Burke and Hume as Historians: Liberty, Authority, and the Crisis of Civilised Society

Introduction

Although recent scholarship has revealed a complicated picture of the intellectual relationship between Edmund Burke and David Hume,¹ the subtle differences in their historical thought remain understudied.² This is partly due to the unsystematic exposition of Burke’s historical thinking in his political works. In analysing Burke in comparison with Hume, the absence of his comments on particular periods or monarchs, especially the Tudor dynasty, poses obvious difficulties for interpretation. However, his sporadic comments on past events sometimes convey views that contrast sharply with Hume’s, such as those on Henry VIII and Cromwell. For a proper methodology, an examination of Burke’s historical ideas must consider both the immediate contexts in which they occurred and the underlying principles relatively independent of them. His views on England’s ancient constitution are a most typical example.

As ‘philosophical historians’ of the eighteenth century, Hume and Burke shared a historical consciousness characteristic of the age and several key principles, including ‘the spirit of the age’, post-feudalism, post-religious wars, and the significance of impartiality. However, they disagreed on a number of historical questions: on Irish history, notably the Irish Rebellion of 1641; on general theories of history, such as the analogy between history and living beings; and on particular historical figures, such as Charles II, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henri IV. Burke’s Irishness also led him to take the role of conquest in historical nation-building more seriously than Hume did.³ Among these major differences, this article focuses on the roles and processes involved in establishing sovereignty as well as the effects of the spirit of the times upon it—such as the spirit of liberty, religious enthusiasm, and philosophical enquiry—in their views of English and, occasionally, European history. This shows that they sometimes shared conclusions, but their views on the processes through which civilisations were formed or disintegrated vastly differed.

Modern commentators have noted that there is a clear similarity between Burke’s Abridgment of English History and the medieval volumes of Hume’s History of England, particularly in their views on Saxons, feudalism, and Magna Charta.⁴ More recently, Richard Bourke points out that Burke shared with Hume ‘the idea of the modernity of English liberty’⁵ and also ‘accepted Hume’s judgment that France was a civilised monarchy’.⁶ As this article demonstrates, nevertheless, their historical views of the process of modernisation were incompatible, which suggests that Burke would have disagreed with the main narrative of English and European history presented by Hume. This divergence shows their different perspectives on the role of political authority and liberty throughout history, and resulted in their divergence of opinion regarding recent history and contemporary events.

The Arrival of Feudalism and its Modification

Burke’s most substantial, though still neglected, historical writing, the Abridgment of English History, provides an appropriate starting point for comparison with Hume’s History of England—especially regarding the latter’s treatment of the ancient and medieval periods up to approximately 1215. A close reading of these works reveals two major differences in their narratives: their differing attention to the effects of conquest on a subdued nation, and the processes through which English liberties were established in ancient and medieval eras. Both texts aimed to be impartial historiographies, refuted the unhistorical claims of ancient constitutionalism, and intentionally adopted European perspectives.⁷ Yet while Burke’s history of England focuses on the process through which the free political system was forged, Hume’s places greater emphasis on the significance of monarchical authority.

Burke’s idea of conquest was especially conspicuous in his depiction of the Roman ruler, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who ‘knew that the general must be perfected by the legislator; and that the conquest is neither permanent nor honourable, which is only an introduction to tyranny’.⁸ In other words, if conquest is bound to occur, ‘the spirit of conquest’ must be replaced by ‘the spirit of liberty’ after the event.⁹ Both Burke and Hume acknowledged that, at times, conquest helped civilise subdued nations by introducing novel arts and manners. However, as an Anglo-Irish thinker, Burke was more interested in the process of reconciliation between subjugators and the subjugated, namely, the introduction of ‘the spirit of liberty’ into the conquered land.¹⁰ After Agricola and Christopher Columbus,¹¹ William the Conqueror provided a notable example in which Burke’s characterisation stood contrasted sharply with Hume’s.¹² For both Burke and Hume, William was a bold, strategic, and authoritarian ruler. Yet Burke described him as a tactful ruler who aimed to reconcile the Normans and the Saxons to bring political harmony to the conquered nation. By contrast, Hume considered William to be the first ruler to successfully establish great monarchical authority in English history. Burke and Hume shared the view that the king introduced feudal law in England, followed by anarchic disorder caused by feudal aristocrats. According to Burke, William helped preserve the spirit of liberty, whereas, for Hume, he was the man who ‘broke through those limits, which first the feudal institutions, then the refined policy of princes, have fixed to the several states of Christendom’.¹³ Hume believed that William created royal authority stronger than that of other European countries of the period.¹⁴ Hence, the English government began to move towards a ‘regular’ government before its neighbouring nations, even though society still suffered from feudal disorder. In this peculiar sense, Hume’s history of England up to this period was distinctive.¹⁵

