Conclusion

Summary

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?’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 govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.’ 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. 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.