DAVID HUME, DE UNIONE TRACTATUS

SEC UND US

DAVID LINDLEY

T H E description of MS. Royal, 12 A.53 in the British Library catalogue states that 'it doesnot appear to have been printed'. Indeed it was not; but two letters in the Public RecordOffice indicate that it did very nearly achieve publication in France in 1610, some fiveyears after its composition. These letters, written by David Home,^ a Scottish ministerat Duras, to the King and to Robert Cecil,^ not only shed light on the history of the BritishLibrary manuscript itself, but also more generally on the course of the debate aboutAnglo-Scottish Union. Home explains to the King:

i'ay recontre par accident entre les mains d'un imprimeur de ceste ville de Bordeaux un certainlivre Latin escrit a la main pour estre bien tost innprime intitule de unione tractatus secundus.^

That it was Hume's work which he had found is confirmed by his description of thetreatise, and his quotations from it. When he goes on to speak of 'cest auteur de qui lenom est efface' it is virtually certain that the British Library copy was the one he had found,since of the other three copies of the work in Edinburgh University Library two, MSS.Dc. 5.50 and Dc. 7.46, have no titlepage, and MS. Laing III. 249, which does containthe titlepage and dedication, gives all the words, including the author's name, that are sothoroughly scored out in the Royal MS.

Why the author's name should be so erased is a puzzling question, for Hume's earliertreatise, De Unione Tractatus Primus had been openly published in 1604. The answer tothis little problem is only to be found by a consideration of the much larger question thatthis incident raises. For it is rather peculiar that as late as 1610 any printer should havethought it worth while to publish a work on Anglo-Scottish Union, let alone that anyoneshould have bothered to intervene in its production. In the years after James's accessionto the English throne many such works had found their way into print as the King pursuedhis scheme for uniting fully the realms over which he reigned. But after the EnglishParliament of 1607 the project had so far collapsed that when Sir William Morris attemptedto raise the matter again in the 1610 Parliament, the Commons, taking no great delight'en ce potage reschauffe', greeted his speech with 'interruption and whistling'.'^ Thoughgrandiose plans for the total union of the two countries had failed, there was yet one issuewhich was reaching its climax in 1610. James's efforts to impose episcopacy in Scotlandare usually treated under the heading of'religion', rather than in the context of the Union

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debate, but to David Hume, one ofthe leading opponents ofthe King's designs, it wasan explicitly nationalistic issue. In the course of his controversy with James Law, who hadaccepted a bishopric, he wrote:

I may say, as a Scotishman to you as a Scotishman, these matters of alteratioun of diseiplineI take to he verie unprofitiiblie handled for this countrie of Seotland, more unprofitahlie to beprosecuted, and most unprofitablie of all to be effectuated, as a verie step which can hardliebut come to a pre-eminence of that other countrie beyond it, yea, a tyrannizing over it.s

It is paradoxical that a man so intensely proud of his native country, and so firm in hisdefence ofthe presbyterian kirk, should at the same time be an impassioned believer in thecause ot the Union. Yet his treatises are marked by the vigour with which he argues fora full union of the two nations and the concrete, if sometimes slightly absurd, proposalshe makes for cementing the bonds between tbem. As late as 1617 when replying to Cam-den's aspersions on the Scots, he still lamented the failure ofthe scheme.^ All his proposals,however, are based upon the premise that the two countries enter the union as equalpartners, and the new nation of Great Britain will draw upon the best aspects of eachnation's political, legal and religious systems. It is not surprising that he should expresshis views on church government in a letter to Law with great simplicity:

I would not dissemble with you this my flatt opinioun, that in all good policie, by anie divine orhumane rules thereof, the fittest, first and best course for his Majestie's effaires . . . were to framethe estait of the kirk governement in England to the forme of this countrie, euen fullie in allpoints.'̂

The treatise itself does not go this far, but it is a general refusal to concede that Scotlandshould go into the Union as inferior partner which incensed Home, and caused him to stayits publication. He expressed his feelings to Cecil:

the booke pretending the union of Scotland with England hes no uther end then to make Scotlandequal to ingland in al and superiour in sume pointis.

This is a strange attitude for a Scot to take, but then the real heart of Home's long letterto the King is not really his objections to the treatise itself (though he has some fair pointsto make at the expense of some ofthe wilder proposals, such as that which suggests thatthe youth of Scotland should be educated in England at Oxford and Cambridge, and theEnglish sbould make their way to Scottish Universities). When he reaches the subject ofreligion he briefly chastises Hume for his comments on the greater purity of the ScottishChurch, but quickly turns to his real purpose, wbich is to deliver himself of the opinionthat tbe great fault in the Scottish Reformation had been the failure to bring the Churchfirmly under the royal control. It is abundantly clear that Home's purpose in staying thetreatise was to give himself the opportunity of declaring his loyalty to the King in thereligious controversy. It is difficult not to believe equally, that part of the motive forattempting to publish the treatise at such a late date was its clear preference for theScottish over the English Church.

It is in the context ofthe religious controversy that the scoring out of Hume's name and

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the surreptitious nature of its attempted publication can be explained. For not only wouldHume's defence of the Scottish Church and his friendship with men like Andrew Melville,imprisoned for his stand against bishops, have rendered him unpopular with the King'sparty, it would seem that it led specifically to censorship of his writings. Calderwoodreported that when William Cowper answered Hume's attack on him for acceptinga bishopric in his Dikatologie, 'Mr David wrott ane ample reioinder soone after, but neuerprinted, becaus the gentleman wanted the commoditie of the presse.'^ Here is sufficientexplanation for the attempt to publish anonymously abroad. The history of this manu-script makes an interesting footnote to the one part of James's great scheme for theunification of Great Britain which achieved, albeit temporarily, some kind of success.

1 'Home' and 'Hume' are, of course, alternativespellings. For the sake of clarity I have kept theformer for the minister in France, and the latterfor the minister of Godscroft. The similarity ofthe two names has led to their lives being conflatedin DNB.

2 Public Record Office, State Papers, James / ,Vol. 57, Nos. 100, 104.

3 Fol. 2^\ In his letter to Cecil he names the printeras 'rouyer, printer to the king of this cuntrie'.

4 Quoted in Proceedings in Parliament, 1610, ed.Elizabeth Read Foster (New Haven and London,

Yale University Press, 1966), p. 4.5 David Calderwood,, The History of the Kirk of

Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson, 8 vols. (Edin-burgh, Wodrow Society, 1841-49), VI, p. 730.

6 Edinburgh University Library, MS. Dc. 5. 50/1,fol. I.

7 D. Calderwood, op. cit.., VI, p, 731.8 D. Calderwood, op. cit,, VII, p. 180.

(I am grateful to the British Academy, whose awardfrom the Small Grants Fund for Research in theHumanities made possible the research for this note.)

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