¹ See Millar's, David study of the foundation of Hume's social and political thought, Philosophy and ideology in Hume's political thought (Oxford, 1981), pt. 1Google Scholar; see also Forbes, Duncan, Hume's philosophical politics (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar. For Smith, see Haakonssen, Knud, The science of a legislator: the natural jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Robertson, William, The history of Scotland during the reigns of Queen Mary and King James VI till his accession to the crown of England (1759)Google Scholar; the edition used here is the 15th edition (3 vols., 1797). Hume, David, The history of England from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the revolution in 1688 (1762)Google Scholar; the edition used here was published in Dublin (7 vols., 1775). Page references to these works and to Knox's History of the reformation will be cited in the text, not in the footnotes.

³ H. M. Hopfl makes the observation that Ferguson's Essay on the history of civil society, Millar's Origin of the distinction of ranks, Kames' Sketches of the history of man conform to Stewart's description of conjectural history as tracing ‘process’ or ‘progress’ between a terminus a quo, namely ‘the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature’, and a terminus ad quern, the ‘wonderfully artificial and complicated condition in which we find ourselves’. ‘From savage to Scotsman: conjectural history in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, XVII (1978), 19–20Google Scholar. Hopfl's article asserts that there is no difference in respect of this programme between the narrative history and the conjectural history practised by the Scottish philosophers. He ascribes the difference that he evidently feels between the two, ‘simply’ to the fact that the sequences of events are typical in the case of conjectural history, while in narrative history they are unique and particular (p. 23).

⁴ ‘Account of the life and writings of William Robertson’, prefixed to The works of William Robertson, D.D. (1831), p. 8.

⁵ ‘Account of the life and writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.’, The works of Adam Smith (5vols., Aalen, 1963), V, 450, 454Google Scholar.

⁶ ‘Life of Smith’, p. 455.

⁷ ‘That the capacities of the human mind have been in all ages the same, and that the diversity of phenomena exhibited by our species is the result merely of the different circumstances in which men are placed, has long been received as an incontrovertible logical maxim;…The application of this fundamental and leading idea to the natural or theoretical history of society in all its various aspects; – to the history of languages, of the arts, of the sciences, of laws, of government, of manners, and of religion, – is the peculiar glory of the latter half of the eighteenth century, and forms a characteristical feature of its philosophy…’. ‘Dissertation: exhibiting the progress of metaphysical, ethical, and political philosophy’, in Hamilton, (ed.), The collected works of Dugald Stewart (11 vols., 1854–60), I, 70Google Scholar. See also ‘Account of the life and writings of Adam Smith’, p. 450.

⁸ Stewart, , ‘Life of Smith’, p. 413Google Scholar.

⁹ Stewart, , ‘Life of Robertson’, p. 26Google Scholar; ‘Life of Smith’, p. 408.

¹⁰ Bolingbroke, Lord, ‘Letters on the study and use of history’, Historical writings, ed. by Kramnick, Isaac (Chicago, 1972), p. 9Google Scholar.

¹¹ On the preoccupation with language in the Scottish Enlightenment see Berry, Christopher, ‘Adam Smith's Considerations on language’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXV (1974), 130–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Stewart, , ‘Life of Smith’, 479–85Google Scholar, Note (E), 533. John Millar called Smith the Newton of the history of civil society. See Forbes, , Hume's philosophical politics, p. 309Google Scholar. For Stewart it was Bacon more than Newton who was the inspiration for the philosophy of mind. Newton was important as the exemplar of the Baconian method. Stewart's emphasis on the value of the hypothesis rather than experiment, in the Baconian method, is discussed by Rashid, Salim, ‘Dugald Stewart, “Baconian” methodology, and political economy’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1985), 245–57Google Scholar. Stewart's appraisal of Montesquieu is in the ‘Dissertation’, 193, n. 1.

¹³ Stewart, , ‘Life of Robertson’, p. 16Google Scholar.

¹⁴ History of America (1777) in The works of William Robertson (9 vols., 1824), VI, 311, 315; VII, 75Google Scholar.

