberty by the mid sixteenth century. He observed that the foreign trade of England, which had always been carried out by foreigners, ‘chiefly the inhabitants of the Hanse-towns, or Easterlings’, had shifted to the hands of English merchants during the reign of Elizabeth.135 Due to the English ignorance of trade in general, English kings, starting from Henry III, had always adopted the policy of encouraging foreign merchants to settle in England by integrating them into a corporation, granting access to patents, and exempting them from various tax duties.136 Hume claimed that until the reign of Edward IV the ‘Stil-yard’ company incorporated ‘almost the whole foreign trade of the kingdom’.137 He praised Elizabeth for continuing Edward’s policy of annulling the tax privilege of the ‘Stil-yard’ company and imposing duties on all alien merchants, thus encouraging English merchants to enter into commerce.138 Not only had this facilitated ‘a spirit of industry’, but it had allowed England the opportunity to cultivate the arts of navigation.139 Accordingly, the English merchants were divided into ‘staplers’ and ‘merchant adventurers’, with ‘the former residing constantly at one place, the latter trying their fortunes in other towns and states abroad with cloth and other manufactures’.140

Hume, History of Great Britain, vol. 1, Containing the reigns of James I. and Charles I (Edinburgh, 1754), p. 238. Hume deleted this sentence in the last edition of his History (London, 1778). 133  Hume, History, VI, 148. 134  Ibid., 46–7. 135  Ibid., III, 386. 136  Ibid. 137  Ibid. 138  Ibid., 386–7. 139  Ibid., 387. 140  Ibid. 132 

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Hume observed that by the time of Charles II’s reign, ‘the prevalence of democratical principles engaged the country gentlemen to bind their sons apprentices to merchants; and commerce has ever since been more honourable in England than in any other European kingdom’.141 This implied a deep transformation in men’s perception of prestige, and so enabled a much larger portion of the population to engage in maritime trade.142 Indeed, the social status of merchants had continued to increase, and, until the first half of the eighteenth century, they were considered by some to be on an equal footing with the gentry. Richard Steele, in his play The Conscious Lovers (1722), wrote that ‘we Merchants are a species of Gentry, that have grown into the World this last Century, and are as honourable, and almost as useful, as you landed Folks, that have always thought yourselves so much above us’.143 Hume evidently shared this belief, and it was on these grounds that he maintained that commerce, rather than civic virtue (as in the ancient republican states) or social rank (as in feudal and territorial states), played a pivotal role in the English political system.144 In stark contrast to Smith’s concerns about this merchant group, Hume attested to its constructive input. As early as 1752, he wrote that merchants were ‘the most useful race of men in the whole society’.145 He maintained that it was through merchants that civilisation and the ‘spirit of liberty’ had arrived in England. Escaping from religious persecution in France and the Low Countries, Protestant merchants and artisans took refuge in England and brought their skills with them.146 Foreign artificers had surpassed the English ‘in dexterity, industry, and frugality’, so this influx of talent promoted industrial growth in their new homeland.147 Hume noted that there had been a setback under Henry VIII, who forced at least 15,000 Flemings out of London at one time because of their support for Queen Catherine. Henry then placed tight constraints on foreign artisans and merchants.148 Compared with the king’s arbitrary conduct in dealing with commerce, Hume emphasised that Parliament had played a pivotal role in promoting commercial activities; for example, Parliament had encouraged ‘foreign merchants and artizans’ to migrate to England, which encouraged natives to improve and diversify their skills.149 Ibid., VI, 148. John B. Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political Philosophy (Princeton, 1992), pp. 187–92, 290–302. 143  Quoted in Bonamy Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century 1700– 1740 (Oxford, 1959), p. 3. 144  For a discussion of the republican discourse of civic virtue, see Shelley Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 64–86. 145  Hume, ‘Of Interest’, p. 129. 146  Hume, History, III, 409; IV, 379. 147  Ibid., III, 327. 148  Ibid., 328. 149  Ibid. 141  142 

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Hume’s next step was to explain how commerce and industry promoted the art of tillage, thus incorporating the agricultural sector into the same market force as the industrial sector.150 In order to eliminate the factor of inflation from his analysis, he consistently applied the price of cattle as the measure of the quantity of money in the market since this kind of commodity could not be ‘much augmented in quantity by the encrease of art and industry’.151 Since more capital (the influx of money from the colonies) and advancing techniques of tillage made corn more plentiful, they also reduced the price of corn.152 For this reason, Hume saw ‘the raising of corn’ as a species of rude manufacturing.153 Comparing the average prices of corn and cattle provided a reliable measure for the state of industry and tillage. The improvement of the art of tillage would naturally lower the price of corn and make cattle relatively more expensive. As he noted, ‘so great a difference between the prices of corn and cattle as that of four to one [during the reign of Henry III], compared to the present rates, affords important reflections concerning the very different state of industry and tillage in the two periods’.154 Hume argued against the traditional view that the development of manufacturing would disadvantage husbandry. This view was indicated by several laws, such as Henry VII’s legislation against binding one’s children to an apprenticeship. Viewing these laws as ‘absurd limitations’, he argued that the promotion of husbandry was ‘never more effectually encouraged than by the encrease of manufactures’.155 In Hume’s eyes, the most characteristic feature of modern liberty was that ordinary men started to abandon idleness and adopt the habits of industriousness.156 He did not see this demolition of the old social hierarchy as the triumph of commercial interests over landed interests. Rather, he believed that these two types of interests, namely the urban-centred merchants and the country-based gentry, would go hand in hand as the champions of the same type of civil liberty. Hume’s discussion of the development of a modern European economy cleared the way for him to explain the ‘general, but insensible revolution’ in ‘the minds of men, throughout Europe, especially in England’.157 He summed up this process as follows:

See also H. J. Habakkuk, ‘English Landownership, 1680–1740’, Economic History Review 10 (1940), 2–17. 151  Hume, History, III, 78. 152  Ibid. 153  Ibid., I, 184. 154  Ibid., II, 67–8. 155  Ibid., 79. 156  Constant Noble Stockton, ‘Economics and the Mechanism of Historical Progress in Hume’s History’, Hume: A Re-evaluation, ed. D. W. Livingston and J. T. King (New York, 1976), p. 315. 157  Hume, History, V, 18. 150 

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Arts, both mechanical and liberal, were every day receiving great improvements. Navigation had extended itself over the whole globe. Travelling was secure and agreeable. And the general system of politics, in Europe, was become more enlarged and comprehensive […] In England, the love of freedom, which, unless checked, flourishes extremely in all liberal natures, acquired new force, and was regulated by more enlarged views, suitably to that cultivated understanding, which became, every day, more common, among men of birth and education.158

This change in sentiment and opinion entailed the gradual displacement of ‘the distinctions of birth and title’ by a new hierarchy based on monetary wealth.159 For Hume, the shift towards the pursuit of monetary wealth had far-reaching implications for the military administration. In his A True Account of the Behaviour and Conduct of Archibald Stewart (1748), he had described the process in which men shifted their preoccupation from ‘military Honour’ to ‘Riches or Address’: ‘when Men have fallen into a more civilized life, and have been allowed to addict themselves entirely to the Cultivation of Arts and Manufactures, the Habit of their Mind, still more than that of their Body, soon renders them entirely unfit for the Use of Arms, and gives a different Direction to their Ambition’.160 ‘The barbarous Highlander’, however, who still lived by ‘Pasturage’ and heard of nothing ‘but the noble Exploits of his Tribe or Clan, and the renowned Heroes of his Lineage’.161 In Hume’s view, commerce was the driving force behind the transition of society from barbarism to civility. It was commerce that led ultimately to the progress of the ‘spirit of liberty’, since commercial activities demanded the protection of the lives and property of the people. This demand was shown in the growth of the ‘monied interests’. In his essay ‘Of Interest’ (1752), he argued that these interests were the natural outcome of commerce. In a pre-commercial state in which the majority of the population consisted of either landed gentry or peasants, no large stocks could be accumulated.162 The gentry, unused to frugality, were naturally prone to borrow, and the peasants simply had nothing beyond their bare subsistence.163 Using the interest rate as ‘a barometer of the state’, he maintained that a lower interest rate indicated a more advanced economy.164 Ibid. Ibid., VI, 132. 160  Hume, A True Account of the Behaviour and Conduct of Archibald Stewart, Esq; late Lord Provost of Edinburgh (1748), pp. 6–7. 161  Ibid., p. 7. 162  Hume, ‘Of Interest’, p. 128. 163  Ibid. 164  The phrase ‘a barometer of state’ was from Hume’s essay ‘Of Interest’, p. 132. Hume reiterated this idea in his History, IV, arguing that the much lower interest rate during the reign of Henry IV of France was ‘an indication of the great advances of France above England in commerce’, pp. 369–70. 158  159 

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Hume mounted an attack on the traditional view that ‘usury’, or the practice of taking interest for lending money, distorted the natural mechanism of economy. In his view, with the rise of commerce, monied interests became part and parcel of the economy because they provided the necessary capital for economic growth.165 Hume’s sympathy with the Jews, who had been persecuted for their practice of usury, was based not simply on the grounds of their property rights, but also on their important role in the economy.166 He observed that Jews had suffered from exploitation and persecution as far back as the time of the Anglo-Normans: ‘the most barefaced acts of tyranny and oppression were practised against the Jews, who were entirely out of the protection of law, were extremely odious from the bigotry of the people, and were abandoned to the immeasurable rapacity of the king and his ministers’.167 The exactions of the Jews were pursued so far that ‘there was a particular court of exchequer set apart for managing it’.168 This kind of persecution against a particular nation gradually diminished in the Tudor age at a time when commerce exercised increasing restraint upon governmental authority. Hume noted the importance of two acts, one in 1546 and the other in 1571.169 By fixing interest at 10 per cent, these acts put the practice of usury under the protection of the law.170 Hume traced the piecemeal progress of the Tudor government in promoting trade, which foreshadowed the significant improvement of maritime trade in the Stuart age. He argued that restrictions on the export of rural commodities – mainly corn – posed one of the major obstacles to the development of an agricultural economy. He noted that this was a common practice in the feudal age, and eased only slightly during Henry IV’s reign. Under Henry, Parliament had granted permission to export corn only during the years of low prices, and encouraged the domestic commerce in corn by granting licences.171 Hume noted that the policy of restricting corn exports was followed throughout the Tudor age until 1558.172 Echoing an earlier historian, William Camden (1551–1623), he maintained that agriculture subsequently ‘received new life and vigour’.173

Hume, ‘Of Interest’, pp. 131–2. Stockton, ‘Economics and the Mechanism’, p. 308. 167  Hume, History, I, 483. 168  Ibid. 169  Ibid., III, 331; IV, 380. Hume compared England and France, in which the interest rate of the time was only 6½ per cent. For him, this difference meant that the latter country had a more advanced economy. 170  Hume, History, III, 318. 171  Ibid., 454. 172  Ibid, 48, 380. The act is 1 Eliz. 1. c. 10. 173  Hume, History, IV, 149. 165  166 

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One of Hume’s recently discovered manuscripts provides further insight into his argument for the importance of free trade in rural commodities.174 The essay was written as an advertisement for a pamphlet on the corn trade, which argued against the prevailing view that corn merchants had been responsible for the high price of corn.175 It is possible that the advertisement was written in 1775, during a time of grain shortage at the beginning of the American War of Independence. He observed that it was common practice for corn merchants to hoard and raise prices when there was ‘a Scarcity of Corn’, and that they became the immediate target of criticism as the prices of corn went up.176 For Hume, however, ‘nothing could be more beneficial than such hoarding’, since the resulting high price obliged the buyers to consume less and accordingly avoid starvation.177 He justified his view with a thought experiment: Suppose a Country, whose usual Produce is only able to maintain the Inhabitants: Suppose that a particular Crop falls short a sixth. If the Corn was sold at a middling Price, and was brought to Market as fast as it was demanded: it is evident, that it would all be consum’d in ten Months, and the whole People must starve during the other two. The high Price alone of the Commodity obliges People to be frugal in their consumption; and the Precaution of some Persons saves for the latter End of the Year.178

As David Raynor has maintained, this passage clearly indicated Hume’s originality as a laissez-faire thinker.179 The essence of Hume’s idea was that market price could naturally adjust demand and supply, and that free trade, rather than arbitrary intervention, could restore the economy during crises. The Rise of the Middling Rank When Hume wrote his Stuart History, it had become a historiographical commonplace to explain the constitutional struggle of the seventeenth century in terms of the significant shift in landed possessions from the aristocracy to Hume, Advertisement [for a pamphlet on commerce], papers of William Pulteney, 1638–1880 (Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, c.1775, MSS PU 1806). Reprinted in David Raynor, ‘Who Invented the Invisible Hand? Hume’s Praise of Laissez-faire in a newly discovered Pamphlet’, Times Literary Supplement 4974 (London, 14 August 1998), 22. 175  Raynor, ‘Hume’s Praise of Laissez-faire’, 22. 176  Ibid. 177  Ibid. 178  Ibid. 179  Ibid. For a discussion of Hume’s argument for free trade and its political implications, see David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought (Oxford, 1981), pp. 121–41. 174 

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the gentry.180 This idea, which was originally proposed by James Harrington in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), had played an important role in shaping the eighteenth-century political discourse of the Civil War.181 The Augustan writers in particular placed an acute emphasis on the fact that the gentry had accumulated a large amount of landed property at the expense of the nobility, thus tilting the balance of power towards the Commons.182 For them, the resulting conflict between Crown and Parliament was an outcome of this commercial revolution, which had gradually reduced the Crown to a state of financial dependence. Although Hume conceded that the gentry’s rise was integral to the increasing power of Parliament, he maintained that the rise of the gentry occurred during the first two reigns of the Stuart monarchy – almost a century later than Harrington had supposed. As Hume wrote, ‘the riches, amassed during their residence at home, rendered them independent. The influence, acquired by hospitality, made them formidable. They would not be led by the court: They could not be driven: And thus the system of the English government received a total and a sudden alteration in the course of less than forty years [since the Stuart accession].’183 Hume’s major contribution to the political theory of government authority lay in his claim that this blow to the political hierarchy forced the government into the task of meeting the demands of the rising gentry. For Hume, commerce led to the emergence of a powerful middling rank, which mainly included merchants, manufacturers, and the gentry.184 Notwithstanding the fact that landed aristocrats had been the first to benefit from commerce (both financially and politically), he noted that, in the long run, it was the gentry whose advantage was the greatest. The key to this debate lay in whether power had shifted from one landed group to another, or from landed to commercial interests.185 Hume argued that land redistribution took place amongst landowners. He pointed out that the nobility had soon fallen prey to luxury and dissipated their fortunes, and thus lost their political Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 423–61. Ibid. For an overview of the rise of the gentry, see G. E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (London and New York, 1976), pp. 39–79. 182  For a detailed discussion of this, see Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 104–47; Quentin Skinner, ‘Augustan Party Politics and Renaissance Constitutional Thought’, Visions of Politics, ed. Q. Skinner (3 vols, Cambridge, 2002 edn), II, 344–67. 183  Hume, History, V, 134. 184  Ibid., 134–7. 185  R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912), pp. 55–173. Tawney’s view – that the rise of gentry as a class was due to their successful management of land – was very influential in the twentieth century. Hugh TrevorRoper, in The Gentry 1540–1640, Economic History Review Supplements 1 (London, 1953), pp. 8–13. Trevor-Roper called this view into question and argued that what was on the rise was not the whole of the gentry but ‘certain families within the landlord class’ through offices and trade. 180  181 

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and social influence. The ‘small proprietors of land’ followed suit by imitating the habits and lifestyle of their superiors.186 This created an unprecedented opportunity for the gentry, who were able to accumulate wealth by buying up the newly released land and managing it directly for profit.187 Hume observed that the gentry under the early Stuarts had enjoyed many privileges. They ‘were engaged in no expence, except that of country hospitality’; ‘no taxes were levied, no wars waged, no attendance at court expected, no bribery or profusion required at elections. Could human nature ever reach happiness, the condition of the English gentry, under so mild and benign a prince [sc. James I], might merit that appellation.’188 ‘The common arts of arbitrary government’, which had ‘ever been practised by all princes’, were that the local magnates should be encouraged to stay in Court in order to ‘encrease their subjection to ministers by attendance’.189 Oddly enough, James I had adopted the policy of forcing the gentry to live in their ‘country seat’ in order to prevent them from interfering with Court politics. As a result of this policy, the gentry became increasingly independent of Court influence.190 Hume maintained that, if one looked with all the wisdom of hindsight at the quarrel between the Crown and the Commons, then the Stuarts could be held responsible for nurturing a formidable political enemy – the gentry – by banishing them from the Court.191 James I had issued several proclamations requiring the gentry to leave London and remain in their country seats. According to Hume, this policy gave the gentry sufficient room to exercise their influence in the country against the power of the Crown by means of local patronage.192 The incapacity of the old financial system to meet the demands of the land market facilitated the shift of power to the gentry. The subsidies and the fifteenths, which had been levied upon the persons to whom the land belonged, were easily evaded after a change of ownership.193 An additional consequence was that this shift in land ownership from great nobles and small freeholders to the gentry came at the expense of the Crown.194 Hume argued that ‘the advantage, therefore of every change was taken against the Hume, History, V, 134–5, 138. Ibid., 134–5. 188  Ibid., 135. 189  Ibid., 134. Clearly, Hume was referring to Louis XIV’s policy of increasing royal patronage by means of an expansive Court. It is a historiographical commonplace that this was not the case for all Stuart reigns. See Paul Kléber Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe 1589–1715 (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 227–8. Monod observed that Charles II followed the example of Louis XIV by promoting an active Court life. 190  Hume, History, V, 134. 191  Ibid. 192  Ibid. 193  Ibid., 135, footnote f. 194  Ibid., 137–8. 186  187 

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crown; and the crown could obtain the advantage of none’.195 The Commons endeavoured to grant freedom to both mercantile and landed interests.196 The latter involved removing ‘the burthen of wardships’ as well as ‘those remains of the feudal tenures’.197 Such a balance of power was the reason that the later Stuarts had failed to introduce a form of centralised government and religion similar to that exercised in France.198 At first glance, Hume subscribed to the Harringtonian claim that property influenced political power. However, his argument was not simply that the new ‘middling rank’, namely merchants, usurers, gentry, and independent peasants, rose to power and created an escalating demand for the protection of life and property. He contended that the growing demand for liberty required a new mentality suited to the rising predominance of commerce. For Hume, the heart of the matter was the very mechanism by which the balance of property affected political power. He laid the groundwork for an association between the new system of property – initiated from the Stuart accession onwards – and a growing ‘spirit of freedom and independence’.199 This demonstrates his belief that, given an exceedingly complex relationship between property and political power, the mid-seventeenth-century struggle between Crown and Parliament was not simply a direct outcome of property redistribution, as the Augustan writers had argued. Hume traced the origin of the constitutional crisis by mapping it onto a long-term narrative in which a property-based social hierarchy gradually replaced elite patronage. The redistribution of property ‘bred opposite sentiments’ among subjects, and ‘the increasing knowledge of the age’ freed them from an inherited pattern of thought and conventional regard for monarchical authority.200 As a consequence, the Crown’s subjects started to ‘pay little regard, either to the entreaties or menaces of their sovereign’.201 Broadly speaking, commerce fostered new kinds of inequality between the various groups within the state. Although Hume observed that the political influence of mercantile interests did not emerge until the late seventeenth century, he maintained that property, as the basis of this new type of inequality, had become central to the development of social relationships. Hume made a compelling case about the way in which the gentry’s rise served as the determining factor in the struggle between Crown and Parliament. The rise of commerce had allowed the Tudors to demolish the feudal order and establish a law-governed order. As wealth became gradually concentrated in the hands of the gentry, their representatives in the 195  196  197  198  199  200  201 

Ibid., 138. Ibid., 20–1. Ibid. Ibid., 289–90. Ibid., 39–40. Ibid., 39. Ibid. 41

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Commons became emboldened. They demanded that the interests of the new propertied class be incorporated into the political remit of the state: After the power of alienations, as well as the encrease of commerce had thrown the balance of property into the hands of the commons, the situation of affairs and 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. And though in that interval, after the decline of the peers and before the people had yet experienced their force, the princes assumed an exorbitant power, and had almost annihilated the constitution under the weight of their prerogative; as soon as the commons recovered from their lethargy, they seem to have been astonished at the danger, and were resolved to secure liberty by firmer barriers, than their ancestors had hitherto provided for it.202

The difficulty with Harrington’s explanation was that it equated the possession of landed property with a broad sense of political influence. Hume solved this difficulty by presenting the rise of the gentry as an entirely new and self-confident political force, something they expressed through political participation rather than the mere possession of land. He observed that a seat in the Lower House was unprofitable because the wages of the representatives still came from fees levied in the counties or the boroughs. Nevertheless, irrespective of the ‘small importance’ of obtaining ‘a seat in the house’, the gentry had begun to regard it as an honour to represent the counties during the reign of James I.203 This was in strong contrast to small boroughs, the representation of which continued to confer only limited political stature.204 By this novel emphasis on the gentry’s desire to participate in national politics, Hume illustrated the new dynamic which the rise of the gentry had brought to English politics. In Hume’s eyes, the Commons’ desire for innovation proved to be a dangerous political force that would distort the original balance of the constitution. Innovators, such as Francis Bacon and Edwin Sandys, were ‘men of genius and enlarged minds’, not the ‘generality of the people’.205 The ‘leading members’ of the Commons ‘began to regulate their opinions, more by the future consequences which they foresaw, than by the former precedents which were set before them; and they less aspired at maintaining the ancient constitution, than at establishing a new one, and a freer, and a better’.206 Hume exposed the hypocrisy of the Commons in holding fast to the idea of the ancient constitution, the purpose of which was not to maintain the existing structure of government, but to dismantle it. In this way, he showed some sympathy towards the Stuarts, whose ambition did not stretch beyond the maintenance of the status quo. 202  203  204  205  206 

Ibid., 40. Ibid., 58. Ibid. Ibid., 550. Ibid., 42. 42

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Thus far, we have investigated the ways in which Hume integrated his economic thinking into a narrative of the historical origin of English liberty. We have also examined his argument that maritime trade had redrawn modern politics on an entirely different basis. According to Hume, the history of England could not be deduced from the ideology of the ancient constitution. For one thing, the ancient constitution could not explain the growth of liberty, which owed its existence to the rise of commerce from the late fifteenth century onwards. Furthermore, Hume’s political economy provided a gateway into the heart of the History since the connection between commerce and liberty guided his theory of the foundation of the modern state.

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2

The Civilised Monarchy under the Tudors

The cities encreased; the middle rank of men began to be rich and powerful; the prince, who, in effect, was the same with the law, was implicitly obeyed; and though the farther progress of the same causes begat a new plan of liberty, founded on the privileges of the commons, yet in the interval between the fall of the nobles and the rise of this order, the sovereign took advantage of the present situation, and assumed an authority almost absolute. Hume, Tudor History, 1759

In 1752, whilst deliberating whether to begin his History with the Stuarts or the Tudors, Hume wrote to Adam Smith that ‘the Change, which then [sc. under the Tudors] happen’d in public Affairs, was very insensible, and did not display its Influence till many Years afterwards. Twas under James that the House of Commons began first to raise their Head, & then the Quarrel betwixt Privilege & Prerogative commenc’d.’1 Five years later, as Hume delved into Tudor History, his attitude changed dramatically. He wrote to his London publisher Andrew Millar that ‘it is properly at that Period [sc. the reign of Henry VII] modern History commences. America was discovered: Commerce extended: the Arts cultivated: Printing invented: Religion reformed: And all the Governments of Europe almost chang’d. I wish therefore I had begun here at first.’2 Hume lamented that had he explained the far-reaching changes of society and government under the Tudors, ‘many Objections’ (mostly charges of partiality) against his Stuart History could have been easily countered.3 More specifically, he would have been able to demonstrate that it was the inconsistency of the Tudor monarchy, rather than the Stuarts’ illegal seizure of power, that had caused the constitutional crisis in the seventeenth century. Letters, I, 167–8. Ibid., 249. 3  Ibid. For the charges of partiality in Hume’s Stuart volumes, see James Fieser, ed., Early Responses to Hume’s History of England (2 vols, Bristol, 2002), I, 1–172, especially the entries by Roger Flexman, Daniel MacQueen, and William Rose. 1  2 

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Based on a thorough investigation of Hume’s Tudor History, this chapter explains Hume’s view that the seventeenth-century constitutional struggle between Crown and Parliament was rooted historically in the Tudor monarchy. This explanation constitutes an alternative to Pocock’s influential reading of Hume. According to Pocock, Hume’s Tudor History merely restated his earlier claim in the Stuart History that the constitutional struggle was an inevitable consequence of the decline of feudalism. This view implies that Hume’s Tudor History added nothing but a narrative of ‘an interval between cause and effect’, in which the Tudors passively occupied the vacuum left by the great nobles before the gentry rose to prominence.4 Against this view, this chapter highlights the importance of Hume’s Tudor History in his analysis of England’s development of commercial and political liberty. It examines Hume’s subtly delineated account of the Tudor monarchy in its European context, particularly the transformation of monarchical government as a consequence of navigation and maritime trade. It does so by exploring Hume’s view that the rise of commerce from the Tudor era onwards precipitated a gradual and yet radical change of public opinions, which in turn promoted a fundamental re-conceptualisation of governmental authority and parliamentary liberty. Seen from this perspective, Hume’s Tudor History is a macro-narrative recounting the post-feudal stage through which the construction of a modern state took place over a period of more than a century. He narrated the emergence of a strong sovereign state oscillating between the old medieval concept of a personified sovereign prince and the modernising machinery of the state. He situated this narrative within the context of a rapidly changing world that was itself transforming from feudalism to market economy. Hume contended that the rise of commerce enabled the Tudors to replace the local jurisdiction of the powerful nobles and clergy with a centralised legal order. The consolidated legal and political power of the Crown was due largely to the quickening pace of socio-economic changes. Increasing commercial activity stimulated a market economy that demanded significant changes to the traditional agricultural system based on tenure. Meanwhile, the introduction of a luxury market from the late fifteenth century onwards led the nobility to expend their fortune and sell their land in the market. The Crown, in alliance with the people, gradually gained an overwhelming monopoly of patronage, and the people, set free from the local jurisdiction of the great nobles, found themselves caught up in a new pattern of dependency and obligation under the aegis of law and government. Crucial to this picture was Hume’s account of the new framework in which law served as the basis of determining property and rights. Building on Hume’s argument regarding the incompatibility between tenure-based feudal law and modern liberty (as discussed in the previous chapter), this chapter investigates his analysis of the new legal order under the Tudors. By doing so, we are able to trace 4 

Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 223. 46

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the connections that Hume made between the post-feudal absolutism of the Tudors and an increasing range of economic, social, and political freedoms. Contrary to Pocock’s reading, I shall attempt to prove that Hume’s originality consists of two main arguments. The first is that the Tudors’ bold legislative effort to reconstruct society prepared the way for the consolidation of liberty in the seventeenth century. Thus, it was the sovereign authority of monarchical government, rather than the ancient constitution, that provided the safeguard for liberty and justice. The second argument is that the Tudor monarchy was an inconsistent fabric which was the source of the increasing conflict between Crown and Parliament. Such an inconsistency had to be explained through a thorough examination of Tudor government and the far-reaching changes in English society after the introduction of international trade. Civilised Monarchy Sylvana Tomaselli has argued that ‘whether conceived as a history of an invention or not, any account of the nature of political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must reap the benefit of Hume’s hint’.5 The hint to which Tomaselli alluded was that modern politics could only be understood in contrast to the social and economic conditions of the premodern world. In his essay ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ (1741), Hume observed that ‘trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century; and there scarcely is any ancient writer on politics, who has made mention of it’.6 For him, the unprecedented role of commerce was to shift the ground of politics beyond its original boundaries, thus initiating a new chapter in European history. Economic growth in early modern Europe consisted in the development of cities, fuelled by the surplus labour created by the abolition of retainers. In free states, this process aided the development of law and the art of government which were then adopted by monarchical governments. Consequently, monarchies assumed a new type of law-governed social order, namely civilised monarchy.7 A civilised monarchy, Hume maintained, was ‘a government of Laws, not of Men’.8 Civilised monarchies could secure life and property more effectively than ancient feudal monarchies because their laws were made and observed by the sovereign. On this basis, Hume denounced Niccolò 5  Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Political Economy: The Desires and Needs of Present and Future Generations’, Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. C. Fox, R. Porter, and R. Wokler (1995), p. 298. 6  Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, p. 52. 7  Ibid., p. 56. See Tatsuya Sakamoto, ‘Hume’s Political Economy as a System of Manners’, The Rise of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. T. Sakamoto and H. Tanaka (London, 2003), pp. 88–92. 8  Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, p. 56.

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Machiavelli’s concept of monarchical government as ‘extremely defective’: ‘there scarcely is any maxim in his prince, which subsequent experience has not entirely refuted’.9 He accused Machiavelli of being unable to lift his eyes above ‘the furious and tyrannical governments of ancient times’ or ‘the little disorderly principalities of Italy’. Machiavelli had failed to foresee that the rise of commerce and industry would irrevocably change the nature of monarchical government by inclining towards a centralised bureaucracy.10 Hume emphasised that a civilised monarchy no longer depended on the personal capabilities of its prince. ‘Almost all the princes of Europe’, he wrote, ‘are at present governed by their ministers; and have been so for near two centuries; and yet no such event [sc. the dispossession of the Crown by the ministers] has ever happened, or can possibly happen.’11 By highlighting the expanded role of ministers, he showed that the administration of government had passed from the hands of sovereign princes into those of quasiprofessional employees of the state. This was an important theme to which Hume returned in his Tudor History, where ministers, such as Thomas Wolsey and the Earl of Hertford, played a significant role in the execution of government policies. However, the actual governance of ministers did not mean that they exercised sovereign power. As Hume concluded, the Tudor monarch, like his counterparts in Europe, was ‘the prime mover of everything’.12 Hume’s concept of the ‘civilised monarchy’ embodied both monarchical absolutism and the subject’s freedom under the protection of the law – a combination that appears inconsistent prima facie. However, he also demonstrated the way in which the introduction of commerce had transformed feudal anarchy into monarchical absolutism, as well as the way in which this process had increased the security of property and life. Hume pointed out that a feudal government ‘knows no other secret or policy, than that of entrusting unlimited powers to every governor or magistrate, and subdividing the people into so many classes and orders of slavery’.13 In a civilised monarchy, however, ‘the prince alone is unrestrained in the exercise of his authority, and possesses alone a power, which is not bounded by any thing but custom, example, and the sense of his own interest’.14 The whole nation, including the most eminent ministers, must ‘submit to the general laws’, and ‘the people depend on none but their sovereign, for the security of their property. He is so far removed from them, and is so much exempt from private jealousies or interests, that this dependence is scarcely felt.’15 Thus, the feudal king was Ibid., p. 51. Hume referred to Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, pp. 52–3. See also Istvan Hont, ‘Adam Smith’s History of Law and Government as Political Theory’, Political Judgment: Essays for John Dunn, ed. R. Bourke and R. Geuss (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 162–4. 11  Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, pp. 51–2. 12  Hume, History, III, 79. 13  Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, Essays, p. 68. 14  Ibid., p. 69. 15  Ibid. 9 

10 

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the largest owner of tenures, whereas the modern king was the head of an elaborate system of laws. In his Tudor History, Hume postulated that monarchical absolutism in modern Europe was prompted by the naval discoveries of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama.16 ‘These great events were attended’, he claimed, ‘with important consequences to all the nations of Europe, even to such as were not immediately concerned in those naval enterprizes.’17 Drawing a connection between the evolution of English government and the discovery of the New World was a historiographical innovation. Many of his contemporaries – the Country ‘Patriots’ for the most part – believed that England’s mixed government dated back to the ancient constitution of the Saxon fathers and that it held nothing in common with the territorial states on the Continent. Hume countered this belief by claiming that Europe, including England, had received a modernising commercial impetus from the discoveries of the New World. Following these discoveries, Hume maintained: The enlargement of commerce and navigation encreased industry and the arts everywhere: 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 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 would 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.18

Hume described the beginning of a new commercial age that heralded new forms of property such as ‘stock’ and ‘commodities’, and in which the role of land in determining social hierarchies gradually diminished. Hume left his readers in little doubt that the Tudor monarchs had owed their increasing power to the expansion of trade and industry in Europe.19 There were significant changes in the agricultural economy due to landowners’ emerging concern for economic efficiency. They saw that the traditional way of land management could not promote their interests effectively. ‘Either inclosing their fields, or joining many small farms into a few large ones’, they Hume, History, III, 80. Duncan Forbes, ‘Politics and History in David Hume: David Hume politico e storico by Giuseppe Giarrizzo’, Historical Journal 6 (1963), 286. 17  Hume, History, III, 80. 18  Ibid. See also Duncan Forbes, ‘The European, or Cosmopolitan, Dimension in Hume’s Science of Politics’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 1 (1978), 57–60; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘England under the House of Tudor: Monarchy, Europe and Enthusiasm’, in his Barbarism and Religion, II, 222–40. 19  Hume, History, III, 79. 16 

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dismissed retainers and turned their land into a more profitable investment. For Hume, this constituted a crucial condition for the centralisation of power. He noted that it had been common practice in the feudal age to restrict the export of rural commodities (mainly corn), and that this practice had only eased under Henry IV but was abolished entirely under Elizabeth. Too much corn in the domestic market would cause its price to drop. Thus, if exports were prohibited, it would not be profitable to cultivate the land. Meanwhile, there were no restrictions on the export of ‘all the produce of pasturage, such as wool, hides, leather, tallow, &c’.20 This, according to Hume, led to the ‘encrease of inclosures and decay of tillage’ because livestock grazing was more economically beneficial to the landowner.21 Hume explained that enclosure was also, and perhaps more importantly, owed to a sudden flourishing of arts and a significant expansion of trade in sixteenth-century Europe. As a mechanical form of employment, ‘the knowledge of agriculture’ made slower progress than ‘the arts of manufacture’ since it required ‘the most reflection and experience’.22 This led naturally to a shift in economic activity from tillage to pasturage and wool production. According to Hume, a great demand arose for wool both abroad and at home: pasturage was found more profitable than unskilful tillage: Whole estates were laid waste by inclosures: The tenants regarded as a useless burden, were expelled their habitations: Even the cottagers, deprived of the commons, on which they formerly fed their cattle, were reduced to misery: And a decay of people, as well as a diminution of the former plenty, was remarked in the kingdom.23

The immediate consequences of enclosure were the low state of husbandry, the poverty of the common people, and a decrease in population.24 The enclosure of large amounts of land substantially affected farmers and cottagers, whose livelihood was entirely dependent on traditional methods of agricultural production. Citing the famous saying of Thomas More, Hume proclaimed that ‘a sheep had become in England a more ravenous animal than a lion or wolf, and devoured whole villages, cities, and provinces’.25 Hume noted that the early Tudors had made several unsuccessful attempts to reduce enclosure in order to address these grievances, and yet these Ibid., IV, 380. Ibid. 22  Ibid., III, 369. 23  Ibid., IV, 380. 24  Ibid. Following an anonymous ‘judicious author’, Hume established the causal connection between this policy of restricting corn exportation and a continual decrease in population. By the work of a ‘judicious author’, Hume referred to A Compendious or Briefe Examination of Certayne Ordinary Complaints of Divers of our Countrymen in These Our Dayes (London, 1581), published anonymously. While this book was republished under the name of William Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, Hume did not confirm this. 25  Hume, History, III, 370. 20  21 

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attempts revealed a deep misunderstanding of the logic of commercial economy. He argued that promoting an interest in husbandry could remedy this problem. Disagreeing with Francis Bacon, who had praised Henry VII for having made laws ‘against enclosure, and for the keeping up of farm houses’, Hume maintained that compelling landowners to maintain their farmhouses or farmers to cultivate the land would not necessarily promote husbandry because it neither increased knowledge of agriculture nor created incentives to concentrate on arable farming. ‘If husbandmen understand agriculture, and have a ready vent for their commodities, we need not dread a diminution of the people, employed in the country.’26 The fact that several laws against enclosure were enacted after the reign of Henry VII showed that ‘the practice of depopulating the country, by abandoning tillage, and throwing the lands into pasturage, still continued’.27 Although these laws decreed that no more than 2,000 sheep could be raised in one flock, Hume observed that some landowners had, in fact, kept 24,000.28 The failure of the legislature to prevent enclosure during the reign of Henry VIII was owed chiefly to Parliament’s misplaced vision of what should be done to improve husbandry. Hume pointed out that Parliament at this time had mistakenly identified the cause of the ‘encreasing price of mutton’ as ‘the encrease of sheep’, whereas the true cause might be ‘the daily encrease of money’ in the market.29 From Parliament’s perspective, the control of sheep production by a limited few was the main reason behind the rising price of the produce of pasturage. It followed for Parliament that, in order to lower the price, farms should not be sold in the market. Against this view, Hume argued that the successive Tudor parliaments should have set their sights on promoting knowledge of manufacturing and free trade in pastoral produce: ‘husbandry […] is never more effectually encouraged than by the encrease of manufactures’.30 Hume maintained that the Tudors’ failed legislative attempt to improve husbandry contributed paradoxically to the ‘change of manners’, which in turn paved the way for ‘the secret revolution of government’ and the subversion of ‘the power of the barons’.31 Since landed interests gradually gave way to those of manufacturing and industry, the nobility’s power base was weakened. Hume maintained that England’s economy was comparatively backwards when set against the unprecedented scale of commercial enterprise in Portugal, Spain, and Italy.32 Yet the English began to reap the rewards as England’s market became gradually connected with other European states 26  27  28  29  30  31  32 

Ibid., 79. Ibid., 330. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 79. Ibid., IV, 385. Ibid., III, 370. 51

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through international finance and produce exchange. Wool constituted a major part of exports, and thus the manufacture of wool products gave a powerful stimulus to the trading sector. In Hume’s eyes, economic interests had increased in direct proportion to the power of the Crown. The power of commerce seeped into every aspect of life, with a strictly defined feudal hierarchy giving way to a relatively equal relationship in the market economy. ‘The habits of luxury dissipated the immense fortunes of the ancient barons; and […] the new methods of expence [sic] gave subsistence to mechanics and merchants, who lived in an independent manner on the fruits of their own industry’.33 One by-product of the nobility’s rival desire for luxury goods was the promotion of the arts and sciences, which significantly diminished the nobles’ power. The nobility soon found themselves no longer in a position to maintain local patronage through retainers. As Hume wrote, ‘a nobleman, instead of that unlimited ascendant, […] retained only that moderate influence, which customers have over tradesmen, and which can never be dangerous to civil government’.34 In order to pay for their luxury goods, the nobility gave longer leases to their tenants for higher rents, thus allowing them greater independence. Hume noted that the local magnates, who had been powerful and intractable in the Middle Ages, had fallen gradually into financial difficulty. The monarch was able to capitalise on these developments by filling the gap left by the nobility’s local patronage with his centralised executive power. Hume observed that the prince, who, in effect, was the same with the law, was implicitly obeyed; and though the farther progress of the same causes begat a new plan of liberty, founded on the privileges of the commons, yet in the interval between the fall of the nobles and the rise of this order, the sovereign took advantage of the present situation, and assumed an authority almost absolute.35

The Tudors’ grip on their subjects, according to Hume, came from the collapse of medieval rural society and the commercial revolution. In Hume’s view, the declining power of the nobility disposed public opinion favourably towards the monarchy, thus increasing the power of the Crown. Ostensibly this serves to reaffirm Pocock’s argument that Hume viewed the Tudor monarchy as nothing more than a de facto outcome of the dismantling of feudal power.36 However, Hume’s intention at a deeper level was to differentiate between medieval and modern politics. He did not believe that the Tudor accession had given rise immediately to a sudden revolution in the legal and financial administration of the state. Rather, he maintained that civilised monarchy, which remained in its infancy, had received its impetus from the collapse of medieval rural society, the profit-seeking investment of 33  34  35  36 

Ibid., IV, 384. Ibid. Ibid. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 223–4. 52

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landowners, the integration of England within the European market, and, above all, from the increase in the arts, sciences, and luxury. The Decline of the Nobility In the closing remarks of his Tudor History, Hume argued that both Francis Bacon and James Harrington had failed to see that it was Henry VII’s laws against entails that had facilitated a change in men’s customs and manners. This, in turn, had led to structural changes to government and society.37 As he wrote, ‘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’.38 Hume claimed that his own unique purpose as a historian was to highlight the importance of Henry VII’s legislative activities. The Tudor monarchs, particularly Henry VII, had dealt a blow to the existing constitution by destroying the power of the nobility and building a modern monarchy in its place. ‘The settled authority, which he [sc. Henry VII] acquired to the crown, enabled the sovereign to encroach on the separate jurisdictions of the barons, and produced a more general and regular execution of the laws.’39 Bacon’s The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seuenth (1622) was the most authoritative account of the reign in Hume’s time.40 Bacon advocated reforming the laws in order to reform society, but he drew the line at subverting the existing social hierarchy.41 In terms of his views on Henry VII’s laws, Bacon went no further than discussing some statutes regarding domestic peace and security. For instance, he referred to Henry’s act on the Attendance of War, which was made ‘for the Population apparently, and (if it bee thoroughly considered) for the Souldierie, and Militar Forces of the Realme’.42 In Bacon’s view, the significance of this type of law was to strengthen the union of the House of Lancaster and the House of York, whose continuous rivalry had caused too much bloodshed during the Wars of the

Hume, History, IV, 384–5. Ibid., 384. 39  Ibid., 384–5. 40  For an analysis of Bacon’s political stance in this work, see Jerry Weinberger, ‘The Politics of Bacon’s “History of Henry the Seventh”’, Review of Politics 52 (1990), 553–81. 41  Francis Bacon, ‘Maxims of the Law’, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (14 vols, Cambridge, 1863), VII, 314–15. See Theodore K. Rabb, ‘Francis Bacon and the Reform of Society’, Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe, ed. T. K. Rabb and J. E. Seigel (Princeton, 1969), pp. 183–8; Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis, 2001), p. 6. 42  Francis Bacon, The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (London, 1622), p. 72. The act is 11 Hen. 7. c. 18. 37  38 

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Roses.43 He claimed that Henry VII’s laws were ‘not made upon the Spurre of a particular Occasion for the Present, but out of Providence of the Future, to make the Estate of his people still more and more happie, after the manner of the Legislators in ancient and Heroicall Times’.44 Neither Harrington nor Hume thought that Bacon’s praise of Henry was justified. However, they disagreed over the nature and extent to which Henry’s laws transformed society and government.45 Fundamental to Harrington’s analysis was his recognition of the role of property, especially landed property, as the foundation of political power.46 In his eyes, Henry VII had effected a scheme to elevate the gentry by allowing them to encroach upon their local superiors’ land, thus shifting political power towards the Commons.47 His emphasis was less on economic and social realities than on military defence in the machinery of feudal government.48 Writing during the Interregnum, Harrington felt that Henry’s scheme, while intending to secure the power of the Crown against that of the nobility, had actually enfeebled and destabilised the monarchy. He reasoned that Henry had made a mistake by reducing the power of the barons, which was a source of the Crown’s own power. Believing that the support of the nobles was indispensable to the maintenance of the monarch’s authority, Harrington suggested that the Crown had depended on the retention of retainers as officers and soldiers for the nobles, as well as military support for the king. As he put it: Henry the Seventh, having found the strength of his nobility, that set him in a throne to which he had no right, and fearing that, the tide of their favour turning, they might do as much for another, abated the dependence of their tenants and cut off their train of retainers, which diminution of their weight, releasing by degrees the people, hath caused that plain or level, into which we live to see the mountain of that monarchy now sunk and swallowed. Wherefore, the balance of the nobility being such as, failing, that kind of monarchy comes to ruin, and not failing, the Bacon, Henry the Seventh, pp. 71–5. Ibid., pp. 71–2. 45  James Harrington, ‘The Art of Lawgiving’, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (2 vols, Cambridge, 1977 edn), II, 659. Harrington criticised Bacon for not having seen that Henry VII’s laws had the calamitous effect of destroying baronial power, e.g. the laws against entails and retainers, because it was ‘the institution of those very laws which have now brought the monarchy to utter ruin’. See also Hume, History, III, 74–80. 46  Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 128–31. 47  For the debate in the twentieth century, mainly in the 1930–50s, on the rise of the gentry, see R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912); R. H. Tawney, ‘The Rise of the Gentry, 1558–1640’, Economic History Review 11 (1941), 1–38; Lawrence Stone, ‘The Anatomy of the Elizabethan Aristocracy’, Economic History Review 18 (1948), 1–53; Trevor-Roper, The Gentry 1540–1640; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1956). 48  Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 131–41; R. H. Tawney, ‘Harrington’s Interpretation of his Age’, Proceedings of the British Academy 27 (1941), 199–223. 43  44 

