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a new one, and a freer, and a better” (
H 5:42). In 1614, the new “house of commons showed rather a stronger spirit of liberty than the foregoing” (
H 5:58). By 1626, Hume announced, “the spirit of liberty was universally diffused,” and it accounted for the unprecedented challenge to the crown posed by the Five Knights’ case (
H 5:179). In the course of a generation, then, this spirit had spread from a few men to the entire House of Commons, thence to England at large, and finally to Scotland (
H 5:257). It approached a saturation point in 1640, when Charles’s attempts to impose forced loans were “repelled by the spirit of liberty, which was now become unconquerable” (
H 5:278). So complete was this triumph that in 1642, even the king’s own party “breathed the spirit of liberty,” as its support was conditioned upon his submission to “a legal and limited government” (
H 5:394). At this point in the
History, the spirit of liberty virtually disappears.
22 It had served its two primary functions: registering the comparative extent of opposition to the crown at any given moment and illustrating how a change in intellectual climate precipitated the demise of Stuart monarchy. Because Hume saw the contest for liberty primarily in terms of political processes, not armed struggle, the spirit of liberty appeared in the run-up to the civil wars, but not the battles themselves.