¹⁵ The canvassing of a topic, suitable for philosophical treatment, which preceded all Robertson's subsequent works, did not occur in the case of The History of Scotland, ‘the earliest object of his ambition’. See Stewart, , ‘Life of Robertson’, p. 4Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Buchanan wrote against Mary in his Detectio Mariae Reginae, composed around 1568 and translated in 1571 as Ane detectioun of the doinges of Marie, Queue ofScottis; in the Book of Articles, used for her indictment at York and Westminster, and in Rerum Scotiarum histona, published in 1582.

¹⁷ Jebb, Samuel, De vita et rebus gestis Mariae (1725)Google Scholar; Keith, Robert, The history of the affairs of Church and State in Scotland, from the beginning of the Reformation in the reign of King James to the retreat of Queen Mary into England (Edinburgh, 1734)Google Scholar; Forbes, Patrick, A full view of the public transactions in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (2 vols., 1740–1)Google Scholar; Anderson, James, Collections relating to Mary, Queen of Scots (1727–8)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Some of the titles of the major contributions to the Marian controversy from the mid-eighteenth century reflect this focus on Hume and Robertson in the debate: Tytler's, WilliamInquiry historical and critical into the evidence against Mary, Queen of Scots and an examination of the histories of Dr. Robertson and Mr. Hume with respect to that evidence (1772)Google Scholar; Whitaker, John, Mary, Queen of Scots, vindicated (3 vols., 1787)Google Scholar; Stuart, Gilbert, Critical observations concerning the Scottish historians Hume, Stuart and Robertson: including an idea of the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots… (1782)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Stewart, , ‘Life of Robertson’ p. 8Google Scholar.

²⁰ For a distillation from modern debate as to the content of the idea of the Scottish Enlightenment, see Sher's, Richard introduction to his Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 3–19Google Scholar.

²¹ Sher, , Church and university, pp. 37–44Google Scholar; 187–212.

²² The claim of Robertson's dependence on Keith is made by the editor of the 1844 edition of Keith's, History of the affairs of church and state in Scotland, from the beginning of the Reformation…to the retreat of Queen Mary… (3 vols.), 1Google Scholar, XXXVI. This dependence is also suggested by the way Robertson's emphases in his narrative parallel the densities of material in Keith's collection. Innes' work was A critical essay on the ancient inhabitants of …Scotland (2 vols., 1729)Google Scholar. Robertson accepted Innes' demonstration that the first forty kings with whom Buchanan opened his history were fabulous. This was not simply accepting scholarship; Innes had shown it to be likely that Buchanan knew his source, Boece, was unreliable, yet retained the kings because their depositions demonstrated the traditional control over the Scottish Crown exercised by the Scottish nobility, which was important to his vindication of the lords, Scottish against Mary. Critical essay (1879 edn), pp. 206–7Google Scholar.

²³ See Gatherer's, W. A. introduction to his criticism of Buchanan in The tyrannous reign of Mary Stewart (Edinburgh, 1958), p. 18Google Scholar.

²⁴ Burnet, Gilbert, The history of the reformation of the Church of England (1679–1715)Google Scholar. Editio n used here (2 vols., 1850), 1, 603. The idea of the Revolution as the continuing Reformation is developed in the Supplement to the History, 1, pt. III, 603–91.

²⁵ See Black, J. B., The art of history (New York, 1926), p. 140Google Scholar; Peardon, T. P., The transition in English historical writing, 1760–1830 (New York, 1966), pp. 19, 26Google Scholar.

²⁶ Gibbon, Edward, The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788)Google Scholar. J. B. Bury's edition has been used here (7 vols., 1897–1902), VI, 125.

²⁷ Priestley, Joseph, An history of the corruptions of Christianity (2 vols., 1793), II, 462Google Scholar; Milner, Joseph, The history of the church of Christ (5 vols., 1819), IV, iv–viGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Hume, , History of England, 1, 95Google Scholar.