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nobility, if they join, may give law unto the king, the inherent disease of monarchy by a nobility remains also uncured and uncurable. 49

According to Harrington, the balance of power had shifted to the estates of the yeomanry and gentry, which enabled them to exchange positions with the nobility as the ‘Ins’ and the ‘Outs’ of military operations.50 For Harrington, this undermined monarchical authority and brought about a commonwealth, which was, by his own definition, a government under which lands were divided among many small landowners and thus protected them from the dominance of large landowners.51 Harrington believed that this process had been caused by a power shift from the nobility to the gentry under the Tudors: ‘between the reign of Henry the Seventh and that of Queen Elizabeth,’ he argued, ‘being under fifty years, the English balance of monarchical became popular’.52 Almost a century later, Hume noted that Harrington’s observation had been proven wrong: ‘Harrington thought himself so sure of his general principle, that the balance of power depends on that of property, that he ventured to pronounce it impossible ever to re-establish monarchy in England: But his book was scarcely published when the king was restored; and we see, that monarchy has ever since subsisted upon the same footing as before’.53 Central to Hume’s objection to Harrington’s account of political transformation was the latter’s belief in property relations as the de facto foundation of a political state: ‘that property has a great influence on power cannot possibly be denied; but yet the general maxim, that the balance of one depends on the balance of the other, must be received with several limitations’.54 According to Hume, monarchical government no longer required the military support of the nobility, because its power was enshrined within a legal framework. This indicated an entirely new kind of relationship between the sovereign and the subject, with the former acting as the legal guardian of the latter’s life and property. For Hume, therefore, the question of how the Tudors built their civilised monarchy was a different question to that of how property, especially landed property, was distributed under the Tudor government. The former had to do with how the rise of a commercial society brought about a series of changes to men’s opinions, which were the foundation of government authority. The latter, on the other hand, was determined by the specific laws regulating property. Hume saw not only that Harrington had confused the nature of state James Harrington, ‘The Prerogative of Popular Government’, Political Works, I, 436. Ibid., See also Pocock’s comment on Harrington’s quote from Bacon in James Harrington, ‘The Commonwealth of Oceana’, Political Works, I, 158, footnote 1. 51  Harrington, ‘‘The Prerogative of Popular Government’, Political Works, I, 408. 52  Harrington, ‘The Art of Lawgiving’, Political Works, II, 665. 53  Hume, ‘Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic’, Essays, p. 28. 54  Ibid. 49  50 

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building and property distribution, but that his account applied exclusively to feudal societies.55 During Henry VII’s reign, Hume noted, the most important law against entails was the Statute of Fines in 1488. Observing that neither Bacon nor Harrington had acknowledged the significance of this law, he stressed that in fact it was this piece of legislation that had legitimised the practice of breaking up ancient entails by a ‘recovery and fine’.56 This way of breaking up entails allowed landowners, whose ownership of land had to be retained within the family heritance, to sell on the open market. Hume acknowledged that this practice had begun during Edward IV’s reign, and that Henry VII ‘only gave indirectly a legal sanction to the practice, by reforming some abuses which attended it’.57 Nevertheless, he emphasised that this law actually encouraged the nobility to squander their new monetary wealth and indulge in a luxurious lifestyle.58 ‘By means of this law’, he wrote, ‘joined to the beginning luxury and refinements of the age, the great fortunes of the barons were gradually dissipated, and the property of the commons encreased in England.’59 The Statute of Fines formally abolished limitations on the circulation of unwanted and unproductive land in the market, the result of which was a breaking up of the large estates of the old medieval magnates, together with their privileges – the privilege of local jurisdiction in particular – which they enjoyed as landowners. The culture of luxury played a crucially important role because it enabled Henry’s laws against ancient entails to work towards the collapse of feudalism.60 It is worth noting that the effects of the Statute of Fines were extended by an act of Parliament three years later, which stipulated that lands could be sold without paying fines. Hume did not believe, as his major source Bacon had claimed, that Henry VII’s motive in sanctioning this act was simply to amass fortune at the expense of his subjects and under the pretext of an imminent war with France. Rather, he thought that the act Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 141. Hume, History, III, 77, footnote l. The Act was 4 Hen. VII. c. 24. See also Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 223. Pocock has remarked that there might be some correspondence between Hume and Adam Smith on this point. This was very plausible, given that Smith was reported to have lectured on this topic in Glasgow University, a few years after Hume’s publication of the TH. 57  Hume, History, IV, 384. 58  Neil McArthur, David Hume’s Political Theory: Law, Commerce and the Constitution of Government (Toronto and London, 2007), pp. 111–12. McArthur points out that Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, 1. 21, in 1728 had a more substantial discussion of Henry VII’s law against entails. Yet, as McArthur says, this law was generally ignored during Hume’s time, and only one pertinent reference was made by Anonymous, An Essay on Civil Government in Two Parts (London, 1743), p. 239. 59  Hume, History, III, 77. 60  Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 261. Smith shared the same view, namely that ‘the power of the nobles however declind in the feudall governments from the same causes as everywhere else, viz. from the introduction of arts, commerce, and luxury.’ See also his Wealth of Nations, I, 419–22. 55  56 

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confirmed his own hypothesis that Henry VII had consistently weakened the political power of his subjects through law. Hume admitted that the text of the Statute of Fines may not give any impression of Henry VII’s intention to break ancient entails: ‘a man may read that Passage [sc. 4 Hen. VII. c. 24] fifty times, and not find any thing that seems, in the least, to point that way’.61 Nevertheless, he explained that this law worked together with a kind of ‘Hocus-Pocus’, which allowed the potential buyer of an entailed estate to claim to have a good title in court with the attestation of the owner of the entail.62 Without transgressing the traditional boundaries of feudal law, this statute made an increasing amount of entailed land available in the market, thereby loosening the ties between land and feudal rights. One indirect consequence of this was a shift in social power within the state.63 In Hume’s view, Henry VII might not have envisaged a whole series of legal reforms, but he did exploit the potential of law and custom to forge new networks of patronage. Hume held that commerce was the driving force in this developing form of government. Henry’s role as a revolutionary legislator was therefore necessary but not sufficient; it was the rise of commerce that enabled him to use law as a means of removing the vestiges of the feudal nobility. Hume depicted Tudor monarchy as a collective entity forming its own principles in accordance with the escalating demands of commerce. In his Medieval History, published five years later, he claimed that this trend had started long before Henry VII’s accession, and that the lengthy War of the Roses had ‘almost entirely annihilated the ancient nobility of England’.64 The erosion of the nobility’s power was not, therefore, the singular accomplishment of Henry VII. Hume’s main point was that Henry’s laws had stimulated a change of manners, which, in turn, would prepare the way for the establishment of a modern, civilised state. This change to the culture of manners adjusted more than men’s life and opinions, since such a change not only altered the limits and rules of private property but also strengthened law and liberty. Unlike Harrington, Hume praised Henry VII’s efforts to abolish the feudal power of the nobility because doing so removed the most formidable obstacle to a centralised system of justice. As discussed earlier, the gradual but steady emergence of a commerce-dominated economy severely reduced the local influence that the nobility exerted over their tenants. The loyalties of the people therefore shifted towards the sovereign, to whom they looked for protection and the execution of justice. Hume discussed these social changes at a time when several Scottish lawyers and judges were launching an attack on the remains of the institution

61  62  63  64 

Letters, I, 261. Ibid., 262. See McArthur, David Hume’s Political Theory, p. 112. Hume, History, III, 80. Ibid., II, 443. 57

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of entails.65 Their targets were, specifically, the Act Concerning Entails of 1685 and its supplement of 1690, which were, in Scotland, originally passed in order to protect heirs of entail from forfeiture of estate. As Phillipson has pointed out, Scottish lawyers and judges had realised that these laws were actually counter-productive because they made it harder for heirs of entail to ‘raise capital’ or ‘grant satisfactory leases’.66 Almost all landowners resisted this scheme, with John Dalrymple as the main advocate.67 While holding his position as the Keeper of the Faculty of Advocates Library (1752–57), Hume was among the proponents for the legislative agenda against entails. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from the neo-Harringtonian connection, generally assumed by other Scottish literati, between power and landed property.68 For him, the breaking up of ancient entails meant releasing a large amount of labour from agriculture to manufacturing, because the demand for luxury increased commensurately with, and indeed caused, the expansion of manufacturing. According to Hume, Henry VII’s successful legislation against the remaining feudal rights of the nobility was also illustrated by a series of laws against the keeping of retainers, passed in 1487, 1495 and 1503.69 The power of the feudal barons lay not simply in their wealth of landed property, but, more importantly, in their power to keep retainers and allocate badges or liveries.70 For this reason, the law against keeping retainers contributed towards the establishment of a centralised system of justice, since retainers had constituted the main threat to the judicial authority of the feudal Crown.71 In Hume’s view, no society could protect personal freedom until it dismantled the system of retainers and freed men from their feudal bondage. In order to afford to satisfy their new desire for luxury, or, to borrow Adam Smith’s expression, the desire for ‘trinkets and baubles’, the nobility no longer kept Henry Home Kames, Historical Law Tracts (Edinburgh, 1758), pp. 189–216; Henry Home Kames, ‘Considerations upon the state of Scotland with respect to entails’, reprinted in W. C. Lehmann, Henry Home Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment (The Hague, 1971), pp. 327–45. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 524. For a background of the Scottish debates against entails, see Phillipson, ‘Lawyers, Landowners, and the Civic Leadership’, pp. 171–94; Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier, pp. 15, 26–7. 66  Phillipson, ‘Lawyers, Landowners, and the Civic Leadership’, pp. 171–94. 67  John Dalrymple, An Essay towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (London, 1757), pp. 133–59; Considerations on the Polity of Entails in a Nation (Edinburgh, 1765). See also Phillipson, ‘Lawyers, Landowners, and the Civic Leadership’, p. 191. According to Phillipson, nothing came of the proposals in Scotland and entails were not abolished until much later. Entails were abolished legally in Scotland in 2000; the act is 2000 asp 5. 68  Phillipson, ‘Lawyers, Landowners, and the Civic Leadership’, p. 191. See also Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 104–47; Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 124–47. 69  The acts included 3 Hen. VII. c. 1 & 12, 11 Hen. VII. c. 3 & 25, and 19 Hen. VII. c. 14. 70  Hume, History, III, 75–6. 71  David Starkey, Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity (London, 2007), p. 5. 65 

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retainers, who had been the main source of their military and social power.72 ‘The retrenchment of the ancient hospitality, and the diminution of retainers’ constituted a blow to the nobility’s authority in their localities. They no longer had the manpower to exercise an independent jurisdiction.73 Hume argued that the ‘diminution’ of retainers made people less dependent on the patronage of the nobility. The retainers ‘formerly were always at their [sc. the nobility’s] call in every attempt to subvert the government, or oppose a neighbouring baron’; now they became independent traders or craftsmen in the city.74 As a consequence, the nobility’s local influence declined, since the relationship with their former retainers now amounted to no more than that between customers and tradesmen. Hume contended that the law against keeping retainers made it less likely that retainers would make false testimony for their patrons in local courts.75 He showed that the Crown became the supporter of the lower orders against the nobility, who, while still powerful, gradually lost their hereditary right of local jurisdiction. Given that their local jurisdiction had constituted one of the main obstacles to the execution of justice in the feudal age, the establishment of this new unifying judicial system amounted to a leap towards uniform justice.76 Hume showed how the slow and piecemeal decline of feudal institutions under the Tudors foreshadowed the emergence of a modern commercial state, since it enabled the Tudors to enrich themselves and establish a firm hold on local jurisdiction. He noted that, by Henry VIII’s statute (27 Hen. VIII. c. 24), ‘all writs [of those counties] were ordained to run in the king’s name’.77 In other words, the king had commandeered the jurisdiction of counties palatine from the nobility. Hume observed that England had clearly followed the logic of a commercial society, since ‘the privileges of the commons encreased, by this encrease of property’.78 The consequence of these endeavours by Tudor monarchs was the creation of a central judicial authority under the Crown and a widespread improvement to the implementation of justice. Thus the medieval system of justice was transformed into its modern counterpart in which the rule of law, as opposed to feudal patronage, played an increasingly important role in social life. In Hume’s eyes, it was Henry’s laws that had started the shift of government from a medieval to a modern form. These laws had curbed the barons’ power by keeping it subordinate to royal authority. He recounted how Henry had increased royal authority ‘by course of law’.79 In the age of the Tudors, 72  Ibid. Smith used the phrase of ‘trinkets and baubles’ in Wealth of Nations, III. iv. 15, p. 421. 73  Hume, History, IV, 383. 74  Ibid. 75  3 Hen. VII. 1 & 12, 11 Hen. VII. 3 & 25, and 19 Hen. VII. 14. 76  Hume, History, III, 75–6. 77  Ibid., IV, 385. 78  Ibid., III, 80. 79  Ibid., 365.

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he argued, lawyers and judges had only started to build up their professional authority and social status. This took place at a time when the royal Court needed to conduct political activities through the courts of justice.80 The proficiency of lawyers and judges at employing ‘the arts of perverted law and justice’ provided what Henry VII needed most ‘in order to exact fines and compositions from his people’.81 It is hardly surprising that they became supporters of monarchical power, at least with respect to fiscal matters.82 Meanwhile, parliamentary power was exercised during this time chiefly as a means of empowering the king. Parliament was still too weak to counter the claims of the rapacious Crown. Henceforth a temporary and yet formidable ally was being formed against the traditional feudal rights of the nobility. How and to what extent did the Tudors apprehend their role in the rise of commercial society? In Hume’s view, the dismantling the nobility’s feudal power did not immediately result in a choice for Tudor monarchs between feudal ownership and modern kingship. Not only were royal wealth and power still contingent upon feudal law, but the old feudal mentality also set constraints upon the aspirations of early Tudor monarchs. It is true that Henry VII’s immediate motivation was to accumulate wealth for his personal gain by turning the still prevailing system of feudal law into ‘a scheme of oppression’ upon his subjects.83 Nevertheless, Hume claimed that Henry himself might have foreseen the consequences of his laws for the feudal system ‘because the constant scheme of his policy consisted in depressing the great, and exalting churchmen, lawyers, and men of new families, who were more dependent on him’.84 Hume suggested that the only difference between medieval government and the Tudor monarchy was that under the Tudors the nobility lost its grip on local government, thereby allowing the sovereign prince to exercise royal prerogatives more frequently and more steadily. In his essay ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’, which appeared in 1758 (one year before the publication of his Tudor volumes), he emphasised that ‘the House of Tudor, and after them that of Stuart, exercised no prerogatives, but what had been claimed and exercised by the Plantagenets. Not a single branch of their authority can be said to be an innovation.’85 To this, he added that ‘former kings exerted these powers only by intervals, and were not able, by reason of the opposition of their barons, to render them so steady a rule of administration’.86 In other words, Tudor monarchs were able to augment their royal power without making structural changes to the existing legal and bureaucratic order.87 80  81  82  83  84  85  86  87 

3 Hen. VII. c. 2, 4 Hen. VII. c. 13 and 11 Hen. VII. c. 15. Hume, History, III, 48. Ibid., IV, 365. Ibid., III, 67. Ibid., 77. Hume, ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’, Essays, p. 209. Ibid. Hume, History, III, 74–5. 60

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For instance, Hume maintained that the Star Chamber Act of 1487 merely asserted the authority of the Star Chamber as a state organ without changing its administrative structure or functions. The monopolistic control of the Court was facilitated by the existing legal and administrative organisation. On these grounds Hume maintained that the modern notion of justice had been established. Indeed, Hume claimed that one of the chief purposes of Henry VIII’s laws was to retain some feudal rights for the Crown. One example was Henry’s measure against the common practice of making settlement of land by will through trust deeds rather than primogeniture.88 Through this practice both the king and the nobility were defrauded ‘of their wards, marriages, and reliefs’.89 The king was affected more severely because this practice also diminished his ‘premier seisin’ and ‘profits of the livery’ – a large part of royal revenue.90 Although the king managed to moderate this practice with the help of Parliament, the decay of feudal institutions was irreversible.91 Hume observed that the early Tudors’ last-ditch effort to keep their feudal rights was unsuccessful. Both Henry VII and Henry VIII attempted to reinforce the system of villeinage through legislation, and yet these efforts proved to be futile. The Jurisdiction in Liberties Act of 1535 marked the last remains of ‘the ancient slavery of the boors and peasants’ during the reign of Henry VIII, and this law, although passed in Parliament, could no longer be executed.92 The Reformation One of the dominant themes in Hume’s History was that opinion, rather than the institutional architecture of the state, served as the foundation of political authority. With Hume it was not the ordinary sense of the word ‘opinion’ that came into play. Rather, he extended its definition to the habits of lifestyle and perspectives. He explained the Tudors’ increasing authority through a series of popular movements, one of which was the Reformation. Indeed, Hume’s modern man did not subscribe to old religious shibboleths and instead demanded the freedom of consciousness. For him, the Reformation amounted to the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas in the midst of a tense ideological struggle. It enabled the Tudors to replace the local jurisdiction of the clergy with a centralised order of religion. The Crown, aligned with the people, gradually gained an overwhelming monopoly of patronage, and the people, set free from the local jurisdiction of the clergy, found 88  89  90  91  92 

Ibid., 196. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 385. 61

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themselves caught in a new pattern of dependency and obligation under law and government. This interpretation revealed an important similarity between the religious views of Hume and those of his Moderate friends in Edinburgh. As early as the 1750s, Hume had formed close ties with them through the annual Assembly parties and the Select Society, as well as informal tavern meetings and personal correspondence. As Richard B. Sher observed, Hume’s overt criticism of religion in his two Enquiries (1748, 1751), Three Essays (1748), several essays in the Political Discourses (1752), and the first volume of the History of Great Britain (1754) made him an obvious target of Kirk politics between 1755 and 1756.93 Thanks to his Moderate friends, the move to excommunicate him did not succeed. Hume shared the Moderates’ view that the role of ‘true’ religion was to transform men’s spiritual lives and subject them to the force of law.94 In other words, religion supplemented the law by educating men to live a peaceful life.95 Only a few years before, Hugh Blair, the Scottish minister of religion and also Hume’s friend, had preached in his sermon that it was necessary for religion ‘to co-operate with the Legislature for civil Good’.96 In an unpublished preface to his second volume of Stuart History, Hume reiterated this view when he asserted that ‘true’ religion should be ‘secret & silent’ because ‘the proper Office of Religion is to reform Men’s Lives, to purify their Hearts, to inforce all moral Duties, & to secure Obedience to the Laws & civil Magistrate’.97 For him, religious beliefs were justified insofar as they reinforced the civil power.98 Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 59–62. See also John Valdimir Price, ‘Hume’s Concept of Liberty and “The History of England”’, Studies in Romanticism 5 (1966), 144–5. The harangues against Hume and his Moderate friends were published in pamphlets, such as An Analysis of the Moral and Religious Sentiments Contained in the Writings of Sopho [Kames], and David Hume, Esq. (Edinburgh, 1755) usually attributed to Rev. John Bonar of Cockpen, and Letters on Mr Hume’s History of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1756) by Daniel MacQueen. For further details about the Select Society, see Roger Emerson, ‘The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: The Select Society of Edinburgh, 1754–1764’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 114 (1973), 291–330. 94  Mossner, Life of Hume, pp. 306–7. 95  Livingston, Philosophy of Common Life; Scott Yenor, ‘Revealed Religion and the Politics of Humanity in Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life’, Polity 38 (2006), 395–415; Will R. Jordan, ‘Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration of David Hume and Religious Establishment’, Review of Politics 64 (2002), 687–713. 96  Hugh Blair, The Importance of Religious Knowledge to the Happiness of Mankind (Edinburgh, 1750), pp. 32–3. 97  David Hume, Preface to The History of Great Britain. Containing the commonwealth, and the reigns of Charles II and James II, 1757 (The Papers of John Maynard Keynes, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge, JMK/PP/87/33). Printed in Burton, Life and Correspondence, II, 11–13; Mossner Life of Hume, pp. 306–7. 98  Jordan, ‘Religion in the Public Square’, 702. According to Jordan, the reason why Hume advocated the practice of providing ecclesiastical salaries was because it bound the clergy under the civil power. 93 

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Hume kept his distance from both Catholic and Protestant sects. As he wrote in the History: The first reformers, who made such furious and successful attacks on the Romish SUPERSTITION, and shook it to its lowest foundations, may safely be pronounced to have been universally inflamed with the highest ENTHUSIASM. These two species of religion, the superstitious and fanatical, stand in diametrical opposition to each other; and a large portion of the latter must necessarily fall to his share, who is so couragious as to control authority, and so assuming as to obtrude his own innovations upon the world.99

To Hume’s dismay, his analysis of the historical origins of the Reformation provoked much dispute. In the second edition of his Stuart History, published in 1759, he deleted these passages in order to avoid persecution. His antipathy towards both Catholic and Protestant sects in his two Tudor volumes (printed also in 1759) was toned down. He conceded that some ecclesiastical establishments might ‘prove in the end advantageous to the political interests of society’ if only they moved to contain the power of the clergy.100 Joseph Towers, a later commentator, detected irony in the fact that ‘the memory of these two inconsiderable sects should be transmitted to posterity through the channel of Mr Hume’s history’.101 Notwithstanding Hume’s neutrality concerning the battle between ‘Romish superstition’ and Protestant ‘enthusiasm’, he inclined towards the latter because it facilitated the secularisation of the state.102 He maintained that the Reformation had struck a heavy blow to the patronage offered by the clergy, and had ultimately brought to an end the medieval system of ecclesiastical justice. Unlike Montesquieu, who believed that the clergy helped to balance the constitution, much like the nobility, Hume saw the clergy’s grip on judicial power as a significant source of injustice.103 In his eyes, the judicial power of the clergy, along with some of its protégés in the laity, obstructed the pursuit of justice by the civil magistrate. Thus, the principal achievement of the Reformation was to break the clergy’s monopolistic control of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and bestow it upon the civil magistrate instead. Hume maintained that, as a law-making 99  Hume, History of Great Britain, under the House of Stuart: containing the Reign of James I and Charles I (Edinburgh, 1754), p. 10. For discussions of Hume’s philosophical argument against religion, see Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols, London, 1881), I, 309–42; John Passmore, ‘Enthusiasm, Fanaticism and David Hume’, The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries, ed. P. Jones (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 85–107. 100  Hume, History, III, 136. 101  Quoted in Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, 2000), p. 59. Joseph Towers, ‘Observations on Mr. Hume’s History of England’, in Tracts on Political and Other Subjects (3 vols, London, 1796), I, 319. 102  Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh, 1741), pp. 141–51. 103  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI, Chapter VIII, p. 167. Hume, History, III, 324.

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authority under the pope’s control, the Church had constituted the chief obstacle to justice and religious freedom. Furthermore, he postulated that this obstacle had remained in place until the establishment of the monarchy’s supremacy: ‘the acknowledgement of the king’s supremacy introduced there 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’.104 Although Hume was more sympathetic to the Protestant reformers, he saw their enthusiasm as a potentially dangerous force that had brought political disorder to ‘Switzerland, France, and the low countries’.105 In these countries, the Reformation was largely a fragmentary and decentralised movement. Conversely, those states in which sovereign princes had served as ‘the head of the reformers’ – i.e., Germany, Denmark, and Sweden – had managed to tone down the fury of the revolution.106 This was also the case in England because Henry VIII had served as the leader of the Reformation. Hume contended that Henry had pursued a carefully orchestrated programme to destroy the power of the clergy. Henry had imitated his father by relying on Parliaments, lawyers, and judges to gather support for his desired judicial reforms. Hume wrote that, heralded by the fall of the feudal system and the progress of ‘human understanding’, a swift change in opinions and religious sentiments followed.107 The abuses of the Church had brought about centuries of struggle between the English laity and the clergy. Hume observed that by the time of the Tudors the demand for religious freedom was growing: ‘nothing more forwarded the first progress of the reformers, than the offer, which they made, of submitting all religious doctrines to private judgment, and the summons given every one to examine the principles formerly imposed upon him’.108 When Henry VIII attempted to obtain a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, there was an outburst of xenophobic sentiment: ‘the ANCIENT and almost uninterrupted opposition of interests between the laity and clergy in England, and between the English clergy and the court of Rome, had sufficiently prepared the nation for a breach with the sovereign pontiff […]’.109 Hume drew attention to the popular undercurrents of religious passion, noting that political discourse at this time was dominated by harangues against the spiritual and episcopal authority of the clergy. In particular, it became conventional to believe that episcopal authority ought to be derived from the civil magistrate and that ‘the Pope had no authority at all beyond

104  105  106  107  108  109 

Hume, History, III, 206. Hume, History of Great Britain, p. 7. Hume, History, III, 324. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 210. 64

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the bounds of his own diocese’.110 Hume mentioned several occasions in which the Commons had made ‘invectives […] against the dissolute lives of the priests, their ambition, their avarice, and their endless encroachments on the laity’.111 Followed by Henry’s failure to obtain the papal annulment of his marriage, the growing nationalist sentiment culminated in the king’s break with the Roman Curia. Hume described the way in which Henry’s strategic employment of the long-disused Statute of Provisors had brought down Cardinal Wolsey and ‘the whole church’.112 The successful indictment of this cardinal, whose only fault seemed to be his failure to obtain the papal bull, was an outright violation of justice.113 However, Hume seemed to believe that Henry’s Act of Appeals in 1532 had served the greater good, which was to undermine the power of the Church.114 This act forbade all appeals to Rome ‘in causes of matrimony, divorces, wills, and other suits cognizable in ecclesiastical courts’.115 In the long run, it led to the abolition of the legatine power and its attendant costs, which had been present from the reign of Henry I. It also transferred ecclesiastical jurisdiction from the Court of Rome to the Tudor court.116 Alongside the transformation of the principles, representative institutions, and operational procedures of ecclesiastical justice, Hume paid particular attention to the fact that financial interests had united Crown and Parliament, both of which represented the landed interests of the time. He emphasised the financial consequences of several acts, one of which had granted Henry VIII all the annates and tithes of benefices – a major source of revenue for the Court of Rome – and to a great extent dissolved ‘the connexions between the pope and English clergy’.117 According to Hume, Henry’s goal had been to take control of the episcopal authority of the Roman Church and its financial resources in England, whereas Parliament had been predominantly concerned with usurping the clergy’s land and property. With the benefits of seizing annates, tithes, and other forms of taxes paid to Rome, the king financed his own prerogative courts (mainly the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commissions, and the Court Marshal). Since Parliament was not yet strong enough to take possession of judicial power, it contented itself with the secularisation of land.118 Ibid., 203. Ibid., 186. 112  Ibid., 128. The act was 23 Hen. VIII. c. 9, which revived the act 25 Edw. III. c. 22. 113  Hume, History, III, 194. By tracing the circumstances under which this indictment was made, Hume discovered that it occurred immediately after Henry’s failure to get a parliamentary impeachment. This proved to Hume that having recourse to a medieval statute was a last resort. 114  24. Hen. VIII. c. 12. 115  Hume, History, III, 199. 116  Ibid. 117  Ibid, 195. 118  Ibid., 323–4. 110  111 

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In Hume’s narrative, the financial interest of the Crown came to the fore in the next stage of the Reformation. He noted that Henry’s practical concern for money outweighed his own religious beliefs; for example, Henry’s sincere belief in the doctrine of purgatory did not deter him from dissolving the monasteries, which were founded on that very doctrine.119 Henry VIII’s determination to suppress these institutions had important repercussions. They destroyed numerous ‘fetters on liberty and industry’, including ‘papal usurpations, the tyranny of the inquisition’, and ‘the multiplicity of holidays’.120 It also gradually abolished an order of men – the monks and friars – whom Hume believed were useless to society and, moreover, dangerous to the civil order.121 In addition, the suppression of the monasteries helped to secularise the state because their properties were bequeathed or sold to laymen.122 Citing the authority of William Dugdale, Hume maintained that Henry had relied chiefly on the political support of the nobility and gentry, who were repaid with the property of the monasteries, which they received either for a low price or for free.123 He observed that ‘six hundred and fortyfive monasteries’ in total were suppressed, and that ‘the whole revenue of these establishments amounted to one hundred and sixty-one thousand one hundred pounds’.124 The dissolution of the monasteries led to the redistribution of abbey lands among ‘the principal nobility and courtiers’, whose style of management was entirely different to that of the monks and friars (the previous landowners).125 Compared with monks who had provided ‘a ready market for commodities’ and ‘a sure source to the poor and indigent’, and friars who were constrained to ‘a certain mode of living’, these new landowners were motivated solely by monetary gain: ‘the rents of farms were raised, while the tenants found not the same facility in disposing of the produce; the money was often spent in the capital; and the farmers, living at a distance, were exposed to oppression from their new masters, or to the still greater rapacity of the stewards’.126 Hume observed that the clergy, much like the dismissed retainers, had to find new sources of occupation: ‘many clergymen, about this time, were obliged for a subsistence to turn carpenters or taylors, and some kept alehouses. The bishops themselves were generally reduced to poverty, and held both their revenues and spiritual office by a very precarious and uncertain tenure.’127 Ibid., 228. Ibid., 227. 121  Ibid., 136. 122  Ibid., 255–6. 123  Ibid., 255. William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated; from Records, Leiger-Books, Manuscripts, Charters, Evidences, Tombes, and Armes (London, 1656), p. 800. 124  Hume, History, III, 255. 125  Ibid., 369. 126  Ibid. 127  Ibid., 392. 119  120 

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The king rapidly acquired legislative authority in both ecclesiastical and civil affairs. In Hume’s view, Henry was clearly aware of the political significance of canon law as one of the essential components of power traditionally wielded by the Church. The king was endowed with the authority to appoint thirty-two commissioners to make canon law, and yet he deliberately neglected this task and even intended to maintain its perplexing condition.128 The ‘perplexity’ of the canon law apparently ensured that the Crown, rather than the canon law courts, became the ultimate authority in religious matters. The Crown’s de facto religious authority strengthened the uniformity of jurisdiction because it removed all distinctions between the clergy and the laity. This power also divested the sanctuaries of privileges – they had served to shelter both the clergy and the laity from the justice of the civil magistrate.129 In particular, Henry’s laws restrained those pernicious rights of ecclesiastics that had protected them from being punished for ‘petty treason, murder, and felony, to all under the degree of a subdeacon’.130 Although Hume acknowledged that the measures listed above had strengthened the Crown’s control of religious jurisdiction, he lamented that the drive towards absolutism did not come to a halt. For instance, the Parliament of 1539 passed the Six Articles, which established the religious supremacy of the king. In another act passed by this Parliament, the king was recognised as the supreme head of the Church of England, which meant that ecclesiastical jurisdiction derived its authority from a royal mandate.131 The king’s proclamation was also sanctioned as being equivalent to a statute.132 To Hume this move was imprudent, since a weakened legislative authority posed a profound threat to England’s delicately balanced constitution.133 In Hume’s narrative, Henry VIII’s next step was his ascension to the spiritual leadership of the realm. Henry’s self-appointed role as the ultimate arbitrator of religious disputes was not a mere trifle for Hume. It meant that kingly power under the Tudors was extended to the sacerdotal roles traditionally carried out by the clergy, thus expanding the reach of the state into various aspects of religious life. The king’s authority in religious matters was entrenched further during the reign of Edward VI. In Hume’s account, public opinion was set against the vestiges of popery, namely ‘all rites, ceremonies, pomp, order, and exterior observances’ of the Church, which thrust upon the government the task of abolishing Catholicism in its entirety.134 Subsequent developments in the course of the Reformation, the majority of which took

128  129  130  131  132  133  134 

Ibid., 230, 287–8. 26 Hen. VIII. c. 13, 32 Hen. VIII. c. 12, and 22 Hen. VIII. c. 14. 23 Hen. VIII. c. 1. 37 Hen. VIII. c. 17. 31 Hen. VIII. c. 8. Hume, History, III, 266–7. Ibid., 339. 67

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place under Edward, mitigated the arbitrary power of the Crown by leaving room for additional religious liberties.135 Hume maintained that Edward’s reign finally brought the Reformation to an end by abolishing the ‘principal tenets and practices of the catholic religion’.136 Nevertheless, it was not until the Protestant settlement of 1559 that the secular leadership of the Church became fully established.137 By a parliamentary act, the supremacy of the Church was annexed to the Crown and the queen was invested with the ‘whole religious power’, which could be exercised ‘without the concurrence, either of the Parliament or even of Convocation’.138 Hume observed that the act also granted to the queen the right to name commissioners, and it was on this right that the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission was founded.139 The unification of ecclesiastical and royal courts was now complete, making Protestantism an integral part of the English state. The Dilemma of the Tudor Monarchy In The Difference Between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy; As it More Particularly Regards the English Constitution (c.1471), John Fortescue (1394– 1480) made a distinction between ‘Dominium Regale’ and ‘Dominium Politicum & Regale’.140 According to him, ‘the first may rule his People by such Lawys as he makyth himself; and therefo he may set upon them Talys, and other Impositions, such as he wyl himself, without their Assent. The second may not rule hys People, by other Lawys than such as they assenten unto; and therefor he may set upon them non Impositions without their own Assent.’141 Although Hume did not refer to these rival concepts himself, they do shed light on aspects of the History, especially those sections in which he sought to determine the locus of political authority within the Tudor monarchy. For him, it was significant that the Tudor monarch, unlike his or her European counterparts, did not have the right to raise taxes. The power of the Tudor monarchy hinged on a common consensus regarding its absolute authority. Since the Tudors possessed extensive political authority without the financial power to reinforce it, the period of rapid economic growth that ensued widened the gap between the political and financial capacities of the Crown. This, for Hume, was the central dilemma of the Tudor monarchy, and Ibid., 353–4. Ibid., 365. 137  Ibid., IV, 12. 138  Ibid., 10. The act is 1 Eliz. c. 1. 139  Hume, History, IV, 11. 140  John Fortescue, The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy; as it more particularly regards the English Constitution (London, 1724), p. 1. 141  Ibid., pp. 2–3. 135  136 

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it accounted for the growing conflict between Crown and Parliament from the Elizabethan age onwards. In his essay ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’ (1742), Hume seconded Voltaire’s praise of Queen Elizabeth for having made love to ‘l’Anglois indompté, qui ne peut ni server, ni vivre en liberté’.142 More than a decade later, by the time he was writing his Tudor History, Hume’s attitude towards Elizabeth’s rule had changed dramatically. This change was reflected in a parallel he drew between Elizabeth’s government and the despotic rule of the Turkish sultan: ‘the government of England during that [sc. Elizabethan] age, however different in other particulars, bore, in this respect, some resemblance to that of Turkey at present: The sovereign possessed every power, except that of imposing taxes […]’.143 Hume observed that Elizabeth’s essentially absolute power had been founded on over ‘twenty branches of prerogative’ supported by established practices.144 In addition to the High Commission, the queen had also held the Court of Star Chamber and the Court Marshal.145 These courts had functioned outside the ordinary procedures of the law and at the behest of the queen’s discretionary power.146 Despite the fact that Elizabeth enjoyed almost untrammelled power over the realm, she could not impose taxes without the consent of the people. Without the right to raise taxes, the Turkish sultan had to ‘permit the extortion of the bashas and governors of provinces, from whom he afterwards squeezes presents or takes forfeitures’.147 Similarly, Elizabeth was obliged to employ unusual measures, such as monopolies and patents, in order to raise the revenue required to maintain her government and defend the realm.148 Hume acknowledged that the Tudor monarchy resembled other European civilised monarchies in its operation and manners. The power of the Tudors was ‘exercised after the European manner, and entered not into every part of the administration; that the instances of a high exerted prerogative were not so frequent as to render property sensibly insecure, or reduce the people to a total servitude’.149 European customs, such as a sovereign’s deference to the property and feudal rights of barons, constituted a bridle on the almost 142  Hume, ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’, Essays, p. 2. Voltaire, La Ligue: ou, Henry le Grand; poëme epique (Geneva, 1723). See John Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compared (London, 1734), p. 24. Hervey had maintained a similar view to Hume’s: ‘never were the Reins of Prerogative held with a stricter Hand, or the Yoke of Slavery faster bound upon the People’s Necks than at this Period of Time [sc. the Elizabethan age]’. 143  Hume, History, IV, 360. 144  Ibid., 367. 145  Ibid., 356–8. 146  Ibid., 356. 147  Ibid., 360. 148  Ibid., 360–1. 149  Ibid., 370.

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absolute power of the Crown.150 For Hume, this guaranteed freedoms more extensive than those in Eastern despotic governments. Hume maintained that, despite the similarities, the European princes’ ability to ‘impose taxes at pleasure’ drew a sharp line between the Tudor monarchy and the civilised monarchies on the Continent.151 Writing immediately after the composition of his Tudor volumes, he observed in his Medieval History that raising taxes had become an indisputable right of Parliament from 1399 onwards.152 When the House of Lancaster forfeited this right, the financial independence of the Crown was much diluted. As Hume explained, feudal law had fallen into disuse as land became readily available on the open market, which gradually dissolved the relationship between rural economy and feudal patronage. The cumulative gains wrought by international trade and domestic manufacturing encouraged a wide range of new policies, through which the Tudors were able to strengthen their political hand by pitting one estate against another. This greatly reduced the power of local magnates and clergy. Nevertheless, commerce had given rise to a latent – and soon to an overt – conflict between Crown and Parliament, which could not be resolved within the tax regime that the Tudors had inherited from the feudal monarchy. Although the Tudors had enjoyed extensive power over their subjects, they were unable to reclaim the right to raise taxes. This was partly because the Crown had turned frequently to Parliament to curb the power of the nobility and clergy, and could not therefore afford to alienate it over the right to raise taxes executively. In Hume’s time, it was very uncommon to claim that the Elizabethan reign bore more resemblance to the rule of a Turkish sultan than to that of another European monarch.153 This claim contrasts sharply with Bolingbroke’s praise of Elizabeth as the guardian of the ancient constitution under whose reign English liberty was enshrined. Unsurprisingly, Hume’s frank description of the queen’s arbitrary government was, in his own words, ‘particularly obnoxious’ to his contemporaries.154 Horace Walpole, in a letter to Thomas Pownall in 1783, called Hume ‘that superficial mountebank’ who mounted a system in the garb of a philosophic empiric, but dispensed no drugs but what he was authorized to vend by a royal patent, and which were full of Turkish opium. He had studied nothing relative to the English constitution before Queen Elizabeth, and had selected her most arbitrary acts to countenance those of the Stuarts: and even hers he misrepresented; for her worst deeds were leveled against the nobility, those of the Stuarts against the people. Hers, consequently, Ibid. Jeremy Black, Convergence or Divergence? Britain and the Continent (Basingstoke and London, 1994), p. 124. Black has referred to this as evidence of the similarity in political culture between England and Continent. 151  Hume, ‘Of the Origin of Government’, Essays, p. 23. 152  Hume, History, II, 318. 153  Ibid., IV, 360. 154  Hume, ‘My Own Life’, Essays MPL, p. xxxviii. 150 

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were rather an obligation to the people; for the most heinous part of despotism is, that it produces a thousand despots instead of one.155

Walpole had evidently misunderstood Hume’s intentions. For Hume, the comparison between Elizabethan government and Turkish despotism showed that the Tudor monarchy was an inconsistent combination of both absolutism and the Crown’s financial dependency. It followed that the Tudor monarchy was different from other civilised monarchies in Europe, and that the failure of its successors to understand these differences explained the increasing deterioration of the Crown’s relationship with Parliament from the Elizabethan age onwards. Hume used the example of Elizabeth’s arbitrary government to highlight the danger of bestowing extensive power on a sovereign without also granting the right to raise taxes. In his time, it was commonplace to claim that English liberty depended on the monarch’s inability to raise taxes legally. Pocock, who has discussed this theme in detail, argued that this claim on liberty was rooted in the common law tradition and the ideological fiction of the ancient constitution, which had already become an ingrained part of the English mindset.156 In De laudibus legume Angliae (c.1470), Fortescue maintained that ‘by his [sc. the king’s] Laws hee may take away none of his Subjects goods, without due satisfaction for the same. Neither both the king there, either by himself, or by his Servants and Officers levie upon his Subjects, Tallages, Subsidies, or any other burdens, or alter their laws, or make newe Lawes, without the express consent and agreement of his whole Realme in his Parliament’.157 Contra Fortescue, Hume claimed that this institutional constraint on the sovereign’s right to raise taxes had continued to disadvantage the government. In his essay ‘Of Taxes’ (1752), he argued that ‘if he [sc. an English prince] cou’d impose a new tax, like our European princes, his interest wou’d so far be united with that of his people, that he wou’d immediately feel the bad effects of these disorderly levies of money, and wou’d find, that a pound, rais’d by a general imposition, wou’d have less pernicious effects, than a shilling taken in so unequal and arbitrary a manner’.158 Hume maintained that the lack of royal revenue had led the Tudors to encroach on the parliamentary privilege of taxation ‘in an indirect manner’, thereby handicapping the progress of trade and industry.159 He disapproved of the large number of patents that had been granted to ‘currents, salt, iron, powder, cards, calf-skins, fells, pouldavies, ox-shin-bones, train oil, lists of cloth, pot-ashes, anniseeds, vinegar …’ and all other basic materials.160 He Quoted in Letters Eminent, p. 2, footnote. Horace Walpole, Private Correspondence of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford: now first collected in four volumes (London, 1820), p. 347. 156  Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 30–69. 157  John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae (1616), p. 84. 158  Hume, Political Discourses (Edinburgh, 1752), p. 122. 159  Hume, History, IV, 361. 160  Ibid., 344. 155 

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treated the presence of government regulations and laws on commerce as needless obstacles, judging that domestic monopolies were ‘grievances, the most intolerable for the present, and the most pernicious in their consequences, that ever were known in any age or under any government’.161 Moreover, Elizabeth’s monopolies had extinguished almost all domestic industry, and ‘the general train of her conduct was ill calculated to serve the purpose at which she aimed, much less to promote the riches of her people’.162 As Hume argued, the invention of monopolies and patents was ‘so pernicious, that, had she gone on, during a track of years, at her own rate, England, the seat of riches, and arts, and commerce, would have contained at present as little industry as Morocco, or the coast of Barbary’.163 In addition, the scope of industry during Elizabeth’s reign was limited by the consignment of both domestic and foreign commerce to exclusive companies. Using the counter-example of the tsar who had revoked the monopoly of the Muscovy Company, Hume remarked that ‘so much juster notions of commerce were entertained by this barbarian than appear in the conduct of the renowned Queen Elizabeth!’164 In Hume’s view, the queen’s prerogatives had widened divisions between the theory and practice of taxation.165 She had employed innovations in taxation that were entirely arbitrary – such as purveyances, pre-emption, benevolence, general loans, wardship, and monopolies – because these taxes could be raised without the approval of Parliament. By the right of purveyance, ‘the officers of the crown could at pleasure take provisions for the household from all the neighbouring counties, and could make use of the carts and carriages of the farmers; and the price of these commodities and services was fixed and stated’.166 Since the rates had been fixed ‘before the discovery of the WestIndies’ and ‘were much inferior to the present market price’, purveyance had become an unbearable burden on trade. The abuses inherent in imposing purveyances and pre-emption, the corruption of exchequer officials, and the expedients of benevolence and wardship were sources of complaint in parliamentary proceedings.167 Taking the bill of tonnage and poundage as an example, Hume showed that no clear rule had been established as to whether the sovereign prince withheld the right to raise similar taxes.168 While Parliament had granted the right to levy tonnage and poundage to Henry VIII for the duration of his reign, it had also condemned those who had failed to pay this Ibid., III, 446–7; IV, 336, 364. Ibid., IV, 374. 163  Ibid., 360–1. 164  Ibid., 376. 165  John Guy. ‘Monarchy and Counsel: Models of the State’, The Sixteenth Century 1485– 1603, ed. P. Collinson (Oxford, 2002), pp. 113–42. 166  Hume, History, IV, 272. 167  Ibid., 303–4. 168  Ibid., III, 326. 161  162 