After the Norman invasion, ‘the spirit of conquest’ continued to influence English and British politics. According to Burke, this was especially true of English attitudes towards Ireland. However, the actual conquest of the English nation had ceased, and his narrative was, accordingly, more focused on how English liberty was institutionally established by the time of the Magna Charta. In this respect, Burke was clearly a Whig, despite his efforts to produce an impartial history. Hume was more subtle in constructing his narrative. He occasionally alluded to the origins of the free constitution of later England, yet the main thread of the narrative was intended to show the process through which an early step was taken towards establishing the regular power of government.

Writing about the charters issued by Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II, Hume remained concerned with the power of Norman monarchs: ‘the concessions of all these princes [the charters issued by Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II] had still remained without effect; and the same unlimited, at least irregular authority, continued to be exercised both by them and their successors’.¹⁶ For Burke, who was not interested in emphasising the powers of the Norman kings, Henry I’s charter ‘laid the foundation of those successive charters, which at last completed the freedom of the subject’.¹⁷ He believed that the Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest made a historic contribution to establishing ‘the foundation of English liberty’, although they were by no means a renewal of Saxon liberties, but rather modifications of the feudal order. Burke shared Hume’s view that the Saxons had not enjoyed genuine liberty, since their manners and governments were barbarous. They nevertheless differed over which aspects of the Charter should be particularly emphasised.

Burke drew attention to the separation of ‘one branch of jurisdiction … from the king’s court’, which meant that it was ‘detached from his person’ and suggested a step towards the practice of the rule of law. This ‘separation of a king’s authority from his person was a matter of vast consequence towards introducing ideas of freedom and confirming the sacredness and majesty of laws’. Moreover, the freedom of the lower classes was extended by barons’ conferring on ‘their tenants the same liberties, which they had stipulated for themselves’. Consequently, Burke sought to explain the peculiar character of England’s feudalism. The Great Charter helped to maintain the balance of power between the barons and the other social classes:¹⁸

This [an extension of tenants’ liberties] prevented the kingdom from degenerating into the worst imaginable government, a feudal aristocracy. The English barons were not in the condition of those great princes, who had made the French monarchy so low in the preceding century, or like those, who reduced the Imperial power to a name. They had been brought to moderate bounds by the policy of the First and Second Henrys; and were not in a condition to set up for petty sovereigns, by an usurpation equally detrimental to the Crown and the People. They were able to act only in confederacy; and this common cause made it necessary to consult the common good, and to study popularity by the equity of their proceedings. This was a very happy circumstance to the growing liberty.¹⁹

Like Hume, Burke acknowledged that England’s monarchical authority had been stronger than that of France under feudalism. However, there was still a difference between Hume and Burke, and it was not simply a matter of the degree of their emphasis on the subject. Like Burke, Hume emphasised that it was a genuine benefit that the rights of ‘inferior ranks of men’ were extended by the Charter, which helped ‘ensure the free and equitable administration of justice … the benefit of the whole community’. Hume also mentioned the reform of the king’s court as an improvement of justice and a step towards ‘a legal government’, although Burke was more emphatic about its effects. In addition, Hume drew attention to a point absent from Burke’s analysis: the Great Charter ‘introduced no new distribution of the powers of the commonwealth’. For both Hume and Burke, the Charter was ‘a kind of epoch in the constitution’.²⁰ Nevertheless, Hume was more concerned with the state of monarchical authority that made possible a ‘regular’ government, which remained the main theme in his narrative of English history up to the Tudor period.

