The History of England (Hume)

The History of England (1754–61) is David Hume's great work on the history of England, which he wrote in installments while he was librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. It was published in six volumes in 1754, 1756, 1759, and 1761. The first publication of his History was greeted with outrage by all political factions, but it became a best-seller, finally giving him the financial independence he had long sought. Both the British Library and the Cambridge University Library, as well as Hume's own library, still list him as "David Hume, the historian." Hume's History spanned "from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688" and went through over 100 editions. Many considered it the standard history of England in its day.

Hume set out at first only to write a history of England under the Stuart monarchs James I and Charles I, which appeared in 1754. He followed this with a second history that continued to the Revolution of 1688. With the relative success of these two volumes, Hume researched the history of earlier eras and produced a total of six volumes. As a result, the fifth volume was the first to appear in print, in 1754, while the first two volumes were published last, in 1762. The complete History of England is arranged in chronological order, as follows:

Because of the titles of the last two volumes, the whole work has occasionally been mistakenly referred to as History of Great Britain rather than History of England.

The last Jacobite uprising of 1745 was a very recent memory, and had come close to turning the War of the Austrian Succession into a war of the British succession. This had come as a shock to Hume. So his main concern was to legitimise the Revolution of 1688, and forestall any future insurrection. He wanted his philosophy of Government to appeal to both Whigs and former Jacobites. Perhaps this can be best understood in his 1748 essay "Of the Original Contract". He was not an adherent of any party.

In England, anti-Scottish prejudice was running high. Hume was a master of the internalised Scoticism, and even wrote a booklet about how to do it. The History of England is a classic of the genre. It helps understand Hume to re-externalise the milieu that he flourished in.

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