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tax even before the bill had been sanctioned. It was therefore unclear as to whether this right had been annexed to the Crown or not. Hume maintained that the means by which royal revenue was collected had become a matter of state under the Elizabethan government since it demarcated the boundaries between monarchical power and parliamentary privilege. In order to carry out the formidable task of defending liberty and religion, the Elizabethan government had been in continuous need of cash, which in turn had forced the queen to impose unparliamentary taxes and loans. Meanwhile, the Commons had regarded it as their privilege to decide the exact amount of grants without interference from the peers or from privy counsellors.169 The divisive issue of war finance aggravated this conflict further. In Hume’s view, Elizabeth had adopted the best possible policy by supporting ‘faction and innovation’ in France and Holland, since it weakened the stronger France and thus supported the weaker Spain.170 However, Elizabeth had found it difficult to meet the demands of warfare because Parliament had started to call for concessions from the queen in return for supplies. With the threat of the Spanish Armada imminent and the difficulty of obtaining supplies increasing, the queen had sold a large amount of her land. She had even resorted to base money so that she could pay her forces in Ireland.171 All these desperate measures were to handicap the financial administration of her heirs, the Stuarts.172 Hume noted that Elizabeth had been very reluctant to call Parliament for supplies, and that she had been able to manage her finances by her own thriftiness. However, the queen’s ever-growing financial need, even after the war with Spain, had made her increasingly dependent on parliamentary supplies, which facilitated the slow but steady ascendancy of the Commons in the Tudor Parliament. In Hume’s narrative, the right traditionally possessed by the Commons to grant taxation became employed as a counterweight to the queen’s arbitrary rule.173 This weapon would become particularly ‘valuable […] because it proved afterwards the means by which the parliament extorted all their other privileges’.174 Hume demonstrated that, with the rise of city merchants and their consolidation of power in Parliament, the Commons had become increasingly concerned with the issue of impositions. He observed that it had become constitutionally problematic for the Crown to raise unparliamentary customs Ibid., IV, 288. Ibid., 55. Eliga H. Gould, ‘Foundations of Empire, 1763–83’, The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. S. Stockwell (Malden, Oxford and Victoria, 2008), p. 23. Wade L. Robison, ‘Hume the Moral Historian: Queen Elizabeth I,’ The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 18 (2013), 576–87. 171  Hume, History, IV, 341. 172  Ibid., 303. 173  Ibid., 285. 174  Ibid., 361. 169  170 

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and impositions, since these taxes were gradually linked to the subject’s ‘freedom from arrests, of access to her person [sc. Elizabeth], and of liberty of speech’ – as demanded by Edward Coke.175 Although the queen granted concessions on some of these points, she also defended the legality of levying unparliamentary impositions at her own behest. She demanded that the liberty of speech should not extend further than the liberty to proclaim ‘Aye or No’. That is to say, Parliament should not meddle with state affairs so as ‘to attempt reforming the church, or innovating in the commonwealth’.176 Elizabeth refused the Commons’ petition against monopolies and maintained that her prerogative was ‘the chief flower in her garden, and the principal and head pearl in her crown and diadem’.177 The queen’s exercise of proclamations was the grounds on which Hume rejected the traditional Whig claim that the nucleus of legislative authority had resided in the Commons on a more or less continuous basis.178 Pocock has maintained that ‘from the time of the Revolution to a date not much earlier than the publication of J. H. Round’s essays and studies, English historiography was ridden by the deliberate and unconscious assumption that our institutions were, originally and naturally, parliamentarian’.179 Hume’s analysis of Tudor politics refuted this assumption, which was prevalent in his time. Indeed, one of his most intriguing historiographical insights was that the Tudor Parliament had not been a rising political force mustering its strength against the absolute power of the Crown. Rather, Parliament had been entirely subordinate to the will of the Crown and, indeed, instrumental in the advance of royal authority. Hume contended that, from the very beginning of the Tudors’ reign, Parliament had been seen as a means of consolidating royal power. While the superintending power of the Tudors had allowed Parliament to pass laws, and while this was conducive to the gradual development of its authority, Parliament was never construed as an institution of legal authority. Hume argued that Elizabeth had operated at the centre of political life through her right to convene and dissolve Parliament. More importantly, Parliament had striven towards specific political ends that had been determined exclusively by the queen and her privy council.180 He quoted Elizabeth’s own argument that the privy counsellors ‘were not to be accounted as common knights and burgesses of the house, who are counsellors but during Ibid., 285–6. Edward Coke, ‘Three Petitions – Liberty of Speech, Freedom from Arrest, and Free Access for Parliamentarians; Laws’, The Selected Writings and Speeches of Sir Edward Coke, ed. S. Sheppard (3 vols, Indianapolis, 2003 edn), III, 1187–93. 176  Hume, History, IV, 285. 177  Ibid., 304. 178  Ibid., 363. 179  J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Controversy over the Origins of the Commons, 1675–88; a Chapter in the History of English Historical and Political Thought’ (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1952), 207. 180  Hume, History, IV, 363–4. 175 

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the parliament’, but rather as ‘standing counsellors’ who ‘for their wisdom and great service are called to the council of the state’.181 The very raison d’être of this council was to serve the interests of the Crown, since the counsellors entered office only at the queen’s pleasure. According to Hume, this was the real mechanism of ‘ancient constitution’, which supported the liberty and property of the subject in an entirely ‘ancient’ manner. Hume’s Tudor History is permeated by his observation that monarchies are intrinsically capable of adapting to the evolution of manners. He showed that monarchical power had been the protector and not the enemy of its subjects’ liberties. By teaching this lesson to the reading public, he believed that he could offer some sort of cure for the ills that Whig historiography had brought to English politics. He explained in detail the way in which the rise of commerce had provided an opportunity for the Tudors to destroy the power of the nobility, which was already in slow decline, and to establish a centralised system of government on the ruins of the feudal system.182 Stressing the Tudor monarchs’ role as legislators, he described how they had protected the individual’s freedom of property and life to a greater extent than their feudal counterparts. The drive towards liberty did not come to a halt in the Stuart age, partly because the ever-increasing progress of commerce had nurtured a powerful middling rank, which gradually became a vehement opponent of royal prerogatives. Moreover, public opinion, which for Hume was the main source of political power, had shifted irrevocably towards the side of liberty after the Stuart accession and away from monarchical authority. Hume explained that there was always a delay, which could extend for generations, between a change of government and a change in men’s opinions. Moreover, there had existed a complex interplay between secular liberty and religious liberty. As Hume observed, ‘the noble principles of liberty took root’ and spread themselves, ‘under the shelter of puritanical absurdities’, during the generation after Elizabeth’s rule, namely the reign of James I.183 Thus, the Stuart monarchy’s dilemma was that its royal prerogative, which had reinforced law and liberty under the Tudors, was coming to be perceived as the main obstacle to both law and liberty. To conclude, Hume’s Tudor History challenged existing assumptions about the way in which monarchical government had been transformed by commercial activity. For him, monarchy was instrumental to the development of liberty, which he defined as the liberty of property and life. His analysis of Tudor government attested to his belief that monarchy had played a pivotal role in the development of law under the Tudors, which would, in turn, Ibid., 289. G. R. Elton presents a similar view in his influential book The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1967), particularly pp. 42–69. However, Elton does not cite Hume as one of his sources. 183  Hume, History, IV, 261. 181  182 

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trigger the progress of liberty and justice in the age of the Stuarts. His Tudor History stood out in its emphasis on the emergence of modern monarchy as an offshoot, and even as a direct consequence, of the pursuit of commercial wealth. In his view, commerce had determined the very nature of political life by lending a mantle of authority to sovereign princes and consequently to law and justice. Further developments in the sphere of commerce had created a fundamental tension between absolute or near absolute governments on the one hand and the increasing demands of the middling rank on the other. Therefore, it was altogether false to claim that monarchs could threaten liberty by themselves. On the contrary, Hume showed that the ascendency of monarchical power under the Tudors had been only a part of the ‘tide’ of politics, which ran between monarchy and popular government.184 This implied that English liberty, which was unparalleled throughout eighteenth-century Europe, could not have come into being had the Tudors not established its legal and administrative apparatus. Trying to achieve liberty by checking the monarch’s authority was therefore counter-productive and inevitably dangerous.

184 

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3

The Paradox of the Constitution

It seems a necessary, though perhaps a melancholy truth, that, in every government, the magistrate must either possess a large revenue and a military force, or enjoy some discretionary powers, in order to execute the laws, and support his own authority. Hume, The History of Great Britain, under the House of Stuart: containing the Reign of James I and Charles I, 1754

Financial administration was central to Hume’s narrative of the transformation of English government in the seventeenth century. He described this transformation as a process by which the Tudor monarchy changed into a political system with a clear division of power between Crown and Parliament. In his view, this process originated in a burgeoning of commercial activity from the Stuart accession onwards. The progress of commerce had placed a greater financial strain on royal finance, which, in turn, had made it possible for a variety of social groups to make legitimate political claims upon the state. While he acknowledged that a central goal of the constitution was to defend individual freedom against royal prerogatives, he contended that such freedom depended on the state’s ability to maintain peace and security. Hume’s preoccupation with public finance was not merely an extension of previous debates about how and on what basis taxes could be levied, or how the boundaries between monarchical authority and parliamentary liberty should be drawn. Rather, this preoccupation stemmed from his engagement with contemporary debates about the ways in which despotism could be restrained institutionally. For Hume, the constitutional struggle over public finance in the seventeenth century served as a context in which to view contemporary demands to revise the tax system and abolish the system of deficit finance. The difficulties in executing this task deepened his own concern about the security of the British mixed government. He feared that Britain would fall victim to despotism if the people’s obsession with ‘the perfection of civil society’ persisted.1 1 

Hume, History, VI, 533.

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In this way, Hume’s Stuart History addressed the growing difficulty of maintaining ‘so extremely delicate and uncertain’ a balance between Crown and Parliament.2 In his own time, the enlarging Civil List, together with Walpole’s single-party dominance, raised new challenges and created new opportunities for the Hanoverian monarchy. It also led to a precarious balance between Crown and Parliament.3 Hume observed that, notwithstanding the stability of Walpole’s government, it had become increasingly difficult to maintain a balanced constitution.4 The connection between Hume’s normative concerns over public finance and his narrative of English government under the Stuarts has attracted much attention in recent scholarship. By placing Hume’s argument against public debt in the context of the Augustan debate over war finance, Pocock has maintained that his preoccupation with debt finance amounted essentially to a concern with domestic economy.5 Hont took issue with this claim, arguing that the problem in question had more to do with Britain’s role in European politics.6 Hont addressed Hume’s arguments concerning the role of public debt in the determination of foreign policy and the policy of continental intervention in particular. In Hont’s view, deficit finance was a pivotal political issue for Hume because it underpinned Britain’s role in European geopolitics. The aim of this chapter is to show that the respective positions held by Pocock and Hont are, in fact, compatible. Indeed, public finance was of great importance for both domestic peace and strategic security. Like any other modern European state at the time, England sought to maintain peace domestically whilst pursuing an active colonial policy in the transatlantic arena. As Brewer highlighted, these two ambitions were closely connected because the ability and effectiveness of the nation’s fiscal apparatus had an immense impact on both the international and the home front.7 This chapter explains that, for Hume, the outdated and inefficient tax scheme prolonged and even encouraged the conflict between a financially beleaguered Crown and a rising middling rank. He believed that the best way to protect English liberty was to incorporate the demands of both the Crown and Parliament into the financial architecture of the state.

Hume, ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, Essays, p. 40. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 230–53. 4  John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, London, New York and Melbourne, 1976), pp. 3–4. See also J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (London, 1967), p. xviii. 5  Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 423–61. 6  Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 325–53. 7  Brewer, Sinews of Power, pp. xiii–xiv. See also John Brewer, ‘The Eighteenth-Century British State: Contexts and Issues’, An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689–1815, ed. L. Stone (London, 1994), pp. 52–71. 2  3 

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In what follows I try to recover Hume’s argument that the need to secure substantive revenue for the Crown was rooted in a longstanding challenge to balance England’s constitution. Although several Hume scholars have examined his analysis of the historical origins of the seventeenth-century constitutional crisis, they have largely overlooked the significance he attached to financial administration. This chapter examines his analysis of the evolution of the tax regime under the Stuarts, and highlights his argument that competent financial administration could maintain the balance of the constitution and circumvent the divisive effects of mixed government. First, attention is shifted away from Hume’s discussion of deficit finance and towards the scheme of taxation, since he identified the latter in his Stuart History as a threat to the long-term survival of England’s mixed government. For him, the government’s ability to enlarge its fiscal base was essential to the suppression of despotism and thus to the defence of popular interests. Secondly, this chapter reinforces the connection between Hume’s detailed analysis of the Stuart taxation system and his explanation of the constitutional crisis. It shows that, by drawing attention to the costs incurred by this crisis, he intended to demonstrate the important role that the public administration of finance had played in preventing the collapse of the free state. The Civil List Controversy In his 1741 essay ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, Hume wrote that the British constitution contained within itself a formidable ‘paradox’. The constitution, he maintained, was destined to shift between two extremes.8 On the one hand, it would lean towards a republic if the Crown depended entirely on the Commons for its revenue.9 Writing this essay on the eve of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), he alerted his readers to the Commons’ pernicious tendency to encroach upon sovereign power at the expense of Britain’s foreign interests. ‘How easy’, he asked, ‘would it be for that house to wrest from the crown all these powers, one after another; by making every grant conditional, and choosing their time so well, that their refusal of supply should only distress the government, without giving foreign powers any advantage over us?’10 Ensuing events on the Continent only increased his concern. Maria Theresa’s Austria, an ally of Britain, suffered greatly by the loss of Silesia.11 Likewise, Hanover was threatened and the

Hume, ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, Essays, pp. 25–6. Ibid., p. 25. 10  Ibid., pp. 25–6. 11  Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (New York, 1993), pp. 42–5; Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (London, 2007), p. 310. 8  9 

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Dutch became vulnerable to invasion after the siege of Bergen op Zoom.12 As Hume wrote pessimistically to his friend James Oswald, ‘what a surprising misfortune is this of Bergen-op-zoom which is almost unparalleled in modern history […] I shall not be much disappointed if this prove the last Parliament, worthy the name, we shall ever have in Britain’.13 For him, the Commons’ monopoly of parliamentary supplies threatened the state’s power to implement its foreign policy. On the other hand, Hume argued that the government would lapse into absolute monarchy if the Crown was granted an allowance beyond its needs. When George II ascended the throne, Walpole secured £800,000 per annum for the new king and £100,000 as a jointure for the queen. In doing so, Walpole managed to outmanoeuvre his potential rival for the position of first minister, Sir Spencer Compton.14 With this large Civil List, Walpole sustained an extensive system of patronage by means of positions, honours, and pensions.15 However, the size of the Civil List budget stimulated concerns over the Court’s control of Parliament. The implication of Hume’s argument was that a despotic government would replace the free constitution that existed. Hume observed that the Civil List budget – an issue of increasing importance in the decades since George II’s accession in 1727 – triggered competition between those who endorsed the monarchical and republican aspects of the constitution respectively.16 Given Walpole’s firm control of Parliament from 1721 to 1742, the main platform for the conflict between the Ministerialists and the Opposition shifted from Parliament to the press.17 As a consequence, Country gentlemen found that the only way to engage directly in politics was through the press.18 In December 1726, William Francis Henry Skrine, Fontenoy, and Great Britain’s Share in the War of Austrian Succession, 1741–48 (Edinburgh and London, 1906), pp. 335–7. 13  Letters, I, 106. 14  Ibid. ‘Sir R. Walpole’s Motion for settling on the King the Entire Revenues of the Civil List [3 July 1727]’, Parliamentary Debates, viii, cols, pp. 599–607. For the historical background of the Civil List controversy, see J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole (2 vols, London, 1960 edn), II, 157–99; Doohwan Ahn, ‘British Strategy, Economic Discourse, and the Idea of A Patriot King, 1702–1738’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011), pp. 154–218. 15  Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability, pp. 159–89; H. T. Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London, 1973), pp. 160–87; Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 210–18. 16  E. A. Reitan, ‘The Civil List in the Eighteenth-Century British Politics: Parliamentary Supremacy versus the Independence of the Crown’, Historical Journal 9 (1966), 318–37; Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, II, 168–9; Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford, 1975), p. 5. For the constitutional position during the reign of George II, see Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1961), pp. 45–119. 17  Laurence Hanson, Government and the Press: 1695–1763 (London, 1967), pp. 1–6. Langford, in his The Excise Crisis, calls this practice ‘epoch-making’, p. 7. 18  Hanson, Government and the Press, pp. 3–5. 12 

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Pulteney and Viscount Bolingbroke founded the periodical The Craftsman, which commenced a war of printed words that would last for almost a decade until Bolingbroke’s self-imposed exile to Paris in 1735.19 While Country writers made a series of attacks upon the corruption and ‘political craft’ of the government, they encountered considerable resistance in Walpole’s press.20 By 1723, Walpole had purchased the London Journal following the death of one of its founders, John Trenchard, and turned it into the major voice of the government.21 Twelve years later, a new Daily Gazetteer appeared with the merging of several government publications including the London Journal, the Daily Courant, and the Free Briton.22 This press war was made possible by the Licensing Act of 1695, which had ended the licensing system and thus enabled the freedom of speech in print.23 Yet, it was not until the start of the Civil List controversy that party-political conflicts began to carry over into the press. Providing a common cause for an otherwise disparate Opposition, the Civil List generated questions about the legitimacy of Walpole’s system of administration, alongside the importance of political reform. Practical concerns regarding financial administration had come to a head at the time of George II’s accession. The Civil List Act of 1697 had granted the Crown £700,000 per annum, even though it was becoming increasingly difficult to meet both royal household costs and public expenditure.24 During the reign of George I, the Commons passed several bills in order to repay the king’s debts. These debts had been incurred not only through the Crown’s increased expenditure in an age of high inflation, but also because the Civil List of Queen Anne’s governments had not been paid in full. However, George I’s persistent demands to settle the Civil List debts had provoked vehement criticism in Parliament and the press. Although Walpole’s motion for a much larger Civil List was passed in 1727 without serious resistance, this large grant to George II went on to bedevil Walpole’s administration. Indeed, until Walpole left office in 1742, alienated Tories and dissident Whigs worked together in order to resist Court patronage. Hume discussed the Civil List at length in his essay ‘Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic’ (1741).25 He gave some credence to the Ministerialist view that the Commons’ vast possession of property and political power had tilted the balance of the British Simon Varey, ‘The Craftsman’, Prose Studies 16 (1993), 58. Ibid., pp. 69–70. According to Varey, after Walpole’s government writers had much less intellectual calibre and influence than those Country writers; their arguments had much less theoretical vigour and clarity than those of the Opposition. See also Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy, pp. 151–6. 21  Hanson, Government and the Press, pp. 106–8. 22  Ibid., p. 115. Robert Louis Haig, The Gazetteer, 1735–1797: A Study in the EighteenthCentury English Newspaper (Carbondale, 1960), p. 4. 23  Hanson, Government and the Press, pp. 2–3; Varey, ‘The Craftsman’, pp. 61–3. 24  9 Will. III c. 23. 25  Hume, ‘British Government Inclines More to Monarchy or Republic’, pp. 28–30. 19  20 

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constitution towards republicanism. Nevertheless, he ultimately rejected the Ministerialist argument because in his eyes the Civil List, enlarged in the wake of the Hanoverian Succession, had granted the Crown too much independence.26 He maintained that it was foolish to hope that ‘a legal authority, though great, has always some bounds, which terminate both the hopes and pretensions of the person possessed of it’.27 The so-called ‘remedy’ proposed by Ministerialists – namely, allowing the executive power to check itself – was at best a misapprehension, because it presupposed that a great power could be constrained by a mechanism, the existence of which depended entirely on the power itself.28 Although Hume argued against the Ministerialists, he nevertheless agreed with their conclusion that, given the existing constitutional arrangement, a large Civil List was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the preservation of constitutional balance. In his view, the Country proposal for constitutional reform was overstated; the threat of royal power, notwithstanding the extensive revenue of the Crown, was less serious than it appeared. This overestimation was, as Pocock put it, due to ‘the conscious recognition of change in the economic and social foundations of politics and the political personality’ after the Revolution settlement.29 With this change of political culture in mind, Hume wrote that ‘had men been in the same disposition at the revolution as they are at present, monarchy would have run a great risque of being entirely lost in this island’.30 He observed that since the Glorious Revolution, the monarchy had ceased to be ‘supported by the settled principles and opinions of men’; it followed that the ‘very slow, and almost insensible’ progress of royal power was not likely to seriously endanger the constitution.31 Since the Crown had essentially lost its political control of Parliament in the wake of the Revolution, Hume maintained that constitutional balance could be achieved by strengthening the weaker part of the constitution, namely the Crown.32 He proposed to grant ‘a large share’ of power in the legislature to Ibid., pp. 29–30. Ibid., p. 30. 28  Ibid. 29  Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 423. See, for instance, Bernard Mandeville, That Mischiefs that ought to be apprehended by a Whig-Government (London, 1714), p. 39. As Mandeville observed, ‘Britons are the most unfit for Slavery of any People in the World, it has been try’d so often, the least touch of a Yoak gas them, no wise Prince will ever make an attempt again upon their Liberties’. 30  Hume, ‘British Government Inclines More to Monarchy or Republic’, p. 31. 31  Ibid. 32  The same view was reiterated in Hume’s essay ‘That Politics May be Reduced to A Science’, Essays, pp. 4–15; ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’, Essays, pp. 24–7. Hume’s argument was cited with approval in an anonymous pamphlet A Letter to Lord North, on His Re-election into the House of Commons. By a Member of the late Parliament (London, 1780), pp. 17–19. Jonathan Swift made a similar argument in his A Discourse of the Contest and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, with the Consequences They had upon Both Those States (London, 1701), pp. 5–6. 26  27 

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the chief magistrate (i.e. the sovereign prince) so that the Crown could ‘form a proper balance or counterpoise to the other parts of the legislature’.33 As Hume argued in ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’ (1742), ‘some degree and some kind of it [sc. corruption and dependence] are inseparable from the very nature of the constitution, and necessary to the preservation of our mixed government’.34 He believed that large revenues could guarantee royal patronage in Parliament, which would ultimately weaken the Commons by fostering tension between the House and its constituent members.35 In other words, the Commons would be less likely to encroach on the executive authority of the Crown since many of its members would retain a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. For these reasons, Hume argued that the Civil List served to balance the constitution; however, he continued to fear the tyranny of Parliament over and above the tyranny of the Crown. Hume’s mischievous solution to the paradox of the constitution was to opt for the lesser evil – absolute monarchy – and to prepare for ‘the easiest death, the true Euthanasia of the British constitution’.36 Hume’s concern with the security of the British constitution was shown in another essay, ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752).37 With tensions increasing between France and England’s allies on the Continent, which would soon lead to the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the British government was on the verge of collapse.38 Since the settlement of 1689, England had been embroiled in several costly continental wars, including the Nine Years’ War (1688–97), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), and the Great Northern War (1700–21).39 The resulting pressures of war on state finance affected almost

Hume, ‘Politics Reduced to a Science’, p. 6. Hume, ‘Independency of Parliament’, p. 26. 35  Betty Kemp, King and Commons, 1660–1832 (London and New York, 1957), pp. 143–4. 36  Hume, ‘British Government Inclines More to Monarchy or Republic’, p. 32. See Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 683–92, particularly p. 685. 37  Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000), pp. 67, 79–80. 38  Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, Essays, pp. 172–3. McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 201; Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1688–1815’, The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. P. J. Marshall and A. Low (5 vols, Oxford, 1998 edn), II, 53–77, particularly 65–7; David Stasavage, ‘Partisan Politics and Public Debt: he Importance of the ‘Whig Supremacy’ for Britain’s Financial Revolution’, European Review of Economic History 11 (2007), 123–53. 39  Simms, Three Victories, pp. 44–76, 107–34. For Daniel Defoe’s argument against participating in the War of the Spanish Succession, see his ‘Reasons Against a War, & c.’, and ‘The Succession of Spain consider’d: or, A View of the several Interests of the Princes and Powers of Europe, as they Respect the Succession of Spain and the Empire’, The Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe., ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (8 vols, London, 2000), V, 85–98, 101–27. 33  34 

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every European power, but most notably France and the Dutch Republic.40 As both Hont and Michael Sonenscher have pointed out, since trade had become the principal way in which interest payments for war debts were serviced, the increasing intensity of European military contests found expression in the competition for international trade.41 Hume observed that, while war finance was a problem common to every major European power, Britain’s difficulties were especially severe.42 As early as 1720, John Trenchard had argued that ’Tis with Grief and Indignation I say it, that England too, which seems designed by Nature and Situation to be the Pride and Glory of the World, that has so large a Dominion, so extensive a Trade and immense Revenue, should be sunk and oppressed by Debts and Anticipations, by needless Offices and Sallaries, and, I wish I could say only, as needless Pensions, to such a Degree as to be scarce a Match for the lesser States of Christendom […].43

Three decades later, Hume observed that the problem was caused less by the Civil List than by Britain’s fiscal administration. He claimed that the British fiscal system placed much greater reliance on ‘those institutions of banks, funds, and paper-credit’ than its European counterparts, with the Dutch Republic cited as the only exception.44 According to Hume’s theory of money, recently dubbed the ‘price-specie flow mechanism’, the market price reflected only the ratio of the stock of money to labour and commodities.45 Since ‘public stocks’, as ‘a kind of papercredit’, created an artificial increase in money supply, they led invariably to inflation.46 Drawing a comparison with France, which had neither ‘banks’ nor ‘Merchants’ bills’ – and thus maintained a low price of commodities and labour – Hume argued that Britain’s exceptional vulnerability to higher prices stemmed from its overuse of public credit.47 Unlike Smith’s optimism regarding paper money and the future of public credit, he maintained that these Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 138. Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 185–266. Michael Sonenscher, ‘Republicanism, State Finances and the Emergence of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-century France – or from Royal to Ancient Republicanism and Back’, Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. M. Gelderen and Q. Skinner (2 vols, Cambridge, 2002 edn), II, 275–91, particularly 276. 42  For a discussion of this problem in the Dutch Republic, see Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 681–3. 43  John Trenchard, Some Considerations upon the State of our Publick Debts in General, and of the Civil List in Particular (London, 1720), pp. 4–5. 44  For an overview of the rise of financial interests after the late seventeenth century, see Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1–19. 45  For an overview of this theory, see Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, pp. 345–7. 46  Hume, ‘Balance of Trade’, p. 142. 47  Ibid., p. 143. 40  41 

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were anathema to domestic peace and external security.48 The use of paper money had put Britain in a difficult position in the international market because the French continually undersold its commodities. The declining revenue from international trade subsequently affected Britain’s capacity to service its debts. Hume maintained that Britain’s inability to solve the problem of public debt was exacerbated by its form of government.49 In his essay ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’, he argued that public finance was a source of degeneracy for free governments.50 Since many of its creditors were also high-ranking officials, the British government would struggle to opt for voluntary bankruptcy as an initial step in the restructuring of its tax scheme.51 Conversely, in absolute monarchies the sovereign ‘may take a bankruptcy as he pleases’ and ‘his people can never be oppressed by his debts’.52 Moreover, the alliance between the British government and its creditors had sacrificed the interests of other social groups, mainly the landed gentry.53 Since the prevailing tax scheme concentrated on the direct taxation of land, the escalation of government debt, which was mainly contracted to finance Britain’s military engagements on the Continent, would inevitably become the burden of landowners. If landowners were oppressed in this way, despotism would flourish. Hume explained that 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.54

Since the landowners would be responsible for servicing the escalating public debt, their diminishing power would render them powerless to check monarchical authority. Deficit finance had exclusively benefited the stockholders, whose exemption from taxation had led them to the ‘lethargy of a stupid and pampered luxury’, thus undermining the ideas of ‘nobility, gentry, and family’.55 Hume noted that it was difficult to tax stockholders because their assets were so easily convertible and just as easy to send abroad. Thus, without landowners as a mediating power, only a despotic government could emerge Donald Winch offers an analysis of the distinction between Hume and Smith on public debt in his Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 124–31. 49  Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, pp. 73–4. 50  Hume, ‘Of Civil Liberty’, pp. 56–7. 51  Ibid., p. 57. 52  Ibid. 53  Hume, ‘Public Credit’, p. 172. 54  Ibid. 55  Ibid. 48 

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because the government’s authority would be based on ‘the commission alone of the sovereign’.56 Accordingly, Hume issued his now notorious warning that ‘either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation’.57 He rejected the prevailing view that, since the public was the sole debtor, debt repayment merely involved ‘transferring money from the right hand to the left’.58 This view was advocated by the French economist Jean-François Melon in Essai politique sur le commerce (1734), and had been a central premise of John Law’s reformation of public finance in France.59 As Law argued, Domestic trade depends on the money. A greater quantity employs more people than a lesser quantity. A limited sum can only set a number of people to work proportioned to it, and ’tis with little success that laws are made, for employing the poor or idle in countries where money is scarce […] they may be brought to work on credit, and that is not practicable, unless the credit have a circulation, so as to supply the workman with necessaries; if that’s supposed, then that credit is money, and will have the same effects, on home, and foreign trade.60

For Hume, this view underestimated the disastrous consequences that extensive public credit could bring, since it merely equated the problem of deficit finance with the problem of wealth redistribution within the state. He was not at all concerned with the prospect of the rich becoming poor and the poor becoming rich: ‘in 500 years, the posterity of those now in the coaches, and of those upon the boxes, will probably have changed places, without affecting the public by these revolutions’.61 The more serious issue, for Hume at least, was that the continuous use of public credit to fund government expenses would eventually destroy the state’s capacity to defend itself from foreign invasions. This would lead to the ‘violent death’ of public credit and to the collapse of the state itself.62 In order to prevent the collapse of the state, Hume proposed to eradicate public credit through voluntary bankruptcy.63 Furthermore, he upheld the economic feasibility of this drastic measure. It is true, he conceded, that voluntary bankruptcy would lead to an increase in interest rates, which would subsequently depress commerce and industry.64 In the long run, however, monetary sources would shift from creditors – mainly Ibid. Ibid., p. 174. See Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 51–2. 58  Hume, ‘Public Credit’, p. 170. 59  Schumpeter, in his History of Economic Analysis, noted that Melon had worked with John Law and was therefore familiar with the latter’s system, p. 174. See also Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford, 1997), pp. 105–22. 60  John Law, Money and Trade Considered: with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (Glasgow, 1750), pp. 20–1. 61  Hume, ‘Public Credit’, p. 171. 62  Ibid., p. 177. 63  Ibid. 64  Hume, ‘Of Interest’, pp. 132–3. 56  57 

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annuitants and stockholders – to merchants. In Hume’s view, this would provide a stimulus to commercial activity and compensation for the losses incurred by the marginalisation of moneyed interests.65 Politically, Hume maintained that voluntary bankruptcy had far-reaching implications for the British constitution.66 It was more than plausible that the post-bankruptcy state would be despotic. Nevertheless, by severing the link between the government and the creditors, bankruptcy would prepare the way for a restoration of the government’s traditional alliance with landowners.67 Voluntary bankruptcy would, therefore, be a constructive step towards a more balanced constitution. However, institutional constraints continued to protect existing property rights from encroachments by the government. Were the state to adopt the expedient of ‘voluntary bankruptcy’, it would violate the property rights of approximately 17,000 stockholders, including both natives and foreigners.68 ‘So desperate an expedient’ was too ‘difficult’, or even ‘dangerous’, to be ventured upon by any minister, given the large political influence of creditors in the British government.69 On these grounds, Hume warned that the notion of property rights had sacrificed ‘the safety of millions […] for ever to the temporary safety of thousands’.70 Hume confessed, somewhat presciently, to the unlikelihood of significantly reducing the public debt in his lifetime. Indeed, each attempt to reduce the debt had failed, and the most noteworthy example was the failure to establish the Sinking Fund, which was tailored to the demand of repaying longterm government debt.71 Noting that ‘the Sum of 290,903 l. 0s. 3½ d. of the Sinking Fund hath been applied to the Current Service of the Year [sc. 1717]’, William Pulteney argued that ‘this deserves more particular Notice, both on Account of the Sum it self, and the Misapplication of so much of the Sinking Fund; as well as to shew that those Men, who value themselves upon having the most perfect Knowledge and the greatest Experience in these Affairs, may be sometimes mistaken […]’.72 The failure of the Sinking Fund had motivated the British to seek alternative methods of debt reduction. Following Ibid. Hume, ‘Public Credit’, pp. 175–7. 67  Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, pp. 75–6. 68  Hume, ‘Public Credit’, p. 177. 69  Ibid. 70  Ibid. 71  Hume attributed this to Walpole’s failure to take seriously concern about the public debt problem. In Hume’s revised version of his essay ‘That Politics May be Reduced to a Science’ in 1770, he added to the character of Robert Walpole that ‘the not paying more of our public debts was, as hinted in this character, a great, and the only great, error in that long administration’. For Robert Walpole’s analysis of the Sinking Fund issue, see his pamphlet Some Considerations concerning the Publick Funds, and the Annual Supplies, granted by Parliament (London, 1735), pp. 38–40. 72  William Pulteney, Some Considerations on the National Debts and the Sinking Fund, and the State of Publick Credit: In a Letter to a Friend in the Country (London, 1729), p. 32. 65  66 

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the example of the Mississippi Company of France, which had taken over the national debt in 1719, Britain had allowed the South Sea Company to do likewise in the following year.73 This caused a boom in the stocks of several major trading companies, including the South Sea Company, the Bank of England, and the East India Company.74 As John Carswell observed, the South Sea bubbles of 1720 drew to a close the post-revolutionary period of high-speed economic development, which he called ‘the commercial revolution’, and prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution.75 The extensive power of the large stockholding corporations, mainly the Bank of England, the South Sea Company, and the East India Company, undermined Walpole’s attempt to reduce the interest rate of government debt in 1737.76 However, the following decade witnessed a swift transformation in the exercise of financial power from these corporations to a number of annuitants and stockholders. This entailed a reduction in, although not the disappearance of, the role of the middlemen who had exerted significant bargaining power with the government on behalf of financiers. This change to the composition of financial power enabled Henry Pelham, the new Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, to achieve – in L. S. Sutherland’s words – a ‘diplomatic revolution in the city’: a new scheme of deficit finance that reduced the interest rate of national debt from 4 per cent to 3 per cent.77 Pelham saw that it was necessary to allow prospective investors to bid for public debt because individual annuitants and stockholders were less likely to sway financial policies without the backing of large corporations.78 As Sonenscher has observed, anxiety about the government’s ability to service the debt had led Charles Davenant, and later Bolingbroke, to propose the ‘patriot king’ solution.79 The idea of a patriot government, in Sonenscher’s reading, expressed a commitment to ‘creating a balanced, John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (London, 1960), p. 95. Murphy, John Law, pp. 188–212. 74  Murphy, ‘The Mississippi Company’, p. 202. See also P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (London, 1967), pp. 90–156. 75  Carswell, South Sea Bubble, pp. v, 1–21. See also Gregory Clark, ‘The Political Foundations of Modern Economic Growth: England, 1540–1800’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (1996), 563–88. 76  Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 214. 77  The phrase appeared in L. S. Sutherland, ‘Sampson Gideon and the Reduction of Interest, 1749–50’, Economic History Review 16 (1946), 24. See also Jeremy Wormell, ed., National Debt in Britain, 1850–1930 (9 vols, London, 1999 edn), I, 154. 78  Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 214; Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship 1603–1763 (London, 1965), pp. 324–5. 79  Sonenscher, ‘Republicanism, State Finances and the Emergence of Commercial Society’, p. 277. For a detailed discussion of Bolingbroke’s idea of ‘a patriot king’ and its continual impact on British politics, see David Armitage, ‘A Patriot for Whom? The Afterlives of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King’, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997), 397–418. 73 

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republican-style constitution to neutralise the despotic potential of a bankruptcy’.80 Bolingbroke had also advocated voluntary bankruptcy, and had remained optimistic that a post-bankruptcy government would be able to integrate kingly virtues into the dynamics of state finance, thus solving the debt problem once and for all. He [sc. a patriot king] will not multiply taxes wantonly nor keep up those unnecessarily which necessity has laid, that he may keep up legions of tax-gatherers. He will not continue national debt, by all sorts of political and other profusion; nor, more wickedly still, by a settled purpose of oppressing and impoverishing the people; that he may with greater ease corrupt some, and govern the whole, according to the dictates of his passions and arbitrary will.81

Although Hume, like Bolingbroke, believed that voluntary bankruptcy could halt the progressive increase in public debt, he remained sceptical about the practicability of the ‘patriot king’ solution. In his view, an overreliance on the virtues of the king – frugality in particular – would make it difficult to sustain constitutional balance.82 As he observed in ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (1752), ‘at present, the balance of our government depends in some measure on the ability and behaviour of the sovereign; which are variable and uncertain circumstances’.83 For him, the paradox was that English liberty could only be secured by a strong executive power, which posed the threat of despotism itself. Therefore, radical patriotism was less desirable than absolute monarchy because it would make the law a threat to, rather than a guardian of, liberty.84 The Problem of Public Finance Hume maintained that the constitutional conflict between Crown and Parliament originated in the controversy over unparliamentary taxes, which, he argued, was caused largely by the persistence of ambiguities and inconsistencies within the political system. Precedents existed in the Plantagenet and Tudor periods for the Crown to levy customs and impositions without parliamentary consent. This practice had also been customary in other European nations.85 As John Davies had observed, ‘the King of England hath ever had this Prerogative incident to his Crown, to shut and open the Ports when it pleased him, as appeareth by many Records, especially by the Parliament Sonenscher, ‘Republicanism, State Finances and the Emergence of Commercial Society’, p. 277. 81  Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘The Idea of a Patriot King’, Bolingbroke: Political Writings, ed. D. Armitage (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 276–7. 82  Winch, Riches and Poverty, pp. 90–123. 83  Hume, ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, Essays, p. 231. 84  Hume, ‘British Government Inclines More to Monarchy or Republic’, p. 32. 85  Ibid., 59. 80 

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Rolls in the time of King Edw. 3 […]’.86 To this Davies added the following: ‘this Prerogative of Custody of the Ports, and of shutting and opening the same, is reserved unto the Crown upon an excellent reason: For Trade and Comerce is not fit to be holden with all persons, neither are all things fit to be imported or exported.’87 The royal prerogative to raise customs, Hume observed, coexisted with the ‘liberties and privileges’ of the common people, which had been affirmed by numerous other precedents.88 The reality was that ‘the constitution of England was, at that time [sc. under the Stuarts], an inconsistent fabric, whose jarring and discordant parts must soon destroy each other, and from the dissolution of the old, beget some new form of civil government, more uniform and consistent’.89 Hume pressed home the need for the Crown to levy unparliamentary taxes by pointing out that royal finance, at least compared to its European counterparts, had been in a precarious state.90 He went on to demonstrate in his Tudor History that the Elizabethan system of financial administration had been marred by a tension between Crown and Parliament over the principles of public finance. This implied that the financial difficulties of the Stuarts were largely a consequence of the same administrative problem that had troubled the Tudors. The Stuarts had inherited a limited amount of landed property because Elizabeth had sold a large amount of land in order to maintain relative independence from parliamentary grants. The Stuarts had little land at their disposal and grew increasingly dependent upon the Commons as a result. In addition, England had adopted an approach to colonisation that was very different to that of other European states.91 Spain, for instance, had accrued great wealth to the Crown by means of specie mining. In contrast, England’s colonial wealth was concentrated in the hands of American colonists and London merchants, and the Crown was granted only a small share by patents and monopolies. The three estates represented by the English Parliament – ‘the clergy, the nobility, and the commonalty’ – were not as distinct as the estates in the assemblies of other European polities.92 As the only legitimate source of taxation, the English Parliament was essentially subordinate to the Commons. This was particularly the case when the Church of England, in exchange for John Davies, The Question concerning Impositions, Tonnage, Poundage, Prizage, Customs, &c. Fully Stated and Argued, from Reason, Law, and Policy (London, 1656), p. 84. 87  Ibid., pp. 84–5. 88  Hume, History, V, 274. 89  Ibid., 59. 90  For a detailed analysis in this respect, see also C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700 (2 vols, Cambridge, 1984 edn.), I, 251–81; Paul Cheney, ‘Finances, Philosophical History and the “Empire of Climate”: Enlightenment Historiography and Political Economy’, Historical Reflections 31 (2005), 141–67. 91  Hume, History, V, 146–7. 92  Ibid., VI, 195. 86 

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fewer ecclesiastical subsidies, surrendered to the Commons its right to impose taxes on the clergy. Whereas its subjects became increasingly wealthy and powerful, the English Crown found it increasingly difficult to maintain its existing level of state expenditure, although the royal finances of its European counterparts were comparatively stable during this time.93 In this context, Hume highlighted the structural flaws inherent in the fiscal bureaucracy of the Stuarts – flaws that were ultimately responsible for the inadequacy of state revenue.94 He drew a comparison between the Stuart period and his own time: In our present constitution, many accidents, which have rendered governments, every where, as well as in Great Britain, much more burthensome than formerly, have thrown into the hands of the crown the disposal of a large revenue, and have enabled the king, by the private interest and ambition of the members, to restrain the public interest and ambition of the body […] It was the fate of the house of Stuarts to govern England at a period, when the former source of authority [sc. ‘ancient powers and prerogatives’] was already much diminished, and before the latter [sc. royal revenue] began to show in any tolerable abundance. Without a regular and fixed foundation, the throne perpetually tottered; and the prince sat upon it anxiously and precariously.95

The Stuarts’ predicament was also caused by their ‘alliance with the hierarchy’, which ‘enraged the puritanical party, and exposed the prince to the attacks of enemies, numerous, violent, and implacable’.96 Hume argued that the failure to reach a more peaceful solution to the problem of royal finance extended beyond the Stuarts’ refusal to satisfy the needs of a rapidly changing society. Rather, the demand for parliamentary privileges, though justifiable, had been carried too far by political puritans. Hume explained that royal expenses before the Civil War had been divided into ‘ordinary disbursements’ and ‘extraordinary disbursements’.97 The former were paid by revenue from ‘crown lands’, ‘customs and new impositions’, as well as feudal duties – such as wards and purveyance – and the latter were covered by ‘subsidies, loans, sale of lands, sale of the title of baronet, money paid by the states, and by the king of France’s benevolences, &’.98 About £2,200,000 was paid into the extraordinary disbursements during the reign of James I, and parliamentary grants, mainly landed taxes, stood at

Richard Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1494–1660 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 352–60. For an overview of the public finance problem before the Civil War, see Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, pp. 89–107. See also Stephen Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes in England: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (4 vols, London, 1965 edn), I, 159–62. 95  Hume, History, V, 569. 96  Ibid. 97  Ibid., 135. 98  Ibid. 93  94 

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only £630,000.99 It was hardly surprising that the Crown had become increasingly indebted and had resorted to exceptional measures in order to service the debt and meet the expenditure of the state. Apart from the shortage of parliamentary grants, Hume pointed out that the Crown had been overly reliant on land taxes. Before the Civil War, direct taxation on land was composed of fifteenths (or tenths in corporate towns) and subsidies. The problem with these taxes, according to Hume, was rooted in an outmoded and inefficient means of tax collection. He claimed that he was the first historian to inquire into the amount and methods of tax collection. The fifteenth, as a quota tax levied on each county, created a stable revenue of about £29,000 per annum.100 By comparison, the subsidy, as an assessed tax levied by commissioners, was continually in decline, from £120,000 per annum in the eighth year of Elizabeth’s reign, to £78,000 in the fortieth, and then to £70,000 afterwards.101 Hume acknowledged that commissioning was a better method than farming, presumably because it was more regular and more amenable to a centralised system of public finance. Nevertheless, he argued that farming should be attempted first in order to establish ‘proper rules for its officers’.102 Since the tax farmers received nothing but the remaining balance after payment to the Exchequer, they were motivated by their self-interest to ‘fall upon a hundred expedients to prevent frauds in the merchants’.103 Hume illustrated this point by referring to customs revenue, arguing that its increase from £127,000 to £190,000 in a mere twenty-year period under James I was owed largely to the farmers’ administration. In contrast, the laxity of commissioners in levying subsidies left extensive room for tax evasion in instances of land redistribution. In Hume’s view, subsidies could not increase despite ‘the encrease of money and rise of rents’ because this kind of tax was levied on a personal basis: that is, through a rough estimation of a landowner’s property based on precedents.104 The proprietor only reported losses that stemmed from falling rents and sold estates, and kept secret any increase: ‘the advantage, therefore of every change was taken against the crown; and the crown could obtain the advantage of none’.105 This discretionary way of rating subsidies explained the continual decrease in subsidies and the growing fiscal insecurity of the state.106 That the gentry had benefited the most from this method of tax Ibid., 135–6. For a detailed discussion of parliamentary taxes in the seventeenth century, see Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of the State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester and New York, 1996), pp. 91–109. 100  Hume, History, V, 137. 101  Ibid. 102  Ibid., 135. 103  Ibid., 135–6. 104  Ibid., 138. 105  Ibid. 106  Ibid. This claim was based on the authority of Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England (1628–44). 99 