Post-Feudalism: Absolute and ‘Civilised’ Monarchies

According to Hume, the peak of Europe’s barbarism occurred in the eleventh century, after which ‘human affairs naturally’ moved ‘in a contrary direction’.²¹ The ‘first incident, which broke in upon this violent system of government [feudalism]’ was ‘the practice of … erecting communities and corporations [in Italy and France], endowed with privileges and a separate municipal government’ which ‘gave them protection against the tyranny of the barons’.²² The broader driving force behind this development was the progress of arts and manners, including the revival of learning. Indeed, Hume acknowledged that the ‘ecclesiastics’ contributed to it most notably through the study of Justinian’s Pandects.²³ This trend was further augmented by the ‘discovery’ of the Americas in the late fifteenth century. Hume thus situated the decline of England’s feudalism within a wider European context. Unlike Burke’s Abridgment, Hume’s historiography tended to emphasise the effects of remote causes on political society rather than the roots of modern systems.²⁴

Like other Scottish historians of the age, Hume emphasised the effects of luxury on feudal aristocrats, who had dissipated their fortunes by purchasing commercial goods and thereby undermined their own power over the vassals. Their newly acquired ‘habits of luxury’ came to form the ‘manners of the age’, which resulted in the decline of disobedient barons and the rise of sovereign states.²⁵ In his historical writings, as in those of other ‘enlightened’ Scots, the overcoming of feudalism was directly linked to the rise of absolutism in Europe, including England.

As an eager reader of Hume and other historians of the time, Burke was aware of this argument. He believed that the manners, arts, and spirit of the ages could significantly influence the forms of constitutions—a chief argument against ancient constitutionalism in the Abridgment and Fragment.²⁶ Burke clearly accepted that several, though not all, European monarchies had been transformed into absolute regimes after the late fifteenth century, with countries such as Poland standing as an exception. Yet he barely discussed the formation of absolutism from the perspective of luxury.²⁷

Although Burke’s views on the Tudor dynasty remain relatively unclear because of his limited comments on the subject—and perhaps also because the Abridgment was unfinished—it is highly unlikely that he agreed with Hume’s interpretation of the period. In Hume’s view, the English constitution turned towards absolutism during Henry VII’s reign. Like many other eighteenth-century historians, Burke generally believed that the first two Tudor monarchs had ruled arbitrarily, but presumably only Hume saw their despotic governments as the road to a ‘regular’ government. As Hume claimed, ‘While he [Henry VII] depressed the nobility, he exalted and honoured and caressed the lawyers; and by that means both bestowed authority on the laws, and was enabled, whenever he pleased, to pervert them to his own advantage’.²⁸ Henry VII’s government marked a step towards stability and the rule of law, yet the king’s ‘oppressive expedients … destroyed all security in private property’, meaning that one of the essential conditions of a ‘civilised monarchy’ remained unfulfilled.²⁹

Henry VIII exercised even more absolute power, suppressing monasteries and rebellions in order to strengthen the authority of the Crown.³⁰ As Hume put it, the king ‘proceeded, by making examples [i.e., the executions] of [John] Fisher and [Thomas] More, to consummate his lawless tyranny’, and yet, the ‘abolition of the ancient religion much contributed to the regular execution of justice’.³¹ By contrast, Burke singled the king out as a prime example of a ‘tyrant’, who ‘was not better enlightened than’ Gaius Marius or Lucius Cornelius Sulla.³² Like William Robertson, Hume also viewed the suppression of monasteries as contributing to the growth of national industry.³³ Burke could not have shared such an interpretation because he generally attributed a positive social role to religious institutions.³⁴

It is unfortunate that Burke’s comments on the Tudor reigns were limited, especially given the distinctive nature of Hume’s critique of Elizabeth I. In 1757, Burke, writing with William Burke, observed that ‘Queen Elizabeth had enough of the blood of Harry the eighth, to make her impatient of an opposition to her will, especially in matters of religion’. This may suggest a tyrannical aspect of her reign.³⁵ However, his overall evaluation of that reign remained unclear. In Hume’s view, Elizabeth’s popularity among her people was due to ‘her frugality’ and her non-interference in the ‘established liberties of the people’.³⁶ Yet he also regarded the queen as so despotic that the government came even closer to ‘that of Turkey at present’.³⁷ One advantage of an absolute monarchy, namely the ‘strict execution of the laws’, still did not appear during her reign because of the limited financial capacities of the period.³⁸ In other words, England had not yet properly reached the phase of a civilised monarchy.³⁹ However, Hume distinguished Elizabeth’s rule from Oriental despotism:

the power of the prince, though really unlimited, was exercised after the European manner … 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.⁴⁰

Despite the very limited evidence that prevents a substantial comment, Burke would likely have shared Hume’s perspective that arts and manners had gradually improved during this period, even though political restraints on economic freedom under the Tudor dynasty—including Elizabeth’s reign—continued to hinder the nation’s further development.⁴¹ However, Burke and Hume differed in their evaluations of the religious policies of the period, and this difference also reflected their views on the spirit of the age.

