Book: The History of England

Overview
David Hume’s 1754 volume, later absorbed into his multi‑part History of England, narrates the turbulent era from the accession of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649. He frames the story as a conflict between prerogative and privilege, monarchy and Parliament, set against the deeper currents of religious zeal, legal change, commercial growth, and shifting manners. The narrative’s throughline is not simply events and battles but the evolution of authority and liberty in a civilized society, which Hume treats with a philosopher’s skepticism and a historian’s eye for character and circumstance.

Scope and Structure
Beginning with James I’s union of the crowns and his awkward courtly politics, Hume follows the emergence of grievances over taxation, impositions, and ecclesiastical governance. He gives sustained attention to the Gunpowder Plot, the rise of royal favorites like Buckingham, and the fraught diplomacy of war and peace with Spain and France. Under Charles I, the story tightens around constitutional flashpoints: the Petition of Right, forced loans, ship money, the prerogative courts, and Archbishop Laud’s program of religious uniformity. The Bishops’ Wars and the Scottish Covenant draw England into a spiral that culminates in the Long Parliament, the fall of Strafford and Laud, the Irish rebellion, and finally the Civil War. The victories of the New Model Army, the ascendancy of the Independents, and the regicide close the arc.

Themes and Arguments
Hume challenges the Whig doctrine of an immemorial “ancient constitution” safeguarding fixed liberties since time out of mind. In his telling, liberty emerges gradually with the refinement of laws, property relations, and manners, not from a primordial charter. He is skeptical of religious enthusiasm, portraying Puritanism as a combustible force that magnifies grievances and nourishes faction. Yet he does not exonerate the crown. Charles I’s duplicity, reliance on extraordinary revenue, and misjudgments in church policy compromised legitimacy and stirred resistance. The tragedy, for Hume, is mutual: a series of imprudent claims on both sides, where zeal and suspicion outpace prudence, dissolving the customary balance that had tempered English governance.

Portraits and Episodes
Hume’s set pieces fuse character analysis with institutional history. James I appears learned but impractical, fond of theoretical prerogatives and ill‑served by favorites. Buckingham symbolizes the hazards of court patronage. Strafford is painted as formidable and capable, whose methods, while severe, sought coherent administration; his execution marks a fatal escalation. Laud embodies the push for order in religion that provokes a counter‑mobilization of dissent. Parliament’s leaders, Pym, Hampden, and later Cromwell, display skill, discipline, and an increasing willingness to recast the constitution. Military turning points, Marston Moor and Naseby, are treated less for tactics than for their political consequences, the shifting balance from king and Lords to Army and radicals. Cromwell himself is granted admiration for talent and energy, shaded by suspicion of ambition cloaked in piety.

Method and Style
Hume writes in polished, measured prose, unafraid of irony and wary of partisanship. He sifts pamphlets, state papers, and memoirs, weighing testimony with a philosopher’s distrust of zeal. Causes are traced to manners, interests, and institutions rather than providence. Commerce, sea power, and colonial ventures enter as background forces altering expectations of government and law. The constitutional story is thus embedded in social change, not insulated from it.

Reception and Legacy
The 1754 volume provoked vigorous controversy. Whig readers resented the sympathy extended to royal authority and the cold eye cast on Puritan saints; High Church readers bristled at the censure of ecclesiastical rigor. Hume revised some judgments in later editions, but the book’s signature remains: a secular, civil account of how a modern polity unmade and remade its constitution. Its influence endured, shaping debates on English liberty, the limits of prerogative, and the perils of political enthusiasm.