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collection was central to Hume’s explanation of the conflict between the Crown and the gentry-controlled Commons. Loopholes within the scheme of tax collection had allowed the gentry, who were the main buyers of landed property in the first half of the seventeenth century, to avoid extensive taxation. Hume situated this within the context of a market economy working from the city to the country.107 First, the commercial activities in the city sustained the culture of luxury consumption. This culture then led the nobility to sell land to the gentry, who subsequently promoted a new type of agricultural economy. As Hume explained, ‘the early improvements in luxury were seized by the greater nobles, whose fortunes, placing them above frugality, or even calculation, were soon dissipated in expensive pleasures’.108 The luxury way of life was soon imitated by ‘small proprietors, or twenty pound men’ – a rank below the nobles. They ‘were often men of family, imitating those of a rank immediately above them, reduced themselves to poverty’.109 It was luxury that had destroyed these two groups of landowners, which ultimately increased the amount of land available in the market. The gentry, who retained enough financial resources to maintain some ‘domestic economy’, had seized this opportunity by becoming large landowners.110 The immediate consequence of this change of landownership was that the Crown was unable to maintain its traditional authority because it could neither levy unparliamentary taxes nor determine the financial policies of the state. Therefore, the problem of the financial administration of the state brought to the surface the growing conflict between Crown and Parliament. As discussed in chapter 1, Hume observed that the gentry in Parliament had represented not only the boroughs but also the towns, due to the latter’s lack of an independent representative institution. The gentry’s representation of interest in Parliament had important implications for Hume’s narrative of the constitutional crisis. It meant that the crisis was not simply precipitated by the failure to reach a consensus either within the landed interests or between the landed and mercantile interests. Rather, the crisis was caused by a struggle between old patrimonial elites, whose power and privileges had depended almost exclusively on the possession of landed property, and the rising middling rank, who had benefited most from the market economy. In Hume’s view, then, the constitutional crisis of the mid seventeenth century reflected a structural problem in England’s transformation from a feudal to a commercial society. For one thing, both the gentry and merchants shared a political ambition to curb royal prerogatives because they perceived this For a review of the eighteenth-century debate on luxury, see Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates’, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. M. Berg and E. Eger (Basingstoke and New York, 2003), pp. 7–27. 108  Hume, History, V, 134. 109  Ibid., 134–5. 110  Ibid., 135. 107 

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as a necessary condition for the security of their property and freedom from arbitrary government.111 Hume maintained that this conflict emanated from the failure of public finance to accommodate the financial needs of the Crown as well as the individual freedom and property of the gentry. Impoverished in an age of high inflation, the Crown had a diminishing hold on executive power and was unable to maintain its authority through patronage in general and venal offices in particular.112 The power to levy taxation thus became gradually concentrated in the hands of the Commons, which was now concerned overwhelmingly with the property rights and privileges of the gentry. The Commons showed little interest in making legal adjustments to meet the financial needs of the Crown. Eager to defend the property rights of the people, the Commons made systematic challenges to the dispensing power, on the basis of which the Crown had been able to levy unparliamentary taxes since the Tudor age. According to Hume, this changed the political landscape dramatically: the Stuarts found it increasingly difficult to maintain the level of patronage dispensed by their Tudor predecessors. So began the long and bitter struggle over the nature of the constitution. Although Hume believed that Parliament was mainly responsible for the inadequacy of war finance, he also maintained that the Stuarts were to blame for introducing their own ambiguities. The desire to protect the liberty of the people from the royal prerogative was fomented by Charles I’s use of writs to levy ship-money, which blurred the boundaries between the legislature and the executive: The defenceless condition of the kingdom while unprovided with a navy; the inability of the king, from his established revenues, with the utmost care and frugality, to equip and maintain one; the impossibility of obtaining, on reasonable terms, any voluntary supply from parliament: All these are reasons of state, not topics of law. If these reasons appear to the king so urgent as to dispense with the legal rules of government; let him enforce his edicts, by his court of star-chamber, the proper instrument of irregular and absolute power; not prostitute the character of his judges by a decree, which is not, and cannot possibly be legal.113

Hume lamented that this situation could have been avoided: Indeed, could the Parliaments in the reign of Charles I have been induced to relinquish so far their old habits, as to grant that prince the same revenue which was voted to his successor, or had those in the reign of Charles II conferred on him as For a discussion of the political influence of merchants in Parliament after the Restoration, see Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 195–233. 112  For an overview of the pattern of office-holding, see Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. T. Harris (Basingstoke and New York, 2001), pp. 153–94. 113  Hume, History, V, 247. 111 

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large a revenue as was enjoyed by his brother, all the disorders in both reigns might easily have been prevented, and probably all reasonable concessions to liberty might peaceably have been obtained from both monarchs.114

Indeed, if the revenue necessary for the expenditure of the state had been granted to the king, ‘probably all reasonable concessions to liberty might peaceably have been obtained from both monarchs’.115 The implication was obvious: the only way to secure England’s liberty was to build a more effective system of public finance, which would have been possible if the people had embraced taxation. Towards a Centralised System of Public Finance In his post-Restoration history, Hume stressed the need for effective fiscal machinery in order to balance the precarious relationship between Crown and Parliament.116 The key was to transform British financial institutions while preserving as much of the existing constitutional arrangements as possible. Such a transformation would not be easy. The problem of converting the land-based tax system to a consumer-driven scheme persisted well into the eighteenth century. In his essay ‘Of Taxes’, Hume observed that the burden of taxation on the landed interest was disproportionally large compared to that of chartered companies, who represented the rising mercantile interest. This scheme of taxation distorted the economy and the balance of the constitution to the extent that a change in fiscal policy was required. In Brewer’s analysis, much of the machinery for raising taxes in the eighteenth century was a legacy from the Stuart age, during which time Parliamentarians used the land-based tax scheme to oppose fiscal centralisation.117 Since a shift from direct (mainly land) to indirect (mainly excises) taxation required the establishment of a professional body of revenue collectors appointed by the Court, Parliament feared that this would give too much power to the Crown. Although commissioning replaced farming in every branch of state revenue in the 1660s, indirect taxation was opposed consistently by the mercantile interest in Parliament. Moreover, land-based taxation was given intellectual credibility by the Physiocratic doctrine, which postulated that ‘the net surplus of the land’ was the sole origin of national wealth.118 Ibid., VI, 535. Ibid. 116  For a discussion of the development of state finance after the Restoration, see Patrick K. O’Brien and Philip A. Hunt, ‘England, 1485–1815’, The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815, ed. R. Bonney (Oxford, 1999), pp. 53–100. 117  Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 100. 118  Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, The Oeconomical Table: An Attempt towards Ascertaining and Exhibiting the Source, Progress and Employment of Riches, with Explanations, by the Friend of Mankind, the Celebrated Marquis de Mirabeau (London, 1766), pp. 164–5. 114  115 

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According to the Physiocrats, it was ultimately the produce of the land that paid for the commodities bought from foreign countries, whereas domestic commerce did not generate new value because it merely circulated commodities and land produce from one place to another.119 In direct opposition to Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s policy of shifting towards a consumer-driven tax scheme, the Physiocrats proposed that taxes should be levied on land only.120 This doctrine was also shared by Locke, who argued in Some Consideration of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money (1691) that ‘it is in vain in a Country whose great Fund is Land, to hope to lay the publick charge of the Government on any thing else; there at last it will terminate’.121 Locke’s point was that while landowners needed to decide whether taxes should be levied directly or indirectly, it was essential that they be levied on land.122 Many of Hume’s contemporaries came to resist this idea in their own conceptions of fiscal policy. For instance, Josiah Tucker claimed that ‘our trade is greatly burthened by the nature of most of our taxes, and the manner of collecting them’.123 Tucker maintained that the centralised bureaucracy of revenue collection, ‘such as the multiplication and splitting of offices, patentplaces, fees, fine-cures, pensions, &c. &c’, had made the Court too independent.124 According to Brewer, this demonstrated a persistent concern amongst parliamentarians for ‘the growth of the fiscal-military state’, starting from the Restoration.125 Hume, on the other hand, believed that consolidated royal authority could be checked by a growing tide of republicanism. As early as 1752, he maintained that the right to levy new taxes should be given to the sovereign in order to assimilate his interests into those of the people.126 Drawing comparisons between the Turkish ‘Grand Signior’ and European princes, he argued that ‘a pound, raised by a general imposition, would have less pernicious effects, than a shilling taken in so unequal and arbitrary manner’.127 In his view, the arbitrary nature of the existing tax scheme overburdened landowners and destabilised the social hierarchy. On these grounds, he proposed

Ibid. Arthur John Sargent, Economic Policy of Colbert (New York, 1968), pp. 20–43. 121  Quoted in Takuo Dome, The Political Economy of Public Finance in Britain, 1767–1873 (London, 2004), pp. 12–13. 122  Tim Harris, ‘“Lives, Liberties and Estates”: Rhetorics of Liberty in the Reign of Charles II’, The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. T. Harris, P. Seaward and M. Goldie (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 218. 123  Josiah Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages & Disadvantages which Respectively Attend France and Great-Britain, with regard to Trade (London, 1749), p. 42. 124  Ibid., p. 23. 125  Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 100. 126  Hume, ‘Of Taxes’, pp. 161–5. 127  Ibid., p. 165. 119  120 

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to substitute consumption taxes for land taxes, thus enabling landowners, merchants, and moneyed interests to bear an equal share of the fiscal burden. Clearly, the failure to reform the bureaucracy of public finance could not be explained by a lack of government initiatives. The Walpole government’s excise scheme of 1733, which attempted to replace the tariff on wine and tobacco with an excise tax, constituted a significant attempt to construct a regular system of debt repayment. Paul Langford has emphasised the extent to which this scheme ‘reflected two of the fundamental themes of Walpole’s policy – the growing emphasis on efficient taxation of internal consumption in the form of inland duties, and the diminishing importance of direct taxes on propertied income’.128 Despite careful planning, Walpole’s excise scheme was aborted because of resistance from smugglers, who exerted a large influence on parliamentary politics.129 In Hume’s eyes, the failure of Walpole’s financial reform reflected the difficulties of meeting the demands of commercial society: ‘the continual fluctuations in commerce require continual alterations in the nature of the taxes; which exposes the legislature every moment to the danger both of wilful and involuntary error. And any great blow given to trade, whether by injudicious taxes or by other accidents, throws the whole system of government into confusion.’130 The significance of reorganising public finance, primarily through indirect taxation, was highlighted in the second volume of Hume’s Stuart History, in which he emphasised the significant change in financial administration during Charles II’s reign. It was characterised by an array of innovations to financial institutions, which, to some extent, relieved pressure on the Crown and moderated tensions with Parliament. Given that the English constitution did not contain within itself the means to check the executive power of the magistrate, Hume maintained that the potential for despotism had to be curbed by the introduction of two fundamental principles of public finance. First and foremost, a centralised system of state finance was needed in order to provide the Crown with sufficient financial support: ‘the natural consequence of the poverty of the crown was, besides feeble irregular transactions in foreign affairs, a continual uncertainty in its domestic administration’.131 Secondly, landed and mercantile interests should protect public freedom from the oppression of the Crown by checking its executive power to suspend the rule of law in special circumstances. What emerged after the Restoration was a scheme of state finance that had observed both principles, namely ‘the support of the crown’ and ‘public freedom’.132 Indeed, serious modifications had been made in order to accommodate Langford, The Excise Crisis, p. 31. Ibid., pp. 26–43. For detailed reviews of the opposition of London to Walpole, see Rogers, Whigs and Cities, pp. 46–86. 130  Hume, ‘Public Credit’, p. 172. 131  Hume, History, VI, 234. 132  Ibid.,159. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, II, 525. 128  129 

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the increasing importance of commerce to the state economy.133 First, the Crown’s feudal duties were abolished, and monetary compensations were given to the Crown in lieu of certain royal prerogatives, such as ‘the tenures of wards and liveries’, ‘wardships and purveyance’.134 This allowed public finance to shift its basis from personal vassalage to monarchical authority. By surrendering feudal duties, the king gave up his hereditary right to draw irregular rents and taxes from his subjects. This prepared the way for a systematic fiscal bureaucracy. However, the abolition of feudal duties also exacerbated the king’s fiscal weakness. Hume observed that ‘the crown having lost almost all its ancient demesnes, relied entirely on voluntary grants of the people; and the commons not fully accustomed to this new situation, were not yet disposed to supply with sufficient liberality the necessities of the crown’.135 Secondly, monthly assessments replaced subsidies as the land tax, which stabilised state revenue because they amounted to a quota tax rather than an assessed tax.136 Cromwell had introduced monthly assessments, which constituted half of the state’s annual revenue.137 Nevertheless, monthly assessments were not a regular tax because they required parliamentary consent and were usually levied for a fixed period of time.138 Their existence was, therefore, a recognition of Parliament’s continued control over fiscal policy in the wake of the Restoration. Thirdly, excises were established as regular tax revenue annexed to the Crown: ‘half of the excise was settled in perpetuity upon the crown’ during the reign of Charles I, and the whole excise was annexed to the Crown by the time of James II.139 Hume explained that excises, as a type of indirect tax, were first levied during the Civil War in order to finance the Parliamentary army against the Crown.140 They were later ‘extended over provisions and the common necessaries of life’, and constituted, together with ‘the monthly assessments’ and ‘the customs’, one of the chief indirect taxes during the time of the Commonwealth.141 The excise and customs were ‘the only constant revenue’, but they ‘fell much short of the ordinary burthens of government’, and had to be supplemented by other taxes such as ‘hearth-money’. For Hume, the annexation of excises to the Crown was a significant step in reforming the scheme of taxation because it provided a sustained income for the Crown as well as a motivation to promote commercial activities. The Crown’s revenue Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, p. 225. Hume, History, VI, 159. 135  Ibid. 136  Ibid., 146. 137  Ibid. 138  Dowell, History of Taxation and Taxes, III, 72–9. Dowell noted that monthly assessments were usually levied on the poor; Hume did not note this disadvantage. 139  Hume, History, VI, 159. 140  Ibid., V, 430. 141  Ibid., 501; VI, 159. This was reiterated in Langford, The Excise Crisis, p. 31. 133  134 

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was now largely dependent on whether the state could effectively stimulate trade and industry. Last but not least, a direct system of tax collection, namely the employment of commissioners, was established in every branch of state revenue. In the Long Parliament, it was ordained that ‘all the farmers and officers of the customs, who had been employed during so many years, in levying tonnage and poundage and the new impositions, were […] declared criminals, and were afterwards glad to compound for a pardon by paying a fine of 150,000 pounds’.142 Despite its limited success, Cromwell had trialled the appointment of commissioners to levy customs and excise from 1650 onwards.143 Although this experiment had to be terminated in 1657, Hume observed that commissioning remained ‘preferable’ to the old method of farming.144 Although Hume acknowledged that these changes had increased the Crown’s support, he argued that ‘the revenue of Charles II as settled by the long parliament, was put upon a very bad footing’.145 In particular, ‘it was too small, if they intended to make him independant in the common course of his administration: It was too large, and settled during too long a period, if they resolved to keep him in entire dependance’.146 Hume noted that the Commons had continued to scrutinise the increasing independence of the Crown. Even though the Crown had been settled for £1,200,000 a year, it continued to depend on Parliament for supplies: ‘not a fourth part of this sum, which seemed requisite for public expences, could be levied without consent of parliament … Tho’ they voted in general, that 1,200,000 pounds a year should be settled on the king, they scarcely assigned any funds, which could yield two thirds of that sum.’147 Hume criticised ‘cautious frugality’ in other matters, such as Parliament’s reluctance to pay for the disbandment of the army: the Commons ‘imitated too strictly the example of their predecessors in a rigid frugality of public money; and neither sufficiently considered the indigent condition of their prince, nor the general state of Europe; where every nation, by its increase both of magnificence and force, had made great additions to all expences’.148 Hume emphasised the necessity of increasing royal revenue to support Britain’s role as a mediating power in Europe: ‘as all the princes of Europe were perpetually augmenting their military force, and consequently their expence, it became requisite that England, from motives both of honour and security, should bear some proportion to them, and adapt its revenue to the new system of politics, which prevailed’.149 Citing Clarendon, Charles’s 142  143  144  145  146  147  148  149 

Hume, History, V, 292. Ibid., VI, 146. Ibid., V, 135. Ibid., VI, 534. Ibid. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 159. 101

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chancellor at the time, Hume demonstrated that the cost of supporting ‘the fleet and other articles’ had increased to ‘£800,000 a year’, ten times as much as before.150 The escalating costs of war reinforced the need to strengthen the state’s ability to meet its expenditure. In addition to the Crown’s role in maintaining the balance of power in Europe, Hume highlighted its role in preserving peace at home. He even justified Charles II’s profligacy by claiming that ‘it is a familiar rule in all business, that every man should be payed, in proportion to the trust reposed in him, and to the power, which he enjoys’.151 This echoed the rhetoric of eighteenth-century Court Whigs, through which they argued that corruption could maintain the government’s authority. Nevertheless, Hume made a clear distinction between Court influence – places, honours, and preferments’ – and the corrupt use of ‘pensions and bribes’.152 The Court’s ‘engine of power’ may become ‘too forcible, but it cannot altogether be abolished, without the total destruction of monarchy, and even of all regular authority’.153 He positioned himself against the use of ‘bribes and pensions’, which had been employed from the mid-1660s onwards in order to exert influence over the members of the Lower House.154 Hume observed that the use of ‘pensions and bribes’ had misfired initially because it ‘conveyed a general, and indeed a just, alarm’ in Parliament, and, moreover, ‘the poverty of the crown rendered this influence very limited and precarious’.155 This position was compatible with Hume’s belief that the Crown should not be granted too much supply so that its executive power would be checked by Parliament. He praised Clarendon for rejecting the plan proposed by the earl of Southampton, which would have given the king ‘a grant of two millions a year, land tax; a sum, which, added to the customs and excise, would for ever have rendered this prince independent of his people’.156 ‘It is no wise probable’, he continued, ‘that all the interest of the court would ever, with this house of commons, have been able to make it effectual.’157 As a matter of fact, the sizable grant awarded to Charles II had allowed him to exercise great discretionary power. Hume gave an account of this king’s writ of quo warranto against London in 1683, which confirmed the Crown’s right to inquire into ‘the validity of its charter’ and therefore compel the city to forfeit the corporation because of its magistrates’ transgressions. In the voice of the lawyers of the City of London, Treby and Pollexfen, Hume gave a long defence of the city’s rights against the king’s pretensions.158 As 150  151  152  153  154  155  156  157  158 

Ibid. Ibid., 535. Ibid., 366. Ibid. Ibid., 234. Ibid. Ibid., 163. Ibid. Ibid., 422–3. 102

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Hume observed, judges defended the interests of the Crown because, at that time, the judge’s office was held at the pleasure of the king. As a consequence, the corporation of London, as well as several other corporations, submitted to Charles II and gave up the right to appoint their own magistrates. Hume thus concluded that ‘every friend to liberty must allow, that the nation, whose constitution was thus broken in the shock of faction, had a right, by every prudent expedient, to recover that security, of which it was so unhappily bereaved’.159 Hume showed that landowners had continued to shoulder the majority of the tax burden, and that the relatively small contribution of the mercantile interests explained that it was impossible to create a sufficiently large fiscal basis for government. Indeed, there had been a growing tension between London merchants and the Crown over the duty on commodities. This tension was illustrated by the merchants’ petition of 1671 against the bill ‘for laying a duty on tobacco, Scotch salt, glasses, and some other commodities’.160 It had led to ‘many remonstrances’ between the two Houses and resulted in the termination of the parliament and the king’s financial loss.161 Since the tension had resulted from the problem of royal finance, Hume insisted on the importance of a centralised system of public finance. This emphasis followed naturally from his belief that government borrowing should take place under the Crown’s supervision.162 At stake, therefore, was a mechanism of self-adjustment that could stabilise the fluctuating economy and balance the relationship between Crown and Parliament. Hume elaborated the process through which the Commons had encroached gradually upon the king’s power, in order to oversee both private and public borrowing. The Crown from the Tudor age onwards had been accustomed to appoint commissioners, whose role was to adjust the differences ‘between prisoners and their creditors’ and to relieve those ‘honest’ and ‘insolvent’ debtors from prison.163 This practice had been grounded in the Crown’s discretionary power. Although James I had tried to limit the practice during his reign’s formative years, he had also thought it necessary to reinstall commissioners in order to pacify complaints about abuses on private borrowing. This offended the Commons, which started to see this practice as a violation of parliamentary privilege. The case of public borrowing was complicated by its links to war finance. As discussed above, Hume maintained that the mounting debt contracted to finance Britain’s military engagements in the eighteenth century threatened Ibid., 424. Ibid., 247. 161  Ibid. 162  For the historical background of public borrowing in Europe before 1688, see David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688– 1789 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 51–67. 163  Hume, History, V, 128. 159  160 

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to undermine political liberty at home. The alliance between the government and its creditors allowed the former to overuse public credit. Tracing this practice to its origins, Hume observed that the Stuarts had been accustomed to borrowing from the City of London in order to finance war. Compared with the Dutch, the English system of credit was far from robust. In Hume’s view, the Dutch ensured their self-defence through credit: ‘though their trade had suffered extremely, their extensive credit enabled them to levy great sums; and while the seamen of England loudly complained of want of pay, the Dutch navy was regularly supplied with money and every thing requisite for its subsistence’.164 According to Hume, this was partly because government loans under the Stuarts were based on the personal credit of the king. Perhaps more importantly, the Commons’ alterations to the method of obtaining loans had built into the fiscal bureaucracy a strong aversion to executive control. According to Hume, the adoption of commissioning in 1640 meant that loans had been paid directly to the commissioners rather than to the Treasury.165 At first, this method served the purpose of indemnifying those who had supported government borrowing on their own credit. Indeed, those who had lent security to public credit could now serve as commissioners. Since the power of appointing commissioners was now concentrated in the Commons, the Crown could no longer access the income stream needed to meet the government’s domestic and external expenses. The increase in government loans posed a serious challenge to the financial administration of the state. Although Hume had once agitated for public bankruptcy in order to maintain self-defence, he now contended that the discontinuance of payments should be seen as a last resort. He noted that the shutting down of the Exchequer in 1672 resulted in ‘the forfeiture of public credit’ and ‘a stagnation of commerce’.166 The money borrowed by the bankers at 6 per cent would be carried to the Exchequer, which usually gave them 8 or 10 per cent. With the closure of the Exchequer, the bankers stopped the flow of payment to their clients. As a consequence, commercial activity was seriously undermined. Twelve years later, in his revised edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1764), Hume reiterated, and even intensified, his criticism of public credit, during his involvement in the Canadian Bills on behalf of British merchants.167 As Hont pointed out, ‘the 1764 version of a fully developed public credit was for Hume deadly serious, providing him with indices for making the stages in Britain’s march through war, empire, and debt towards the destruction of its mixed constitution’.168 According to Robert W. 164  165  166  167  168 

Ibid., VI, 207–8. Ibid., V, 298. Ibid., VI, 253–4. Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 340–7. Ibid., p. 347. 104

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Dimand, Hume’s new position was owed to his diplomatic negotiations with the French Court about ‘settling outstanding paper currency after the British conquest of Quebec’.169 Hume wrote to the secretary of the state in August 1765 – now as chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy in France – that war had brought about a shortage of labour and commodities, which had served to push up their prices.170 It followed that paper money was not necessarily the only cause of inflation. ‘The War’, Hume argued, ‘employ’d almost all the hands and took them off from the Cultivation of the Land, which produc’d a great Scarcity of Provisions. There were Troops in considerable Numbers sent over from France, which bred a great Consumption.’171 Nevertheless, Hume insisted that paper credit was the most important cause of inflation: ‘above all, the great Quantity of circulating Paper, even without any Diffidence of its Solidity, cou’d not fail to raise the Prices, since a great Quantity of Gold & Silver had necessarily the same Effect’.172 Hume maintained that diluting the influence of creditors was the sole means by which the problem of deficit finance could be resolved. In his eyes, this was a necessary precondition for a far-reaching reform of taxation in which a greater burden would be placed on consumption.173 In a series of exchanges from 1766 to 1767, Hume sought, ultimately without success, to convince Anne Robert Jacques Turgot that taxes should not be levied directly on land, since doing so would place an undue burden on the landed interest.174 For Hume, direct taxation on land would leave merchants and stockholders as the sole beneficiaries of the burgeoning market economy – to the obvious exclusion of landholders. He refuted Turgot’s assumption that the price of labour increased in proportion to the level of tax. He cited Switzerland, France, and the American colonies as examples. For Hume, the price of labour was determined by supply and demand, not by taxes. Therefore, only consumption taxes could ensure that the financial burden extended to merchants as well as to ‘all Shop-Keepers and Master-Tradesmen of every Species’.175 In the event of public bankruptcy, as predicted by Hume, William Strahan argued that the losses would be shared by landholders and public Robert W. Dimand, ‘David Hume on Canadian Paper Money: An Overlooked Contribution’, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 37 (2005), 783. 170  New Letters, pp. 100–5. 171  Ibid., p. 101. 172  Ibid. 173  Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, p. 75. 174  Hume’s letters to Turgot on 5 August 1766 and in late September 1766, Letters, II, 74–7, 88–95. In July 1766, Turgot extended his invitation to Hume on participating in a prize competition held by La Société d’Agriculture du Limousin, the subject of the prize being the demonstration and assessment of the effects of indirect tax on the income of landowners. In his letter to Turgot on 5 August 1766, Hume questioned the assumption of this competition, arguing that it was consumers, rather than landowners, who should pay taxes. 175  Hume’s letter to Turgot on 5 August 1766, Letters, II, 94. 169 

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creditors alike: ‘the Debt is in fact a Debt upon the lands of Gr: [sc. Great] Britain, these are the real security, supported by the Faith of the Legislature’.176 To this, Hume responded that ‘the Authority of the Land-holders is solidly established over their Tenants and Neighbours: But what Stock-holder has any Influence even over his next Neighbour in his own Street?’177 Public creditors, or ‘Stock-holders’, would be ‘reduc’d to instant Poverty’ because of their lack of influence.178 Rather than an open conflict between two social orders, Hume feared that ‘the public Force will be allowd to go to total Decay, before the violent Remedy, which is the only one, will be ventu’d on’.179 We have examined Hume’s concerns over the increasing danger of despotism, stressing his views on the problems of national finance and public credit from the age of the Stuarts. In his opinion, the problem of state finance from the seventeenth century onwards was essential to the understanding of the two competing views concerning the nature of English government and its policies. For Hume, these two views underlay the continual competition for power between Crown and Parliament since the Stuart accession. The Stuarts’ financial difficulties stemmed from a constellation of circumstances, including the English methods and composition of taxation, England’s approach to colonisation, and even Queen Elizabeth’s financial administration. This becomes clear if one looks carefully at the ways in which he described the tax scheme under the Stuart government in comparison with its counterparts on the Continent.

176  177  178  179 

Quoted in Letters, II, 248, footnote 2. Letters, II, 248. Ibid. Ibid. 106

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Maritime Trade as the Pivot of Foreign Policy

The glory of preserving the balance of Europe, a glory so much founded on justice and humanity, flattered the ambition of England; and the people were eager to provide for their own future security, by opposing the progress of so hated a rival [sc. France]. Hume, The History of Great Britain. Containing the Commonwealth, and the Reigns of Charles II and James II, 1757

The balance of power in Europe was central to Hume’s historical vision. From the vantage point of mid-eighteenth-century Europe, the maxim of the balance of power, which had been firmly established since classical antiquity, was seen as essential to the mutual prosperity and security of European states.1 This maxim became especially germane as France began to compete for commercial wealth and thus to increase anxieties about the dangers of universal monarchy.2 In the event that France would go on to dominate Europe and the New World, England and its allies on the Continent would face significant pressure to defend their government and religion. Hume was a vociferous proponent of the classical doctrine of the balance of power, which, he observed, was ‘founded on true politics and prudence, and […] preserved distinct for several ages the partition made after the death of that famous conqueror [sc. Alexander]’.3 Yet his defence of the balance of power was not refracted through the prism of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War or Cicero’s

M. S. Anderson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Theories of the Balance of Power’, Studies in Diplomatic History: Essays in Memory of David Bayne Horn, ed. R. Hatton and M. S. Anderson (Harlow, 1970), pp. 183–98. 2  This was foreseen by several thinkers in the seventeenth century, such as Charles Davenant. See Davenant, An Essay on the East India Trade (London, 1696), p. 61. 3  Hume, ‘Balance of Power’, p. 335. For a review of the eighteenth-century arguments regarding Britain’s role as a balancing force in European politics, see Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven, 2002), pp. 89–127. 1 

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Roman Republic.4 Rather, his views on foreign policy demonstrated a clear understanding of England’s path towards commercial wealth, which, in turn, called for an entirely new role for England in the European state system. In the past few decades, Hume’s views on foreign policy have generated interest. Forbes contended that Hume’s argument for the balance-of-power doctrine exemplified his cosmopolitan ideals. According to this view, Hume consistently advocated a cosmopolitan, or more precisely a ‘Europocentric’, view of geopolitics.5 This stands in stark contrast to the insular view of geopolitics as popularised in the middle of the eighteenth century, when England came to be seen as an island nation. Robert Manzer and Karen O’Brien have echoed this reading by placing Hume’s integrated continental strategy in the context of popular demands for a new geopolitics freed from universal monarchy, autocratic rule, and religious oppression.6 Frederick Whelan has adopted a comparative approach, bringing into focus the extent of Hume’s debt to Machiavellian statecraft. In Whelan’s view, Hume endorsed a realist approach to foreign policy by taking into account potential costs and benefits.7 Although these works have shed light on Hume’s examination of the infighting among European states, as well as his examination of the political uncertainty faced by England abroad, they have not fully explained the foundations upon which he defended England’s role in maintaining the balance of power in Europe. This is partly because these works have, more often than not, focused on Hume’s essays rather than on his History of England. While Pocock and Hont have contended that Hume’s starting point was England’s role as a trading nation, they have not explained why Hume believed that commercial interests determined the nature and extent of England’s strategy in Europe.8 The main intention of this chapter is to show how Hume’s vision of foreign policy was intrinsically connected to his observation that Britain had become For a detailed analysis of the emergence of European states-system and balance-ofpower politics at the end of the fifteenth century, see Ernest W. Nelson, ‘The Origins of Modern Balance-of-Power Politics’, Medievalia et Humanistica 1 (1943), 124–42; Ahn, ‘British Strategy’, pp. 98–153. See also Michael T. Clark, ‘Realism, Ancient and Modern: Thucydides and International Relations’, Political Science and Politics 26 (1993), 491–4. According to Clark, Hume’s realistic thinking on foreign policy resembled to that of Thucydides, whom he admired deeply. 5  Forbes, ‘The European, or Cosmopolitan, Dimension’, pp. 57–60. 6  Robert A. Manzer, ‘The Promise of Peace? Hume and Smith on the Effects of Commerce on War and Peace’, Hume Studies 22 (1996), 369–82; O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 56–92. 7  Frederick G. Whelan, Hume and Machiavelli: Political Realism and Liberal Thought (Lanham, MD and Oxford, 2004). See also Whelan’s earlier paper ‘Robertson, Hume, and the Balance of Power’, Hume Studies 21 (1995), 315–32. In this paper, Whelan draws an interesting parallel of the balance-of-power theme between Hume’s History and William Robertson’s History of Charles V (1769). 8  Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 423–61; Barbarism and Religion, II, 163–257. Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, pp. 54–94. 4 

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a trading nation, and that Britain’s fast-paced progress towards a commercial empire had brought about a series of challenges to its national security.9 A complicated and yet essentially coherent picture of Hume’s vision of foreign policy emerges through an investigation of his strategic analysis in the context of his Stuart History. The reason for this reappraisal is twofold. First, the existing literature has not paid enough attention to Hume’s account of how colonial settlement enabled England to carve out a position within the European state system. This chapter recovers his argument that colonial interests should have been used to leverage England’s position in the European balance of power. Secondly, this chapter establishes the connection between Hume’s political essays and his History. It highlights developments in his views of diplomacy and foreign policy with a particular focus on his argument, upon which the isolationists of his time relied. Strategic Orientation In his essay ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ (1758), Hume wrote that ‘the increase of riches and commerce in any one nation, instead of hurting, commonly promotes the riches and commerce of all its neighbours; and that a state can scarcely carry its trade and industry very far, where all the surrounding states are buried in ignorance, sloth, and barbarism’.10 To this he added that as ‘a British subject’ he prayed for ‘the flourishing commerce of GERMANY, SPAIN, ITALY, and even FRANCE itself’.11 This statement has been picked over by generations of Hume scholars, the majority of whom have focused on Hume’s political economy. However, his concerns extended to foreign policy as well. At stake were the formidable advantages of international trade, and more importantly, the maintenance of England’s national security within the European state system.12 Six years earlier, in his essay ‘Of the Balance of Trade’ (1752), Hume had maintained that government regulation was necessary in order to stimulate domestic industry: ‘a tax on German linen encourages home manufactures, and thereby multiplies our people and industry. A tax on brandy increases the sale of rum and supports our southern colonies.’13 Roger Emerson has suggested that this claim may have been based on Hume’s observation of the Brewer, Sinews of Power, pp. xiii–xxii. Hume, ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’, p. 150. This essay first appeared in Hume’s 1758 edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. 11  Ibid., p. 153. See Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 185–266. 12  Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 462–505. For a discussion of the rivalry between England and France in international trade, particularly in American and West Indian colonies, see Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1986), pp. 134–58. 13  Hume, ‘Balance of Trade’, p. 148. See Stockton, ‘Economics and the Mechanism’, pp. 296–320, particularly p. 306. 9 

10 

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successful operation of the British Linen Company in Scotland.14 Established in 1746, this company had protected the nascent Scottish linen industry by subsidising domestic craftsmen and providing them with necessary provisions, which came at the expense of ‘the linen producers in Ireland, Holland, and the Baltic’.15 According to the General report of the agricultural state, and political circumstances, of Scotland (1812), mid-eighteenth-century Scotland had remained agrarian ‘before the introduction of improved industry’.16 More specifically, ‘in every town and village, saddlers, carpenters, plough and cart wrights, mill-wrights (for threshing machines and fanners), masons, bakers, and butchers, now abound, where such trades before hardly existed’.17 Hume observed with a keen eye Scotland’s transformation from a feudal to a commercial society, and seemed to believe that some degree of government protection was necessary to safeguard the still fledgling industry.18 In his later essay, ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ (1758), Hume refuted his own argument for limited government protection of domestic trade. He criticised the protectionist policies upheld by the Walpole government and argued against the ‘narrow and malignant opinion’ that a nation’s commercial wealth and power increased when its competitors were priced out. Turgot, who had argued that an increase of the import-export dynamic would stimulate industry and promote the interests of individuals, influenced the isolationist position.19 Another source of inspiration for Hume, according to Eugene Rotwein, was Josiah Tucker, a leading exponent of free trade. As Rotwein noted, Hume and Tucker had exchanged letters on the poor-country/ rich-country debate from March to July 1758, and Tucker’s thoughts on this subject had impressed Hume to the extent that he completely renounced his residual protectionism.20 Hume’s endorsement of free trade resembled that of the Tories, for whom free trade had become a party principle since the Prohibition of 1678.21 They Roger L. Emerson, ‘The Scottish Contexts for David Hume’s Political-Economic Thinking’, David Hume’s Political Economy, ed. C. Wennerlind and M. Schabas (London and New York, 2008), pp. 10–30, particularly p. 19. 15  Ibid., pp. 18–19. 16  John Sinclair, ed., General Report of the Agricultural State, and Political Circumstances, of Scotland, drawn up for the consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement (8 vols, Edinburgh, 1812), I, 605. 17  Ibid. 18  For a discussion of Scotland’s economic and political conditions, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 2012), pp. 118–34. 19  Fieser, ed., Early Responses, pp. xii–xiii; Edwin van de Haar, ‘David Hume and International Political Theory: A Reappraisal’, Review of International Studies 34 (2008), 225–42, 36. 20  Eugene Rotwein, ‘Introduction’, in his David Hume, Writings on Economics (Edinburgh, 1955), p. lxxvii. For a detailed discussion of the exchange between Hume and Tucker, see also Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 283–9. 21  W. J. Ashley, ‘The Tory Origin of Free Trade Policy’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 11 (1897), 338–9. 14 

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held that much of Britain’s power relied on an international demand for its industrial products, and that the only way to maintain its maritime advantage in the face of fierce competition was to promote free trade. It was, therefore, a grave mistake for the Walpole government to continue the mercantilist policy that had prevailed since the epoch of the Tudors. The longer the mercantilist policy lasted, the Tories argued, the more it would weaken Britain’s influence in Europe and undermine its ability to defend itself. However, Hume’s adherence to the principle of free trade did not induce him to support the Bolingbroke-led Country platform, the target of which was not only Walpole’s commercial policy but also his foreign policy.22 In contrast to Whig propaganda, which emphasised the ‘corrupt’ nature of man as exemplified by a Hobbesian state of war, Bolingbroke’s anti-government charge championed virtue and the ‘spirit of freedom’.23 As David Armitage has pointed out, from the 1730s onwards Hume moved to challenge ‘the ideological foundations of the anti-Walpolean, pro-imperial campaign’.24 For Hume, the party zeal behind Bolingbroke’s patriotism had jeopardised British foreign policy because the latter’s pan-Atlantic concept of empire had overstated the implications of Britain’s success in maritime trade and overseas conquest.25 For several decades, the connection between trade and conquest had been part and parcel of Britain’s public discourse of empire.26 In his The Evident Approach of a War; and Something of the Necessity of It, in order to establish Peace, and preserve Trade (1727), Daniel Defoe wrote that ‘peace is a Friend of Commerce, and Trade flourishes under the Banner of the general Tranquility’.27 To this, Defoe added that the power of Great Britain and its Allies ‘is always exerted to protect their Trade; ’tis their Business to keep the Doohwan Ahn, ‘The Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1713: Tory Trade Politics and the Question of Dutch Decline’, History of European Ideas 36 (2010), 167–80. For a discussion of Walpole’s foreign policy, see Jeremy Black, A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy 1660–1793, 2nd edn (Stroud, 2000), pp. 183–94. For a brief overview of Bolingbroke’s foreign policy position against France, see George M. Trevelyan, ‘Introduction’, Bolingbroke’s Defence of the Treaty of Utrecht: Being Letters VI–VIII of the Study and Use of History, ed. Trevelyan (Cambridge, 1932), pp. vii–x. 23  Simon Targett, ‘Government and Ideology during the Age of Whig Supremacy: The Political Argument of Sir Robert Walpole’s Newspaper Propagandists,’ Historical Journal 37 (1994), 289–317, particularly 294–303. 24  David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 188–91. Hume’s arguments against patriotism were in parallel with his encouragement for moderation in public discourse. See Claudia M. Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History (University Park, 2003), pp. 291–3. 25  Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 192–4. 26  P. J. Marshall, ‘A Nation Defined by Empire, 1755–1776’, Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (London and New York, 1995), pp. 208–22; Kathleen Wilson, The Senses of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 137–205. 27  Daniel Defoe, The Evident Approach of a War; and Something of the Necessity of It, in order to establish Peace, and preserve Trade (London, 1727), p. 13. 22 

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Seas open, the Ports open, and all the Doors of Commerce open for their Merchants, and for their Ships […] if this cannot be done by peaceable and quiet Means, they must do it by Force, and so they are as ready for War as other People’.28 While Hume agreed that Britain’s foreign policy was closely associated with its commercial interests, he believed that Defoe’s view was far-fetched. The only way to preserve Britain’s hard-won liberty, he argued, was to abandon hopes of building a commercial empire.29 Meanwhile, Hume remained unsympathetic to the propaganda promulgated by the ministry, which exaggerated the dangers of France’s military and the Counter-Reformation. He thought that this propaganda, which had brought about widespread jealousy of France’s commercial power, would force England into adopting an isolationist stance. Compared with Bolingbroke, Hume’s argument for free trade was rooted in a different strategic purpose, since it strove to modify, rather than completely overturn, Walpole’s continental strategy. His deep-seated worry was that the government’s failure to understand the importance of free trade might damage Britain’s system of national defence. As a trading nation, Britain needed to pursue free trade not only because it helped to preserve its competitive edge, but also because the country’s defence system was anchored in market relations between Britain and the Continent.30 In Hume’s view, this system would be damaged should Britain impose further barriers to trade.31 He observed that protectionism – the underlying reason for the isolationist position in foreign policy – posed the most formidable obstacle to British strategic thinking. This thinking was demonstrated most clearly by the Earl of Sandwich in the debate of the Upper House on 1 February 1743. According to Sandwich, Britain should only command ‘the dominion of the sea’ and avoid expensive wars with the formidable power of France.32 The ‘wanton expences’ for experimenting in ‘the guardianship of the liberties of Europe’, Sandwich argued, had distressed the public and caused the ‘heaviest calamites’.33 This view represented one of two dominant strands of thought in British strategic discourse in the first half of the eighteenth century.34 As The Annual Ibid. Ahn, ‘British Strategy’, pp. 219–87. 30  Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 185–266. 31  Ibid. 32  William Cobbett, ed., Parliamentary History from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (36 vols, London, 1806–20), XII, 1071–83. See also J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue 1660–1802 (London and Toronto, 1965), pp. 104–26. Western has argued that this popular view against a continental war had important implications in the reform of the militia. 33  Cobbett, ed., Parliamentary History, XII, 1072–3. 34  For a recent survey of the British public discourse on foreign policy debates of the time, see Doohwan Ahn and Brendan Simms, ‘European Great Power Politics in British Public Discourse’, The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000, ed. W. Mulligan and B. Simms (London, 2010), pp. 79–101. 28  29 

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Register observed, one strand, championed by the ‘popular party’ with little influence in Parliament, emphasised ‘maritime strength’ as the source of Britain’s power.35 According to this view, seaborne trade was the focal point around which English national interests, both domestic and foreign, should be articulated. The priority should be to maximise commercial wealth with a strong navy, which could only be achieved by avoiding ‘that inextricable labyrinth of continental politics’.36 The other strand, advocated by two factions with great parliamentary influence, argued that Britain’s national security depended on its ability to defend its allies on the Continent.37 From their perspective, ‘a considerable regular landforce ought to be constantly maintained’, and the navy should only play a secondary role ‘to be cultivated and employed subserviently to the more comprehensive continental system’.38 In the mid-1750s, the rivalry between these views escalated, with the focus shifting towards the other side of the Atlantic.39 Hume observed that colonial disputes with France in North America had wrought significant domestic and geopolitical changes. There was a growing concern, he argued, about whether Britain should prioritise continental alliances or naval supremacy.40 From the perspective of Patriot Whigs, only a strong naval power could protect Britain’s colonial interests; it might even serve as a serious deterrent to France’s military activities in Europe.41 William Pitt the Elder, the leader of the Patriot Whigs, contended that a strong navy was fundamental to England’s development of a maritime empire. As his follower Lord Holderness put it, Pitt’s principle was ‘that we must be merchants while we are soldiers, that our trade depends upon a proper exertion of our maritime strength; that trade and maritime force depend upon each other, and that the riches which are the true resources of this country depend upon its commerce’.42 With its vital interests invested in colonies and maritime trade – so the argument ran – Britain should maintain its naval supremacy and avoid costly wars on the Continent. The Hanoverian connection was a burden, rather than an asset, because the need to protect the king’s interests in Hanover could distract the

Quoted in Simms, Three Victories, pp. 424–5. The Annual Register: Or a View to the History, Politics and Literature for the year 1758, special collector’s edn (London, 2009), pp. 11–12. 36  The Annual Register, pp. 11–12. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 462–505. 37  The Annual Register, pp. 10–11. 38  Ibid., p. 11. 39  See Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Withdrawing from Europe: Anglo-French Maritime Geopolitics, 1750–1800’, International History Review 20 (1998), 1–32. 40  T. O. Lloyd, The British Empire 1558–1995, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York, 1996), pp. 66–73. For a recent overview of this debate, see Brendan Simms, Europe: the Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (London, 2013), pp. 107–10. 41  Simms, Three Victories, pp. 355–83. 42  Quoted in Paul Langford, The Eighteenth Century 1688–1815 (London, 1976), p. 24. 35 