Eras of Religious Disputes

Political authority was a matter not only between rulers and subjects, but also between civil and religious powers. Hume and Burke agreed that conflict between these two powers had deeply unsettled political societies throughout British and European history. As Hume interpreted it, the churches of Roman Catholicism became so powerful after the collapse of the Roman Empire that they established their own political influence and became ‘philosophical’, giving rise to a number of ‘furious’ theological disputes and sectarian conflicts.⁴² After the Protestant Reformation, the ‘bigotry’ of Roman Catholics caused disasters such as St. Bartholomew’s massacres, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and the Irish rebellion of 1641.⁴³ In these accounts, Hume did not intend to reveal the peculiar malignancy of Roman Catholicism in the way Protestant writers often did. ‘Superstition and enthusiasm’ were, for him, part of the nature of religion in general, even though the former was more easily associated with Catholics and the latter with Protestants.⁴⁴ Hume analysed European history from the generalised perspective to an extent that Burke and others scarcely did.

Hume was also distinct in the way he addressed the redress of such religious conflicts: ‘Erastian’ supervision, sovereigns’ indifference, and toleration.⁴⁵ Similarly, Burke, in the Abridgment, claimed that excessive clerical power, including connections with Rome, had frequently militated against the sovereign, and he endorsed Henry I and Henry II’s attempts to suppress ecclesiastical privileges.⁴⁶ Burke dismissed Thomas Becket’s principles for maintaining these privileges as ‘subversive of all good government’.⁴⁷ In analysing Henry II’s religious policy, Hume similarly asserted that the ‘union of the civil and ecclesiastical power serves extremely, in every civilized government, to the maintenance of peace and order’.⁴⁸ However, unlike Hume, Burke did not intend to imply the significance of civilian supervision over religious authorities.⁴⁹ Later in English history, Henry VIII, as Hume put it, ‘appointed a commission’ which consisted of archbishops, bishops and ‘doctors of divinity’, and ‘by virtue of his ecclesiastical supremacy he had given them in charge to chuse [sic] a religion for his people’. These ‘ecclesiastical commissioners should establish nothing repugnant to the laws and statutes of the realm’. Henry was also ‘pleased … to introduce appeals from the spiritual to the civil courts’ and ‘encouraged the judges on all occasions to interpose in ecclesiastical causes’. ‘A happy innovation’, Hume summarised, ‘though at first invented for arbitrary purposes’.⁵⁰ Henry VIII, though autocratic, was successful in centralising power, thereby laying a foundation for the rule of law and for the subjugation of ecclesiastical power to civil authority.

This monarch also aimed to achieve ‘an uniformity in their religious sentiments’, and ‘encouraged the people, by his example, to apply themselves to the study of theology’. It was, however, impossible that ‘they would cordially agree in any set of tenets or opinions prescribed to them’.⁵¹ According to Hume, Henry and other sovereigns were alike in this regard. James I was likewise unaware that ‘the speculative refinements in it [theology] are mean, and even dangerous in a monarch’. ‘By entering zealously into frivolous disputes’, Hume commented, ‘James gave them an air of importance and dignity’, but ‘he [James] could no longer have recourse to contempt and ridicule, the only proper method of appeasing it’.⁵² The solution was non-intervention, as exemplified to some extent by Elizabeth I, who ‘preserved her people, by her superior prudence, from those confusions, in which theological controversy had involved all the neighbouring nations’. The queen ‘established no inquisition into men’s bosoms’. Although ‘the exercise of every religion but the established was prohibited by statute, the violation of this law … was in many instances, connived at’. However, Elizabeth was still ‘unacquainted with the practice of toleration, the true secret for managing religious factions’.⁵³

For both Hume and Burke, the policy of religious toleration only emerged substantially in the seventeenth century and beyond.⁵⁴ As Hume put it, the significance of toleration was appreciated only ‘after spilling an ocean of blood in those theological quarrels’. ⁵⁵ In his Natural History of Religion, Hume pointed to the tolerant character of polytheists in contrast to monotheists’ spirit of persecution. Nevertheless, he claimed elsewhere that ‘it is a vulgar error to imagine, that the ancients were as great friends to toleration as the ENGLISH or DUTCH are at present’.⁵⁶ In this respect, Burke similarly refuted the popular belief that ancient religions were tolerant, observing that they persecuted Druids and Christians, though he once commented that ‘who were more religious than the Romans, who were more tolerating?’⁵⁷

