a “spirit” or distinguishing characteristic connected to a larger climate of opinion immediately calls to mind Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748).1 Yet such language actually predated Montesquieu and was comparatively new to British historical writing when Hume applied it to his account of the British civil wars. Hume adopted the phrase “the spirit of liberty” as a key explanatory device in his History, convenient shorthand for a combination of political and religious ideals that motivated Britons to oppose what they perceived to be excessive monarchical power. Hume plucked this term from the world of partisan politics and redefined it as part of a larger project promoting political moderation. Yet we shall see that choosing to deploy such a multivalent rhetoric had ironic consequences for his narrative. One of Hume’s goals was to write an utterly secular account of the English past, but using “the spirit of liberty” according to the grammatical rules set forth by its progenitor, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, actually made it resemble providence to a startling degree.2 In a further irony, while Hume wanted to defuse this highly charged slogan, his own extensive use of the term only made it more popular, especially as a way of understanding political upheaval, past and present. On both sides of the Atlantic, Hume’s History helped to shape the vocabulary used to explain the seventeenth-century British and eighteenth-century American and French revolutions.3
Given Hume’s penchant for “the spirit of liberty,” it is perhaps surprising to locate its intellectual origins in a Machiavellian tradition that ran counter to Hume’s conviction that institutions and laws are more powerful determinants of a nation’s political well-being than the manners and morals of its leaders.4 During the Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s study of the ancient republics convinced him that liberty in a republic could best be preserved not so much by adjusting the institutional machinery of government as by ensuring that the value of political liberty was nurtured in the people as a whole. Such a perspective emphasized structural and impersonal factors such as the spirit of the times and public opinion and imagined the polity as possessing its own characteristics and desires.5 In Britain, Machiavelli’s analysis influenced “Country” political groups that developed in the 1690s to defend parliamentary independence against encroaching executive power. These “True” or “Old” Whigs relied heavily on the political writings of such “Commonwealthmen” as James Harrington, Edmund Ludlow, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Marchamont Nedham, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and John Toland. In many cases, these thinkers were more concerned that the ethos of liberty be preserved than whether the actual form of government was a republic or a monarchy. It was in this ideological context that the expression “the spirit of liberty” was coined. Ludlow’s Memoirs of the civil wars, written in the 1660s and redacted by Toland, twice referred to this “spirit” as an opponent of Oliver Cromwell’s despotic actions.6
By the time the Memoirs were published in 1698, the phrase had begun to enter the lexicon of the British political class. In that year, a precocious nineteen-year-old, whose future as a Tory secretary at war and later a Jacobite secretary of state still lay ahead of him, wrote a letter to his mentor Sir William Trumbull. Henry St. John stated that whereas patriotism and “zeal for liberty” were once “imprinted on our hearts,” the opposite values now held sway in Britain. St. John traced those traditional political virtues to the Romans. Even after ancient Britain threw off the Romans’ legal system, he noted, “their divine spirit (if I might use the expression) shed its influence on us.” After making this distinction between laws and their “spirit,” and citing republican tags from Tacitus, Cicero, and Horace, St. John went on to observe that liberty-loving people had historically been enslaved not by force of arms but by the corruption of manners. He gave the Greek example of Cyrus, who failed to pacify the Lidians militarily because “the spirit of Liberty crost his designs, and stopt the course of his victories.”7 The spirit of liberty, as St. John viewed it, was thus more powerful than armies or laws; it was a god-like, “divine” influence; it was republican. These were the germs of a concept St. John would fully develop thirty years later and eventually bequeath to Hume.
During those years “the spirit of liberty” was occasionally mentioned in British political writings, essays, and histories.8 Yet, as in the case of St. John’s letter, it rarely appeared more than once in any given work; it was not deployed systematically in any purposeful way until St. John, now Lord Bolingbroke, mounted a decade-long political campaign, beginning in 1725, against the Whig regime of Sir Robert Walpole. To unite his coalition of fellow Tories and disaffected Whigs, Bolingbroke had to justify the very idea of political opposition and refute the charge that he was raising a treasonous “faction” of the sort that caused the civil wars. This was the goal of the Remarks on the History of England, twenty-four essays he published under the pseudonym Humphrey Oldcastle between September 1730 and May 1731 in his paper The Craftsman. Here Bolingbroke tried turning the tables on his opponents by pinning the label of “faction” on them. Drawing from Renaissance humanism’s preoccupation with internal faction as the enemy of liberty and its technique of dividing history into good and evil periods based on republican criteria,9 Bolingbroke went through English history showing how “the spirit of liberty” had always supported the national interest in the face of the self-interested “spirit of faction” that Walpole’s Court Whigs now fomented.10 England had the trappings of liberty, Bolingbroke argued, but Walpole’s placemen, pensions, and bribes corrupted its political institutions, which were free in name only. The spirit of liberty alone could give life to the institutions of liberty, the English laws and system of government. Resuscitating the “Country” platform, Bolingbroke cited Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy as the source of this distinction between external constitutional forms and the true spirit of a government. To illustrate his point, he explained: “As losing the spirit of liberty lost the liberties of Rome, even while the laws and constitutions, made 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