²⁹ See Robertson's explanation of the development of the features of Catholicism out of the adaptation Christianity made to barbarianism on the fall of the Empire, Roman, in his ‘View of the progress of society in Europe’, in The history of the reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769)Google Scholar. Edition used here (4 vols., 1798), 1, 20–1. See also Notes , L. and , M. in his ‘Proofs an d illustrations’, to the ‘View of the progress of society’, 1, 242–4Google Scholar.

³⁰ Gibbon, , Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, VI, 125Google Scholar; Hume, , ‘Of superstition and enthusiasm’, Essays moral, political, and literary (1741–2) edition used here (London, 1903), pp. 76–9Google Scholar.

³¹ Priestley, , Corruptions of Christianity, 11, 462Google Scholar; Milner, , History of the church of Christ, IV, 513Google Scholar.

³² See Black, , The art of history, p. 140Google Scholar; Peardon, , The transition in English historical writing, p. 19, 26Google Scholar; also Gilbert, F., ed. The progress of society in Europe (Chicago, 1972), p. XXGoogle Scholar.

³³ Robertson's History of Scotland was published a month earlier than Hume's Tudor volume in which the Scottish reformation is treated of, but Robertson's remark applies to Hume's general account of the reformation in the original Stuart volumes. It is also probable that Robertson was acquainted with Hume's Tudor work before publication, as Hume had certainly studied his. See Hume, to Robertson, [18 Nov, 1758], Greig, J.Y.T., ed., The letters of David Hume (2 vols., 1932), 1Google Scholar, no. 155.

³⁴ These points concerning the relationship between Moderatism and the Enlightenment draw on Sher, , Church and university, pp. 66–74Google Scholar.

³⁵ Sher, , Church and university, pp. 105–6Google Scholar.

³⁶ Knox's, History of the reformation was not published until 1644Google Scholar. 1761 edition used here. Subsequent references to it will be placed in the text.

³⁷ Spottiswoode's History of the Church of Scotland was undertaken at the instance of King James, according to the writer of ‘The author's life’, prefixed to Royston's 1655 edition of Spottiswoode's History (no pagination).

³⁸ Spottiswoode, , History of the Church of Scotland, Russell, M., ed. (3 vols., 1851), 1, 167Google Scholar.

³⁹ Keith, , Affairs of church and slate, 1, ‘Advertisement to the reader’, pt. 1, 109Google Scholar; pt. II, 231.

⁴⁰ These works were: Leslie's De origine, moribus et gestis Scotorum libri decem; Pitscottie's The history and chronicles of Scotland from the slaughter of King James … to 1565; the Autobiography and diary of James Melville; the anonymous Diurnal of remarkable occurrents and (also of unknown authorship) the Historie of the estate of Scotland. None of these, except Leslie's catholic attack on the reformation, published in 1578, was available in printed form to Spottiswoode.

⁴¹ Donaldson, Gordon, ed., The register of the Privy Seal of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1957)Google Scholar, V, pt. 1, i.

⁴² See Knox's, preface to History of the reformation, Bk. II, 134Google Scholar.

⁴³ See Dickinson's, W. Croft introduction to John Knox's history of the reformation in Scotland (2 vols., 1949)Google Scholar for the dates of composition of the books.

⁴⁴ One departure in Hume's and Robertson's treatment of the reformation from historiographical tradition was their not aligning sympathy and judgement. Robertson's tenderness towards his guilty Mary Stuart was censured as prejudicial to the national reformer. See M'Crie, Thomas, The life of John Knox (2 vols., 1813–18), II, 248–9Google Scholar. As for Hume, he pursued both Mary and Knox with equal zeal. He wrote to Robertson: ‘Tell Goodall’, – Mary's passionate historian – ‘that if he can but give me up Queen Mary, he will have the pleasure of seeing John Knox made very ridiculous.’ Hume, to Robertson, [London, 02 or Mar., 1759], The letters of David Hume, 1, no. 162Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Foxe, John, Acts and monuments of the Church (London, 1838), pp. 20–31Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Hume, , Essays, moral, political, and literary, pp. 496–7Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, in Hume, , Essays, p. 74Google Scholar, note.