In Hume’s historiography, the English constitution was transformed into a virtually ‘simple’ monarchy—a modernised form of government—earlier than the French one, as Henry VIII’s government predated Louis XIII’s. In a sense, the reverse was true of the religious policy of toleration. In France, the Huguenots were granted ‘liberty of conscience’ chiefly due to the government’s financial hardship in 1570, though persecution returned in 1577.⁵⁸ Later, the Edict of Nantes was introduced,⁵⁹ which Louis XIV was to abolish⁶⁰ before religious policies were substantially implemented in England, where the Independents were ‘the first [of all Christian factions], which … always adopted the principle of toleration’.⁶¹ In fact, England followed the Dutch Netherlands, which ‘set the example’ of toleration.⁶²

Although Burke did not differ greatly from Hume in his understanding of these historical facts, his idea of toleration was not identical. William Burke and Edmund Burke briefly outlined the persecutions of Puritans carried out by two of the Tudors (Henry VIII and Elizabeth I), the early Stuarts (James I and Charles I), and William Laud, and were broadly dismissive of the religious policies of these figures. According to the Burkes, ‘[i]n all persuasions the bigots are persecutors; the men of a cool and reasonable piety are favourers of toleration’.⁶³ Burke fully appreciated the significance of religious toleration for a reason different from that of Hume: his latitudinarian belief that ‘toleration [is] a part of Christianity’.⁶⁴ As a Protestant, he certainly assumed the evilness of the Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation. ‘By toleration’, he spoke in Parliament on 17 March 1773, ‘Christianity flourished’. ‘When the Romish church cast aside its toleration, and betook itself to threatenings, slaughter, and persecution’, then ‘commotions ensued; ecclesiastic anarchy prevailed’.⁶⁵ As he later maintained, the Protestant Reformation ‘was one of the greatest periods of human improvement’. In this revolution of opinions, however, things were not settled ‘without a violent concussion’. The ‘tolerating spirit’ was ‘long gaining ground in Europe’, but ‘a full toleration’ was not yet realised even in his age.⁶⁶ The 1689 Act of Toleration was an important milestone towards genuine religious freedom, but Burke noted that ‘my opinion in favour of toleration goes far beyond the limits of that act’.⁶⁷

Religious fanaticism frequently confused political society, with the subversion of the English monarchy in 1649 acting as a prime example. Hume interpreted it as an event brought by more than one cause. Like Burke, he believed that religious enthusiasm played a crucial role, but he added one more remote, yet fundamental, cause: the spirit of liberty, which became vigorous in James I’s reign and after. Hume further complicated his argument by suggesting that the limited revenue of Charles I was also a main cause of the political confusion.⁶⁸ According to Burke, figures such as Hugh Peter represented the religious fanaticism of the age.⁶⁹ Apart from this, he also referred to Charles I’s misgovernment in a way reminiscent of Hume’s account of the monarchy: ‘the unfortunate Charles the First defended himself on the practice of the Stuart who went before him, and of all the Tudors; his partizans might have gone to the Plantagenets’.⁷⁰ The context was Burke’s proposal for financial reform in opposition to Lord North’s administration. He continued:

late reformations are made under a state of inflammation. In that state of things the people behold in government nothing that is respectable. They see the abuse, and they will see nothing else—They fall into the temper of a furious populace provoked at the disorder of a house of ill fame; they never attempt to correct or regulate; they go to work by the shortest way—They abate the nuisance, they pull down the house.⁷¹

Though rhetorically expressed, the passage conveyed a familiar image of the Civil Wars of the 1640s.⁷² Burke agreed with Hume that the spirit of liberty became more conspicuous as a result of improved arts and manners in the seventeenth century. However, unlike Hume, Burke did not claim that the early Stuarts’ argument for inherited prerogatives clashed with the extended spirit of liberty embraced by the parliamentarians. In Hume’s view, the spirit of liberty helped properly transform England’s absolutism into a ‘civilised monarchy’—and into a mixed monarchy after 1660—⁷³which Burke regarded as an output of the Englishmen’s political prudence and their inherited spirit of liberty.