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government from maintaining its colonies and maritime power.43 However, the Whig ministry, led at the time by the Duke of Newcastle, toned down the preoccupation with colonies and naval power. Newcastle suggested that a network of European alliances could prevent France from retaining its colonial dominance. The security and long-term interests of the thirteen colonies, Newcastle maintained, demanded the containment of France by means of an Anglo-Austrian alliance buttressed by lesser powers such as the Netherlands and the German states.44 In this conflict between isolationist and continental strategies, Hume came down on the side of the latter, which required Britain to side with the weaker Austria against the stronger France. In 1742, he wrote to William Mure of Caldwell that he had given an Aye to ‘the Approbation of Treaties’, referring to the Treaty of Seville (1729) and the Treaty of Vienna (1731).45 These treaties effectively substituted an Anglo-Austrian for an Anglo-French alliance, thus making France a rival rather than a partner. Article IV of the Treaty of Seville had decreed that ‘the Commerce of the English and French Nations, as well in Europe as in the Indies, should be re-established on the Foot of the Treatise and Conventions antecedent to the Year One thousand seven hundred twenty five, and particularly, that the Commerce of the English Nation in America should be exercised as heretofore […]’.46 Despite strong opposition from the Patriots, Hume believed that this move represented a diplomatic victory out of which Britain acquired the means to balance power in Europe.47 Four years later, in 1746, Hume accompanied LieutenantGeneral James St Clair as his secretary on a diplomatic mission to Turin, and even participated in an unsuccessful raid on Brittany.48 He commented that a unified Germany would overpower France, and that Hanoverian interests should be given due weight in Britain’s strategic plan on the Continent.49 There was a trace of these reflections in Hume’s ‘Of the Balance of Power’ (1752), in which he argued that achieving a balance of power in Europe was the desired means by which to achieve domestic security. He wrote that ‘in Jeremy Black, ‘Hanoverian Nexus: Walpole and the Electorate’, The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837, ed. B. Simms and T. Riotte (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 10–27. 44  Simms, Three Victories, pp. 355–83; Black, A System of Ambition?, pp. 38–40. 45  Letters, I, 44. 46  Robert Walpole, The Treaty of Peace, Union, Friendship, and Mutual Defence, Between the Crowns of Great-Britain, France, and Spain, concluded at Seville on the 9th of November, N. S. 1729 (London, 1729), pp. 8–9. 47  For the historical background of the Anglo-French relationship during this time, see Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies, pp. 1–35. 48  Hume, Diary of David Hume, the Philosopher and Historian, as Judge Advocate to Gen. James St Clair’s Expedition to Port l’Orient, 18 September–2 October 1746 (British Library, London, Add MS 36638). Printed in Burton, Life and Correspondence, I, 240–66. 49  Hume, ‘Fragments of a Paper in Hume’s Handwriting, describing the Descent on the Coast of Brittany, in 1746, and the Causes of its Failure’, Burton, Life and Correspondence, I, 441–56. See Rothschild, ‘The Atlantic World’, pp. 410–13. 43 

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the general wars, maintained against this ambitious power [sc. France], Britain has stood foremost; and she still maintains her station. Beside her advantages of riches and situation, her [sc. the English] people are animated with such a national spirit and are so fully sensible of the blessings of their government, that we may hope their vigour never will languish in so necessary and so just a cause.’50 For Hume, only an Anglo-Austrian alliance could prevent France’s empire from expanding further, and thus protect the balance of power in Europe.51 In his view, this doctrine had served, and would continue to serve, as a bulwark against France’s pretensions to power. He claimed that Europe has now, for above a century, remained on the defensive against the greatest force that ever, perhaps, was formed by the civil or political combination of mankind. And such is the influence of the maxim [of the balance of power] here treated of, that tho’ that ambitious nation, in the five last general wars, have been victorious in four, and unsuccessful only in one, they have not much enlarged their dominions, nor acquired a total ascendant over Europe.52

However, Hume did not agitate for an overactive role in the European theatre of war. He warned that Britain’s intervention on the Continent had been motivated more by ‘the ancient Greek spirit of jealous emulation’ than by ‘the prudent views of modern politics’.53 The dynamics of emulation, as Sophus A. Reinert has explained, engendered a continual struggle between commerce and conquest in eighteenth-century Europe.54 For Hume, the struggle had led to a certain level of diplomatic inflexibility, and had made the British carry the war further than had been necessary.55 As Armstrong Starkey has contended, Hume’s worry was that ‘Britain’s defence of the balance of power often concealed more predatory motives’.56 For Hume, the most harmful consequence of this embroilment in the European contest for power was the significant accumulation of debt. Indeed, this concern was shared by Bolingbroke, who in 1754 would go on to argue that ‘a moneyed interest being firmly established by this time, and such numbers being accustomed to make immense profit at the publick expense, there is no room to wonder, if we proceeded on the same plan during the reign Hume, ‘Balance of Power’, p. 158. Haar, ‘David Hume and International Political Theory’, p. 233. 52  Hume, ‘Balance of Power’, p. 634. This passage first appeared in 1752 and was deleted from the 1770 and subsequent editions. 53  Ibid., p. 339. See Doohwan Ahn, ‘From “Jealous Emulation” to “Cautious Politics”: British Foreign Policy and Public Discourse in the Mirror of Ancient Athens (ca. 1730–ca.1750)’, Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe (1650–1750), ed. D. Onnekink and G. Rommelse (Ashgate, 2011), pp. 100–2. 54  Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA and London, 2011), pp. 13–72. 55  Hume, ‘Balance of Power,’ p. 634. 56  Armstrong Starkey, ‘“To Encourage the Others”: The Philosophes and the War’, The Seven Years’ War: Global Views, ed. M. H. Danley and P. J. Speelman (Leiden, 2012), p. 34. 50  51 

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of queen Anne’.57 On the basis of the ‘cancerous’ debt, Bolingbroke argued that ‘the interest of Britain required, no doubt, that we should turn our eyes from the continent to our own island, and that we should improve the opportunity and the advantages which a peace gave us’.58 In his essay ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752), Hume opined that ‘our children, weary of the struggle, and fettered with incumbrances, may sit down secure, and see their neighbours oppressed and conquered; till, at last, they themselves and their creditors lie both at the mercy of the conqueror’.59 This would lead to the ‘violent death’ of public credit and eventually to the collapse of the state.60 In order to prevent this, Hume, like Bolingbroke, proposed – to borrow Hont’s expression – a ‘coup d’état against debt and creditors’, which would eradicate public debt through voluntary bankruptcy.61 Hume admitted that voluntary bankruptcy would lead to an increase in interest rates, which would subsequently lead to a decrease in commerce and industry.62 Nevertheless, he maintained that in the long run more money would shift from creditors, mainly annuitants and stockholders, to merchants. This, he believed, would provide a stimulus to commercial activity as well as compensation for the losses incurred by the marginalisation of moneyed interests.63 He was fully aware of the difficulties implied by this plan, given the extensive influence of creditors in government, and yet he was adamant that a viable and wellcoordinated financial system was essential to Britain’s defence strategy.64 Colonial Settlement and Transoceanic Trade In his Stuart History, Hume demonstrated that England’s preoccupation with colonial trade from the seventeenth century onwards had helped to determine its identity in Europe. He explained that England’s role in Europe depended largely on its approach to colonisation.65 Hume gave credit to the Stuarts for establishing American settlements ‘on the noblest footing that has been

Henry St John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘Some Reflections on the Present State of the Nation, Principally with Regard to Her Taxes and Her Debts, and on the Causes and Consequences of Them’, The Works of the late Right Honourable Henry St John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, ed. David Mallet (4 vols, London, 1809), IV, 359. 58  Ibid., 360. 59  Hume, ‘Public Credit’, p. 177. 60  Ibid. 61  Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 336. 62  Hume, ‘Of Interest’, pp. 132–3. 63  Ibid. 64  Hume, ‘Public Credit’, p. 177. 65  For a discussion of the role of sea power in modern European geopolitics, see Richard Harding, ‘British Maritime Strategy and Hanover, 1714–1763’, The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837, ed. B. Simms and T. Riotte (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 252–74. 57 

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known in any age or nation’.66 He maintained that England had adopted a completely different, and far better, approach to colonial settlement than that of Spain, for example. The gold- and silver-mining industries established by the Spanish required constant input of labour, and had therefore depopulated Spain itself.67 In contrast, English merchants had occupied from the outset ‘the fine coast […] which reaches from St Augustine to Cape Breton’ that had been neglected by the Spanish. The English had taken important steps to establish tobacco plantations, and this approach turned out to be very profitable later on.68 According to Hume, although colonial settlement had started during Elizabeth’s reign, it was not until the reign of James I that England had begun to make serious forays into transoceanic trade.69 The expansion of trade routes created an opening for merchant adventurers. In particular, the discovery of ‘a more direct and shorter passage to Virginia’ in 1609 reshaped the trade route between England and its Virginian settlement, which connected the two territories without provoking Spain.70 The Dutch, who had adopted a similar approach to the English, monopolised the spice trade through the Dutch East India Company. As Josiah Child observed in his A New Discourse of Trade (1690), ‘the Dutch, with good reason, esteem the trade of the East-Indies more profitable to them, than are the mines of gold and silver in America to the King of Spain’.71 Six decades later, Hume echoed this view by maintaining that the English approach to colonisation had proven more successful than the one adopted by the Spanish. Unlike Davenant who had criticised chartered companies for stunting the development of a more efficient economy, Hume believed that these companies had played a positive role in previous phases of colonisation.72 He maintained that it was not until James granted a new patent to the East India Company that English merchants had started to gain a foothold in Hume, History, V, 146. For a general review of England’s establishment of tobacco colonies in North America from the late sixteenth century to the seventeenth century, particularly in Virginia, see Lloyd, British Empire 1558–1995, pp. 14–24. 67  Hume, History, V, 146–7. For a study of the English and Spanish colonisation of America in the seventeenth century, see J. H. Elliott, Empire of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America (New Haven and London, 2006), pp. 88–114. For the impact of this colonial approach on Spanish war finance and European geopolitics, see Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore and London, 2000), pp. 40–56. 68  Hume, History, V, 147–8. 69  Ibid., 146–7. 70  Ibid., 147. Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘Virginia and the Atlantic World’, The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. P. C. Mancall (Chapel Hill, 1996), pp. 558–70; Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia 1607–2007 (Charlottesville and London, 2007), pp. 18–40. 71  Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade, 5th edn (Glasgow, 1751), p. 120. 72  Hume, History, V, 20. 66 

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that region.73 Thereafter, chartered companies had played a significant role in the building of maritime infrastructure, not only by establishing a network of trading routes, but also by making regular ‘recruits of provisions, utensils, and new inhabitants’.74 Hume also noted that chartered companies had operated on a different basis to the previous settlements under Elizabeth, which had been based on tenure.75 More specifically, chartered companies ensured the importation of the raw materials required for England’s nascent manufacturing industry. In Hume’s view, these companies had promoted the modernisation of commercial activities. Nonetheless, he maintained that chartered companies should be abolished once they had fulfilled their initial role. On these grounds, he considered that Charles II’s revival of the charter of the East India Company had been imprudent.76 Hume argued that colonies had been, and remained, a vital asset, since the flourishing agriculture of colonial economies had given Britain a highly competitive edge in the European market. Notwithstanding his concerns about the immorality of a plantation economy based on the low costs and ‘little humanity’ of slave labour, he could not bring himself to forsake the economic advantages that it produced.77 A letter in Felix Waldmann’s recently published Further Letters of David Hume (2014) provides additional evidence for this claim.78 On 20 March 1766, Hume wrote to the first Earl of Hertford on behalf of three London brokers. Hume tried to persuade Hertford to invest in a Grenada plantation. As Waldmann noted, Hume’s bank account from one month earlier showed that he had lent £400 to one of the brokers, Mr Stewart the wine merchant, which suggests that Hume might have invested in this plantation himself.79 Indeed, Hume believed that the only way to nullify the immoral effects of plantation economies was to forsake the plantations themselves. However, this would surrender the economic advantages afforded by slave labour, which had been part and parcel of transatlantic trade. Maritime trade, to which the slave economy had contributed extensively, played a central role in Hume’s strategic vision. He observed that maritime power had become pivotal to England’s foreign policy since its establishment Ibid., 145. Ibid., 147. 75  For Hume’s narrative of the two failed attempts at American colonisation during the Elizabethan reign, one by Humphrey Gilbert and another by Walter Raleigh, see Hume, History, IV, 216–17, 381. 76  Hume, History, VI, 538. 77  Hume, ‘Populousness of Ancient Nations’, p. 386. For a discussion of the political implications of British slave trade, see Christopher L. Brown, ‘The Politics of Slavery’, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. D. Armitage and M. J. Braddick (London, 2002), pp. 214–32. 78  Felix Waldmann, ed., Further Letters of David Hume (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 65–9. 79  Ibid., p. 66. 73  74 

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of colonies in the New World.80 The need to seek out profit had been a continual leitmotiv of sea adventures, one consequence of which was that colonial trade elided gradually but seamlessly into England’s obsession with maritime supremacy.81 For Hume, colonial settlement had increased England’s sea power as well as its standing in Europe. He maintained that maritime trade had stimulated the development of sophisticated manufacturing skills, which, in turn, had helped to establish England’s nascent industrial base. As he observed, ‘such advantages have commerce and navigation reaped from these establishments, that more than a fourth of the English shipping is at present computed to be employed in carrying on the traffic with the American settlements’.82 He also noted that, beyond the shipping industry, ‘several new manufactures were established’, such as ‘iron, brass, silk, hats, glass, paper, &c’.83 With the reason of state becoming increasingly commercial, naval power emerged as fundamental to the control of seaways, ports, and entrepôts, and also to the protection of merchants from privateering and piracy.84 Hume noted that ships had been widely pillaged since the fifteenth century; indeed, one of the accusations levelled against the Duke of Buckingham in 1626 was that he had failed to protect merchant ships from being captured by the French.85 Moreover, the difficulties of launching war on terra firma had increased England’s reliance on the navy for the upkeep of its national security. ‘As England had no military force, while all the other powers of Europe were strongly armed,’ Hume claimed, ‘a fleet seemed absolutely necessary for her security.’86 Colonial settlement had played an important part in the development of a strong navy, which would later give England a decisive advantage in both war and foreign policy. In particular, it created a substantial body of skilled seamen employed in merchant ships, who could be readily enlisted See Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of “a grand marine empire”’, An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689–1815, ed. L. Stone (London, 1994), pp. 185–223. 81  For an overview of Britain’s colonial expansion from the Elizabethan reign, see Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (London and New York, 2003), pp. 3–50. 82  Hume, History, V, 148. 83  Ibid., VI, 538. 84  Ibid., 537. 85  Ibid., V, 169. 86  Ibid., 235. Hume was to make a more positive statement regarding a standing army in the last edition of his History (1778): ‘and it seems a necessary, though perhaps a melancholy truth, that in every government the magistrate must either possess a large revenue and a military force, or enjoy some discretionary powers, in order to execute the laws and support his own authority’, History, V, 129. See Forbes, Philosophical Politics, p. 172. According to Forbes, this passage shows Hume’s ‘half-hearted death bed conversion to the opinion of his friend Adam Smith, concerning the necessity of standing armies in modern states’. For Smith’s view of standing army, see Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, 701–8. 80 

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in times of war.87 Since merchants were able to sustain the navy’s manpower in peacetime, the financial burden on the government was lessened.88 Throughout his Stuart History, Hume remained optimistic about colonial settlement and its role in Britain’s grand strategy. He noted that there had been, from the earliest phase of colonial settlement in North America and the West Indies, a concern about whether Britain should maintain its planted colonies in remote regions: ‘speculative reasoners, during that age, raised many objections to the planting of those remote colonies; and foretold, that, after draining their mother-country of inhabitants, they would soon shake off her yoke, and erect an independent government in America’.89 In Hume’s time, this particular critique of colonial settlement found its fullest expression in Josiah Tucker’s A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages, which Respectively Attend France and Great Britain (1749).90 Tucker cast into doubt the view that colonial trade afforded substantial benefits to the mother country. Furthermore, he questioned whether England should be drawn into remote contests with European states, especially for control over maritime trade. He saw that the increasing significance of the East India Company and the American colonies meant that the competition for hegemony would no longer be restricted to Europe. In 1664, the French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had promoted mercantilist expansion to the Indian Ocean, and the rivalry between England and France in North America escalated as a result.91 From Tucker’s point of view, the rivalry with France had brought about important challenges to England’s national defence. Three decades later, in a letter to Lord Kames, Tucker claimed that ‘I look upon it to have been a very imprudent act, to have settled any distant colonies at all, whilst there remained an inch of land in [G]reat Britain capable of further cultivation’.92 He warned that American colonisation had not only drained England’s population, but

Hume, History, V, 142. Ibid. 89  Ibid., 148. 90  Tucker would make a more elaborate analysis of the problem of American independence in his later work, Cui Bono? Or, An Inquiry, What Benefits can Arise either to the English or the Americans, The French, Spaniards, or Dutch, from the Greatest Victories, or Successes, in the Present War, being a Series of Letters, Addressed to Monsieur Necker, late Controller General of the Finances of France (Gloucester, 1781), pp. 38–42. George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (London and Basingstoke, 1981), pp. 182–213. 91  Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb, 1996), pp. 66–88; William R. Nester, The Great Frontier War: Britain, France, and the Imperial Struggle for North America, 1607–1755 (Westport, CT and London, 2000), pp. 3–26. 92  Henry Home, Lord Kames, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home Kames… one of the Lords Commissioners of Justiciary in Scotland, etc. (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1807), II, 180–1. 87  88 

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also that her economy had been risked on a ‘very foolish and absurd’ quarrel with the French and Spanish.93 Although Hume did not cite Tucker in his critique of those ‘speculative reasoners’, and while there is no evidence to suggest that they had exchanged views directly during the composition of Hume’s Stuart History, it is likely that he intended to respond to Tucker’s arguments.94 In response to Tucker’s belief that colonial settlement had drained the domestic population, Hume entertained the possibility that England’s population had actually increased: ‘peopled gradually from England by the necessitous and indigent, who, at home, encreased neither wealth nor populousness, the colonies, which were planted along that tract, have promoted the navigation, encouraged the industry, and even perhaps multiplied the inhabitants of their mothercountry’.95 Using William Petty’s statistical evidence on the population of London, Hume wrote that ‘from 1600, it doubled every forty years; and consequently, in 1680, it contained four times as many inhabitants, as at the beginning of the century’.96 Hume noted that maritime trade had boosted the growth of agricultural knowledge as manifested in the publication of numerous new ‘books and pamphlets, treating of husbandry’.97 For him, maritime trade was largely responsible for developments in agricultural knowledge, which, in turn, had helped to increase the population of England. Whereas Tucker argued that colonial trade had driven Britain to the European struggle for power – to its own disadvantage – Hume argued that Britain was bound irrevocably to the geopolitics of Europe. He saw that the English and the Spanish had competed for colonies, and that their respective claims had been built upon entirely different foundations.98 The Spanish and the Portuguese had justified their title to colonies not only by their ‘arts and arms’ but also by papal authority.99 They had ‘applied to Alexander VI who then [sc. 1493–44] filled the papal chair; and he generously bestowed on the Spaniards the whole western, and on the Portuguese the whole eastern part of the globe’.100 On the other hand, the Protestant colonists ‘who acknowledged not the authority of the Roman pontiff, established the first discovery as the foundation of their title; and if a pirate or sea-adventurer of their nation

Ibid., 181. The earliest letter from Tucker to Hume was dated 1764, see Letters, I, 270, footnote 2. 95  Hume, History, V, 147. 96  Ibid., 141. William Petty, Essays in Political Arithmetick, or, A Discourse concerning the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings: as the same relates to every Country in general but more particularly to the Territories of Her Majesty of Great Britain and her Neighbours of Holland, Zealand, and France (London, 1711), pp. 9–43. 97  Hume, History, V, 148. 98  Ibid., 75–6. 99  Ibid., 75. 100  Ibid. This claim was not very accurate, since the demarcation line which the pope prescribed for Spain and Portugal was not precise and it did not encircle the globe. 93  94 

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had but erected a stick or stone on the coast, as a memorial of his taking possession, they concluded the whole continent to belong to them’.101 It was hardly surprising that England and Spain had come into conflict with each other over the disputed colonies of America and the West Indies. Indeed, Hume noted that although Sir Walter Raleigh had in 1595 ‘acquired to the crown of England a claim to the continent of Guiana’, his claim was not supported by settlement.102 As a consequence, Spain’s later settlement of certain parts of Guiana had brought about conflicts ‘on the river Oronooko’.103 Hume observed that England and Spain had continued thereafter to trade with each other’s colonies until the conclusion of ‘the first American treaty between England and Spain’ in 1667.104 This treaty established the exclusive right of both countries to trade with their respective colonies. For Hume, the security and strategic interests of the American and West Indian colonies depended on a balanced presence of European powers. England’s contest with other European states for colonial trade was not an imminent disaster, but rather an opportunity to strengthen her defence against the continental powers. Reflecting on Cromwell’s invasion of the Spanish West Indies in 1654, Hume argued that national interest had demanded ‘that balance of power, on which the greatness and security of England so much depend’.105 He explained that the Anglo-Spanish War (1655–60) had its roots in Cromwell’s plan to transform England into a consolidated trading bloc that could compete on equal terms with Spain in the West Indies. According to Hume, Cromwell’s more immediate goal in launching this war was to prevent the Spanish from gaining access to West Indies’ resources, which ‘the extensive empire and yet extreme weakness of Spain’ was unable to safeguard, and to finance England’s army with these resources.106 Notwithstanding the failure of Cromwell’s ambitious project, England had managed to acquire Jamaica from the Spanish – ‘a conquest of greater importance, than he [sc. Cromwell] was himself at that time aware of’.107 Although Hume did not explain this point in detail, it is likely that he saw Jamaica as a means of stemming the Habsburg tide in the New World. This more than compensated for England’s losses on the Continent.

Hume, History, V, 75–6. For the connection between Protestantism and British empire, see Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 61–99. 102  Hume, History, V, 76. 103  Ibid. 104  Ibid., VI, 538. 105  Ibid., 79. For an overview of Cromwell’s unsuccessful operations against Spain, see N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815 (London, 2004), pp. 20–32. 106  Ibid. The financial imperatives and their effects in the operations of the AngloSpanish War are explained in more detail in Timothy Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 118–21. 107  Hume, History, VI, 82. 101 

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Hume observed that the settlement of colonies in America and the West Indies had bolstered England’s maritime supremacy in the seventeenth century, thus preparing the way for its prosperity in the eighteenth. In addition to the conquest of Jamaica and Tangiers (formerly Spanish), England had gained the upper hand over Dutch colonists in America: ‘the recovery or conquest of New York and the Jerseys was a considerable accession to the strength and security of the English colonies; and, together with the settlement of Pensilvania and Carolina, which was effected during that reign, extended the English empire in America’.108 For Hume, the rising stakes of maritime trade had threatened to divert the government’s attention away from developments on the Continent, in which it had a longstanding interest. However, Hume was not suggesting that England ought to cast itself adrift from the European state system, but rather that colonial trade had become a significant factor in determining the balance of power in Europe.109 Thus, the plentiful resources of the American and West Indian colonies could help to consolidate England’s position in Europe. Hume noted that colonial interests influenced the nature and composition of England’s alliances in Europe. For instance, Charles II went on to marry a Portuguese, rather than a Spanish, princess: ‘the interest of the English commerce likewise seemed to require, that the independency of Portugal should be supported, lest the union of that crown [sc. the Crown of Portugal] with Spain should put the whole treasures of America into the hands of one potentate’.110 In Hume’s view, the now dynastic bond with Portugal provided England with a pretext to check Spain’s formidable power in Europe and the Atlantic world, and thus with the opportunity to advance its colonial interests in the guise of diplomacy.111 However, this move also prevented Charles from enlisting Spain’s support in the rivalry with France, which in turn made it difficult to maintain a strategic balance of power in Europe: ‘Charles [II]’s alliance with Portugal, the detention of Jamaica and Tangiers, the sale of Dunkirk to the French; all these offences sunk so deep in the mind of the Spanish monarch, that no motive of interest was sufficient to outweigh them.’112 For Tucker, these factors counted against the practice of colonisation. However, his most substantive concern was that England’s colonies would eventually agitate for, and at some point gain, their independence. He had been one of the first to foresee the independence of the American colonies. Hume, on the other hand, argued in his History that ‘a mild government and

Ibid., 537. For a recent analysis of the divergence between Britain and the Continent in the early modern age, see Black, Convergence or Divergence?, pp. 116–38. 110  Hume, History, VI, 178. 111  See also Black, A System of Ambition?, p. 142. 112  Hume, History, VI, 199. 108  109 

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great naval force have preserved, and may still preserve during some time, the dominion of England over her colonies’.113 Hume’s optimism was reaffirmed by England’s victory on the North American front in the French and Indian Wars (1754–63). He believed that England’s thirteen colonies would seize the opportunity to reduce France’s colonial presence by extending their own territorial claims. However, Hume was aware that Britain’s control over its colonies depended on the extent to which it could remain a ‘mild government’ by granting the commercial and political freedoms demanded by the colonists. He soon realised that these freedoms could not be granted to colonies, since they had to pay an increasing amount of tax to meet Britain’s expenses in the French and Indian Wars.114 The colonists perceived these taxes as intrusive and unjust, and thus their already fragile bonds with Britain were getting weaker. The escalating conflict on both sides of the Atlantic led to a significant change in Hume’s attitude towards British colonial policy.115 In 1768, his caution for a ‘mild government’ transformed into fury when he anticipated a breakdown in England’s political relationship with the thirteen colonies.116 In a letter to Gilbert Elliot in 1768, he expressed his longing to see ‘America and the East Indies revolted totally & finally, the Revenue reduc’d to half, public Credit fully discredited by Bankruptcy, the third of London in Ruins, and the rascally Mob subdu’d’.117 As tensions increased between France and England’s allies on the Continent, culminating in what became known as the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Hume feared the collapse of systematic government and the despotism that would emerge from a war funded by deficit finance.118 Seven years after his letter to Elliot, rage had turned into despair. In 1775, he argued in a letter to William Strahan that ‘if we retain any anger, let it only be against ourselves for our past Folly; and against that wicked Madman, Pitt; who has reducd us to our present Condition’.119 He reasoned that the pursuit of a navalist strategy in the French and Indian Wars had Ibid., V, 148. See, for instance, Hume’s letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto on 22 July 1768, Letters, II, 184–5. See Edmund Burke’s argument against taxation upon American colonies: ‘Mr. Burke’s Speech on American Taxation, 1774’, Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (8 vols, London, 1792–1827), I, 509–80. The speech was made on 19 April 1774. 115  Hume’s exchange with Josiah Tucker during this period might have contributed to his changing attitude to British colonial policy. In his letter to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot on 8 July 1768, Hume mentioned his exchange with Tucker, Letters, II, 182–3. For Hume’s view of American Independence, see also Schmidt, Reason in History, pp. 293–4. 116  Rothschild, ‘The Atlantic Worlds’, p. 418. 117  Letters, II, 184. Hume followed closely the news about bankruptcies; see, for instance, his letter to Adam Smith on 10 April 1773, Burton, Life and Correspondence, II, 467. 118  Hume, ‘Public Credit’, pp. 172–3. Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 325–53. See also McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 201. 119  Letters, II, 301. 113  114 

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alienated the American colonies through taxes levied by the English, without which the wars could not have been accounted for financially. In another letter to William Strahan in October 1775, Hume wrote that ‘the Colonists cannot at any time [pay so great an Army], much less after reducing them to such a State of Desolation: We ought not, and indeed cannot, in the over-loaded or rather over-whelm’d and totally ruin’d State of our Finances’.120 He fully expected the ‘Scheme of conquering the Colonies’ to fail. Even if the scheme managed to succeed, the English would still lack a system of governing ‘so wide and disjointed a Territory’.121 He commented that even though ‘a limited Government can never long be upheld at a distance’, the introduction of arbitrary power in that region would be inconsistent with the internal organisation of British government.122 Were a limited government to be established in America, ‘we must … annul all the Charters; abolish every democratical Power in every Colony; repeal the Habeas Corpus Act with regard to them; invest every Governor with full discretionary or arbitrary Powers; confiscate the Estates of all the chief Planters; and hang three fourths of their Clergy’.123 To do so would require greater manpower than was available.124 In this way, the inner structure of British government became one of the most formidable obstacles to the preservation of the American colonies. Perhaps Hume now realised that he had been too optimistic about retaining the American colonies in his Stuart History, and that he had neglected the extent to which England’s mixed government had constrained its colonial policy. In his second letter to Strahan, Hume observed that the prospect of losing the American colonies had become imminent: ‘the worst Effect of the Loss of America, will not be the Detriment to our Manufactures, which will be a mere trifle […] but to the Credit and Reputation of Government, which has already but too little Authority. You will probably see a Scene of Anarchy and Confusion open’d at home’.125 The Quest for a Foreign Policy In his Stuart History, Hume’s thoughts on foreign policy diverged from his earlier remarks in ‘Of the Balance of Power’ (1752). Whereas he had once conceived of the European balance of power in terms of national security, his Ibid. Ibid., 300–1. 122  Ibid. 123  Ibid. 124  Ibid. 125  Letters, II, 304–5. For a recent analysis of Hume’s view on American colonies, see Moritz Baumstark, ‘The end of empire and the death of religion: a reconsideration of Hume’s later political thought’, ‘The End of Empire and the Death of Religion: A Reconsideration of Hume’s Later Political Thought’, Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain: New Case Studies, ed. R. Savage (Oxford, 2012), pp. 231–57. 120  121 

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Stuart History addressed England’s central role as the driving force of a peaceful international order and as a principal source of opposition to universal monarchy. Hume’s view of foreign policy in the Stuart History stemmed from a more sophisticated understanding of England as a trade-based nation with colonies as a most strategically valuable asset. His insistence on England’s leading role as a bulwark against universal monarchy showed that he was not merely an exponent of the classical maxim of the balance of power. Rather, his view of strategic imperatives was located in a shifting mental map of European geopolitics in which England continually readjusted its role in foreign affairs. Identifying the rivalry of Spain and France as a longstanding fulcrum of European politics, Hume maintained that England’s best hope had been to support the weaker side. As he explained, ‘the two great monarchies of the continent, France and Spain, being possessed of nearly equal force, were naturally antagonists; and England, from its power and situation, was intitled [sic] to support its own dignity, as well as tranquillity, by holding the balance between them’.126 According to Hume, James I and Charles I had pursued foreign policies that were both misplaced and irresolute. Consequently, foreign policy had become an increasing source of conflict between Crown and Parliament. This was best illustrated by ‘murmurs and complaints against the king’s neutrality and unactive disposition’ during the Palatinate crisis of 1620.127 Answers to the divisive question of whether England should send troops to help James I’s son-in-law Frederick – who had been elected as ‘King of Bohemia’ in the wake of the Protestant Reformation – demarcated the line between the Court and the Country parties.128 Notwithstanding the religious disputes between England and Spain, for Hume the central question was ‘whether peace and commerce with Spain, or the uncertain hopes of plunder and of conquest in the Indies, were preferable?’129 He sided with the Court’s appraisal of the situation, believing that trading interests counted for more than religious principles. In particular, he maintained that the danger for England was distant; numerous difficulties would attend the waging of a distant war on land; and, finally, a naval attack would fail to distract the enemy.130 From the perspective of the Country party, however, the Court had entertained the tantalising possibility of undermining the Spanish Habsburgs’ command of their maritime borders. Motivated by Protestant zeal, the Country party had felt the need to pursue an interventionist strategy. This was one of Hume, History, IV, 55. Ibid., V, 83. 128  Ibid., 556–9. Hume’s discussion of the emergence of Court and Country parties was moved from the main text to a note for the 1770 and subsequent editions. 129  Hume, History, V, 83–4. 130  Ibid., 83. 126  127 

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only a handful of cases in his Stuart History in which Hume inclined towards the Court position. As he argued, ‘interposition in the wars of the continent, though agreeable to religious zeal, could not, at that time, be justified by any sound maxims of politics’.131 In this way, Hume reaffirmed James’s perception of England as a member of the European state system, with priority given to maintaining ‘peace and commerce’ with other European powers over and above the defence of religious freedom. This case also illustrates Hume’s belief that the European balance of power now depended on the success of England’s collaboration with Spain, the purpose of which was to contain France.132 Joining the war against Spain to rescue the Palatinate would no doubt contribute to the Protestant cause, but, for him, the battle lines were drawn between dynastic families (Bourbons, Habsburgs, and Stuarts) rather than between competing religions.133 It was more important to maintain peace with Spain in order to contain the rising power of the French. From this perspective, Charles I’s proposed alliance with Bourbon France, through which he hoped to contain Habsburg Spain, had misjudged the balance of power in Europe. Failing to see that France had become a serious threat in itself, Charles had taken actions that had actually pushed France further towards European hegemony. Moreover, the wars against Spain in 1625 had demanded a vigorous naval campaign for which Charles’s government was ill-equipped. According to Hume, this shortfall had come about because of the Crown’s shrinking revenue (inflation was high after the import of gold and silver from the West Indies) as well as Parliament’s reluctance to release funds.134 These constraints had forced the Stuarts into adopting a passive role on the international stage. In Hume’s view, Stuart England should have maintained an intermediate position for as long as the rivalry between the Bourbon and Austrian families continued. He explained that Nothing more happy can be imagined than the situation, in which England then [sc. during the reign of Charles I] stood with regard to foreign affairs. Europe was divided between the rival families of Bourbon and Austria, whose opposite interests, and still more their mutual jealousies, secured the tranquillity of this island. Their forces were so nearly counterpoised, that no apprehensions were entertained of any event, which could suddenly disturb the balance of power between them […] And thus Charles, could he have avoided all dissentions with his own subjects, was in a situation to make himself be courted and respected by every Ibid. For a detailed study of France in mid-seventeenth-century European geopolitics, see Andrew Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy (New Brunswick, 1997), pp. 38–63. 133  This was illustrated on several occasions when Hume compared Stuart England with Bourbon France and Habsburg Spain, for instance History, V, 182. 134  Hume, History, V, 38–42, 84–6, 113–15, 161–6, 202, 247–8. For a detailed discussion of inflation and coinage, see Hume, ‘Of Interest’, pp. 126–35. 131  132 

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power in Europe; and, what has scarcely ever since been attained by the princes of this island, he could either be active with dignity, or neutral with security.135

Aside from the abortive attempt to launch a naval expedition against Spain in 1625, Charles had steered a neutral course by giving priority to colonial interests and naval dominance, and by avoiding military confrontation with major powers on the Continent. Hume considered this a reasonable policy given England’s geopolitical position. As he observed, ‘England enjoys a profound peace with all her neighbours: And what is more, all her neighbours are engaged in furious and bloody wars among themselves, and by their mutual enmities rather ensure her tranquillity.’136 Although Hume saw that transoceanic colonisation had introduced a new dimension to foreign politics, he believed that it would be unwise to stake the economy and national defence on naval power alone.137 Arguing against the laws that prevented the king from keeping ‘the militia under arms above fourteen days in the year’, he observed that ‘the situation of this island, together with its great naval power, has always occasioned other means of security, however requisite, to be much neglected among us’.138 Furthermore, Hume maintained that Europe was fundamental to the dynamics of colonialism. Otherwise, France’s dominance on the Continent would lead to her expansion overseas, thereby threatening England’s possession of the thirteen colonies. Hume stressed the strategic importance of continental intervention, which had been pursued intermittently since the seventeenth century, to halt French expansion. He contended that Charles II’s sale of Dunkirk to France for £400,000 in 1662 could not be ‘justified by any party’: ‘the chief importance indeed of Dunkirk to the English was, that it was able to distress their trade, when in the hands of the French: But it was Lewis the XIVth who first made it a good sea-port. If ever England have occasion to transport armies to the continent, it must be in support of some ally whose towns serve to the same purpose as Dunkirk would, if in the hands of the English.’139 By losing Dunkirk – an important stronghold on the Continent – England had squandered the opportunity to disturb French trade. This, Hume argued, had played into France’s expansionist ambitions. Indeed, this example reiterated his point that dominant European powers should be checked. This was the case with the Habsburgs in the Elizabethan era and the Bourbons in the Stuart era.140 In his eyes, England could not maintain its security through diplomatic neutrality; rather, its security relied on an active continental policy in which the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic were increasingly bound to England. 135  136  137  138  139  140 

Hume, History, V, 218–19. Ibid., 246. Ibid. Ibid., VI, 187. Ibid., 183. Whelan, ‘Robertson, Hume, and the Balance of Power’, p. 325. 128

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Notwithstanding the short-lived Triple League with the United Provinces and Sweden (1668–70), Hume illustrated the way in which the Stuarts had maintained a passive military stance in the wake of the Restoration. Dubbed the ‘blue-water policy’ by later generations, this strategy was widely regarded by seventeenth-century Parliamentarians as a sign of diplomatic impotency.141 Hume tended to agree that England’s neutrality had been caused, in part, by the personal incapacity of the Stuarts to agitate on the Continent. In his eyes, Charles I’s dilemma was that ‘terms advantageous to the allies must lose him the friendship of France: The contrary would enrage his parliament’.142 For Hume, Charles’s conduct was far from satisfactory: ‘between these views, he perpetually fluctuated; and from his conduct, it is observable, that a careless, remiss disposition, agitated by opposite motives, is capable of as great inconsistencies as are incident even to the greatest imbecility and folly’.143 Hume was also alert to the fact that England’s policy of isolation had sprung, at least to a certain extent, from concerns that continental wars, skirmishes, and interventions would provide Parliament with an excuse to encroach on royal prerogatives. Since Parliament had no right to interfere in state affairs, the Stuarts had appeared to believe, and not without reason, that their passive foreign policy could reduce conflict with Parliament. A costly war on the Continent would lead the Stuarts to depend entirely on parliamentary supplies as well as political concessions to Parliament. According to Hume, this concern prompted ‘feeble irregular transactions in foreign affairs’ and also ‘a continual uncertainty in its [sc. the Stuarts’] domestic administration’.144 With Puritan zeal and a mercantile spirit both on the rise, Parliament had placed into jeopardy the security of the nation by abolishing the discretionary power of the Crown. Furthermore, the Commons had ‘neither sufficiently considered the indigent condition of their prince, nor the general state of Europe; where every nation, by its increase both of magnificence and force, had made great additions to all public expenses’.145 Compared to the ‘harmony’ of the government after the Revolution of 1688, ‘the parliaments of this reign [sc. under Charles II] seem rather to have merited a contrary reproach’.146 For Parliament, however, a general sense of crisis in the face of the Counter Reformation grew into a demand for continental intervention. Central to this view was the connection between Protestant freedom and political alliances on the Continent, both of which were based on England’s self-image as the leader of a Puritan network of opposition to Catholicism. According to Hume, 141  For an overview of this conflict between English kingship and the mercantilist interest in the light of the blue-water strategy debate, see Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 170. 142  Hume, History, VI, 303. 143  Ibid. 144  Ibid., 234. 145  Ibid. 146  Ibid.

