In his essay ‘Of Tragedy’ David Hume offers a striking observation on Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. As Clarendon approaches the execution of King Charles, Hume writes, he

Hume's sympathetic understanding of Clarendon's reticence, combined with the clear sense that the spectacle that had been most painful to an earlier generation had become most interesting to his own, highlights the issue I want to address in this essay: the question of historical distance, both as a general problem for historiographical narrative and as a specific issue in the historical writing of Hume's century. Hume clearly accepts the fact that both Clarendon and his audience found themselves in a kind of proximity to the regicide that ruled out many potential representations of that event, especially (we surmise) the kind of detailed, pathetic treatment that Hume himself would later offer his own readers in the History of England. Implicit, then, in his remarks, is an understanding that historical distance is a significant variable in historical accounts, affecting both the historian and his audience (‘an historian and a reader of another age’).