Liberty and Authority after 1649

After the Civil Wars, fanaticism was still prevalent, and major figures such as Oliver Cromwell infused it into politics. For both Hume and Burke, Cromwell’s government was clearly despotic, yet they remained divided in their evaluations of it. Hume characterised it as close to oriental despotism, in which people were governed ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Cromwell ‘delegated to his inferior ministers the same unlimited authority, which he himself had so violently assumed’.⁷⁴ In contrast, Burke, in the 1790s, underlined this government’s contribution to ‘the preservation of our [English] laws’ and civil order, intending to contrast it with the barbarous tyranny of revolutionary France. ‘Cromwell knew’, Burke wrote, ‘how to separate the institutions expedient to his usurpation from the administration of the public justice’. ⁷⁵ In other words, Burke’s Cromwell sought to produce a government that might be equivalent to a civilised monarchy.⁷⁶

Hume’s England lost such a monarchy, imperfectly established by the Tudors and improved by the early Stuarts, during the Interregnum, but recovered it within about a decade. After the Restoration of 1660, England ‘could fully ensure, at once, her tranquillity and her liberty’ almost for the first time in history. ‘Instead of reviving those claims of prerogative’, Hume wrote, ‘Charles [II] had strictly confined himself within the limits of law.’⁷⁷ The Stuart reigns from James I to James II were, in Hume’s view, ‘a continual struggle maintained between the Crown and the people: Privilege and prerogative were ever at variance.’⁷⁸ Hume explicitly dismissed the Whiggish view of these reigns, that is, ‘one continued encroachment on the incontestable rights of the people.’⁷⁹ He avoided attributing the main causes of political confusion to the sovereigns, with the exception of James II. In the late Stuart age, the spirit of liberty still provided a foundation for the controversy between Parliament and the Crown. Religious enthusiasm still existed, but the spirit of party was more visible than before and frequently marked by enthusiastic opposition to the sovereigns. The insufficient budget of the Crown was, in Hume’s view, once again a major cause of political turmoil in Charles II’s reign.⁸⁰ Hume attributed one major cause of the 1688–9 Revolution to James II’s ‘misconduct’, especially his defiance of the Test Acts, which provoked a strong reaction from parliamentarians.⁸¹ The final outcome of the 1688–9 Revolution was ‘a new epoch in the constitution’, which ‘not only put a period to their hereditary succession, but made a new settlement of the whole constitution.’⁸²

For Burke, Hume’s history of England was ‘very superficial’, prioritising ‘a pleasing narrative’ over facts. Although the ‘reign of Charles II … was the period on which Hume had bestowed the most labour’, according to Burke, Hume showed ‘an unaccountable partiality for that monarch.’⁸³ Hume’s ‘partiality’ towards Charles II, as well as his dismissive characterisation of the leaders of the Rye-House conspiracy as tainted by the fanatic spirit of partisanship, clearly disgusted Burke.⁸⁴

In his interpretation of 1688–9, Burke was a Whig, specifically an ‘old’ Whig, in his own phrase, or an heir of ‘vulgar’ Whiggism.⁸⁵ As he put it in 1777, the ‘People at that time [1688] reenter’d into their original rights’.⁸⁶ In the Regency Crisis of 1788, Burke also argued that the principles of 1688–9 were ‘not formed upon precedent, but upon general reason, and the inalienable rights of men.’ At the same time, he underlined the fact that both the Restoration of 1660 and the 1688–9 Revolution ‘were acts of necessity’ as he was to do so after the French Revolution.⁸⁷ However, in 1784, 1790 and 1791, Burke decided to employ the pre-Enlightenment language of ancient constitutionalism (of which he was critical in the late 1750s) to counter the radicals’ argument inspired by the French Revolution.⁸⁸ The political necessities obviously urged him to do so, yet he had still remained consistent since the 1750s in acknowledging that the English constitution had evolved in response to the changing political conditions and modes of life. In the Reflections, he famously stressed both institutional continuities and Englishmen’s peculiar disposition to reflect on their own past. As a Whig, Burke depicted both 1660 and 1688–9 as the moments when the constitution was ‘regenerated’,⁸⁹ whereas Hume adopted none of these interpretations of the events of the period from 1660 to 1688–9.