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the Parliament of this time was dominated by a group of ‘political puritans’, who argued that English interests lay in the defence of the Protestant religion against the Counter Reformation.147 This rising puritan spirit clashed with the Stuarts’ anxious desire to retain their monarchical authority. Although Hume disapproved of the rebellious nature of Puritanism, he generally agreed with the Parliamentary position that English liberty owed its very existence to the delicate balance of power in Europe. Whereas it had been justifiable for the early Stuarts to maintain an uneasy neutrality, their pursuit of this policy after the Restoration was nothing but ‘ignominious’.148 Hume observed that, as Stuart England lingered on the threshold of commercial society – and thus modernity – it stood poised between opportunity and danger. In the geopolitics of the seventeenth century, its relationship with its main commercial rival, the Dutch Republic, was marked by dramatic oscillations between the poles of friendship and envy. Moreover, France’s increasing dominance on the Continent posed a continuous threat to England’s national security and religious freedom. In this context the rivalry between an isolationist (or navalist) and a continental strategy emerged, and Hume took an unflinching stand for the latter. From the perspective of the Crown and the ministry, Hume observed that England’s main interests lay in commercial imperialism. He also argued that England should use its maritime supremacy to shoulder out commercial rivals, particularly the Dutch Republic. This stance would make it difficult, if not impossible, to enforce an anti-French alliance with other European nations, because an indispensable member of this alliance would be the Dutch Republic. According to the Crown, its discretionary powers had been endowed by ‘birth-right’, and it was through royal prerogatives that the policies of national defence could be determined and executed.149 In Hume’s view, the Stuarts, who had failed to observe the changes to English society, believed their government continued to be the same as that of their Tudor predecessors. This view had underpinned Charles II’s ‘highly criminal and dangerous’ move to allow France to buy an alliance with England, as well as James II’s failed attempt to support the Augsburg alliance.150 In the eyes of Parliament and the people, however, England’s strategic interests and religious freedoms hinged on a network of alliances with Protestant nations against the emerging power of France.151 Accordingly, naval power was seen as the key to containing France, whose ambitions, once unchecked, would pose a threat to England on both sides of the Atlantic. The Commons maintained Ibid., V, 284–5. For a discussion of Hume’s views on the political significance of Puritan revolutionaries, see Donald Livingston, ‘Hume on the Natural History of Philosophical Consciousness’, The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries, ed. P. Jones (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 68–84. 148  Hume, History, VI, 321. 149  Ibid. 150  Ibid., 498–508. 151  Ibid., 303. For a background review, see Rodger, The Command of the Ocean, pp. 80–94. 147 

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that national privileges were ‘so sacred and inviolable, that nothing but the most extreme necessity could justify an infringement of them’.152 Hume illustrated this point with William Temple’s remonstrance to Charles in 1674 against the Cabal’s project of building a French-style absolute monarchy in England.153 Temple had argued that it was dangerous to use French support to fix absolute authority to the Crown. Moreover, Temple had suggested that the differences between France’s and England’s respective political systems lay in the distribution of property as well as social structure. In France, landed property was owned mainly by the nobility, whose occupation of government offices constituted a major source of support for the Crown; the commonalty was too ‘poor and dispirited’ to be able to exert any influence; and the ecclesiastics provided ideological support for royal authority.154 England, on the other hand, had built its political authority on entirely different social foundations: ‘a great part of the landed property belonged either to the yeomanry or middling gentry; the king had few offices to bestow; and could not himself even subsist, much less maintain an army, except by the voluntary supplies of his parliament […]’.155 Together, these observations had helped Temple to explain how and why England’s monarchy continued to depend heavily on the support of the people.156 Therefore, any policy that threatened to infringe the rights of the people, particularly the interests of the middling rank, would inevitably fail. Hume developed this point further in his account of the transformation of manners in the Stuart age. He placed a special emphasis on the insensible and yet swift transfer of national wealth into the hands of the middling rank, which included the monied interests, merchants, gentry, and yeomen. According to him, English liberty depended largely on the concentration of landed property in the hands of the middling rank, which was represented by Parliament as a unitary body. With the Stuarts insisting on an alliance with France at the expense of England’s traditional allies, i.e. the Dutch Republic, the gulf between the Stuart monarchy and Parliament grew. As we shall see, this problem persisted throughout Hume’s account of the rivalry between England and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Naval Supremacy In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Britain’s competitive advantage in the international market, as well as its defence of religious and political

152  153  154  155  156 

Hume, History, V, 236. Ibid., VI, 289–90. Ibid., 289. Ibid., 289–90. Ibid., 290. 131

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freedoms, was rooted in its ability to maintain a strong navy.157 While Hume acknowledged this in his Stuart History, he also argued that the overriding importance of naval power in England’s defence policy should not lead automatically to a policy of isolationism. Rather, the navy should be central to the preservation of domestic liberty in the face of royal prerogatives, and to the security of Protestants in the religious conflict with France and Spain. Hume maintained that the demand for maritime supremacy in the Stuart age did not mean that England should have isolated itself from the European contest for power. In his view, the role of the navy in advancing strategic and commercial interests had posed three fundamental problems: first, how to perpetuate maritime capabilities to dominate the international market; second, how to use diplomacy to advance England’s long-term interests; finally, and most importantly, how to resist attempts by powers on the Continent to impose universal monarchy.158 Hume praised the Stuarts for trying to modernise the navy. Not only did they enlarge the size of the fleet but they also improved the administration of the Admiralty.159 In contrast to Elizabeth’s navy-building efforts, Hume observed, it was mainly the Stuarts’ endeavours that had developed England’s unprecedented system of defence. From the outset, however, the navy had been placed under financial pressure by the rivalry between the executive and the legislature. While foreign policy had always fallen within the remit of the monarch, it could not be executed without parliamentary grants. This meant that decisions had to be made according to the administration of war finance. In Hume’s view, this commitment to liberty had undermined the raising of revenues for war, which in turn had threatened England’s ability to defend itself. The desire to maintain the liberties of the people against royal prerogatives was fomented by Charles I’s use of writs to levy ship-money – an indirect tax levied at seaports. This impolitic move, in Hume’s view, had blurred the boundaries between the legislature and the executive: ‘the defenceless condition of the kingdom while unprovided with a navy; the inability of the king, from his established revenues, with the utmost care and frugality, to equip and maintain one; the impossibility of obtaining, on reasonable terms, any voluntary supply from parliament: All these are reasons of state, not topics of law’.160 Hume saw that an exclusive reliance on the navy, together with a paucity of war finance, had made it difficult for England to maintain the balance of power in Europe. Indeed, England’s relationship with the Dutch Republic had prompted the development of a navalist strategy. The joint mediation of James I and Henry IV in the truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic Black, A System of Ambition?, pp. 80–94. Knud Haakonssen, ‘Introduction’, Essays, p. xxii; Haar, ‘David Hume and International Political Theory’, p. 233. 159  Hume, History, V, 141–2; VI, 50, 537. 160  Ibid. 157  158 

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in 1609 had, in Hume’s eyes, shaped European politics for the next century.161 The subsequent emancipation of the Dutch from the yoke of Spanish tutelage had put the Anglo-Dutch relationship on an equal footing for the first time. Moreover, England’s delivery of the Cautionary Towns – ‘Flushing, the Brille and Rammekins’ – to the Dutch seven years later had precipitated the ‘full liberty of the Dutch commonwealth’.162 Hume showed that throughout the Stuart age England had been challenged into handling its competition with the Dutch Republic. Without manufacturing, except ‘ship building and the founding of iron cannon’, or trading skills, England had been playing a game of catch-up.163 Although wool was England’s staple product, the rudimentary state of manufacturing had forced the English into exporting raw cloth to Holland, where it was dyed and dressed before being sold throughout Europe. Hume noted that it was not until the third Anglo-Dutch war (1672–74) that the art of dyeing woollen cloth was brought to England from the Low Countries.164 Since the wool trade had comprised nine-tenths of English export, the competition with the Dutch had helped to define England’s strategic relations in Europe.165 Hume pointed out that the fear of France’s dominance in Europe had ensured a ‘close union and confederacy’ between England and the Dutch Republic that went on to last for nearly seventy years.166 However, by the mid seventeenth century the consolidation of their respective colonial interests had turned them into rivals. Hume explained that the growing tension between these two maritime powers had brought about a series of changes to England’s constitutional arrangements, the implications of which extended to foreign and domestic policies alike.167 He maintained that the Stuart government had used the navy to promote trading interests at the expense of strategic ones. In his view, England’s envy of the Dutch Republic’s dominance in maritime trade had precipitated England’s pursuit of navalist policies. Indeed, the three Anglo-Dutch Wars had been triggered chiefly by England’s desire to further its commercial dominance.168 This desire had sprung from the belief Ibid., 37–8. Citing Winwood’s Memorials as evidence, Hume defended James’s strict neutrality, however dangerous an approach to diplomacy, as ‘just and fair’. For more details, see Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James I (3 vols, London, 1725), II, 429–30, 456–76. 162  Hume, History, V, 64–6. 163  Ibid., 143. See also Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 3–50. 164  Hume, History, VI, 538. 165  Ibid., V, 143. 166  Ibid., VI, 191–2. 167  For a detailed analysis of English political culture in the formation of foreign policy in the 1650s–60s, particularly in relation to the three Anglo-Dutch Wars, see Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 1996). 168  For a detailed analysis of the historical context of the three Anglo-Dutch Wars, see J. R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1996). See also Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 132–52. 161 

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that England’s commercial wealth and power depended on its ability to defeat the Dutch navy. England’s antipathy towards the Dutch was manifested in the Navigation Ordinance of 1651, ‘which prohibited all nations from importing into England in their bottoms any commodity, which was not the growth and manufacture of their own country’.169 For Hume, this demonstrated England’s jealousy of Dutch commerce at the expense of a rational understanding of national interests. The Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 effectively banned the Dutch Republic’s trade with England.170 Hume observed that, while the Dutch’s maritime defence had been robust, England had effectively snatched away their commercial advantages. After the first Dutch war (1652–54), ‘the whole commerce [of the Dutch] by the channel was cut off: Even that to the Baltic was much infested by English privateers. Their fisheries were totally suspended. A great number of their ships, above 1600, had fallen into the hands of the enemy.’171 This victory against the Dutch, Hume observed, had reinforced England’s stance as the dominant commercial power in Europe. In Hume’s view, it was France who profited the most from the AngloDutch wars. The second Dutch war (1664–67) had been a mirror image of the first, triggered by competition in the West African slave trade. Hume attached great importance to the Triple Alliance of England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic (1668), which had effectively ended this war. The alliance had resulted from anxieties over Louis XIV’s territorial advances into the Spanish Netherlands in the War of Devolution (1667–68).172 According to Hume, this alliance represented a rare diplomatic success in which the longterm mutual interests of England and the Dutch Republic had been secured, thanks to the expertise and hard efforts of William Temple and Johan de Wit.173 The resulting Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had forced France into withdrawing its claims to the Spanish Netherlands, which had served as a buffer state not only for the neighbouring Dutch Republic but also for the whole of Europe. ‘And thus all Europe’, Hume claimed, ‘seemed to repose herself with security under the wings of that powerful confederacy, which had been so happily formed for her protection.’174 The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had also reconciled Crown and Parliament, albeit temporarily: ‘the great satisfaction, expressed in England, on account of the counsels now embraced by the court, promised the hearty concurrence of parliament in every measure, which could be proposed for opposition to Hume, History, VI, 46–7. E. N. Williams, The Ancien Regime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States 1648–1789 (London, 1999), pp. 484–6. 171  Hume, History, VI, 50. 172  Ibid., 216–22. 173  Ibid., 219–22. See also Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, Memoirs of the Life, Works, and Correspondence of Sir William Temple, Bart. (2 vols, London, 1836), I, 143–70. 174  Hume, History, VI, 223. 169  170 

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the grandeur of France’.175 However, the pursuit of anti-French diplomacy was reversed in 1670, when Charles II retracted his position and once again pursued an alliance with the French. This move inadvertently helped France to make ‘considerable conquests’ in the aftermath of the alliance.176 In Hume’s view, the third Anglo-Dutch war (1672–74) had been motivated by England’s longstanding jealousy of the Dutch. The Earl of Shaftsbury, who wanted to enfeeble the Dutch Republic completely, had argued that ‘the Hollanders were the common enemies of all monarchies, especially that of England, their only competitor for commerce and naval power, and the sole obstacle to their views of attaining an universal empire, as extensive as that of ancient Rome’.177 As a consequence of the Dutch defeat, France had taken the opportunity to move closer towards complete hegemony in Europe. According to Hume, this opportunity had arisen mainly from Charles’s personal attachment to France; his failure to recognise France as a threat to England; and, finally, his inattention to the European balance of power.178 While Hume conceded that Charles may have acted out of ‘mysterious and inexplicable’ weakness, he also suggested that Charles’s motive might have been to use France to bolster his own authority.179 Citing John Dalrymple, he noted that in 1677 Charles had received from France two million livres in return for prolonging the adjournment of Parliament and thereby delaying or even precluding strikes against France.180 Hume had claimed previously that this sum was paid to Charles on a yearly basis.181 In addition to these ‘mean pecuniary motives’, which rendered Charles’s conduct ‘highly criminal and dangerous’, the king seemed to have entertained the possibility of turning to France in the event of conflict with Parliament.182 Noting that the three Dutch Wars had inflicted serious damage on the Dutch Republic and its trade, Hume claimed that this had come at the expense of England’s long-term security.183 In his view, the Stuarts had missed an opportunity to strengthen England’s role as a counterweight to France’s Ibid. Ibid., 320–1. 177  Ibid., 273. 178  See also J. D. Davies, ‘The Navy, Parliament and Political Crisis in the Reign of Charles II’, Historical Journal 36 (1993), 271–88. 179  Hume, History, VI, 448. 180  Ibid., 311. 181  Ibid., 302. 182  Ibid., 302, 320–1. 183  Jonathan I. Israel offers an overview of the effects of the military defeat upon the Dutch commercial empire, in his The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477– 1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 700–806. For his analysis of how the two Anglo-Dutch Wars triggered the emergence of the British empire and European geopolitics, see Jonathan I. Israel, ‘The Emerging Empire: The Continental Perspective, 1650–1713’, The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. W. R. Louis, N. Canny, and A. Low (5 vols, Oxford and New York, 1998), I, 423–44. 175  176 

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persistent attempts to impose universal monarchy. This was due in part to their inability to identify and pursue England’s strategic interests. As early as 1719, Samuel Pufendorf had advocated a similar view in his An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe (1719): Holland seems to be the only obstacle that the English cannot be sole Masters of the Sea and of Trade […] Nevertheless, how desirous soever the English are to be the sole Masters at Sea, it does not seem to be the interest of England, frequently to engage it self in Wars with Holland, it having been observed, that the Dutch, since the Wars with England are rather increased in Valour, Experience, and Power at Sea. And because other Nations are not likely to suffer that Holland should be swallowed up by the English, or that one Nation should have the Monopoly of Europe.184

While Hume shared Pufendorf’s view, he explained that Charles II’s failure to defend the continental alliance against France had turned out to be less fatal to national security than it could have been. This was because colonial expansion and maritime power had allowed England to assume a mediating role between the great powers of Europe. The acquisition of Tangiers had strengthened England’s bargaining position with other European powers. The English title to Jamaica and Tangiers, both of which had belonged to Spain for more than a century, was officially confirmed by the American treaty between England and Spain in 1667.185 In addition, both countries renounced the right to trade with each other’s colonies.186 Thus, Hume’s vision of an English grand strategy went far beyond England’s immediate sphere of interest on the Continent. Indeed, colonial settlement was central to his conception of an active but moderately interventionist foreign policy. It remains commonplace to argue that the Glorious Revolution brought to an end the series of conflicts between England and the Dutch Republic.187 From Hume’s perspective, the Revolution was strategically important because it reconciled two previously intransigent domestic forces and united dynastically the interests of two great maritime powers.188 Furthermore, the latter signified an evolution of maritime strategy alongside a redefinition of England’s strategic interests.189 Since Hume did not write a post-Revolutionary Samuel Pufendorf, An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe (London, 1719), p. 168. 185  Hume, History, VI, 538. 186  Ibid. 187  For a general background of this event, see Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2006), pp. 308–63. 188  Jonathan I. Israel, ‘The Dutch Role in the Glorious Revolution’, The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact, ed. J. I. Israel (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 105–62; K. H. D. Haley, ‘The Dutch, the Invasion of England, and the Alliance of 1689’, The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives, ed. L. G. Schwoerer (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 21–34. 189  Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London, 2009), pp. 305–65. 184 

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history, it is hard to know which direction he would have taken after the unification of English and Dutch interests. Nevertheless, it seems clear that for him England’s strategic role as the defender of commercial liberty against the idea as well as the imposition of universal monarchy was finally settled. To summarise, Hume’s endorsement of the balance-of-power doctrine in his Stuart History was based on the supposition that English society had endorsed the fundamental principles of commerce. His conclusion was unequivocally unique: commercial society needed to defend its political freedom from the threat of universal monarchy. He dismissed the policy of isolationism by showing that maritime security should not be seen as a diversion, but rather as part of an integrated continental strategy. Moreover, he claimed that continental alliances were essential to the preservation of England’s commercial wealth and naval power since they could pre-empt challenges to its maritime supremacy. Finally, Hume insisted on the importance of maritime trade in the development of foreign policy: political leaders and the civilised public had to free themselves from the ungrounded jealousy of trade. For him, this was essential to the implementation of a strategy that embodied both flexibility and modern prudence.

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5

Public Liberty in Jeopardy

This situation of England [under Elizabeth], was in reality more remote, tho’ seemingly it approached nearer, a despotic and eastern monarchy, than the present government of that kingdom, where the people, tho’ guarded by multiplied laws, are totally naked, defenceless, and disarmed, and besides, are not secured by any middle power, or independent powerful nobility, interposed between them and the monarch.1 Hume, The History of England, under the House of Tudor, 1759

In his Stuart History, Hume claimed that ‘by the changes, which have since [the Stuart accession] been introduced, the liberty and independence of individuals has been rendered much more full, intire, and secure; that of the public more uncertain and precarious’.2 His notion of ‘civil liberty’ entailed a wide range of personal freedoms under the aegis of the law, such as the freedom of individuals to property, life, conscience, and speech. Indeed, the flourishing of civil liberty depended on the proper administration of justice through the legal system. The arbitrary power of the sovereign prince constituted the main obstacle to the perfection of civil liberty. The primary channels of the monarch’s authority, especially the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, posed a constant threat to the legal protection of liberty and property. By ‘public liberty’, Hume meant the freedom of Parliament to make and maintain laws independently, including the freedom to redress abuses of the royal prerogative by the monarch; to enable its members to take their seats; Hume, History, IV, 370. Ibid., V, 128–9. Forbes had a detailed discussion of this in Philosophical Politics, pp. 125–92. As Forbes emphasised, Hume toned down the contrast between liberty and arbitrary, or despotic, government in his third edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1754), published in the same year as his first volume of The History of Great Britain under the House of Stuart. He deleted some passages containing the implication that absolute civilised monarchies could not afford individual liberty, and in their place maintained that this type of government, characterised by the rule of the law, would provide the civil liberty along the lines of other free governments. 1  2 

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and to judge their elections and returns after taking leave. As with civil liberty, the main obstacle to public liberty was the discretionary and suspending power of the Crown. Nonetheless, public liberty was more concerned with the extent to which the Crown ought to possess and thus exercise its discretionary or suspending power, which tended to obstruct the regular administration of the law, rather than with the question of whether this power actually endangered the liberty and property of the people. According to Forbes, Hume’s direct comparison between civil liberty (or ‘the liberty and independence of individuals’) and public liberty (or parliamentary privilege) was rooted in contemporary issues, especially the parliamentary obsession with ‘the perfection of civil society’, which was typified by the ideal of property rights and which threatened to endanger public liberty and unbalance the constitution.3 What Hume was concerned with was an institutional problem which haunted eighteenth-century Britain, namely that the prioritisation of individual liberties conferred too much power on the legislature, and thus jeopardised the limited constitution. While Hume was acutely aware of this problem, he concerned himself with the origins and nature of the seventeenth-century constitutional struggle – a revolutionary process that had altered the relationship between king, Parliament and people. He maintained that the divergence between civil and public liberty from the Stuart accession onwards was caused by ‘a jealousy of liberty’ rather than by a solid understanding of liberty itself.4 This divergence indicated that the century-long battle against royal prerogative had been won at a significant cost. It was true that the liberty and privileges of the nation had been secured by the rule of law, which had succeeded in setting ‘firmer barriers’ against the discretionary power of the Crown. Nonetheless, the rule of law had also posed an increasing threat to the balance of the constitution and even to the survival of the state, thereby putting liberty in serious and continual danger. As a historian of the state, Hume saw that among all the European nations the English had pushed the cause of liberty the furthest, partly because the moderating powers of the nobility and the clergy had been considerably weakened in the Tudor age. Nonetheless, he feared that liberty could overextend and thus undermine itself without the mediation of the nobility and the clergy. He observed that, even towards his own time, civil and public liberty Hume, History, VI, 533. Ibid., 18–19, 387, 558–9. The phrase ‘jealousy of liberty’ appeared in History, V, 550. There is an interesting contrast between Hume’s idea of public liberty and Montesquieu’s concept of political liberty. Briefly speaking, the former referred simply to parliamentary privileges, whereas the latter depended on the separation of the legislative and the executive power. For a detailed discussion of the latter concept, see Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York and London, 1989), p. 234. As Mansfield, explains, by ‘political liberty’ Montesquieu meant ‘that tranquility of spirit which comes from the opinion that each has of his security’; therefore, ‘the government must be such that one citizen cannot fear another’. 3  4 

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continued to diverge. The only means by which liberty could be strengthened, he argued, was to dispel the myths of Whig ideology and consolidate monarchical authority. This chapter builds on Forbes’s work by providing a deeper analysis of Hume’s account of the way in which the principles of liberty had been integrated into the operational principles of government. This goes to the heart of Hume’s concern with how to accommodate monarchical authority and parliamentary liberty in the English mixed government. In the mid-eighteenth century, the conflict between authority and liberty fuelled the rivalry between Court and Country. The History was written as a denunciation of the exaggerated claims about civil liberty made by the Country writers, especially Bolingbroke. For Hume, the greatest threat to liberty did not come from the Crown, but rather from the increasing influence and power of Parliament. ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ In 1748, Montesquieu published his De l’Esprit des lois anonymously in Geneva. Describing England as ‘the republic hid[ing] under the form of monarchy’, he maintained that English liberty was in jeopardy because the country’s system of government was on the verge of becoming unbalanced.5 As he observed, ‘in order to favour liberty, the English have removed all the intermediate powers that formed their monarchy. They are quite right to preserve that liberty; if they were to lose it, they would be one of the most enslaved peoples on earth.’6 Finding this claim ‘novel and striking’, Hume wrote to Montesquieu in April 1749 with evidence that the English might indeed be heading in that fatal direction.7 He referred to the Heritable Jurisdictions Act passed two years earlier, which had been drafted by Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.8 The private jurisdiction traditionally possessed by Scottish clan chiefs was to be transferred to the High Court and Circuit Courts of Justiciary within two years of the act’s passing. The 5  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book V, Chapter XIX, p. 70. For a discussion of Montesquieu on the nature of English liberty, see C. P. Courtney, ‘Montesquieu and English Liberty’, Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on The Spirit of Laws, ed., D. W. Carrithers, M. A. Mosher and P. A. Rahe (Lanham, 2001), pp. 273–90. 6  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book II, Chapter IV, pp. 18–19. 7  Letters, I, 134. For Montesquieu’s influence on Hume, see Forbes, Philosophical Politics, pp. 125–92; Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 41–52; James Moore, ‘Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment’, Montesquieu and His Legacy, ed. R. E. Kingston (Albany, 2008), pp. 181–4; Paul A. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty (New Haven and London, 2009), pp. 118–43. 8  George Harris, The Life of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke with selections from his Correspondence, Diaries, Speeches, and Judgments (London, 1847), II, 312–15. The act is 20. Geo. 2. c. 43.

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act was clearly an infringement of the Union Treaty of 1707, particularly Article 20, which had laid down the protection of these heritable jurisdictions.9 Nevertheless, it was passed within one year, despite resistance from ‘the tories & jacobites, & Scotch’.10 ‘The English Parliament’, Hume commented acidly, ‘finding by what had occurred recently that the Scottish nation was not sufficiently republican, concluded that this violent tendency towards monarchical government [sc. the Jacobite rebellion in 1745] stemmed from what the nobility had retained of feudal Gothic jurisdictions […].’11 According to Hume, this move towards republicanism exemplified a common and enduring misconception of the English constitution, which was that the powers of the monarchy and nobility ought to be restrained in order to protect the liberty of the people. His fear was that the balance of the constitution, which was already tilting towards the Commons, would become even more precarious because the juridical power of the Scottish nobles, who had served as mediators between the Crown and the Commons, would be suppressed. In the light of Hume’s letter, Montesquieu became aware of the political ramifications of the Heritable Jurisdictions Act. Six months later, he discussed this issue with the second son of Lord Hardwicke, Charles Yorke.12 Montesquieu restated his belief that the local jurisdiction of the nobility would protect liberty by guarding against the Crown. Like Hume, he felt that this transgression of the Scottish nobility’s multiple jurisdictions (by which they were entitled to hold local courts) would, in turn, threaten English liberty. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu had argued ‘No monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch’.13 In his view, the power of the nobility was fundamental to a balanced monarchical government because it served as the ‘mediate channels through which the power flows’.14 That is to say, the nobility acted as a consolidating as well as a checking force on royal power.15 For a historical background of this treaty, see Michael Fry, The Union: England, Scotland and the Treaty of 1707 (Edinburgh, 2006). 10  Harris, Life of Hardwicke, II, 314. 11  Letters, I, 134. 12  Harris, Life of Hardwicke, II, 401. In Charles Yorke’s letter to his father, dated 11 November 1749, he described the interview with Montesquieu. 13  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book II, Chapter IV, p. 18. Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, p. 45. Sonenscher observed that Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) were on the same line of thinking. 14  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book II, Chapter IV, p. 18. John Trenchard had proposed a similar view almost two decades earlier. See his pamphlet The Thoughts of A Member of the Lower House, in Relation to a Project for Restraining and Limiting Power of the Crown in the Future Creation of Peers (London, 1719), p. 9. According to Trenchard, ‘there is not a more certain Maxim in Politicks, than that a Monarchy must subsist by an Army or Nobility; the first makes it despotick, and a latter a free Government’. 15  Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘A Dissertation upon Parties’, Bolingbroke: Political Writings, ed. Armitage, p. 125. Bolingbroke also emphasised the importance of 9 

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However sound Montesquieu’s argument might be in theory, Yorke was confident that it could not be applied to England in practice.16 He reiterated his father’s opinion that the limited monarchical government of England, unlike the absolute monarchy of France, did not need a powerful and independent nobility to check the power of the Crown because it was already restrained by the constitution.17 To this Yorke added that ‘all private rights which encroached on the legal authority of the Crown tended to erect petty tyrants at the expense of the people’s liberty’.18 In fact this line of argument had actually prompted Montesquieu’s concerns for the future of English liberty. Observing that the English had misidentified the power of the nobility as destructive rather than protective of liberty, he warned that ‘if you abolish the prerogatives of the lords, clergy, nobility, and towns in a monarchy, you will soon have a popular state or else a despotic state’.19 In his view, Henry VII had made the same mistake as the king of ancient Rome, Servius Tullius, when he suppressed the power of the nobility by increasing the privileges of the people.20 In Henry’s case, this error precipitated the constitutional upheavals of the seventeenth-century struggle. England’s post-revolutionary regime had partly solved the problem by returning the constitution to its original Anglo-Saxon form, which strove to maintain a balance between legislative and executive powers.21 The legislature restrained the executive by holding the right to grant its revenue, whereas the executive restrained the legislature through the power of veto.22 However, this system was inherently unstable. According to Hont, Montesquieu’s chief concern was that, notwithstanding its decentralised and internally regulated administration, England had failed to restore ‘the moderating power of the nobility that was destroyed by the Henrician reformation’.23 Referring to England as a republic hiding ‘under the form of monarchy’, Montesquieu claimed that the only safeguard for liberty afforded the role of the peers in the legislature in order to maintain the constitutional balance. According to him, the peers, ‘depending neither on the King nor the people, … constitute a middle order, and are properly mediators between the other two, in the eye of our constitution’. 16  Harris, Life of Hardwicke, II, 400–1. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid. See also Charles Yorke’s Some Considerations on the Law of Forfeiture, for High Treason. Occasioned by A Clause, in the late Act, for making it Treason to correspond with the Pretender’s Sons, or any of their Agents, &c. (London, 1748), p. 38. Yorke disagreed with Montesquieu’s prediction of the demise of the English constitution, arguing that the principles of the English constitution ‘will preserve it from the usual mortality of Government’. 19  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book II, Chapter IV, p. 18 20  Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1999), p. 26. 21  Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 105. For Montesquieu’s description of the German system of government, see The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI, Chapter VIII, pp. 167–8. 22  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI, Chapter VI, p. 161. 23  Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 105. 143

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by the present constitution was ‘a legislative body composed of the representatives of the people’.24 He maintained that this body ran the risk of corruption, and that its corruption would lead ultimately to the collapse of liberty itself.25 As he noted, the English system of government ‘will perish when the legislative power shall be more corrupt than the executive’.26 Montesquieu explained this point in detail in a letter to an English correspondent, William Domville, in the Pensées: ‘all falsehoods, all depths of corruption in England, thus relate only to the Parliament, and that Parliament may well have no integrity, but it missed no light …’.27 Similarly, in his 1752 essay ‘Of Some Remarkable Customs’, Hume argued that the challenge to preserve England’s system of government came not from the ‘irregular power’ of the Crown but rather from the lawful authority of Parliament.28 His fear was that the lack of institutional and structural resistance to parliamentary power – a champion of English liberty – would endanger liberty itself.29 As he argued, ‘the greatest jealousy and watchfulness in the people’ provided sufficient support for liberty against the government’s authority; therefore, in ‘a country of the highest liberty’ like England, liberty could make ‘its own defence, without any countenance or protection’.30 Indeed, the Commons’ suspicion of Court patronage made surveillance an indispensable part of political culture, and this became a natural check to royal prerogatives.31 If the Crown abused its power, Hume reasoned, then ‘the Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book V, Chapter XIX, p. 70. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic, n. 20, p. 300. As Rahe points out, Montesquieu’s passage on English corruption drew much attention in American colonial debate on the eve of the American Revolution. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967), pp. 55–143; Donald S. Lutz, ‘The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought’, American Political Science Review 78 (1984), 189–97. Montesquieu, however, was a proponent of the venality of offices. See Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 104–5. 26  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI, Chapter VI, p. 161. 27  Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic, pp. 136–41. See William Domville’s letter to Montesquieu on 4 June 1749, and the latter’s reply on 22 July of the same year, in Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. A. Masson (Paris, 1950–55), III, 1244–5. 28  Hume, ‘Remarkable Customs’, p. 184. 29  Ibid., pp. 184–5. 30  Ibid., p. 185. 31  Hume enumerated several cases of this nature, for instance, the Bill of Exclusion passed by the Commons to exclude anyone in the Lower House from holding any lucrative office. Hume, History, VI, 365–6. Montesquieu noted the role of surveillance in the English system of government, but he believed that it was a part of constitutional mechanism, rather than of political culture. Montesquieu also recognised the presence of surveillance in English political culture, but, unlike Hume, he believed that it applied both to the Crown and to the Commons. As he said in the Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, VIII, 87–8: ‘the government of England is wiser, because a body there continually examines it and continually examines itself. And such are its errors that they never last long and are often useful for the spirit of watchfulness they give the nation.’ 24  25 

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opposite faction, and indeed all lovers of their country, would immediately take the alarm, and support the injured party; the liberty of ENGLISHMEN would be asserted; juries would be implacable; and the tools of tyranny, acting both against law and equity, would meet with the severest vengeance’.32 In Hume’s view, the complexities of the English constitution provided a ready solution to the problem posed by the increasing Civil List. For him, in the long run, the ‘corrupt’ influence of the Crown and the English people’s love of liberty would counterbalance each other. On these grounds, Hume argued that a more pressing and imminent threat to the constitution was the tyranny of Parliament, rather than the tyranny of the Crown.33 According to Montesquieu, the present system of government in England lacked the balance of the original German model, since the power of the magistrate was not sufficiently checked. This entailed a necessary loss of ‘political liberty in its relation with the citizen’.34 For Montesquieu, this liberty was entirely different from ‘political liberty in its relation with the constitution’, which could be found only in a state characterised by the representation of an independent legislature and a functional separation of powers.35 He traced the loss of ‘political liberty in relation with the citizen’ in England to the reign of Henry VII, in which ‘the monarch had found the means of abasing them [sc. the nobles] by raising the people’.36 Hume had no illusions about the superiority of mixed government to other forms of government, accounts of which Montesquieu derived from the teachings of Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero. Nor did Hume subscribe to Montesquieu’s belief in the German origins of English liberty.37 Indeed, Hume, ‘Remarkable Customs’, p. 185. Ibid. Hume was at variance with Bolingbroke’s position that ‘liberty would be safer, perhaps, if we inclined a little more than we do to the popular Side’. Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England: From the Minutes of Humphry Oldcastle (London, 1747), p. 11 (Letter I). This point was also reiterated in his ‘A Dissertation upon Parties’, p. 163 (The Craftsman 441, 14 December 1734). 34  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XII. 35  Ibid., Book XI. According to Montesquieu, while a free constitution may contribute to political liberty in relation to the citizen, the two types of political liberty did not necessarily correlate with each other. For a detailed analysis of these two concepts, see Forbes, Philosophical Politics, p. 166. 36  Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XIX, Chapter XXVII. In his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734), Montesquieu had argued that the king of Rome, Servius Tullius, made the same mistake as Henry VII in increasing the privileges of the people in order to suppress the power of the nobility. To Montesquieu, in both cases this demolished the foundation of monarchy itself. Linking ancient Rome to modern England, Montesquieu sought to prove that the English constitution would inevitably lose its balance, because it had already lost the support of an independent and powerful nobility. 37  Hume’s disillusion was also reflected in his argument against the common view that the ancient nations were more populous than the modern ones. Hume, ‘Populousness of Ancient Nations’, pp. 377–464. In the letters 112–22 of Lettres Persanes and the Book 32  33 

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Hume’s refutation of these origins signalled most clearly his opposition to the myth of the ancient constitution in English historiography.38 However, he agreed with Montesquieu that the great diminution of the nobility in the wake of the Civil War had played a significant part in the unbalancing of England’s constitution.39 Sonenscher has rightly pointed out that Hume’s deeper concern was reserved for the increasing tension ‘between the disguised republican foundations of the English monarchy and the complicated intricacies of its constitution’.40 For both Montesquieu and Hume, this tension had become ‘a genuine problem for liberty’s long-term survival [in England]’.41 Hume’s approach to this problem underpinned his criticism of Bolingbroke’s proposals for constitutional reform, which had been advocated vehemently on the Country platform. The main goal of Bolingbroke’s reform was to allow the three constituent powers in the mixed constitution – king, Lords, and Commons – to perform their respective political roles (executive, judicial, and legislative). As Pocock has emphasised, Bolingbroke’s chief intention was to prevent the king from interfering with the legislature through patronage, strictly for the reason that the predominance of royal authority would convert the English government into an absolute monarchy and endanger the liberty of the people.42 According to Pocock, Bolingbroke’s proposals strove to consolidate the rule of law and weaken the executive power, thereby jeopardising the system of liberty established by the Revolution settlement. Hume’s essay ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (1752) can be read as a warning against the radical constitutional reforms that Bolingbroke and his followers had proposed.43 In a development of Harrington’s argument, Hume strove to achieve ‘the most perfect model of limited monarchy’ XXIII of the The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu had argued that this decrease in population was due to moral rather than physical causes. Hume denied Montesquieu’s claim of population decline, and argued that ‘the situation of affairs in modern times, with regard to civil liberty, as well as equality of fortune, is not near to so favourable, either to the propagation or happiness of mankind’, p. 402. 38  Isaac Kramnick, ‘Augustan Politics and English Historiography: The Debate on the English Past, 1730–35’, History and Theory 6 (1967), 33–56. 39  For Montesquieu’s influence on Hume, see Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment, pp. 4–6; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 258–61; Emerson, Medical Men, pp. 119–20. It is hard to tell if Montesquieu was Hume’s only source in relation to this. It is a commonplace that Montesquieu himself owed a debt to another political thinker of the time – Bolingbroke. For Bolingbroke’s influence upon Montesquieu, see Robert Shackleton, ‘Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, and the Separation of Powers’, French Studies 3 (1949), 25–38. For another interpretation which identifies Paul de Rapin-Thoyras as Montesquieu’s main source, see Nelly Girard d’Albissin, Un Precurseur de Montesquieu: Rapin-Thoyras (Paris, 1969). 40  Letters, I, 134. Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 41–52. 41  Ibid. 42  Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 480. 43  Hume, ‘Perfect Commonwealth’, pp. 221–33. Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, p. 74. 146

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through equitable representation in a Parliament of social elites, landholders, merchants, and the city.44 Hume sought to combat political corruption, not through the concept of the patriot king, but rather by consolidating the interests of the middling rank. He believed that this would establish a genuinely reciprocal relationship between the members of the constitution and secure the safety of the constitution in the process. Since only order and regular government could safeguard these groups’ long-term interests, their concern for their own interests would protect them from corruption.45 Hume proposed to incorporate the political needs of different social groups into the bureaucratic organisation of the state by establishing a meritocratic Upper House and a plutocratic Lower House.46 The nobility would ‘consist entirely of the men of chief credit, abilities, and interest in the nation’.47 This not only required an increase in the number of nobles in the Upper House; it also involved allowing them to elect their own members.48 The aim here was to build a stronger aristocracy that would serve as ‘an excellent barrier both to the monarchy and against it’.49 Unlike Montesquieu, Hume believed that the nobility should not hold hereditary titles and that they should take their seats for life. A nobility that represented the social elites of each generation would be able to counterbalance the great wealth and power of the Commons.50 The second part of Hume’s proposal involved restoring Cromwell’s plan to introduce a plutocratic Lower House.51 He later recounted the details of this plan in The History of Great Britain, Vol. II. Containing the Commonwealth, and the Reigns of Charles II and James II (1756).52 For Hume, this plan would advance the liberty of the people in such a way that it would seem inconsistent with Cromwell’s otherwise tyrannical government. The basic qualification for election to the Lower House was that the candidate owned an estate of at least £200 in value.53 This effectively deprived small boroughs, as well as the poor, of the right to be elected – a desired result for Hume because he believed that candidates such as these could be swayed by vested interests.54 In this plan, Parliament would have a suitable representation of counties (270 seats) and of the city of London with ‘the more considerable corporations’ (130 seats).55 Hume claimed that the representation of cities would promote liberty because they inclined towards republican notions of 44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55 

Hume, ‘Perfect Commonwealth’, pp. 231–2. Ibid., p. 231 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, 240. Hume, ‘Perfect Commonwealth’, p. 231. Hume, History, VI, 68–9. Hume, ‘Perfect Commonwealth’, p. 231; Hume, VI, History, 69. Ibid. Ibid. 147

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government: ‘the natural equality of property favours liberty, and the nearness of habitation enables the citizens mutually to assist each other’.56 Contra to ‘the common opinion, that no large state, such as FRANCE or GREAT BRITAIN, could ever be modelled into a commonwealth, but that such a form of government can only take place in a city or small territory’, Hume argued that ‘there is more facility, when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction’.57 This passage went on to influence the architects of the American constitution, since it attested to the possibility of establishing a large state as a republic.58 Hume, however, did not necessarily believe that such a ‘perfect commonwealth’ could transpire.59 As he argued in his analysis of the Commonwealth era, ‘the idea […] of a perfect and immortal commonwealth will always be found as chimerical as that of a perfect and immortal man’.60 Indeed, even if such a republic could be established, it would destabilise a constitution that was already precariously balanced. Instead, Hume’s concept of a perfect commonwealth reaffirmed the importance of political stability and sought to prevent the dominance of one part of the constitution over the others. His vision for a ‘perfect commonwealth’ also revealed his views on the normative importance of a single unified state in which the interests of various social groups, rather than the exclusive interests of the propertied class alone, were represented. The Perfection of Civil Liberty Hume’s immediate historiographical starting point was the constitutional crises of the seventeenth century. By identifying the ‘spirit of liberty’ as the engine of the constitutional struggle, he stressed the importance of public opinion to the development of England’s constitution: ‘the humour of the nation, during that age, running strongly towards fanatical extravagancies, the spirit of civil liberty gradually revived from its lethargy, and by means of its religious associate, from which it reaped more advantage than honour, it secretly enlarged its dominion over the greater part of the kingdom’.61 For him, the ‘spirit of liberty’ gained its momentum from both the civil and the religious spheres of life, most notably from the revival of classical wisdom regarding the value of limited constitutions, the example of the Dutch commonwealth, and Puritan beliefs.62 Hume, ‘Perfect Commonwealth’, p. 232. Ibid. 58  Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill and London, 1992), pp. 586–90. 59  Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory’, p. 74. 60  Hume, History, VI, 153. 61  Ibid., V, 559. 62  Ibid., 18–19, 387, 558–9. Miller, ‘Hume on Liberty’, pp. 85–6. 56  57 

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Hume observed that the appearance of the term ‘civil liberty’ or ‘civil constitution’ in histories of England had occurred only recently, starting from ‘the Restoration, at least since the Revolution’.63 According to Tim Harris, the Restoration of 1660 and the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81 had prompted the propertied classes to call for institutional safeguards to their ‘lives, liberties and estates’.64 The fact that the coinage of the term ‘civil liberty’ appeared only after the Civil War implied that the constitutional struggle was, at its very beginning, driven by a nascent ‘jealousy of liberty’. It was not until some decades later that this jealousy was elucidated and rationalised in English historiography. In light of this, Hume drew attention to the middling rank’s call for the safety of property and life, as well as the Puritans’ intention to alter the fundamental basis of the established Church. He observed that these calls for the safety of property and life were made as far back as the 1604 parliament, just a year after James I ascended the throne. At this time, ‘the jealousy of Liberty, though rouzed, was not yet thoroughly enlightened’.65 Classical doctrines furnished an important source of inspiration: ‘a familiar acquaintance with the precious remains of antiquity excited in every generous breast a passion for a limited constitution, and begat an emulation of those manly virtues, which the Greek and Roman authors, by such animating examples, as well as pathetic expressions, recommend to us’.66 The ideal of liberty – Libertas – was later replaced by the idea of the social contract, according to which monarchical authority was conferred as the legal guardian of the subject’s life and property. Hume noted that it was through the hands of ‘the puritanical party’ that the idea of contract ‘began to be promulgated’.67 He suggested that the struggle between the puritanical party and the Church party was intertwined with the struggle between the Commons and the Crown. The ‘engine of religion, which with so little necessity was introduced into politics, falling under more fortunate management, was played with the most terrible success against him [sc. Charles I]’.68 The debate on ‘original contract’ and ‘passive obedience’ was mainly concerned with the sovereign–subject relationship. For the Stuarts, it was in the person of the sovereign prince that ‘all legal power [was] to be centred, by a hereditary and a divine right’; moreover, ‘passive obedience was there recommended in its full extent, the whole authority of the state was represented as belonging to the king alone, and all limitations of law and a constitution were rejected as seditious and impious’.69 In practice, the 63  64  65  66  67  68  69 

Hume, History, IV, 368, footnote g. Harris, ‘‘Lives, Liberties and Estates’’, pp. 217–41. Hume, History, V, 550, note [B]. Ibid., 18–19. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 19, 177. 149

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Stuart government had inherited from the Tudors a system in which the king acted as the chief magistrate (advised by privy counsellors) answerable to Parliament.70 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, had expressed this view in detail when he argued that England’s monarchy was based on a conciliar system responsible for providing counsel to the sovereign on matters of state, and that Parliament merely granted taxes to the government. For Hume, Clarendon’s view was germane to the social and political contexts in which it was expressed. However, England’s government was continually evolving because the gentry-led Commons had successfully consolidated parliamentary privilege at the expense of royal prerogatives. With the development of two entirely different views regarding the English government, Hume described the intensifying conflict between Crown and Parliament: ‘if the republican spirit of the commons encreased, beyond all reasonable bounds, the monarchical spirit of the court, this latter, carried to so high a pitch, tended still farther to augment the former. And thus extremes were every where affected, and the just medium was gradually deserted by all men.’71 He argued that moderation was needed on both sides in order to maintain a balanced constitution, and that further authority should be extended to the monarch, whose continuity was instrumental to the maintenance of political order. This stance was originally explicated in his essay ‘Of Passive Obedience’ (1752).72 Notwithstanding the fact that ‘the doctrine of obedience’ was carried ‘to such an extravagant height’ that it had become ‘so pernicious, and so destructive of civil society’, Hume claimed that ‘I shall always incline to their side, who draw the bond of allegiance very close, and consider an infringement of it, as the last refuge in desperate cases, when the public is in the highest danger, from violence and tyranny’.73 Although the power of the Crown had been consolidated during the decline of the nobility and clergy in the Tudor age, Hume argued that this power had been based not on a large possession of ‘money’ or ‘force of arms’, but rather on ‘the opinion of the people, influenced by ancient precedent and example’.74 Unsurprisingly, therefore, monarchical authority suffered deeply from the sudden change of opinion in the first half of the seventeenth century, when the spirit of independence entrenched itself into the nation’s political culture: The same advantage, we may remark, over the people, which the crown formerly reaped from that interval between the fall of the peers and the rise of the commons, was now possessed by the people against the crown, during the continuance of a For the relevant quotations on Clarendon’s view of English government, see W. C. Costin and J. S. Watson, eds, The Law and Working of the Constitution: Documents 1660– 1914 (2 vols, London, 1952 edn), I, 317–23. 71  Hume, History, V, 199. 72  Balog, ‘Scottish Enlightenment and Tradition’, p. 205. 73  Hume, ‘Of Passive Obedience’, Essays, p. 203. 74  Hume, History, V, 128. 70 

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like interval. The sovereign had already lost that independent revenue, by which he could subsist without regular supplies from parliament; and he had not yet acquired the means of influencing those assemblies. The effects of this situation, which commenced with the accession of the house of Stuart, soon rose to a great height, and were more or less propagated throughout all the reigns of that unhappy family.75

Hume wrote that ‘the king [sc. Charles I] was astonished to observe, that a power, exercised by his predecessors almost without interruption, was found, upon trial, to be directly opposite to the clearest law, and supported by few undoubted precedents in courts of judicature’.76 This period witnessed a growing conflict between the metaphysical principle of government authority based on ‘divine right’ and ‘passive obedience’ on the one hand, and the sporadic and loosely expressed desire for independence and freedom on the other. ‘The king’s despotism’, Hume suggested, ‘was more speculative than practical, so the independency of the commons was, at this time, the reverse; and though strongly supported by their present situation as well as disposition, was too new and recent to be as yet founded on systematical principles and opinions.’77 The shortcomings of the Commons’ principles were to be mitigated by a growing intellectual need to justify the legitimacy of political freedom in the wake of the Civil War. Hume acknowledged that the Commons’ demand for the legal protection of liberty and property was to some extent justifiable, and that the Stuarts’ failure to understand changes to the way in which property was distributed in England, as well as changes to social hierarchies, had provoked much unnecessary conflict with Parliament. However, absolute authority, ‘which had been exercised for above a century’, did not emanate from royal births and titles, as the Stuarts had believed; rather, it was based entirely on ‘the prudence and spirit of the monarchs’ and ‘the conjunctures of the times’.78 According to Hume, the early Stuarts’ inability to understand the fundamental basis of their authority, as well as the changing dynamics of society, contributed to the onset of the constitutional crisis in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Repudiating the Stuarts’ belief in passive obedience and divine right as ‘dangerous, if not fatal, to liberty’, he claimed that ‘public liberty must be so precarious under this exorbitant prerogative, as to render an opposition not only excuseable, but laudable, in the people’.79 Nevertheless, Hume argued that the Commons were largely responsible for the increasing tension between themselves and the Crown, and that the Stuarts’ defensive position could to some extent be excused: ‘the fluctuating nature of the constitution, the impatient humour of the people, and the 75  76  77  78  79 

Ibid., 137. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 236. 151

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variety of events … were sufficiently strong in favour of the king to apologize for his following such maxims’.80 Although the Crown’s discretionary power needed to be curbed, he did not believe that it needed to be abolished. He even defended James I’s refusal to give up the power of the High Commission Court: ‘many inconveniences must necessarily result from the abolishing of all discretionary power in every magistrate; and that the laws, were they ever so carefully framed and digested, could not possibly provide against every contingency; much less, where they had not, as yet, attained a sufficient degree of accuracy and refinement’.81 Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between these rival theories of government, they agreed that either the monarchical or the republican aspect of the constitution should predominate over the other. For Hume, however, the English constitution was weakened by this competition for political power, since the monarchical and republican parts of the constitution were invested with their own interests and guiding principles. In Hume’s eyes, civil liberty was linked inextricably to the rule of law, which had been defended vigorously by the ‘republican part of the constitution’ from the Stuart accession onwards. In his earlier essay ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (1742), he maintained that republican governments afforded institutional protections to the life and property of the people: ‘besides that the frequent elections by the people, are a considerable check upon authority; it is impossible, but, in time, the necessity of restraining the magistrates, in order to preserve liberty, must at last appear, and give rise to general laws and statutes’.82 In sharp contrast, the military and barbarian governments that succeeded the Roman Empire had relied exclusively on the ‘discretionary power’ of the magistrate: the people under these governments sought ‘no farther security against mutual violence and injustice, than the choice of some rulers, few or many, in whom they place[d] an implicit confidence, without providing any security, by laws or political institutions, against the violence and injustice of these rulers’.83 Hume’s emphasis on the capacity of a free state to safeguard life and property complemented his view that only the regular execution of law could promote freedom. As discussed in chapter 2, this view was crucial to his account of the progress of modern liberty in Europe, which he conceptualised as a process through which arbitrary government gradually gave way to the centralised administration of justice under the Tudors. In his Stuart History, Hume described the way in which the law had circumscribed the royal prerogative and strengthened civil liberty: ‘the English government, at the accession of the Scottish line, was much more arbitrary, than it is at present; the prerogative less limited, the liberties of the subject 80  81  82  83 

