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ABSTRACT
This paper is in four parts. The first sets out the debate between those who wished England to have only a professional army, and those who sought to supplement it with a citizen militia. This debate is crucial for understanding The History of the Proceedings in the Case of Margaret, Commonly Called Peg, Only Lawful Sister to John Bull, Esq. This political satire (commonly known as Sister Peg) is about the successful struggle to re-establish the militia in England in 1757, and the unsuccessful attempt to extend the measure to Scotland. Adam Ferguson was in favour of Scotland having a militia, whereas some have claimed that Hume was against it. It is argued that Hume supported the measure. In the second part Sister Peg is briefly compared to Dr John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull, of which it is an imitation and sequel. In the third part the issue of the disputed authorship of Sister Peg is considered at length and Hume’s claim to have written it is compared to the Rev. Alexander Carlyle’s account that Ferguson alone wrote the work. Which of the two accounts is reliable? Richard B. Sher, in an article in this journal, assumes that Carlyle’s account is reliable, and takes issue with my arguments for reattributing the satire to Hume. It is argued that none of his arguments is successful, and that simply assuming the reliability of Carlyle’s account begs the question. In the fourth part some emendations made by Ferguson in his copy of Sister Peg are set out so that readers may see for themselves that they are almost certainly non-authorial.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following for assistance in preparing this paper: Robert Betteridge, Mark Box, Richard Connors, Ben Gilding, Douglas Hay, Eugene Heath, Donald Livingston, Ralph McLean, Alexander Murdoch, John Valdimir Price, Spartaco Pupo, and Richard Sher. I am also obliged to the publishing house of Taylor and Francis for allowing me to use material which originally appeared in my ‘Ferguson’s Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia,’ in Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, eds., Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. G.A. Bonnard (London: Nelson, 1966), 107; hereafter Memoirs.
2 ‘Mr Speaker Onslow’s Speech to the King on Presenting the Money Bills’, May 27, Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1756, 457.
3 H. Walpole, Memoirs of King George II, ed. J. Brooke, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), vol. 2, 91.
4 Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1756); date of publication as given in the Public Advertiser, November 25, 1756. Hereafter abbreviated as Reflections.
5 Reflections, 53.
6 Ibid., 3.
7 For a detailed account of General St Clair’s expedition see Ernest C. Mossner, Life of David Hume, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 15. Hume gave an account of France’s land forces in that year: ‘The force of France, either for offence or defence, consists chiefly in three different bodies of men: first, in a numerous veteran army, which was then entirely employed in Italy and on their frontiers … secondly, in a regular and disciplined militia, with which all the fortified cities along the sea coast were garrisoned … thirdly, in a numerous body of coast militia, or garde-côte, amounting to near 200, 000 … .’ ‘The Descent on the Coast of Brittany’, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. T.H. Green and T.H. Grose (London: Macmillan, 1882), 443–60, at pp. 450f. St Clair had been ‘assur’d there were no regular Troops near this whole Coast,’ and the aim of the expedition was to ‘reduce the French to a Necessity of guarding their Coast with regular Forces, which must produce a great Diversion from their ambitious Projects on the Frontiers.’ Letter to John Home of Ninewells, October 4, 1746. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), I, 95f.; hereafter Letters. This casts doubt on Sher’s claim that ‘it seems clear that the ideas about military defence in “Of Commerce” and “Of Refinement in the Arts” grew out of Hume’s experience with British and French armies (not militias) during the War of Austrian Succession’.
8 ‘“Let Margaret Sleep”: Putting to Bed the Authorship Controversy over Sister Peg’, History of European Ideas (29 October 2021), 321 n. 132; emphasis added. Hereafter LMS.
9 Reflections, 17.
10 Ibid., 30.
11 Ibid., 8, 13, 16, 17.
12 Gilbert Elliot to George Grenville, May 25, 1756, in W.J. Smith, ed., The Grenville Papers, 4 vols. (London: John Murray, 1852), vol. 1, 160.
13 Parliamentary History, vol. 15, 736. Hardwicke’s speech was published in Two Speeches of a Late Lord Chancellor (London, 1770).
14 Gentleman’s Magazine (June 1756), 295.
15 Lord Dacre to Sanderson Miller, May 1756, in L. Dickins and M. Stanton, eds., An Eighteenth-Century Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1910), 333.
16 John N. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 138.
17 Reflections, 36, 37, 41, 43, 46, 47.
18 Ibid., 53.
19 Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 218f.; emphasis added. Hereafter Church and University.
20 Parliamentary History, vol. 15, 757.
21 Reflections, 50, 53.
22 My estimate is based upon tables in Robert Allen, ‘Class Structure and Inequality During the Industrial Revolution: Lessons from England’s Social Tables, 1688–1867’, Economic History Review 72 (2019): 88–125. I am grateful to Professor Allen for discussing this matter with me.