An even clearer difference in perspective lies in Burke and Hume’s views on post–1688 England. Although both clearly regarded the period as one of liberty and growth, neither was optimistic about Britain’s present or future. The most important difference lies in their views of the crises Britain has recently faced. For Hume, the Whig oligarchy after 1688–9, ‘which, in some particulars, has been advantageous to the state, has proved destructive to the truth of history’. The Whigs, ‘forgetting that a regard to liberty, though a laudable passion, ought commonly to be subordinate to a reverence for established government … celebrated only the partizans of the former’.⁹⁰ In eighteenth-century Britain, as Hume wrote, ‘the people, though guarded by multiplied laws, are totally naked, defenceless, and disarmed, and besides, are not secured by any middle power, or independent powerful nobility’.⁹¹ As a result, the nation was closer to ‘a despotic and eastern monarchy’ than it had been in Elizabeth’s reign.⁹² In contrast, Burke believed that intermediary power was strongest during Queen Anne’s reign and continued until 1760, when George III began to conspire with Lord Bute to weaken the Whig aristocrats.⁹³

According to Hume, the spirit of liberty was prevalent in England during the preceding decades, whereas Burke believed that this spirit had declined rapidly since 1760. In both cases, the constitution faced a great crisis. For Hume, the expanding power of the Commons, as opposed to the curtailed authority of the Crown, was an indicator of risk to the constitution. He observed that the Wilkes affairs of the 1760s reflected this historical trend—the growth of a powerful spirit of liberty—which might have reminded him of the disastrous civil wars of the 1640s.⁹⁴

Hume was also sceptical about aspects of the fiscal-military state of Britain established after 1688–9,⁹⁵ especially the government’s accumulated debt. He believed that this would soon lead to disaster, including the collapse of intermediary power. The advent of powerful ‘stock-holders’ had been transforming the existing social order, and the influence of landed interests would eventually diminish. Hume further noted that ‘the middle power between king and people being totally removed, a grievous despotism must infallibly prevail.’⁹⁶ According to Burke, landed and monied interests had been effectively connected in Britain, which helped prevent a political revolution there.⁹⁷ Burke agreed with Hume about the significance of intermediary powers and that the union between the landed and commercial interests would cease if ‘our public debts encrease to such a degree, as to become altogether oppressive and intolerable.’⁹⁸ However, unlike Hume, Burke did not believe that Britain was on the verge of a massive catastrophe.⁹⁹

Burke was more positive than Hume about the situation chiefly because he firmly believed in the strength of the British economy, which had continued to grow, as the statistical figures undoubtedly proved.¹⁰⁰ While Hume believed that the Seven Years’ War ‘proceeded from the most frivolous Causes’ and was ‘more pernicious to the Victors than to the Vanquished’,¹⁰¹ Burke singled out the war as an opportunity that demonstrated Britain’s international competitiveness, explicitly dismissing John Brown’s thesis of ‘effeminacy’.¹⁰²

Until around 1763, both Burke and Hume presumably believed that a ‘mild government and great naval force have preserved, and may still preserve during some time, the dominion of England over her colonies’.¹⁰³ However, this became increasingly doubtful. According to Hume, the colonies were ‘no longer in their Infancy’, but they were ‘still in their Nonage’.¹⁰⁴ Even so, Britain’s recent conflicts with the colonies were not seriously affecting either side, and even their independence would be desirable to ‘establish our Prosperity’.¹⁰⁵ Burke characteristically refused to trace such an analogy between life and the polity, and observed that American affairs were causing great distress to the empire, thereby destroying their long-term harmonious relationship.

Moreover, Hume and Burke shared the view that late eighteenth-century France was an example of civilised monarchy,¹⁰⁶ but their views on the process that realised it must have been very different. As O’Brien points out, Hume seems to have accepted Voltaire’s views on Louis XIV’s politics, which, accordingly, he believed had already realised a modern government by law.¹⁰⁷ Burke could barely endorse such views, although he acknowledged the flourishing state of France under the despotic ruler.¹⁰⁸ For him, the parlements played a key role in securing ‘both certainty and stability of the laws’ in France before 1790.¹⁰⁹ Hume viewed the absolute monarchy as a necessary stepping-stone toward the rule of law, whereas Burke searched for the seeds of liberty in the cracks of absolutism. Hume did not survive to witness the 1789 Revolution in France, but his ideas of republicanism,¹¹⁰ as well as of political authority, suggest that he would not have welcomed it. For both Burke and Hume, the French Revolution would, in a sense, have meant the disintegration of a civilised monarchy, elegantly constructed in modern history. However, the two would have held distinct views on what collapsed in 1789–1790, as they developed different opinions on the recent history of the nation and social groups or institutions such as the clergy.