Ibid. Ibid., 44. Hume, ‘‘Rise and Progress of Arts and Sciences’, p. 63. Ibid., p. 61. 152

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less accurately defined and secured’.84 ‘The courts alone of high commission and star-chamber’, he continued, ‘were sufficient to lay the whole kingdom at the mercy of the prince.’85 This situation had forced the Commons into making a choice: ‘either to abandon entirely the privileges of the people, or to secure them by firmer and more precise barriers than the constitution had hitherto provided for them’.86 Supported by the middling rank and the Puritans, the Country party had attracted ‘a set of men of the most uncommon capacity and the largest views’.87 ‘Animated with a warm regard to liberty’, Hume opined, ‘these generous patriots saw with regret an unbounded power exercised by the crown, and were resolved to seize the opportunity, which the king’s necessities offered them, of reducing the prerogative within more reasonable compass.’88 Under the leadership of these patriots, the Commons had fully exploited the desperation of the Crown and successfully used their right to raise taxation as a weapon to undermine royal authority. Since the Crown had defended itself ineffectually, the Commons had been able to make a series of laws through which they shifted the foundation of civil liberty from royal authority to the law.89 They had attacked the exclusive companies and given ‘liberty to the trading part of the nation’.90 Hume contended that the removal of this kind of monopoly – epitomised by the 1624 Bill against monopolies – had marked the beginning of the development of economy and liberty. The resulting boon of civil liberty, he maintained, had disseminated the belief that ‘every subject of England had entire power to dispose of his own actions, provided he did no injury to any of his fellow-subjects; and that no prerogative of the king, no power of any magistrate, nothing but the authority alone of laws, could restrain that unlimited freedom’.91 Furthermore, Hume noted that the Commons had ‘endeavoured to free the landed property from the burthen of wardships, and to remove those remains of the feudal tenures, under which the nation still laboured’.92 Feudal remains, such as ‘wards’, ‘respite of homage’, and ‘the burthen of purveyance’, were then removed incrementally.93 According to Hume, prerogatives such as ‘wardships and purveyance’ had been ‘more or less touched on, every session, during the whole reign of James’.94 They were to be entirely abolished by Hume, History, V, 124. Ibid. 86  Ibid., 160. 87  Ibid. 88  Ibid. 89  Laurence L. Bongie, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (Oxford, 1965), pp. 52–6. 90  Hume, History, V, 20. 91  Ibid., 114. The act is 21 Jas. 1 c. 3. 92  Hume, History, V, 20–1. 93  Ibid., 21. 94  Ibid., 44. 84  85 

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the republican parliament, and ‘a compensation for the emoluments of these prerogatives’, which amounted to ‘a hundred thousand pounds a year’, was later offered to Charles II upon the restoration of the monarchy.95 For Hume, the security of property was instrumental to the notion of civil liberty. According to Whelan, Hume’s argument for liberty from medieval regulations and restrictions anticipated Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ argument, namely that human and material resources are best allocated by the market.96 Alongside the freedom to enjoy one’s property, Hume drew attention to the importance of physical liberty, which signified personal freedom from arbitrary imprisonment. He explained that the freedom from arbitrary imprisonment was first established by the Magna Carta, and later reinforced by the Petition of Right and the Habeas Corpus Act.97 He emphasised that in the Magna Carta only one clause attended to the villeins’ right. In his view, the widespread neglect of commoners’ rights and liberties was consistent with the fact that the Commons, or the representatives of counties and boroughs, did not have an official position in Parliament at that time. This helps us to unpack his claim that the Gothic constitution could not support ‘political or civil liberty’.98 The Commons, although formidable and independent in the eighteenth century, had been politically powerless in the medieval age because of the feudal vassalage to which they were subjected. Therefore, in a feudal society dominated by the great landed interests, namely the Crown and the nobility, one could expect only a limited and informal degree of ‘personal freedom’ through customs and conventions. The law that protected men’s personal safety could not be administered reliably due to the great power of the nobility and the lack of a ‘settled military force’.99 The discretionary power of the Crown was at the time the sole foundation of law and personal liberty. This foundation gradually turned out to be insufficient, and the rise of commerce demanded more extensive support for personal security. Hume maintained that in the Stuart age the Petition of Right and the Habeas Corpus Act had maintained the security of one’s person: ‘the great charter had laid the foundation of this valuable part of liberty; the petition of right had renewed and extended it; but some provisions were still wanting, to render it complete, and prevent all evasion or delay from ministers and judges. The act of habeas corpus … served these purposes.’100 Hume acknowledged that the Habeas Corpus Act had finally established the subject’s right against arbitrary imprisonment ‘in a mixed monarchy’, and Ibid., VI, 159. Frederick G. Whelan, ‘Church Establishments, Liberty & Competition in Religion’, Polity 23 (1990), 155–85. 97  Hume, History, V, 193; VI, 366–7. 98  Ibid., I, 524. 99  Ibid., V, 179. 100  Ibid., VI, 366–7. 95  96 

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that ‘this consideration alone may induce us to prefer our constitution to all others’.101 Whelan has pointed out that, for Smith, the freedom of conscience should also be left to each individual, whereas Hume stopped short of making a similar case. According to Whelan, Hume disagreed with Smith’s argument that the religious sphere could introduce free competition as well. For Hume, this kind of freedom would only bring chaos and danger to the established civil power.102 Will R. Jordan has echoed this view, maintaining that Hume argued for an established religion that supported limited toleration but not full religious liberty.103 A closer examination reveals that Hume, like Smith, was a proponent of toleration and the liberty of conscience. Hume observed that England and the Dutch Republic were the only European states to have exercised the principles of toleration.104 The Dutch, he wrote, ‘began to be more intent on commerce than on orthodoxy; and thought, that the knowledge of useful arts and obedience to the laws formed a good citizen; though attended with errors in subjects, where it is not allowable for human nature to expect any positive truth or certainty’.105 Therefore, the Dutch had been successful in finding the remedy for the natural conflict of religious sects. Hume argued for the same policy in England, since for him, toleration was the only means by which religious zeal could be moderated and a stable political order promoted. As he wrote, ‘an unlimited toleration, after sects have diffused themselves and are strongly rooted, is the only expedient, which can allay their fervor, and make the civil union acquire a superiority above religious distinctions’.106 The Path of Public Liberty Hume’s concept of public liberty means the absence of the discretionary power of the Crown. For him, the abolition of the Crown’s discretionary power had constituted an important step towards the establishment of public liberty. This power had been abolished in 1641, with the removal of the Court of High Commission, the Star Chamber, the Marshal’s Court, the Stannary Courts, the Council of North, and the Council of Wales.107 Since it was through the Star Chamber that ‘the king’s power of binding the people by his proclamation’ had been exercised, the abolition of this body had brought to an end to the exercise of the Crown’s discretionary power.108 The categories 101  102  103  104  105  106  107  108 

Ibid., 367. Ibid., 180–5. Jordan, ‘Religion in the Public Square’, 687–713. Ibid., 699. Hume, History, V, 242. Ibid., VI, 322. Ibid., V, 328–30. Ibid., 330. 155

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of power that the sovereign had possessed included ‘the dispensing power, the power of imprisonment, of exacting loans and benevolence, of pressing and quartering soldiers, of altering the customs, of erecting monopolies’.109 Hume maintained that these powers, ‘if not directly opposite to the principles of all free governments, must, at least, be acknowledged dangerous to freedom in a monarchical constitution, where an eternal jealousy must be preserved against the sovereign, and no discretionary powers must ever be entrusted to him, by which the property or personal liberty of any subject can be affected’.110 In order to explain why the old dispensing power was incompatible with public liberty, Hume offered a fully articulated account of its history in England. ‘In the feudal governments’, he explained, penal statutes were commonly the instrument of the sovereign prince to secure men’s private property and safety, and the prince was also endowed with the dispensing power, as a supplement to penal statutes, to handle cases of ‘exception or indulgence’.111 The security of property was, at the time, more important to subjects than participation in public affairs.112 Thus, the dispensing power had been allowed to operate to ‘its full extent’ from the feudal age to the reign of Charles I.113 Any law with a clause ‘by which the king was disabled from granting a dispensation’ was liable to be dispensed with, and ‘it became an established principle in English jurisprudence, that, though the king could not allow of what was morally unlawful, he could permit what was only prohibited by positive statute’.114 Hume argued that, notwithstanding the constraints placed upon monarchical authority from the Stuart accession onwards, ‘the dispensing power, still remained, or was supposed to remain with the crown; sufficient in an instant to overturn this whole fabric, and to throw down all fences of the constitution’.115 In the wake of the Restoration, this situation raised a further problem: since this authority was not sufficient to enact a law, it would be absurd to suppose that it could repeal a law.116 Moreover, if the Crown were allowed to repeal penal laws, the question in that instance would become: ‘by what principle could even the laws, which define property, be afterwards secured from violation?’117 Hume’s point was that the coexistence of dispensing (and suspending) powers and law-ordained public liberty had provoked disputes throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century. A further complication arose when civil and public liberty diverged. Hume noted that England’s law and constitution required conformity to the 109  110  111  112  113  114  115  116  117 

Ibid., 126. Ibid. Ibid., 472. Ibid. Ibid., 473. Ibid. Ibid., 475. Ibid., 474. Ibid. 156

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established religion, which left no room for ‘general indulgence or toleration’ – an important expression of one’s liberty of conscience.118 The paradox was that the Crown’s suspending power, rather than the law, had facilitated the liberty of conscience. Both Charles II and James II had attempted, but ultimately failed, to enforce toleration through the suspending power. The exercise of the suspending power required the king to issue a declaration and suspend the relevant penal statutes: ‘this was a strain of authority […] quite inconsistent with law and a limited constitution; yet was it supported by many strong precedents in the history of England’.119 The coexistence of the rule of law with the suspending power, although it was rarely exercised, indicated that a clear boundary between liberty and authority did not yet exist: ‘where the exercise of the suspending power was agreeable and useful, the power itself was little questioned: Where the exercise was thought liable to exceptions, men not only opposed it, but proceeded to deny altogether the legality of the prerogative, on which it was founded’.120 This ambiguity was not resolved until the Revolution of 1688, which ‘happily put an end to all these disputes: By means of it, a more uniform edifice was at last erected: The monstrous inconsistence, so visible between the ancient Gothic parts of the fabric and the recent plans of liberty, was fully corrected: And to their mutual felicity, king and people were finally taught to know their proper boundaries’.121 Later on Hume came to regret his optimistic account of the Revolution. Yet even when he wrote the Stuart History, he believed that his task as a historian was to account for this unique event in the hope of addressing a contemporary question: how, if at all, could liberty and authority coexist under the aegis of government? As early as 1740, Hume was aware that republican governments tended to sacrifice the interests of the state for the security of individual property and liberty. In a memorandum, Hume wrote that ‘the government of England [was] perhaps the only one, except Holland, wherein the legislature has not force enough to execute the laws without the good-will of the people. This is an irregular kind of check upon the legislature.’122 For him, England had displayed symptoms of this problem since the seventeenth century – a problem that was owed primarily to the tendency of weighing individual right to property over state interest. Moreover, the security of public liberty now depended on the extent to which Parliament was able to prioritise the long-term interests of the state above the immediate interest of certain social and political groups.

Ibid., 481. Ibid. 120  Ibid., 482. 121  Ibid., 475–6. 122  Hume, ‘Extracts from a Collection of Memorandums’, Burton, ed., Life and Correspondence, I, 128. 118  119 

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Hume’s concern over the safety of public liberty led to his increasing conservatism towards ‘civil liberty’. In his Stuart History, he proposed that the ideal of individual property should give way to the long-term interests of the state if the state found itself in serious danger, either from the collapse of its economy or from foreign invasion. This principle underpinned his idea of justice in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals (1752), and would go on to influence Smith’s jurisprudence.123 Hume’s concept of justice does not mean a virtue qua its meritorious motive before action, but mean a virtue to the extent that its consequences benefited society. For him, justice did not entail reciprocal advantage between individual human beings, but rather the fulfilment of society’s practical needs considered as a whole. On this basis, Hume underscored the importance of curbing the zeal for civil liberty, since the latter had caused the Crown’s relationship with Parliament to deteriorate. It had also thrown the constitution into persistent upheaval. Hume argued that the idea of property rights had made it difficult for the state to obtain the fiscal revenue required for its external security. Citing the example of the navy’s successful defence of England’s fishing rights from the ‘herring-busses of the Dutch’ in 1636, he maintained that the navy’s considerable development had depended on ship-money – an indirect tax levied at seaports.124 He noted that, only two years earlier, there had been strong resistance among the people to the government’s proposal to extend shipmoney from seaports to the whole kingdom.125 Hume acknowledged that the subjects’ opposition was partly due to their disapproval of Charles I’s foreign policy, but he stressed the irrationality of their reluctance to pay taxes to support the nation. Hume stressed that ship-money had been levied as an indirect tax since the time of Elizabeth I, and that the resistance to it during the Stuart period had reflected the growing concern with securing individual property from arbitrary taxation. This was also the case with tonnage and poundage, the purpose of which had been to maintain maritime security: The duty of tonnage and poundage, in more ancient times, had been commonly a temporary grant of parliament; but it had been conferred on Henry V and all the succeeding princes, during life, in order to enable them to maintain a naval force for the defence of the kingdom. The necessity of levying this duty had been so apparent, that each king had ever claimed it from the moment of his accession; and the first parliament of each reign had usually by vote conferred on the prince what they found him already in possession of.126

Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 83–98; Winch, Riches and Poverty, pp. 90–123. 124  History, V, 239. 125  Ibid., 235. 126  Ibid., 207.

123 

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The prevailing view, Hume observed, was that ‘though the motive for granting it [sc. tonnage and poundage] had been the enabling of the king to guard the seas; it did not follow, that, because he guarded the seas, he was therefore entitled to this revenue, without farther formality’.127 Clearly, the problem of navy finance largely originated in the seventeenth-century belief that the preservation of English liberty demanded elaborate constraints upon the sovereign.128 According to this belief, individual life and property needed to be protected from the arbitrary infringements of the executive. It was feared that the right to levy arbitrary taxes, once granted to the Crown, would lead inexorably to the collapse of ‘all ancient laws and institutions’, the very cornerstone of ‘national liberty’.129 In Hume’s view, this commitment to liberty had posed the greatest challenge to war finance, which in turn had undermined national security. Furthermore, Hume argued that the excessive zeal to maintain civil liberty had jeopardised public liberty and thus public peace; the competition between the executive and the legislature had made it increasingly difficult to maintain an effective balance between authority and liberty.130 Thus, Hume contended that the main threat to public liberty was the pendulum of English politics swinging between the extremes of republicanism and monarchical absolutism. In his view, an excess of civil liberty could destroy the edifice of mixed government. Hume’s analysis of Habeas Corpus exemplified the problem of public liberty. Like his contemporaries, he attached great significance to the passing of this law: ‘this law seems necessary for the protection of liberty in a mixed monarchy; and as it has not place in any other form of government, this consideration alone may induce us to prefer our present constitution to all others’.131 While Habeas Corpus had helped to advance civil liberty, Hume argued that this law could be legitimately suspended in times of crisis: ‘it must, however, be confessed, that there is some difficulty to reconcile with such extreme liberty the full security and the regular police of a state, especially the police of great cities. It may also be doubted, whether the low state of the public revenue in this period, and of the military power, did not still render some discretionary authority in the crown necessary to the support of government.’132 This passage struck a resonant chord with Montesquieu’s argument in The Spirit of the Laws that certain civil liberties could be suspended in times of Ibid., 210. Pocock, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Debate’, pp. 462–505. 129  Hume, History, V, 247. 130  Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (Dublin, 1776). Hume’s idea of civil liberty would later be developed by Richard Price, who argued that incomplete representation in government, or a limited scope of political liberty, unavoidably undermines civil liberty. Price’s idea is summarised briefly in Winch, Riches and Poverty, p. 145. 131  Hume, History, VI, 367. 132  Ibid. 127  128 

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crisis. Montesquieu had observed that ‘there are, in the states where one sets the most store by liberty, laws that violate it for a single person in order to keep it for all. Such are what are called bills of attainder in England.’133 The nucleus of this argument was that since the government’s political authority formed the basis of the subject’s liberty, it followed that this authority ought to be consolidated in times of conflict. Hume’s refusal to endorse the Whigs’ enthusiasm for Habeas Corpus was consistent with his view that the English constitution had been continually threatened by too much eagerness to protect civil liberty. His reservations about civil liberty were criticised by several French writers in the late eighteenth century, most notably by Mirabeau, Mably, and Brissot.134 Mirabeau wrote that ‘this way of ambiguous speech by the famous writer [sc. Hume] is a little too much for all those who are interested in the government, leaving almost doubt if he approves or disproves this famous law without condition’.135 For him, Hume’s desire to contain the spirit of liberty made him appear as a defender of absolutism. However, Hume warned that monarchical authority must be checked in order to protect civil liberty. He observed that while the post-Restoration Parliament had ‘raised itself to be a regular check and control upon royal power’, the structural conflict between authority and liberty had continued to widen.136 Trusting ‘entirely to the good-will of the king’, Parliament had turned itself into an instrument of monarchical authority at the expense of liberty. In order to counterbalance republicanism, Parliament had adopted exorbitant measures through which public liberty was endangered even further: ‘the recent evils of civil war and usurpation had naturally encreased the spirit of submission to the monarch, and had thrown the nation into that dangerous extreme’.137 Much of the government machinery, such as that for regulating corporations, was retained, but many magistrates who had served under the Cromwellian Commonwealth were expelled.138 The king was empowered to appoint commissioners to replace these magistrates. In addition, the repeal of the Triennial Act exchanged all the securities of parliamentary liberty for a general clause ‘that parliaments should not be interrupted above three years at the most’.139 Hume observed that these measures had left the king too much room for manoeuvre, to the detriment of Parliament. Meanwhile, the authority of the Episcopal Church was re-established by the Act of Uniformity in 1662. For Hume, this was a dangerous move: ‘as the old persecuting laws of Elizabeth still subsisted in their full rigor, and new clauses 133  134  135  136  137  138  139 

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Law, Book XII, Chapter XIX, p. 204. Bongie, Prophet of the Counter-Revolution, pp. 52–6. Quoted in ibid., pp. 52–3. Hume, History, VI, 191. Ibid. Ibid., 174–5. Ibid., 190–1. 160

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of a like nature were now enacted, all the king’s promises of toleration and of indulgence to tender consciences were thereby eluded and broken’.140 Hume saw that, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the disparity between Court and Country interests had widened even further.141 By 1680s, ‘the liberty of the subject, which had been so carefully guarded by the great charter, and by the late law of habeas corpus, was every day violated by their arbitrary and capricious commitments’.142 The Commons had no means other than ‘commitments’ by which they could secure their privileges, and yet the use of ‘commitments’, in lieu of precisely defined laws, required the discretionary support of the monarch. The demand for individual liberty and independence had garnered intellectual support from Locke and various Whig scholars, who had pushed their argument so far as to grant the people the right of resistance.143 Hume never endorsed Locke’s conception of liberty, and argued that excessive liberty would endanger the established regime.144 He acknowledged that the subject’s right of resistance was, to some extent, justifiable: ‘if subjects must never resist, it follows, that every prince, without any effort, policy or violence, is at once rendered absolute and uncontrollable: The sovereign needs only issue an edict, abolishing every authority but his own; and all liberty, from that moment, is in effect annihilated’.145 Nonetheless, ‘to suppose in the sovereign any such invasion of public liberty is entirely unconstitutional; and that therefore expressly to reserve, upon that event, any right of resistance in the subject, must be liable to the same objection’.146 The Revolution of 1688 It was Hume himself who offered the clearest insight into the political sensibility of his History: ‘my views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representation of persons to Tory prejudices’.147 As early as 1741, he endorsed the Court Whig view that the Revolution had laid ‘the firmest foundation of British liberty’ by embedding the republican part of the constitution Ibid., 176. Ibid., 381. 142  Ibid., 385. 143  Harris, ‘‘Lives, Liberties and Estates’’, pp. 217–18; Mark Goldie, ‘Introduction’, John Locke: Two Treatises of Government, ed. M. Goldie (London, 1993), pp. xxiii–xliii. For Locke’s view concerning ‘lives, liberties and estates’, see Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 10, 157, 185, 221, 227. See also John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 204–5. 144  Balog, ‘Scottish Enlightenment and Tradition’, pp. 205–6. 145  Hume, History, VI, 174. 146  Ibid. 147  Mossner, Life of Hume, p. 311. This volume became an instant success and reconciled him with the Whigs, who had accused him of being a Tory historian. 140  141 

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in a mixed monarchy.148 The Revolution, he insisted, had helped to solve the hitherto thorny question of whether sovereignty resided in the king or in Parliament.149 Indeed, the Revolution Settlement had rallied public opinions around a unified political system, which differed fundamentally from that of other European nations because it was neither an absolute monarchy nor a republic.150 Hume’s interpretation of the Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, as two events that had remedying effects on the constitution, led to his unprecedented concept of an English mixed monarchy. He observed that the post-Revolution constitution had formed a unified system, around which the debate had shifted from the nature of sovereignty to the weight of constitutional balance. Nevertheless, the political unity of English government had been based on ‘so extremely delicate and uncertain’ a foundation that party divisions had become almost inevitable.151 After the Revolution, the ideological divisions between the Whigs and the Tories, which had clustered around the normative values of liberty and monarchy, had started to lessen.152 As Trenchard and Gordon wrote: Forget therefore, Gentlemen, the foolish and knavish distinction of High Church and Low Church, Whig and Tory; sounds which continue in your mouths when the meaning of them is gone; and are now only used to set you together by the ears, that rogues may pick your pockets, I own myself to be one of those, whom one side in respect, and the other in contumely, call Whigs; and yet I never discoursed with a candid and sensible Tory, who did not concur with me in opinion, when we explained our intensions.153

Notwithstanding this reconciliation, in light of which the Country Opposition had argued that party distinctions no longer existed, Hume believed that Hume, ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, p. 44. For a review of the debate on the Glorious Revolution during Hume’s time, see H. T. Dickinson, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the ‘Glorious Revolution’’, History 61 (1976), 28–45. 149  For a discussion of Hume’s view on the Glorious Revolution, see Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Propriety, Property, and Prudence: David Hume and the Defence of the Revolution’, Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 302–20. 150  It seems that Montesquieu’s analytical distinction between absolute monarchy and republic prepared the way for Hume’s analysis in this regard. 151  Hume, ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, p. 40. For a discussion of the continued existence of Tory constitutional thoughts, see J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal, 1983), pp. 120–93. 152  Hume, ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, p. 45. H. T. Dickinson, ‘The EighteenthCentury Debate on the Sovereignty of Parliament’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976), 189–210, at 195–201. 153  John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters: or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects (2 vols, Indianapolis, 1995 edn), II, 501, originally published in No. 69, The London Journal, 10 March 1721. 148 

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party politics would continue to influence and even shape Britain’s political landscape. He redefined a Tory as ‘a lover of monarchy, though without abandoning liberty; and a partizan of the family of Stuart’, and a Whig as ‘a lover of liberty though without renouncing monarchy; and a friend to the settlement in the Protestant line’.154 While casting these definitions in dynastic terms, Hume emphasised that there was an overlapping consensus about the nature of sovereignty in the middle years of the eighteenth century. Moreover, he believed that Whigs and Tories were currently distinguished by the issue of who should implement sovereign authority.155 Since both parties had abandoned their previous principles, Hume continued, ‘the settlement of the crown’ became the most important vestigial presence of party divisions.156 With the gradual ascendency of Whig historiography in the first half of the eighteenth century – i.e. after the Revolution settlement of 1688 – it became commonplace to argue that sovereign authority resided in the legislature of king, Lords, and Commons.157 Nonetheless, it remained unclear as to whether the Revolution settlement had played a vital role in the formation and development of English liberty. Under Walpole’s government the position of both camps shifted, since each endorsed the historical position of the opposite side rather than that of its own predecessors.158 Following the Tory historians of the previous century, including Robert Brady, Court Whigs argued that the Revolution had established English liberty as a bulwark against feudal tyranny.159 They contended that the restraints imposed on the monarchy by the Revolution settlement had allowed the Whigs to establish new political institutions, the purpose of which was to maintain liberty and property. On the other hand, Country supporters revived the seventeenth-century Whig idea of Gothic liberty and argued that Germanic institutions had secured English liberty from time immemorial.160 For them, the Revolution did not establish, but merely restored, Gothic liberty after its usurpation by the Stuarts.161 Whereas Brady’s An Historical Treatise of Cities and Burghs (1690) survived in the hands of Court Whigs, Opposition writers cloaked their arguments in the historiography of seventeenth-century Whigs, and thus recounted English history from Revolution ideology. As the authors of The Craftsman Hume, ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, p. 45. Ibid. 156  Ibid. 157  Mark Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94’, The History of Political Thought 1 (1980), 195–236. For a review of the eighteenth-century Whig historiography, see Laird Okie, Augustan Historical Writing: Histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Lanham, New York and London, 1991), pp. 47–113. 158  Targett, ‘Government and Ideology’, 289–317. 159  Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, pp. 128–9. 160  Ibid., p. 179. Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition’, pp. 121–4. 161  Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca, 1992), p. 130. 154  155 

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maintained, ‘nothing was more demonstrable than that the Court-Whigs of this Age are exactly the same kind of Creatures with the Court Tories before the Revolution; that, vice versa, the Body of the present Tories have adopted the Spirit of the old Whigs, etc.’162 Speaking the seventeenth-century language of old Whigs, Country writers heralded the Revolution settlement as the restoration of ancient liberty.163 In contrast to the Court Whigs’ view that the Revolution settlement had established liberty on an entirely new foundation, Country writers reiterated the argument of Whig historians that it had protected England’s ancient liberty from the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts. As Bolingbroke claimed in Remarks on the History of England, ‘this Establishment is founded on the principles of Liberty … It was made by the People of Great Britain, to secure the Possession of their Liberty, as well as their Religion.’164 Paul Rapin de Thoyras, whom Hume had previously admired, provided what turned out to be a paradigmatic Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution.165 In the first half of the eighteenth century, Rapin’s History fuelled debates between the Court and Country parties on the nature of the Revolution.166 According to Rapin, the Revolution had been caused largely by James II’s illegal activities and his subsequent abdication.167 With regard to William III’s title to the Crown, Rapin was emphatic that the people had provided William with a powerful source of political legitimacy. For Rapin, it followed that the meeting of the Convention between 22 January and 23 February 1689 had not been a meeting of Parliament.168 Rather, the Whigs had viewed the Convention as a physical embodiment of the sovereignty of the people, which in turn legitimated their decision to confer the Crown on William.169 Hume exhibited a clear contempt for the Revolution ideology in Whig historiography when he referred to works of Whig authors ‘such as Rapin Quoted in Langford, The Excise Crisis, p. 13. The Craftsman (6 October 1733). Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, pp. 127–36. 164  Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, letter XXIV, p. 318. 165  Rapin, The History of England as well Ecclesiastical as Civil (15 vols, London, 1726–31), XV, 103–287. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Our First Whig Historian: Paul de Rapin-Thoyras’, in his From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, 1992), pp. 249–65. In January 1753, Hume wrote to John Clephane that ‘even Rapin during this latter period [sc. from the Stuart accession] is extremely deficient’; five months later, he wrote to James Oswald that ‘Rapin, whom I had an esteem for, is totally despicable.’ For Hume’s argument against Rapin, see M. G. Sullivan, ‘Rapin, Hume and the Identity of the Historian in Eighteenth Century England’, History of European Ideas 28 (2002), 145–62. 166  Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, pp. 47–73. The arguments between Court and Country journals on Rapin’s history were in Daily Gazetteer 64 (11 September 1735), The Craftsman 497 (10 January 1736), The Craftsman 500 (31 January 1736). Letters, I, 170, 179. 167  Rapin, History, XV, 281–7. 168  Ibid. Forbes, Philosophical Politics, pp. 233–40. 169  Forbes, Philosophical Politics, p. 233. 162  163 

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Thoyras, Locke, Sidney, Hoadley, &c’ as ‘compositions the most despicable’.170 He went as far as to provide a point-by-point refutation of Rapin’s analysis of the Revolution.171 In Hume’s eyes, James II neither effected nor intended changes to the constitution; rather, his main weakness as a sovereign had been a lack of ‘due regard and affection to the religion and constitution of his country’.172 While this weakness was indeed ‘dangerous and pernicious’, Hume pointed out that the Revolution represented the culmination of a century-long struggle between the two constituent parts of the constitution: The revolution forms a new epoch in the constitution; and was probably attended with consequences more advantageous to the people, than barely freeing them from an exceptionable administration. By deciding many important questions in favour of liberty, and still more, by that great precedent of deposing one king, and establishing a new family, it gave such an ascendant to popular principles, as has put the nature of the English constitution beyond all controversy.173

One significant implication of this account was that the Revolution settlement had finally resolved the conflict between the executive and the legislature by demarcating their respective boundaries. The Revolution had embedded the principle of liberty into the constitution itself: ‘no prerogative of the king, no power of any magistrate, nothing but the authority alone of laws, could restrain that unlimited freedom’.174 Moreover, ‘the full prosecution of this noble principle into all its natural consequences, has at last, through many contests, produced that singular and happy government, which we enjoy at present’.175 Hume’s encomiastic analysis of civil liberty in England may well resemble the ‘vulgar Whiggism’ to which Forbes has drawn attention.176 However, this vulgar Whiggism should not eclipse what was at stake for Hume: that this particular brand of liberty was unique to England and its adherence to the rule of law. As Hume put it, the Revolution settlement had established ‘if not the best system of government, [sc. then] at least the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind’.177 Presumably, ‘the best system of government’ would contain a buffer within itself that could prevent the Hume, History, VI, 533. See Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Locke, Lockean Ideas, and the Glorious Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990), 531–48. 171  Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Hume as a Historian’, David Hume, a Symposium, ed. D. F. Pears (London, 1963), p. 90. Trevor-Roper maintained that Hume’s history was directed against Rapin’s Whig history, as the latter was ‘the official historian of his triumphant patrons, the English Whigs’. 172  Hume, History, VI, 520. For John Locke’s development of a different idea in this respect, see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke’s Circle and James II’, Historical Journal 35 (1992), 557–86. 173  Hume, History, VI, 531. 174  Ibid., V, 114. 175  Ibid. 176  Forbes, Philosophical Politics, pp. 125–92. 177  Hume, History, VI, 531. 170 

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monarchical and republican parts of the constitution from clashing. However, Hume claimed that a buffer such as this, which both he and Montesquieu located in the moderating power of the nobility, had already been lost in the course of the Civil War. Hume suggested that the Revolution had prepared the way for what later became the predominant idea of English government: the sovereign prince’s ministry took executive actions in the light of the decisions made by Parliament (mainly the Commons). According to Hume, the historical significance of the Revolution was twofold: first, it united two previously intransigent political forces; and, secondly, it defined clear boundaries for each of those forces. The Revolution therefore signified the triumph of England’s system of mixed monarchy, through which the government had been able to steer a steady course. It was more a triumph of monarchy than a triumph of liberty because it removed a great threat to the stability of monarchical government. Hume denounced as fallacious the Whigs’ claim that the original contract constituted the philosophical foundation of English government.178 As early as 1745, in A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh he wrote that ‘he [sc. Hume himself] does not maintain that Men ly [sic] under no Obligation to observe Contracts, independent of Society; but only, that they never would have formed Contracts, and even would not have understood the Meaning of them, independent of Society’.179 Hume observed that nearly all of the parties to the Settlement had agreed upon the existence of an original contract, which James II had broken. This view went unchallenged in the first half of the eighteenth century.180 Indeed, this victory for Whig principles was, for Hume, the only downside to the Revolution.181 In his own words, ‘this event, which, in some particulars, has been advantageous to the state, has proved destructive to the truth of history, and has established many gross falsehoods, which it is unaccountable how any civilized nation could have embraced with regard to its domestic occurrences’.182 Hume maintained that the most important consequence of the Revolution had involved amending the line of succession, the purpose of which was to limit the authority of the Crown and make it possible to strike a constitutional balance. This, he insisted, had not undermined the nature of the English government or breached the political obligation of obedience. In his essay ‘Of the Original Contract’ (1752), Hume had argued thus: David Gauthier, ‘Hume, Contractarian’, Philosophical Review 88 (1979), 3–38. Gauthier disputed the common view that Hume’s philosophical position was fundamentally different from the contractarians’. 179  Hume, A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1745), p. 32. 180  Hume, History, VI, 526. 181  For a discussion of the role of Whig principles in English politics after the Glorious Revolution, see J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 102–27. 182  Hume, History, VI, 533.

178 

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Let not the establishment at the Revolution deceive us, or make us so much in love with a philosophical origin to government, as to imagine all others monstrous and irregular … It was only the succession, and that only in the regal part of the government, which was then changed. And it was only the majority of seven hundred, who determined that change for near ten millions. Was it not justly supposed to be, from that moment, decided, and every man punished, who refused to submit to the new sovereign?183

The last line held the key to Hume’s suggestion of the inviolable principle of the political obligation of obedience. Hume cast doubt on the Whigs’ claim of the unique character of the Convention of 1689, and maintained that this convention was only a parliament. He saw that calling for this convention was the Prince of Orange’s stratagem to obtain a more legitimate title to the Crown. From Hume’s perspective, the debates about whether James II had abdicated or deserted his position amounted to an extension of old Whig–Tory feuds, which were no longer relevant to contemporary British politics. He maintained that the Revolution had diluted differences in party principles and ideologies.184 He claimed that ‘both parties, while they warped their principles from regard to their antagonists, and from prudential considerations, lost the praise of consistence and uniformity’.185 For Hume, the novelty of the Revolution was not confined to the domain of political theory. Rather, it constituted a historical example of centralised government, the likes of which could not be found at any other time in history. Moreover, he located the ultimate cause of the seventeenth-century constitutional crisis in the rivalry between the monarchical and the republican components of sovereign power. This meant that the lines of division had been clearly demarcated after the Revolution of 1688. This view of the Revolution appeased many Whigs. Indeed, Catharine Macaulay, a Whig historian of the time, commented that ‘Mr Hume, who is assiduously careful not to offend in any point of popular recommendation, gives the prince of Orange great credit for the not using any undue influence, or the not putting any apparent constraint on the convention […]’.186 A decade after the publication of the History, Hume identified republicanism as the principal threat to Britain’s system of government. He expressed regret at his claim in the Stuart History that the English enjoyed ‘if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind’.187 In a letter to his friend Gilbert Elliot on 12 March 1763, he lamented that ‘as I began the History with these two Hume, ‘Of the Original Contract’, Essays, p. 191. Ibid. 185  Ibid. 186  Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution (8 vols, London, 1763–83 edn), VIII, 329. 187  Hume, History, VI, 531. 183  184 

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Reigns [sc. under James I and Charles I], I now find that they, above all the rest, have been corrupted with Whig Rancour, and that I really deserv’d the Name of a party Writer, and boasted without any Foundation of my Impartiality’.188 Subsequent emendations of the History reflected his increasingly critical attitude towards Whig ideology and republicanism. In Forbes’s view, Hume’s early intoxication with the Revolution ideology stemmed from a confusion regarding his own historical vision and the contemporary Whig interpretation of history.189 Wilkes and Liberty Hume’s conservatism increased with age. His chief purpose in his political essays and History was to promote the virtue of moderation and correct prevailing misconceptions. However, this neutrality was tempered in subsequent revisions of the History and his earlier essays. He distanced himself gradually from the principles of the Whigs and endorsed Toryism instead. He came to believe that the contagion of republicanism had imbalanced the constitution that he sought to preserve. Indeed, Hume’s misgivings about republicanism were soon confirmed. On 23 April 1763, John Wilkes published an article in The North Briton (number 45), in which he championed ‘a spirit of liberty’ against the oppressions of the Crown and Parliament.190 ‘Number 45’ quickly became a popular slogan for liberty as well as for violent protests by the general public. In March, Hume wrote to Gilbert Elliot that he intended to get rid of ‘the plaguy prejudices of Whiggism’.191 Six years later, at the height of the Wilkes and Liberty riots, he wrote to another friend, Hugh Blair, that the ‘Madness about Wilkes … exceeds the Absurdity of Titus Oates and the popish Plot; and is so much more disgraceful to the Nation’.192 In 1771, Hume found it ‘a pleasure’ to see that ‘the Wilkites and the Bill of Rights-men are fallen into total and deserved Contempt’.193 To this, he added that ‘their Noise is more troublesome and odious than all the Cannon that will be fired on the Atlantic’.194 New Letters, p. 70. Quoted in Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago and London, 1998), p. 257. New Letters, p. 69. 190  For brief reviews of the context of this event and its implications, see Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics, pp. 163–200, and Wilson, The Sense of the People, pp. 206–36. 191  Hume’s letter to Gilbert Elliot on 12 March 1763, Letters, I, 379. For a detailed analysis of Hume’s views on the Wilkes and Liberty affair, see Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy, pp. 256–89. See also David Raynor, ‘Hume on Wilkes and Liberty: Two Possible Contributions to The London Chronicle’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 13 (1980), 365–76. 192  Hume’s letter to Hugh Blair on 28 March 1769, Letters, II, 197. 193  Hume’s letter to William Strahan on 21 January 1771, Letters, II, 235. 194  Ibid. 188  189 

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From Hume’s perspective, the riots – fuelled by Wilkes – were more dangerous than America’s rebellions because they could precipitate a total collapse of England’s government.195 In reaction to Lord North’s ‘Insolence to the House of Bourbon’ and ‘Timidity towards the London Mob’, Hume exhibited concern for the diminishing powers of government: ‘the right of displacing the Judges was given up; General Warrants are lost; the right of Expulsion the same; all the co-ercive Powers of the House of Commons abandon’d; all Laws against Libels annihilated; the Authority of Government impair’d by the Impunity granted to the Insolence of Beckford, Crosby, and the common Council: the revenue of the civil List diminished’.196 Above all, Hume’s concern was that escalating public debt would bring the state to ‘inevitable Ruin, and with a Certainty which is even beyond geometrical, because it is arithmetical’.197 Although the Court party (or ‘the King’s Friends’), led by the Prime Minister, Lord North, moved quickly to subdue the riots, Hume observed that it was merely a ‘temporary and imperfect’ victory because the government lacked the brute force required to eradicate the opposition.198 As he explained, ‘the Misfortune is, that this Liberty can scarcely be retrench’d without Danger of being entirely lost; at least, the fatal Effects of Licentiousness must first be made palpable, by some extreme Mischief, resulting from it’.199 Thus, Hume undermined his earlier praise for the liberty of the press with the claim that ‘it must however be allowed, that the unbounded liberty of the press, though it be difficult, perhaps impossible, to propose a suitable remedy for it, is one of the evils, attending those mixt forms of government’.200 The king, he argued, should first ‘punish those insolent Rascals in London and Middlessex, who daily insult him and the whole Legislature, before he think of America’.201 Hume was now prepared to accept the ‘common opinion’, which he had earlier refuted in his essay ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (1752), that ‘no large state, such as France or Great Britain, could ever be modelled into a commonwealth, but that such a form of government can only take place in a city or small territory’.202 In a letter to his nephew David Hume the Younger, he implicitly admitted his previous mistake of not taking into account Montesquieu’s argument about the relationship between the size of a country For a discussion of Hume’s critique of the false philosophy underlying the Wilkes and Liberty affair, see Donald W. Livingston, ‘Hume’s Historical Conception of Liberty’, Liberty in Hume’s History of England, ed. N. Capaldi and D. W. Livingston (Dordrecht and Boston, 1990), pp. 144–52. 196  Hume’s letter to William Strahan on 25 June 1771, Letters, II, 244–5. 197  Ibid, 245. 198  Hume’s letter to Gilbert Elliot of Minto on 21 February 1770, Letters, II, 216. 199  Ibid. 200  Hume, ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’, Essays, p. 3. 201  Letters, II, 303. 202  Hume, ‘Perfect Commonwealth’, p. 232. 195 

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and the form of its government.203 Although Hume remained convinced that ‘the Republican Form of Government’ was ‘by far the best’ in both ancient and modern times, he was now ready to concede that ‘Republicanism is only fitted for a small State: and any Attempt towards it can in our Country, produce only Anarchy, which is the immediate Forerunner of Despotism’.204 Reiterating the lesson drawn from the constitutional struggle of the seventeenth century, he opined that ‘such Fools are they, who perpetually cry out Liberty: [and think to] augment it, by shaking off the Monarchy’.205 The true principle of government – as he had claimed throughout his life – was that the legitimacy of all governments rested on the mere fact of their establishment. With this emphasis on the ultimate force of convention in political life, he returned once again to a theme that he had explored almost twenty years earlier in a letter to Montesquieu: ‘Harrington establishing his Oceana in opposition to the English Constitution is like the blind Men who built Chalcedon on the opposite [shore] to the Seat of Byzantium.’206

203  204  205  206 

Hume’s letter to David Hume the Younger on 8 December 1775, Letters, II, 306. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 307. 170

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I was assailed by one Cry of Reproach, Disapprobation, and even Detestation: English, Scotch, and Irish; Whig and Tory; Churchman and Sectary, Free-thinker and Religionist; Patriot and Courtier united in their Rage against the Man, who had presumed to shed a generous Tear for the Fate of Charles I, and the Earl of Strafford: And after the first Ebullitions of this Fury were over, what was still more mortifying, the Book [sc. The History of Great Britain, under the House of Stuart: Containing the Reign of James I and Charles I] seemed to sink into Oblivion. Hume, ‘My Own Life’, 1776

Hume’s political stance has perplexed generations of scholars. As J. Y. T. Greig put it, ‘how could the same man, and at the same time, be both Edmund Burke and George III? How could he defend the colonists in North America for their resistance to the arbitrary power of king, ministers, and a venal House of Commons and yet attack the old Whigs, Patriots, and Wilkites, and the democratic radicals of every sort for trying to resist the same agencies at home?’1 This paradox captures the difficulty of situating Hume’s History within the Whig–Tory dichotomy of contemporary historiography in the eighteenth century. Although Hume straddled the ideological principles of both the Whigs and the Tories, he was not merely a mediator between the two. His underlying concern was, above all, to provide a coherent and impartial historical narrative, which had been absent until and throughout his time. As a historian of the state, Hume observed that eighteenth-century Britain faced two fundamentally different problems. In terms of foreign policy, he came to acknowledge the potential dangers of keeping the American and West Indian colonies within Britain’s orbit. This was shown clearly in a letter to William Mure of Caldwell in 1775, in which Hume asserted that ‘I am an American in my Principles, and wish we would let them alone to

1 

Quoted in Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy, p. 258.

