He wrote of the Revolution: "By deciding many important questions in favour of liberty, and still more, by that great precedent of deposing one king, and establishing a new family, it gave such an ascendent to popular principles, as has put the nature of the English Constitution beyond all controversy".

It fell to the Scottish Parliamentary Convention, meeting a month after the English one: "in a bold and decisive vote", to declare "that king James, by his maladministration, and his abuse of power, had forfeited all title to the crown".

The narrative ends with a parliamentary convention annexing to the settlement "a declaration of rights, where all the points, which had, of late years, been disputed between king and people, were finally determined; and the powers of the royal prerogative were more narrowly circumscribed and more exactly defined, than in any former period of the English government".

On the whole, Hume portrays this complex king, who had grown up with the same predicament as Orestes, as a beneficent ruler keeping Britain at peace, notably by staying out of the Thirty Years' War.

As the King was dying, his son's wooing of the Spanish Infanta turned into a jilting, and the two countries drifted into a war, spurred on by Protestant extremists in the House of Commons.

Charles I's attempt following the Petition of Right (1628) to rule without a Parliament in England collapsed after he provoked the revolution of the National Covenant in Scotland (1638).

Of the book's reception, Hume wrote: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I, and the Earl of Strafford.Hume continues the story with an account of: the leveller experiment with communism; of the Scottish Parliament's proclamation of Charles II as king; of Cromwell's genocidal suppression of the Irish revolt; of his near nemesis at the Battle of Dunbar; of the crowning of Charles II at Scone; of Cromwell's final destruction of the now royalist Covenanter army at the Battle of Worcester; and of his subsequent annexation of Scotland.

This was followed by the execution of the remaining regicides: "... a mind, seasoned with humanity, will find a plentiful source of compassion and indulgence ... No saint or confessor ever went to martyrdom with more assured confidence of heaven than was expressed by those criminals, even when the terrors of immediate death, joined to many indignities, were set before them.".

3) with the final overthrow and extinction of the old Plantagenet royal family by the Anglo-Welsh Henry Tudor; and his success in gaining acceptance for what was a weak hereditary claim.

[11] There follows the reign of Henry VIII, and his break with Rome; the English Reformation under his ill-starred son Edward VI; and the attempt at counter-reformation by his daughter "bloody" Mary I. Vol.

It was possible to agree at that time with Montesquieu that the Polish Szlachta, or aristocracy, had remained as a bulwark against autocracy, which had been lost by aristocrats like himself through the centralisation of Bourbon power in France.

The convention that the kings could not raise taxes without parliamentary consent, Hume dates to the time of the usurpers of the House of Lancaster, who needed to bolster their shaky claim to the throne with warlord support.

This earlier era of Polish style aristocracy came about through the gradual implementation of Magna Carta; before which the kings had been more absolute, ruling by right of conquest.

"The rise, progress, perfection, and decline of art and science, are curious objects of contemplation, and intimately connected with a narration of civil transactions.

The period, in which the people of Christendom were the lowest sunk in ignorance, and consequently in disorders of every kind, may justly be fixed at the eleventh century, about the age of William the Conqueror".

Hume described the crusades, beginning in the reign of William Rufus, as "the most signal and most durable monument of human folly, that has yet appeared in any age or nation" (chapter V).

They threw aside their arms, still streaming with blood: They advanced with reclined bodies, and naked feet and heads to that sacred monument: They sung anthems to their Saviour, who had there purchased their salvation by his death and agony: And their devotion, enlivened by the presence of the place where he had suffered, so overcame their fury, that they dissolved in tears, and bore the appearance of every soft and tender sentiment.

Richard, equally martial and brave, carried with him more of the barbarian character; and was guilty of acts of ferocity, which threw a stain on his celebrated victories".

Hume also writes that on one occasion, Richard ordered the massacre of 5000 defenceless Muslim prisoners, although "the Saracens found themselves obliged to retaliate upon the Christians by a like cruelty".

"Perhaps there was no event, which tended farther to the improvement of the age, than one, which has not been much remarked, the accidental finding of a copy of Justinian's Pandects, about the year 1130, in the town of Amalfi in Italy."

Nevertheless, "a great part of it was secretly transferred into the practice of the courts of justice, and the imitation of their neighbours made the English gradually endeavour to raise their own law from its original state of rudeness and imperfection".

However, he footnotes Locke, along with Algernon Sidney, Rapin de Thoyras and Benjamin Hoadley, as authors whose "compositions the most despicable, both for style and matter, have been extolled, and propagated, and read; as if they had equalled the most celebrated remains of antiquity".

Of these three alchemists, Hume writes: "From the grossness of its superstitions, we may infer the ignorance of an age; but never should pronounce concerning the folly of an individual, from his admitting popular errors, consecrated by the appearance of religion".

The reign of Charles II, which some preposterously represent as our Augustan age, retarded the progress of polite literature in this island, and it was then found that the immeasurable licentiousness, indulged or rather applauded at court, was more destructive to the refined arts, than even the cant, nonsense, and enthusiasm of the preceding period".

At the end of his life, Hume wrote: "... though I had been taught by experience, that the Whig party were in possession of bestowing all places, both in the state and in literature, I was so little inclined to yield to their senseless clamour, that in above a hundred alterations, which farther study, reading, or reflection engaged me to make in the reigns of the two first Stuarts, I have made all of them invariably to the Tory side.

What Hume was combating was the atavism of Whigs who, like Jefferson, wanted to portray the regicides as heroic patriots who stamped the first great seal of the Commonwealth with the legend: "ON THE FIRST YEAR OF FREEDOM, BY GOD’S BLESSING, RESTORED, 1648" (old style).

He prosecuted as an English traitor the general of the Scottish Parliament's army for King and Covenant in the War of the Engagement, on the strength of evidence derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth that there had been a dark age union of England and Scotland.

[18] Astonishingly, Cooke also appealed to recent treaties, notably the Solemn League and Covenant, as a kind of union; though it had just been abrogated by the Rump Parliaments unilateral execution of the king.

[19] Hume passed on an oral tradition that Cromwell, through his Stewart mother, was a cousin of Charles I. Thomas Carlyle did some further research, concluding: "The genealogists say, there is no doubt of this pedigree ...".

[20] Carlyle does, however, add in a footnote to that very sentence that "This theory [...] has been entirely refuted by Mr. Walter Rye, who shows that Mrs. Cromwell was descended from an old Norfolk family, originally named Styward."