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for the preservation of them, remained entire; so we see that our ancestors, by keeping this spirit alive and warm, regained all the advantages of a free government, tho a foreign invasion [by William the Conqueror] had destroyed them, in great measure, and had imposed a very tyrannical yoke on the nation.”¹¹

      In this passage, “the spirit of liberty” described the preconditions for genuine liberty. Yet elsewhere in the Remarks, more interestingly, Bolingbroke endowed it with an agency all its own. He made it the subject of his sentences and paired it with active verbs. The spirit of liberty now “enacted” Roman laws; “prevailed” to secure Magna Carta; “exerted itself” in favor of Edward III; “diffused itself” through nobles, clergy, and commoners; “preserved” the constitution during the Wars of the Roses; “rose” to resist James I; and “baffled” his plans to wage war on the people.¹² In the process of anthropomorphizing this concept, Bolingbroke underscored its republican character. His adjectives describing the spirit of liberty as “generous” and “disinterested” indicated its public spiritedness; “vigorous” and “active” its aggressive political virtue (virtù); “watchful,” “jealous,” and “easily alarmed” its eternal vigilance.¹³ More explicitly than its Machiavellian and Commonwealth sources, Bolingbroke’s rhetoric depicted liberty not simply as the product of human creativity but as possessing its own creative powers. This idea of liberty received further elaboration from another member of Bolingbroke’s circle, James Thomson. Inspired by the Remarks as well as classical mythology, Thomson traced the spirit of liberty to its ultimate source in the goddess of liberty. Thomson’s poem Liberty (1735–36) credited this deity with “infusing” nations with “her spirit.” This divine aid, “the Spirit of Liberty,” was what enabled humans to love their country. Thomson thus brought to the surface what had always been a latent meaning of “spirit,” a deity’s power to create, animate, or inspire, a role not unlike that played by the Holy Spirit in Christian theology. Between them, Thomson and Bolingbroke had elevated liberty to a position above the human mortals on whom it might bestow or withdraw its favor.¹⁴

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      By incanting it hundreds of times as a centerpiece of his propaganda war, Bolingbroke gave “the spirit of liberty” currency in Anglophone political culture. More than ever before, it resonated in parliamentary speeches, political journalism, and private correspondence.¹⁵ It now also began to appear in the writings of David Hume. Hume first cut his teeth as a political thinker observing the titanic struggle between Bolingbroke and Walpole. His earliest political essays criticized Bolingbroke’s violent partisanship and basic premise that under Walpole, crown patronage had endangered the constitution. Nonetheless, Hume co-opted Bolingbroke’s virulent language to help him conceptualize the English past. In his essay “Of the Parties of Great Britain” (1741), to compress into a few sentences the essential dynamic of the British civil wars, Hume imagined two entities that each “arose” and then collided: “an ambitious, or rather a misguided, prince” (King Charles I) and “the spirit of liberty” (E 68). Thirteen years later, Hume would adopt the same terminology to carry out his full-scale treatment of the same subject in The History of England. As early as 1741, then, writing in the waning days of Walpole’s regime, Hume had already picked up this phrase and used it in the manner of Bolingbroke.¹⁶ This usage, coming seven years before the publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), strongly suggests that Hume first encountered the concept in Opposition, not French, discourse. In other words, there was an English genealogy for this particular term from which Hume was drawing that ran back at least as far as Ludlow or Bolingbroke in 1698 and more immediately to the latter’s essays in 1730–31. Montesquieu’s magnum opus used a term translated as “spirit of liberty” (un esprit de liberté) in the two Bolingbrokean senses of an active force in history and a republican political culture. An earlier work, Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Romans’ Greatness and Decline (1734), also employed this term.¹⁷ These writings, together with Voltaire’s Essay on Manners (1754–56), accustomed Europeans to speaking in terms of the esprit of nations and helped to invent the genre of philosophical history. Yet, interestingly, the historical thinking that informed Hume’s Essays and History was largely independent of these models.¹⁸

      Hume’s source for “the spirit of liberty” was a polemical historical commentary in letter form, Bolingbroke’s Remarks, not the French philosophes or the formal histories of England that preceded Hume’s. Those histories by Thomas Carte, William Guthrie, James Ralph, Laurence Echard, Paul Rapin de Thoyras, White Kennett, and the first Earl of Clarendon portrayed events chiefly as the deeds of individual “great” men. Sometimes they discerned larger patterns of causation and highlighted the actions of “the people” or of divine providence. More occasionally, they used the formula “the spirit of” some idea, value, or feeling with which historical actors were imbued—faction, independence, jealousy, and so on.¹⁹ In only a handful of instances, however, did they mention “the spirit of liberty.”²⁰ In sum, this “spiritual” form of historical causation was not a common element in English historical writing before Hume made it so.

      Hume’s main purpose in adopting the concept of “the spirit of liberty”²¹ was to explain the political catastrophe of the 1640s. The History expanded on the thesis of his 1741 essay to depict the British civil wars as a showdown between the spirit of liberty and early Stuart monarchy. By Hume’s reckoning, Charles I was tragically overwhelmed and ill-equipped to deal with this formidable opponent:

      Unhappily, his fate threw him into a period, when the precedents of many former reigns favoured strongly of arbitrary power, and the genius of the people ran violently towards liberty. And if his political prudence was not sufficient to extricate him from so perilous a situation, he may be excused. . . . [T]he high idea of his own authority, which he had imbibed, made him incapable of giving way to the spirit of liberty, which began to prevail among his subjects. (H 5:543, 221)

      Charles had inherited this political predicament from his father, James, who encountered the nascent spirit of liberty soon after his accession. James’s first parliament “showed more spirit of liberty than appeared among his bishops and theologians” at the Hampton Court Conference, Hume observed (H 5:13). A few pages later, Hume noted that “this watchful spirit of liberty . . . appeared in the commons” to challenge royal judicial authority in the Goodwin electoral case (H 5:17). To account for this newfound spirit, Hume embarked upon one of the History’s famous digressions: “About this period, the minds of men, throughout Europe, especially in England, seem to have undergone a general, but insensible revolution,” Hume wrote. The new learning, improved arts, and increased travel resulted in a “universal fermentation” in which “the ideas of men enlarged themselves on all sides” and “the love of freedom . . . acquired new force” (H 5:18). “This rising spirit” (H 5:19) could just be glimpsed in the previous reign, when one might “observe the faint dawn of the spirit of liberty among the English, the jealousy with which that spirit was repressed by the sovereign, the imperious conduct which was maintained in opposition to it, and the ease with which it was subdued by this arbitrary princess” (H 4:138). Analyzing Elizabethan political life, Hume again pared history down to its bare essentials, pitting the personal skills of a single monarch against the impersonal forces of the spirit of liberty. By contrast with Elizabeth’s masterful response to the challenges presented by this new political reality, James “possessed neither sufficient capacity to perceive the alteration, nor sufficient art and vigour to check it in its early advances” (H 5:19). Although the spirit of liberty drew sustenance from deep-rooted intellectual, economic, and social changes in English society, its triumph over James and Charles was, therefore, by no means inevitable, provided these rulers possessed the political acumen and resolution to repress or accommodate it.

      At James’s accession, that spirit animated comparatively few Englishmen, Hume pointed out: “the principles of liberty . . . were, as yet, pretty much unknown to the generality of the people.” Only in the work of “men of genius and of enlarged minds” such as Francis Bacon and Edwin Sandys did a “spirit of liberty” appear (H 5:550). By 1610, however,

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