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govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.’2 As a political economist, he warned that the political arithmetic of colonisation was incompatible with Britain’s form of mixed government, and that it would therefore be impossible to transpose the politics of ancient commercial empires onto modern Britain.3 In terms of domestic politics, Hume’s pessimistic view about imperial politics went hand-in-hand with his argument for increased governmental authority at home. For him, ‘Patriots’ had obtained too much freedom. The diminishing hold of the executive power had made it increasingly difficult to sustain economic and political liberty. That is to say, despotism would be the natural outcome should liberty overextend itself. On these grounds, Hume raised the spectre of losing liberty entirely and argued that the deployment of the ‘spirit of liberty’ must take place under certain conditions and with moderation. Both cases, foreign and domestic, exhibit Hume’s view of Britain’s political prospects. Since commercial interests were already integral to British politics, the state’s only course of action was to opt for stability in both international and domestic politics. Hume’s anxiety over Britain’s future was closely intertwined with his analysis of the emergence of England’s mixed government from the feudal to the commercial age. Indeed, his attempt to retain political neutrality has led several historians to believe – wrongly – that he was preoccupied with the ongoing ideological exchanges between Whigs and Tories. Hume’s History should not be read as a legitimation of Tory principles.4 It would be wrong to perceive him as constructing a history of England out of party ideologies, since he adopted a critical stance to all ideological interpretations of history. Hume’s originality as a historian is one of the focuses of this book. He described the way in which the rise of commerce had freed men from feudal duties and enabled them to interact with each other on a more equal basis. As wealth was redistributed from large landowners (notably the Crown and the nobility) to the gentry, the new balance of property quickly brought the principles of monarchical authority and parliamentary liberty into Letters, II, 303. For a discussion of Hume’s influence on American independence, see John M. Werner, ‘David Hume and America’, Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972), 439–56; Mark Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester, NY, 2005), pp. 82–153. 3  For a discussion of the idea of empire in the age of Walpole, see Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 170–98. 4  Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Was Hume a Tory Historian? Facts and Reconsiderations’, Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941), 225–36; Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘An Apology for David Hume, Historian’, PMLA 56 (1941), 657–90; Laird Okie, ‘Ideology and Partiality in David Hume’s History of England’, Hume Studies 11 (1985), 1–32. Both Mossner and Okie have challenged the view of Hume as a Tory historian. For the earlier reception of Hume’s History, see James Fieser, ‘The Eighteenth-Century British Reviews of Hume’s Writings’, Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996), 645–57. 2 

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conflict. One of Hume’s objectives in his History was to emphasise the need to accommodate authority and liberty; both, he argued, were intrinsically linked to England’s role as a maritime trading power. Therefore, his History sought to alert its eighteenth-century audience to the danger of allowing either one – authority or liberty – to dominate. In Hume’s view, an adherence to any particular party principle could undermine Britain’s capacity to defend its commercial power and freedom amidst the European competition for power. Furthermore, Hume’s History could be reappraised by focusing on the role of economics in the making of his modern history. In order to fully understand and appreciate his political arguments in the History, one has to grasp his analysis of the development of a market-generated society. Indeed, his arguments were often couched in terms of political economy. Seen through the eyes of subsequent economists, Hume, like his friend Adam Smith, anticipated the emergence of the market economy. Hume’s views as a political economist, most notably those concerning the relationship between town and country, were crucial to his unique historical understanding of modern politics. Hume saw that commerce had shaped not only the contours of English politics, but also power relations within the European state system. This view has far-reaching implications for the way in which we ought to interpret his analysis of England’s future in the context of European geopolitics. Hume sought to deploy a new language of impartiality amidst bitter party conflicts, competing interests, religious disagreements, and, above all, conflicting historical narratives. It is only by examining his view of the pivotal role of commerce in the evolution of English government that we can begin to understand his argument that policy ought to be compatible with, and even tailored to, the demand for increasing commercialisation. Hume did not see England’s government as a self-sustaining system replete with organising principles. Rather, he saw it as an institution that required periodical amendment in order to meet the constantly changing demands of economics and society. The European setting in which Hume described England’s path towards commercial modernity has been highlighted. But two points in particular deserve additional emphasis. The first is that Hume mapped the evolution of English government onto the turbulent geopolitical contexts of early modern European history. He drew attention to the discovery of the New World and the subsequent colonisation of America and the West Indies; to the slave trade and the continuous flow of gold and silver; and, above all, to the contest for resources and power in Europe and the colonies. The European connection, which Hume wove into his history of England, not only involved short-term arrangements such as treaties, dynastic marriages, and wars, but also long-term historical changes in various parts of socio-economic life. He underlined the fact that English liberty could 173

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not have come into existence without European civilisation. The majority of his contemporaries and followers overlooked this point.5 Furthermore, the European context helped Hume to investigate the connection between commerce and the power of the state. While he embraced the expansion of the market economy, he was concerned about the government’s capacity to circumvent the dangers posed by fast-growing commercial interests. England’s mixed government, he contended, had grown complacent about its ability to protect individual life and property. Although the first volume of Hume’s History was received somewhat indifferently, the ensuing volumes were so popular that he became widely renowned as a historian as opposed to a political theorist.6 Indeed, the sheer scope of the History, along with its emphasis on manners as the foundation of social relationships, greatly influenced the next generation of British historians, including Catharine Macaulay and Robert Henry.7 Many eighteenthcentury readers appreciated Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution (1763–83) because it constituted an important refutation of Hume’s work.8 Notwithstanding Macaulay’s own political motivations, she borrowed heavily from Hume’s approach by integrating economic and social factors into an ‘Enlightenment history of liberty’.9 Hume’s intellectual legacy also helped to shape the American constitution; C. H. Firth, ‘The Development of the Study of Seventeenth-Century History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1913), 41. 6  For a discussion of the role of booksellers in the growing fame of Hume as a historian, see Ernest Campbell Mossner and Harry Ranson, ‘Hume and the “Conspiracy of the Booksellers”: The Publication and Early Fortunes of The History of England’, Studies in English 29 (1950), 162–82. Edmund Burke, ‘An Essay towards an Abridgement of the English History in Three Books’, Works, V, 441–727. Partly due to the publication of Hume’s History, Burke did not finish his history. 7  Firth, ‘The Development of the Study’, 25–40. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 3–59. For a discussion of Hume’s influence on historiography, see Francis Palgrave, ‘Hume and his Influence upon History’, The Collected Historical Works of Sir Francis Palgrave, ed. R. H. Inglis Palgrave (10 vols, Cambridge, 1919–22), IX, 535–98. Robert Henry, History of Great Britain from the Invasion by the Romans under Julius Caesar (1771–93). For a discussion of Hume’s influence on his protégé, Robert Henry, see Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Hume as Literary Patron: A Suppressed Review of Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain, 1773’, Modern Philology 39 (1942), 361–82. 8  Lucy Littlefield, ‘The Political Thought of Catharine Macaulay’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011), p. 50. See also the exchanges between Hume and Macaulay, European Magazine 4 (1783), p. 331–2. 9  Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 155–9. See also Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman’, Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. S. Knott and B. Taylor (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 118–19; Karen Green, ‘Will the Real Enlightenment Historian Please Stand Up? Catharine Macaulay versus David Hume’, Hume and the Enlightenment, ed. C. Taylor and S. Buckle (London, 2011), pp. 39–51. Green’s article is a direct response to Stephen Buckle, ‘Hume and the Enlightenment’, Hume and the Enlightenment, ed. C. Taylor and S. Buckle (London, 2011), pp. 13–37. 5 

174

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indeed, his work was well known to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.10 Building an accurate history of England on a concrete analysis of commercial society, Hume developed a comprehensive account of the evolution of English society and government. For this reason, Hume’s History remains to this day an ebullient and ground-breaking endorsement of commercial society, the origins and development of which preoccupied him for much of his intellectual career.

For the reception of Hume’s History in America from the mid eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century, see Mark G. Spencer, ed., Hume’s Reception in Early America (2 vols, Bristol, 2002). See also Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), pp. 37, 504; Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: the Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago and London, 1988), pp. 37, 47, 110–11. 10 

175

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Index NOTE: Works by David Hume (DH) appear directly under title; works by others under author’s name. Adams, John, 175 Addison, Joseph, 2 agriculture: labour and productivity, 19; feudal, 23–4; and enclosure, 28, 49–50; and promotion and decay of tillage, 35, 50; and free trade, 37–8; knowledge boosted by maritime trade, 121 Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of (1668), 134 Alexander VI, Pope, 121 America: English trade with, 10; mining (gold and silver), 30; English colonies, 92, 116–17, 119–20, 125, 171; FrancoBritish rivalry in, 113–14, 120, 124; European presence and disputes in, 122–3, 173; colonies achieve independence, 123; rebellions, 169; see also United States of America American War of Independence: and corn prices, 38 Anglo-Dutch wars: second (1664–67), 134; third (1672–74), 133, 135 annates, 65 Anne, Queen of Great Britain, 83, 116 Annual Register, The, 112–13 Appeals, Act of (1532), 65 aristocracy: and rise of gentry class, 38–9; strengthening, 147; see also nobility Aristotle, 145 Armitage, David, 111 army: and military service, 29; and monetary wealth, 36; payment for disbandment, 101 arts: stimulate demand for quality commodities, 30; improvements and increase, 36, 52–3 Attendance of War, Act of (1495), 53 Augsburg alliance, 130

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Austria: loss of Silesia, 81; alliance with Britain, 114–15 authority: Hume endorses, 3, 9; sovereign’s, 45; effect of opinion on, 61; and liberty, 157 Bacon, Francis, 42, 51, 53, 56; The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seuenth, 53–4 Bank of England: stock boom, 90 bankruptcy, voluntary: by state, 89, 91, 104, 116 Baumstark, Moritz, 2 Beckford, William, 169 Bergen-op-Zoom, 82 Berry, Chris, 14 Bill of Rights-men, 168 Blair, Hugh, 62, 168 blue water policy, 129 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st Viscount: praises Elizabeth, 70; exile, 83; founds The Craftsman, 83; proposes ‘patriot king’, 90; free trade policy, 111–12; opposes Walpole’s policies, 111; concern over public debt, 115; foreign policy, 116; on civil liberty, 141; proposals for constitutional reforms, 146; Remarks on the History of England, 164 boroughs: instituted, 26–7 borrowing see debt Boufflers, Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte, Countess de, 5 Bourbon dynasty, 127–8 Brady, Robert: An Historical Treatise of Cities, and Burghs or Boroughs, 26–7, 163 Brewer, John, 80, 97–8 Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre, 160 Britain see England; Scotland

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INDEX British Linen Company, 110 Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of, 119 Camden, William, 37 Canadian Bills, 104 canon law, 67 Carswell, John, 90 Catherine of Aragon, Queen of Henry VIII, 64 Catholicism: and control, 20; and English European policy, 129 cattle: price of, 35 Cautionary Towns (Dutch Republic), 133 Charles I, King of England: assumes new claims of Crown, 32–3; uses writs to levy ship-money, 96, 132; receives excise revenues, 100; uncertain foreign policy, 126–9, 158; power limited by law, 151, 156 Charles II, King of England: suspends Navigation Acts, 33; and gentry’s engaging in commerce, 34; financial administration, 101; profligacy, 102; corporation of London submits to over appointment of magistrates, 103; revives East India Company charter, 118; marriage to Portuguese, 123; sells Dunkirk to France, 128; relations with Parliament, 129; attachment to France, 130, 135–6; and Cabal’s proposing French style of monarchy, 131; and religion, 149; receives compensation for loss of prerogatives, 154; and suspending powers, 157 chartered companies: low taxes, 97; Davenant criticises, 117; develop maritime infrastructure, 118 Child, Josiah: A New Discourse of Trade, 117 Church (Catholic): land transferred to, 25; as obstacle to justice and religious freedom, 64; power undermined, 65; sources of revenue, 65; abolished in England, 67; and power of canon law, 67 Church of England: monarch as supreme head, 67–8; surrenders right to tax clergy, 93; Puritan challenge to, 149; authority re-established by Act of Uniformity, 160 Cicero, 107, 145 Civil List: enlarged under Walpole, 80, 82–5, 145; and British fiscal system, 86 Civil War, English: origins, 19; and acquisition of property by gentry, 39; and

royal expenses, 93; excises levied, 100; and political freedom, 151 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of, 101–2, 150 Clephane, John, 1 clergy: and authority, 64–5; find new occupations after monasteries dissolved, 66; moderating powers reduced, 140; see also Church (Catholic); Church of England Coke, Edward, 74 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 98, 120 colonies: English, 8, 10, 33, 80, 92, 113–14, 116–17, 119, 124–5; established, 33; and England’s role in Europe, 109, 116; as economic asset, 118; aid development of strong navy, 119; in England’s grand strategy, 120; and papal authority, 121; independence, 123; and foreign politics, 128, 136 Columbus, Christopher, 49 commerce (trade): transforms society and government, 8–9, 13–16, 18–19, 36, 47; as source of national wealth, 32; and emergence of middle class, 39, 42; rise under Tudors, 46; affects royal finances, 79; helps pay war debts, 86; effect of taxation on, 99; transoceanic, 117; see also maritime trade commodities: money supply and prices, 30; as new form of property, 49 Commons, House of: origins and representation, 27; increase in power, 39, 73; grants freedom to mercantile and landed interests, 41; desire for innovation, 42; seats, 42; decides amount of grants, 73; tax–raising, 73–4, 92, 96, 153; effect on foreign policy, 82; relations with Crown, 85, 95; suspicion of Court power, 144; Hume proposes plutocratic composition, 147; extends parliamentary privilege, 150; challenge to Charles I, 151; privileges secured by ‘commitments’, 161; see also Parliament commonwealths, 16, 148, 169 Compton, Sir Spencer, 82 Condottieri (Italy), 29 conscience, liberty of, 155 constitution: conflicts over, 9, 38; and growth of liberty, 43; and Commons’ encroaching on sovereign power, 81; and

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INDEX Parliament-Crown balance, 84–5, 152, 167; and voluntary bankruptcy, 89; effect of commercialisation on, 95; and powers of magistrates, 99; and rule of law, 140; origins, 143, 146; resistance to corruption, 145; Bolingbroke proposes reforms, 146; seventeenth century crises, 148; and abolition of feudal restrictions, 155; effect of Revolution and Hanoverian Succession on, 162 contracts, 166 Convention (Parliament, 1689), 164, 167 corn: prices, 35, 38; exports restricted, 37–8, 50 Council of North: abolished, 155 Council of Wales: abolished, 155 Counter Reformation, 129–30 Country party (Opposition), 18–19, 82, 84–5, 111, 141, 153, 161–2 Country ‘Patriots’, 49 Court of High Commission, 65, 69, 139, 152–3, 155 Court Marshal, 65, 69; abolished, 155 Court party: religious zeal, 126–7; rivalry with Country party, 141, 161 Court Tories, 164 Court Whigs, 163–4 Craftsman, The (journal), 83, 163 credit, public, 88–9, 104, 106, 116 Cromwell, Oliver, 100–1, 122, 147, 160 Crosby, Brass, 169 Crown: and tenure, 25; and delegation of power, 26, 48; financial needs and revenues, 27, 82–5, 93; struggle with Parliament, 27–8, 39–41, 45, 69, 91, 95, 106, 140, 149–52, 158; legal and political power, 46, 52; and increase in economic interests, 52; power struggle with nobility, 54; supports lower orders against nobility, 59; and land settlement, 61; shares financial interests with Parliament, 65; financial interests and Reformation, 66, 82; loses tax-raising rights, 70, 95, 100; served by Privy Counsellors, 75; division of power with Parliament, 79–80; and public finances, 80; danger of absolute monarchy, 82; Hume advocates strengthening for constitutional balance, 84; and unparliamentary taxes, 91–2; prerogative of custody of ports and customs, 92; expenses, 93; and state

expenditure, 93; debts, 94; conflict with middle ranks, 95–6; Hume advocates granting right to levy new taxes, 98; oppression checked, 99; compensated for loss of prerogatives and feudal duties, 100, 154; receives excise revenues, 100; dependent on Parliament for revenues, 101; and corrupt use of pensions and bribes, 102; relations with City of London, 102–3; and relief of honest and insolvent debtors, 103; assumes discretionary powers, 130; reconciliation with Parliament, 134; and public liberty, 140; threat of abuse of power, 144–5; power sustained by popular opinion, 150; abolition of feudal discretionary powers, 154–6; effect of Revolution settlement on, 161–7; see also monarchy Daily Courant, 83 Daily Gazetteer, 83 Dalrymple, John, 58, 135 Davenant, Charles, 90, 117; Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England, 30–1 Davies, John, 91–2 debt: public, 103–4, 116, 169; accumulated from involvement in Europe, 115 deficit finance, 80, 105–6 Defoe, Daniel, 2 Descartes, René, 15 despotism: restrained, 79, 99; as constitutional threat, 81–2, 106, 172 Devolution, War of (1667–68), 134 Dimand, Robert W., 104–5 discoveries and exploration, 49 Domville, William, 144 Dugdale, William, 66 Dunkirk: sold to France, 123, 128 Dunn, John, 13 Dutch East India Company, 117 Dutch, the see Netherlands duties (taxes), 103, 109 earls: powers, 26 East India Company, 90, 117–18, 120 East Indies: Dutch trade with, 117 Edinburgh: Moderates in, 62 Edward I, King of England, 27 Edward III, King of England, 92 Edward IV, King of England, 33

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INDEX Edward VI, King of England, 67–8 Elizabeth I, Queen of England: abolishes ban on exports of rural commodities, 50; power, 69, 71, 139; monopolies, 72; and collection of revenues, 73–4; sells land, 92; influence of financial administration on Stuarts, 106; colonial settlements, 117–18; persecuting laws, 160 Elliot, Sir Gilbert, 124, 167–8 Emerson, Roger, 2, 109 employment: diversification and useful, 19–20 enclosures (land), 28, 49–51 England: foundations, 1; and modern commercial society, 3; as trading nation, 3, 108–9, 111–13; naval and maritime enterprises, 6; Union with Scotland (1707), 15, 142; early commercial economy, 16–17; Court-Country argument, 17–19; learns from European neighbours, 21, 23–4; love of liberty, 29, 36; rise of merchants, 33–4; foreign merchants and artisans in, 34; and European market, 51–3; as mediating power in Europe, 80, 101–2, 107, 112–15, 126, 132, 236–7; in continental wars, 85–6; public debt, 87–9; American colonies, 92, 116–17, 119–20, 125, 171; reform of public finance system, 97–9; free trade, 111; colonial and power rivalry with France, 113–15, 120, 123; defence strategy, 113–16, 120, 128, 130, 132, 158–9; population increase, 121; isolationist policy under Stuarts, 129; landed property ownership, 131; trade rivalry with Dutch Republic, 133–4; Montesquieu describes as republic hiding as monarchy, 141, 143; war with Spain (1655–60), 152; and popular support for legislation, 157 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, An (DH), 158 Entail, Act Concerning (1685 and Supplement 1690), 58 entails: broken up, 56–7; in Scotland, 58 Essays, Moral and Political (DH), 6, 19 Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (DH), 104 Europe: naval discoveries and exploration, 7, 49; liberty in, 14, 32; abandons villeinage, 24; colonies, 33, 128, 173;

as market for England, 51–3; Britain maintains balance of power in, 80, 102, 107, 109, 112–15, 125–7, 132, 136–7; effect of colonial settlement on, 123; Hume’s views on, 173; effect on English liberty, 174 excise tax, 99–100 Exclusion Crisis (1679–81), 149 feudalism: decline and collapse, 15, 22–5, 52, 56, 58, 61, 64, 153; morals, 20; and growth of large workforce, 21–2; and tenure, 23; judicial system, 26; inadequacy in national defence, 29; government, 48; and retainers and bondage, 58; duties abolished, 100; restrictions and regulations removed, 154; courts abolished, 155–6 Flèche, La (Jesuit college), 4 fleet see navy Flemings: driven from London under Henry VIII, 34 Forbes, Duncan, 7, 108, 140, 165; Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 2, 7 Fortescue, John: De laudibus legume Angliae, 71; The Difference Between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, 68 France: supports commerce, 16–17, 109; and origin of boroughs in England, 26; in continental wars, 86; financial system, 86–8; labour shortage caused by war service, 105; dominance in Europe and New World, 107, 130, 133, 135; colonial and power rivalry with Britain, 112–15, 120–1, 124, 126, 128, 130; captures English merchant ships, 119; war with England in America, 124; Anglo-Spanish containment policy on, 127; Charles II’s attachment to, 130, 135–6; property ownership, 131; Stuarts advocate alliance with, 131, 145; religious conflict with England, 132 frankalmoigne, 25 Free Briton (newspaper), 83 free states, 17, 27 free trade, 111–12 freedom see liberty French and Indian Wars (North America, 1754–63), 124 friars, 66 Gama, Vasco da, 49

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INDEX gentry: landed, 20; and parliamentary representation, 26, 95; borrowing, 36; acquire possessions and rise in power, 38–41, 54–5; and luxury culture, 95; and tax collection, 95 George I, King of Great Britain, 83 George II, King of Great Britain, 82–3 Germany: commercial activities, 109; as counterbalance to France, 114; as supposed origin of English system of government, 145 Gibbon, Edward, 4 Glorious Revolution (1688), 84, 129, 136, 157; effect on constitution, 161–7 gold: inflow, 30–1, 117, 173 Gordon, Thomas, 162 Gothic liberty, 19 Great Britain see England; Scotland Great Council, 25 Great Northern War (1770–21), 85 Greig, J.Y.T., 171 Guiana, 122 Habeas Corpus, 154, 159–61 Habsburg dynasty: in European power struggles, 126–8 Hamilton, Alexander, 175 Hanover, 81, 113 Hanoverian Succession, 162 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of, 1412 Harrington, James: Temple and, 16; followers on principles of government, 17; on rise of middling ranks, 22; influence on Hume, 32, 41; on landed property and political influence, 42, 54–5; fails to see effect of Henry VII’s laws against entails, 53, 57–8; disregards Statute of Fines, 56; The Commonwealth of Oceana, 39, 170 Harris, Tim, 149 hearth money, 100 Henry III, King of England, 33, 35 Henry IV, King of England, 50 Henry V, King England, 158 Henry VII, King of England: on servitude of villeins, 24; laws against binding children to apprenticeships, 35; and beginning of modern history, 45; and laws of enclosure, 51; effect of anti-feudal laws, 53, 56–8; and decline of nobility, 54–5, 58, 143, 145; exacts fines from people, 60

Henry VIII, King of England: expels Flemings from London, 34; commandeers jurisdiction of counties, 50; and laws of enclosure, 51; laws on settlement of land, 61; as leader of Reformation, 64, 66; granted church benefices, 65; and dissolution of monasteries, 66; and power of canon law, 67; religious authority, 67; and tonnage and poundage, 72 Henry IV, King of France, 132 Henry, Robert, 175 Heritable Jurisdictions Act (1747), 141–2 Hertford, Edward Seymour, 1st Earl (later Duke) of, 48 Hertford, Francis Seymour Conway, 1st Earl (later Marquis) of, 118 High Commission (Court) see Court of High Commission history: Hume on importance of as study, 1; and national esprit, 3–4; Scottish approach to, 3; Hume’s approach to, 5–6, 14 History of England, The, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (DH): popularity and influence, 1–3, 174–5; Gibbon on, 4; on development of English liberty, 5, 9, 13, 16, 139, 141; denies importance of progress, 8; on government authority, 9–10; on Stuart constitutional crisis, 9, 38, 40; society and politics in, 22; and tenure, 22; on money stimulating industry, 31; on foundation of modern state, 43; on Tudor sovereign’s authority, 45–7, 49, 75–6; on opinion as foundation of political authority, 61; on religion, 62–3; on monarchical rule, 68; and Hume’s view of Elizabeth, 69; on raising taxes, 70; on adaptability of monarchies, 75; on colonial trade, 116; on American colonies, 125; on foreign policy, 126; on Stuart Court party’s religious zeal, 127; on English naval strength, 132; and Cromwell’s plan for plutocratic Commons, 147; Hume records vol.2 sinking into oblivion, 147; and power of law, 152; on liberty and authority, 157, 173; on long-term state interests, 158; influence in America, 174–5 Hoadley, Benjamin, 165 Holy Roman Empire: relations with England, 128

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INDEX Hont, Istvan, 13–14, 80, 86, 104, 108, 116, 143; Jealousy of Trade, 6–7, 17 Hume, David: influence on modern world, 1; contribution to 18th-century historiography, 2; on human nature, 3; on primacy of maritime trade, 7; Adam Smith on, 13; on liberty dependent on commercial society, 18; on moral dimension in commercial society, 20; admiration for merchants, 34; opposes entails in Scotland, 58; criticisms of religion, 62–4; Horace Walpole criticises, 70; on sovereign’s right to raise taxes, 71; warning on public credit, 88–9; on foreign policy, 107–9, 125–6; continental strategy, 114; invests money, 118; on colonial policy, 124–5; and war with France, 124; opposes political corruption, 147; increasing conservatism, 168; enigmatic political stance, 171–2; originality as historian, 172–3; on market economy, 173 Hume, David the Younger, 169 Hurd, Richard, 5 husbandry, 35, 50–1; see also agriculture ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (DH), 91, 146, 169 imperialism: commercial, 130 imprisonment: arbitrary, 154 Industrial Revolution: and South Sea Bubble, 90 industries: development in England, 119 industry: stimulated by money, 31–2; as source of national wealth, 32 interest: low rates, 36; and usury, 37 isolationism, 137 Italy: commercial activities, 109 Jacobite rebellion (1745), 141–2 Jacobites, 18 Jamaica, 122–3, 136 James I, King of England (James VI of Scotland): gentry under, 40; and rise of Commons, 45; royal expenses and revenues, 93–4; limits power of commissioners, 103; foreign policy, 126–7; mediates in Spanish-Dutch truce, 132 James II, King of England: annexes whole of excise, 100; grants new patent to East India Company, 117; fails to support Augsburg alliance, 130; and suspending

power, 157; as cause of Glorious Revolution, 164; breaks Revolution contract, 166; dethroned, 167 Jefferson, Thomas, 175 Jews: persecuted for money-lending, 37 Jordan, Will R., 155 Jurisdiction in Liberties Act (1535), 61 justice: and delegation of authority, 26–7; and local jurisdiction, 27, 61; medieval, 59; and abolition of feudal courts, 155–6; Hume’s concept of, 158; see also Court of High Commission; Court Marshal; magistrates; Star Chamber Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 120 kings: and allocation of power, 26–7; levy taxes, 27; see also monarchy Kirk (Scottish Church): opposition to Hume, 62 labour: costs, 105 Lancaster, House of, 53, 70 land: and forming of social relations, 32; ownership redistribution, 39–40; disposed of by Crown, 40, 92; ownership and political interest, 42, 131; management, 49–50; and breaking of entails, 56; settlement by trust deeds, 61; Parliament appropriates from Church, 65; direct taxation, 87, 94–5, 97–8, 103, 105–6; Physiocrats on as origin of national wealth, 97–8; see also enclosure; property Langford, Paul, 99 law: reforms under Henry VII, 53–4, 56–60; development under Tudors, 75; rule of, 140, 152, 157 Law, John, 88 legal system: centralisation, 22 Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Endinburgh, A (DH), 166 liberty (freedom): Hume endorses, 3, 22; origins and development in England, 5–10, 15, 18, 43, 46, 75, 139; in Europe, 14, 32; love of, in England, 29; commerce promotes, 36; demand for, 41; and Tudor legislation, 47, 76; and monarch’s right to raise taxes, 71; of speech, 74; and strong executive power, 91; and limited war revenues, 132; Hume defines public, 139–41, 155–9, 161; and power of sovereign, 139; civil, 140–1, 148–9,

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INDEX 152, 156, 158–60, 165; jealousy of, 140; Montesquieu on English, 141, 143–5; and threat to parliamentary power, 144–5; and constitutional struggle, 148; and social contract, 149; and rule of law, 152; and abolition of sovereign’s discretionary powers, 155–6; and arbitrary taxes, 159; Locke on, 161; and right of resistance, 161; and Revolution settlement, 163; Wilkes and, 168–9 Licensing Act (1695), 83 linen, 109–10 Livingston, Donald, 2 Locke, John, 13, 15, 161, 165; Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money, 98 London: population, 121 London, City of, 102–4 London Journal, 83 Long Parliament, 101 Lords, House of: Hume proposes meritocratic, 147; see also nobility; Parliament Louis XIV, King of France, 128, 134 luxury: leads to increased sociability, 21–2, 28; Adam Smith on, 29; and increased demand for commodities, 30, 53, 58; nobility and, 39, 46, 52, 56; and consumption culture, 95 Mably, Gabriel Bonnet de, 160 Macaulay, Catharine, 167, 174; History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution, 174 Macchiavelli, Niccolò, 16, 18, 47–8, 108 magistrates: powers, 79, 99, 145; in City of London, 103; in Roman Empire, 152; expelled in Restoration, 160 Magna Carta, 154 Mandeville, Bernard: The Fable of the Bees, 21 manners: transformed under Stuarts, 131 manufacturing: demand for, 31 Manzer, Robert, 108 Maria Theresa, Austrian Empress, 81 maritime trade: Hume’s emphasis on, 3, 6–8; and rise of monarchies, 32; and support of liberty, 33; effect on modern politics, 43; as source of British power, 113; and sea power, 118; stimulates manufacturing

skills, 119; boosts agricultural knowledge, 121; see also commerce Marshal’s Court see Court Marshal Mary Queen of Scots, 2 Medieval History (DH) see History of England Melon, Jean-François: Essai politique sur le commerce, 88 merchant adventurers, 33, 117 merchants: rise in England, 33–4; aim to restrict royal prerogatives, 95; light tax burden, 103, 105 middle class: emergence, 39, 41, 75, 95 military fees, 25 militia: decline of feudal, 29; limited duties, 128 Millar, Andrew, 45 Ministerialists, 83–4 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de, 160 Mississippi Company (French), 90 Moderates (Edinburgh): support for Hume, 62 modernity: Hume champions, 3 monarchy: commerce in, 16–17; civilised, 47–8, 52, 55, 70; absolute and limited, 48, 68, 85; Macchiavelli on, 48; and expansion of trade and industry, 49; and decline of nobility, 52–3; power dependent on legal framework, 55; re-established in England, 55; supported by lawyers and judges, 60; ecclesiastical supremacy, 67–8; tax-raising powers, 71–2, 91; adaptability, 75; middle class opposition to prerogatives, 75; Cabal proposes absolute form in England, 131; dependence on popular support, 131; Montesquieu on in Britain, 141–2; and conciliar system in England, 150; dispensing and suspending powers, 156–7; authority restrained, 160; mixed, 162; Whig and Tory views on, 163; see also Crown; Stuart dynasty; Tudor dynasty monasteries: dissolution, 66 money: supply, 30–1; wealth, 36 monks, 66 monopolies, 72, 153 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de: influence on Hume, 4; on government in England, 19, 145; on role of clergy, 63; on English liberty, 141–4, 160; and heritable jurisdictions in Scotland, 141–3; on

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INDEX Northumberland, Henry Algernon Percy, 5th Earl of, 28

republicanism in England, 141; on diminution of nobility in England, 145–6; on moderating power of nobility, 166; on size of country and form of government, 169; letter from Hume on Harrington, 170; De l’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws), 141–2, 159; Pensées, 144 Montfort, Simon de, 23 Moore, James, 2, 15 More, Thomas, 50 Mure of Caldwell, William, 114, 171 Muscovy Company, 72 ‘My Own Life’ (DH), 171 navigation, extends maritime trade, 32–3, 36, 49 Navigation Acts, 33, 134 Navigation Ordinance (1651), 134 navy (British): financing, 102, 158–9; development, 113, 119–20, 128, 130, 158; role and importance, 131–2 Netherlands (Dutch Republic): commonwealth, 19, 148; trade with England prevented by Navigation Acts, 33; vulnerability to invasion, 82; continental wars, 86; public credit, 104; spice trade monopoly, 117; England gains American acquisitions from, 123; relations with England, 128, 130–7; truce with Spain, 132; Cautiononary Towns, 133; dominance in maritime trade, 133, 136; and toleration, 155; and popular support for legislation, 157; conflict with England over fishing rights, 158; see also AngloDutch Wars New World: discovery, 49; see also America Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of, 114 newspapers, 83 Nine Years’ War (1688–97), 85 nobility: decline in power and privileges, 21, 26, 38, 42, 51–3, 55, 57, 59–60, 140, 145–6; property-owning, 24; benefits from market economy, 28; sells land for luxuries, 46, 52, 56, 95; gives up retainers, 58–9; Montesquieu on power of, 142–3, 147, 166; Hume opposes hereditary principle, 147; qualities in Upper House, 147; see also aristocracy North Briton, The (journal), 168 North, Frederick, Lord, 169

Oates, Titus, 168 obedience, 150–1 O’Brien, Karen, 108 ‘Of the Balance of Power’ (DH), 114, 125 ‘Of the Balance of Trade’ (DH), 109 ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ (DH), 60 ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’ (DH), 81, 85 ‘Of Interest’ (DH), 36 ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ (DH), 21, 109–10 ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ (later ‘Of Civil Liberty’; DH), 16, 47, 87 ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’ (DH), 69 ‘Of Money’ (DH), 30 ‘Of the Original Contract’ (DH), 166 ‘Of Passive Obedience’ (DH), 150 ‘Of Public Credit’ (DH), 85, 116 ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (DH), 21, 152 ‘Of Some Remarkable Customs’ (DH), 144 ‘Of Taxes’ (DH), 71, 97 Old Whigs, 18 opinion: effect on political authority, 61, 75 Palatinate crisis (1620), 126–7 paper money, 86–7, 105 Parliament: boroughs represented in, 26, 147; struggle with Crown, 28, 39–41, 46, 69, 91, 106, 140–1, 149–512, 158, 160; promotes commercial activities, 34; and monarchical power, 60, 160; appropriates Church land, 65; shares financial interests with Crown, 65; raises taxes, 70–1, 92; Tudor, 74; division of power with Crown, 79–80; and public finances, 80; dependence on press, 82; and taxation, 91; three estates (clergy, nobility, commonalty), 92; opposes fiscal centralisation, 97; grants revenues to Crown, 101; and Stuart military passivity, 129; Puritan dominance, 130; reconciliation with Crown, 134; legislative independence, 139; and liberty, 141; lawful authority, 144; Hume fears tyranny of, 145; representation of counties and cities, 147; decision making and executive actions, 166; see also Commons, House of; Lords, House of

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INDEX patents, 72 patriot king, 90–1 Patriot Whigs, 113, 172 peasants, 20 pecuniary scutages, 25 Pelham, Henry, 90 Petition of Right (1628), 154 Petty, William, 121 Phillipson, Nicholas, 2, 7 Physiocrats, 97–8 Pitt, William the Elder, 113, 124 Pocock, J.G.A.: on Hume’s political thought, 7, 46–7, 84; on Walpole’s administration, 17; on growth of towns, 27; on Tudor monarchy, 52, 71; and Hume’s concern with debt finance, 80; on England as trading nation, 108; on Bolingbroke’s restraints on king, 146 Political Discourses (DH), 7, 19 Pollexfen, Sir Henry, 102 Polybius, 145 Pope: authority, 64–5; see also Church (Catholic) Popish Plot (1678), 168 population: and increased productivity, 19; of London, 121 Portugal: colonies, 121; independence, 123 Pownall, Thomas, 70 press: liberty of, 69, 169; Parliament’s dependence on, 82–3 price-specie flow mechanism, 86 prices: and supply of bullion, 31 privy counsellors, 74–5 property: ownership and distribution, 24, 38–9, 41, 49, 56, 151, 172; Harrington on role of, 54–5; and rise of gentry, 54; and interests of state, 158; see also land protectionism, 110, 112 Protestantism: established in England, 68; and English European policy, 129; and strength of navy, 132; see also Church of England; puritanism public finance: constitutional struggle over, 79–80; reforms, 97–9, 103; Hume advocates centralisation, 103 Pufendorf, Samuel: An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe, 136 Pulteney, William, 82–3, 89 puritanism: and English European policy, 129–30; and civil liberty, 148; challenge to

established Church, 149; supports Country party, 153 purveyances, 72 Quebec: conquered, 105 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 122 Rapin de Thoyras, Paul, 1, 164–5 Raynor, David, 38 Reformation: effect on authority, 61–2, 64; historical origins, 63; and financial interests of Crown, 66 Reinert, Sophus A., 215 religion: Hume’s view of, 62–4; and EnglandSpain disputes, 126 republicanism: and monarchy, 83–4, 98, 160–1, 167; and patriot government, 91; Hume’s view of, 98, 142, 170; Montesquieu on English, 141; and commonwealth idea, 147–8; strength in cities, 147; and individual security and liberty, 157, 160; and Whig ideology, 168 republics: commerce in, 16–17 Restoration (England, 1660), 149, 154 retainers: in feudal society, 58–9 Revolution see Glorious Revolution Robertson, William, 4–5, 30 Rogers, Nicholas, 18 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism Roses, Wars of the, 53–4, 57 Rotwein, Eugene, 110 Round, J.H., 74 rural society: medieval collapse, 52 Sandwich, John Montagu, 4th Earl of, 112 Sandys, Edwin, 42 sciences: improvements and increases, 52–3 Scotland: Hume’s background in, 2–3; economic liberty in, 15; Union with England (1707), 15, 142; delayed commercialisation, 17; and entails, 57–8; linen industry, 110; private (heritable) jurisdictions passed to High Court, 141 Scottish Enlightenment, 8, 14, 21 Seven Years’ War (1756–63), 1, 85, 124 Seville, Treaty of (1729), 114 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of, 135 sheep: numbers restricted, 51 Sher, Richard B., 62 sheriffs, 26

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INDEX ship-money, 96, 132, 158 Sidney, Algernon, 165 silver: supply from America, 30, 117; inflow, 31, 173 Sinking Fund, 89 Six Articles (1539), 67 slaves and slave trade, 23, 118, 134 Smith, Adam: on political theory, 15; on land engrossment, 28; on luxury goods and culture, 29, 58; on supply and demand, 32; on merchants, 34; letter from Hume on authority, 45; on paper money and public credit, 86; on foreign policy, 125–6; on freedom of conscience, 155; on jurisprudence, 158; on emerging market economy, 173; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 13–14, 29 smugglers, 99 social contract, 149 Sonenscher, Michael, 86, 90 South Sea Company, 90 Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th Earl of, 102 sovereigns: greatness and happiness of the state, 20; authority, 45; see also kings; monarchy Spain: supports commerce, 16, 109; colonial revenues, 92; colonial settlement, 117, 121–2; English rivalry with, 121–2, 126; war with England (1655–60), 122; alliance with Britain against France, 127; naval campaign against (1625), 127–8; religious conflict with England, 132; truce with Dutch Republic, 132–3; England acquires colonial possessions from, 136 Spanish Armada, 73 specie: as medium of exchange, 30; and demand for manufactured goods, 31; Spanish colonial mining, 92; see also gold; silver Stannary Courts: abolished, 155 staplers, 33 Star Chamber, 61, 65, 69, 139, 153, 155 Starkey, Armstrong, 115 State, the: happiness in, 20 Statute of Fines (1488), 56 Statute of Provisors (1350–1), 65 Steele, Richard, 2; The Conscious Lovers (play), 34 Stewart, Mr (wine merchant), 118

stock: as new form of property, 49; and money supply, 86; holders exempt from tax, 87 Strahan, William, 1, 105, 124–5 Stuart dynasty: European policy, 12–17, 109, 127, 135; maintains status quo, 42; financial administration, 73, 106; and development of liberty and justice, 75–6; and constitution, 81, 92; tax regime, 81, 96–7, 106; little land ownership, 92; alliance with the hierarchy, 93; diminished level of patronage, 96; borrows from City of London, 104; establishes colonies in America, 116; passive military stance, 129–30; transformation of manners, 131; modernises navy, 132; use of navy, 133; and sovereign-subject relationship, 149–50; and basis of authority, 151; and property distribution, 151; monarchical constraints, 156 Stuart History (DH): on constitutional crisis, 9, 38, 80; on English liberty, 16; on money stimulating industry, 31; on taxation, 81, 99; on colonial trade, 116; on American colonies, 125; on foreign policy, 126; on Court party’s religious zeal, 127; on English naval strength, 132; on English balance-of-power doctrine, 137; development of liberty, 139; power of law, 152; on liberty and authority, 157; on long-term state interests, 158 Sutherland, Lucy S., 90 Tangiers, 123, 136 taxes and taxation: raised by Parliament, 70, 73–4, 92, 96; raised by monarch, 71–2, 91; under Elizabeth, 72; outdated scheme, 80; under Stuarts, 81, 106; of land, 87, 94, 97–8; restructuring in Britain, 87; unparliamentary, 91–2; collection, 94–5, 97, 101, 104; indirect, 97, 158; consumption, 99; as threat to liberty, 159 Temple, Sir William, 16–17, 131, 134 tenure: decline, 23–6; and authority, 25; and modern liberty, 46 ‘That Politics May be Reduced to a Science’ (DH), 89n Thomaselli, Sylvana, 47 Thucydides, 107 tillage: art promoted, 35; decay of, 50–1 tithes, 65

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INDEX toleration: and liberty, 155 tonnage and poundage, 72, 101, 158–9 Tories: interpretation of history, 8; and Whig rule by gentry, 18; abandon mercantilist policy, 111; Hume endorses, 161, 168; reconciliation with Whigs, 162–3; and Hume’s History, 172 Towers, Joseph, 63 towns: growth, 27 trade see commerce Treby, Sir George, 102 Trenchard, John, 83, 86, 162 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 2 Triennial Act (1641), 160 Triple League (England-United ProvincesSweden, 1668–70), 129 True Account of the Behaviour and Conduct of Archobald Stewart, A (DH), 36 Tucker, Josiah, 98, 110, 123; A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages, which Respectively Attend France and Great Britain, 120–1 Tudor dynasty: monarchical authority and legislation, 46, 48, 54–5, 57, 59–60, 68–9, 75, 79, 139; fails to improve husbandry, 51; enrichment, 59; and rise of commercial society, 60; fails to preserve feudal rights, 61; lacks financial power to support political authority, 68; loses tax-raising powers, 70; combines absolutism and financial dependency, 71; Parliament, 74; and development of law, 75; and sovereign-subject relationship, 150 Tudor History (DH): on sovereign’s authority, 45–7, 49, 75–6; and Hume’s view of Elizabeth, 69; on adaptability of monarchies, 75 Tullius, Servius, 143 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 105, 110, 124n Turkey: compared to Elizabethan rule, 69–71, 98 Uniformity, Act of (1662), 160 United States of America: constitution, 148; see also America usury, 37 Vienna, Treaty of (1731), 114 villeinage, 23–5, 154

Virginia: colonisation, 117 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet, 4, 69 Waldmann, Felix: Further Letters of David Hume, 118 Walpole, Horace, 70–1 Walpole, Sir Robert: Pocock on, 17; mercantile policy, 18, 111; dominance, 80, 82; patronage, 82; and press war, 83; and government debt, 89n, 90; excise scheme, 99; protectionism, 110; continental strategy, 112; and Whig-Tory differences, 163 war: British readiness for, 112 War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), 81 war finance, 73, 80, 86–7, 96, 102–4, 132, 159 War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), 85 wardships, 153 West Africa: slave trade, 134 West Indies: English trade with, 10; English colonies, 120, 171; European presence and disputes in, 122–3, 173; imports of gold and silver from, 127 Whelan, Frederick G., 108, 154–5 ‘Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic’ (DH), 83 Whigs: interpretation of history, 2, 6, 8, 14, 75, 163–5; Hume’s attitude to, 18; parliamentary representation by gentry, 18; on power of Commons, 74; on efficacy of corruption, 102; support Habeas Corpus, 160; demand for individual liberty, 161; Hume supports principles on things, 161; reconciliation with Tories, 162–3; on Revolution settlement, 165–7; Hume turns against, 168; ideology and republicanism, 168 Wilkes, John, 168–9 William III (of Orange), King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 164, 167 Wit, Johan de, 134 Wolsey, Thomas, 48 wool: prices and productivity, 31, 50; exports, 52, 133 yeomanry: status, 55 York, House of, 53 Yorke, Charles, 142–3

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STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY I Women of Quality Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 Ingrid H. Tague II Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas Clare Jackson III Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 Andrew C. Thompson IV Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 Nick Harding V The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 Grant Tapsell VI Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England Jason McElligott VII The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 Politics, Culture and Ideology Gabriel Glickman VIII England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion Joseph Cope IX Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 Matthew Jenkinson X Commune, Country and Commonwealth: The People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 David Rollison

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XI An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain: Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 Edited by Nigel Aston and Clarissa Campbell Orr XII London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War Jayne E. E. Boys XIII God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 Brodie Waddell XIV Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England Edited by Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter XV Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689–1750 Julia Rudolph XVI The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts Edited by Stephen Taylor and Tim Harris XVII The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England Matthew Neufeld XVIII The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited Edited by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell XIX The King’s Irishmen: The Irish in the Exiled Court of Charles II, 1649–1660 Mark R .F. Williams XX Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions Edited by Sharon Adams and Julian Goodare

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XXI Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England Mark Hailwood XXII Social Relations and Urban Space: Norwich, 1600–1700 Fiona Williamson XXIII British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700 John Cramsie XXIV Domestic Culture in Early Modern England Antony Buxton XXV Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 Craig Spence XXVI Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington

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D

The first part of the book considers Hume’s account of the fundamental rationale of maritime trade and England’s unique approach to liberty in the modern era. The second part looks at his views concerning the profound impact of maritime trade on English politics. From his perspective, the problem of how to cope with the challenges posed by the commercial revolution in eighteenth-century Britain was closely linked to the question of how transoceanic trade had fundamentally recast English politics from the sixteenth century onwards. This study shows how these two narratives were interwoven into Hume’s History and will be of interest to scholars and students not only of David Hume and political theory but of historiography, eighteenth-century British history and Enlightenment studies.

COMMERCE AND POLITICS IN HUME’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

avid Hume’s six-volume History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1754-61) is probably his most important work as a constitutional historian and political theorist. Jia Wei’s book shows that the History can be understood in two ways: firstly, as Hume’s own narrative of England’s state formation, and secondly, as his answer to the question of how eighteenth-century Britain could cope with the challenges of commercial revolution. It illuminates the relationship between Hume the political thinker, Hume the historian, and Hume the political economist and highlights the social, economic and institutional changes which he wove into an innovative theory of causation.

COMMERCE AND POLITICS IN HUME’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

JIA WEI received her PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Cover image: A portrait of David Hume by Yaowen Zhang, 2015.

Jia Wei

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

∂ Jia Wei