Consequences of Philosophical Enquiry

The divergence between Burke and Hume in their interpretations of recent history and contemporary events also arises from their irreconcilable views on philosophy and religion. This included the possible consequences of philosophical enquiry into Christian traditions such as the authority of the Bible and sacred history; as Hume famously put it in the Treatise, ‘the errors in religion are dangerous’ while ‘those in philosophy [are] only ridiculous.’¹¹¹ His ‘philosophical’ essays also revealed his religious scepticism, casting doubtful eyes on biblical narratives of miracles, including the Resurrection. In doing so, he was, of course, aware of the popular anxiety that ‘certain Tenets of Philosophy’, including Epicureanism, would be ‘pernicious to the Peace of civil Society’ by rejecting the belief in divine Providence and the life after death. Nevertheless, Hume’s narrator claimed that ‘the State ought to tolerate every Principle of Philosophy’. According to him, there was no ‘Instance of any Government’s suffering in its political Interests by such Indulgence.’¹¹² As Philo said in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ‘vulgar superstition’ tended to invite ‘the dismal consequences’. ‘If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it’.¹¹³

Burke was markedly different, as a staunch advocate of anti-deism commentators—notably Joseph Butler, John Leland, and James Beattie—who claimed that deists’ arguments against biblical narratives were defective and that the narratives could convey historical truths.¹¹⁴ Burke himself maintained that people should not ‘forget the use of that guide which God has given us for our direction’, although human intelligence is very limited.¹¹⁵ Scripture provides the ‘examples’ for human life, which is largely led by habits and customs.¹¹⁶ A sceptical inquiry into these foundations would not uncover any new morality; rather, it would cause confusion of minds and society. According to Burke, morality changed little over a long period, despite the improvement of various arts in modern eras, and Hume was not far from Burke in this respect. In 1751, Hume noted that ‘such Changes … in Religion, Language, laws and Customs’ after the Greco-Roman age have not ‘ever produc’d any considerable Innovation in the primary Sentiments of Morals.’¹¹⁷ However, while Burke regarded the moral essence of Christianity as a major foundation of social development, Hume found it to have more adverse effects.

Burke viewed Hume as one of the contemporaries who attempted to undermine the foundations of morality in a manner similar to that of other ‘deist writers’¹¹⁸ and the French revolutionaries. He was reported to have said that the eighteenth century was ‘an ignorant Age’ in the sense that ‘many useless sciences’, rather than ‘wisdom’, were ‘much advanced’. He also maintained that ‘our fore-fathers’ were ‘deeper Thinkers than ourselves.’¹¹⁹ In his view, Hume’s philosophical inquiry into religion may well be categorised as one of those ‘useless sciences’. As Burke highlighted, ‘it would be impossible that civil society could subsist long if we were all Philosophers’.¹²⁰ In saying so, he might have been close to Hume’s thesis of superstition as a stabilising force in society.¹²¹ However, Burke obviously differed from Hume in his belief on the extent to which religious tradition forms a genuine foundation for political society.

Conclusion

The detailed analysis presented in this paper suggests that an examination of their entire works is required to properly appreciate both the intellectual tensions and connections between Burke and Hume. Both were sceptical of ancient constitutionalism in their earlier years, stressing the modern origins of British liberty. For Hume, modern liberty was an outcome of established monarchical authority that had grown since the Tudor period, or even since after the Conquest, and yet it had been threatening the same authority during and after the Stuart age. In theory, Burke, too, regarded authority as a prerequisite for the establishment of liberty, but he did not believe that despotic monarchies such as Henry VIII’s had contributed to it. He and Hume also shared the view that an unrestrained desire for freedom could undermine political stability. Burke, however, did not believe that the ascendancy of the House of Commons in the eighteenth century was a cardinal example of this. The two were deeply divided on the question of whether philosophical inquiry into religious tradition could compromise the foundations of political society. In their interpretations of English or British history after 1688–9, they diverged chiefly in their views on the impact of the increasing spirit of liberty on political stability. In their earlier period, they differed instead over the extent to which particular authorities had contributed to the formation of liberty. Recent scholarship has often regarded Burke as ‘enlightened’, significantly associated with the Scottish intellectuals of the age on a number of specific and broad points such as the idea of chivalry and a critical attitude towards religious fanaticism.¹²² However, ‘the Burke-Hume connection’¹²³ is one of several intellectual relationships between Burke and his Scottish contemporaries in which only a rigorous examination of their texts can uncover the full implications.

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Charles Bradford Bow and two anonymous readers for their help and valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.