23 John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 90f. Hereafter Scottish Militia.
24 Almost 50 years after Ferguson wrote Reflections he told Henry Dundas that ‘in admitting Recruits [to the volunteer militia] we are rather to select than to solicit; for besides that it is no recommendation to any institution, that it is open to everyone; here is a trust that must not be prostituted.’ To be selected a volunteer must also have ‘a character without reproach.’ As for compulsion: ‘In this way no doubt every subject may be forced to handle a firelock: but this is soon obtained and it is of little value if the heart does not go along with it. There is danger that whatever is forced may leave an impression of servitude and consequently some degree of repugnance to the bussiness.’ The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1995), vol. 2, 473, 476. Hereafter Correspondence.
25 ‘If you lay your hand on Ferguson’s Pamphlet with regard to the Militia, which I forgot on your Table, I must also beg that it may be packt up with the Historian.’ Hume to Elibank, ‘New Letters to Lord Elibank, 1748–1776’, Texas Studies in Literature & Language 4 (1962): 441. This casts doubt on Sher’s claim that ‘Ferguson never acknowledged any of his anonymous works’ (LMS, 333). How did Hume and Elibank know that Ferguson had written Reflections if he ‘never acknowledged’ it?
26 ‘Of National Characters’, Essays, 212; True Account, 17.
27 For Hume’s account of France’s two-tier militia see Note 7 above.
28 Memoirs, 109.
29 ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, Essays Moral Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 520f. Hereafter Essays.
30 History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), I, 70. Hereafter History.
31 ‘Of the Protestant Succession’, Essays, 505.
32 History, IV, 370. Hume computed the number of able-bodied men then available to serve in the militia, concluding that it was ‘formidable by their numbers; but their discipline and experience were not proportionate.’ And he added that it was ‘unfit’ to defend the English coasts (378).
33 History, V, 140.
34 Ibid., 546.
35 History, VI, 164.
36 Ibid., 536.
37 Mossner, Life of Hume, 144.
38 ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, Essays, 525, 527.
39 ‘Of the Protestant Succession’, Essays, 509.
40 Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 126, 212; emphasis added.
41 Scottish Militia, 65.
42 Ibid., 66.
43 H.T. Dickinson, ‘Review of Sister Peg’, Parliamentary History 3 (1984): 229. The fact that the satire employs radical Whig arguments against those who would rely entirely upon a standing army casts doubt on Sher’s claim that in Ferguson’s time ‘antiarmy ideology as such was dead except for rhetorical purposes’ (Church and University, 219).
44 ‘The Militia Question’, TLS, July 23, 1982, 806.
45 See David Wormersley, ed., Writings on Standing Armies (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 2020). The position that comes closest to that of Sister Peg is to be found in Charles Sackville’s A Treatise Concerning the Militia (1753) at page 344: ‘the militia may be restored, and the standing-army not entirely disbanded; and then there can be no reasonable objection to either.’ See David R. Raynor, ed., Sister Peg: A Pamphlet Hitherto Unknown by David Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 94; hereafter SP.
46 Scottish Militia, 240.
47 James Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 546 n.3; for Sher’s judgement see LMS, 319. Such views assume that Hume did not write Sister Peg, which is the very issue in dispute.
48 Quoted in Church and University, 227.
49 Letters, II, 209–12. John Robertson does not take this letter seriously and misunderstands what Hume meant by ‘this Country is almost unanimous.’ It has nothing to do with support for a Scottish militia, but rather for support for the government against ‘the Mob of London.’ Robertson facetiously suggests that it may have been ‘a particularly convivial evening at the Poker which prompted Hume’s exclamation to Strahan’ (Scottish Militia, 237f.). Sher equally misunderstands Hume’s meaning, and wonders why he writes of a Scottish militia when ‘the civil unrest he dreaded was not then evident in Scotland’ (LMS, 319f.). But article 22 of the rejected militia bill enabled the king to order the Scottish militia to serve anywhere in Great Britain, not just in Scotland.
50 Lester Beattie, John Arbuthnot: Mathematician and Satirist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 185f.
51 LMS, 322; emphasis added. Sher devotes less than a page to Sister Peg in his Church and University and does not mention it at all in his Enlightenment and the Book.
52 ‘Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Briton’, in McGill Hume Studies, ed. D.F. Norton, N. Capaldi, and W.L. Robson (San Diego, CA: Austin Hill Press, 1980), 341; reprinted in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). I wish to acknowledge that it was hearing this lecture in 1976 which gave a new turn to my interest in Hume.
53 Letter to Trudaine de Montigny, May 25, !767, New Letters of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 235. This letter gives Hume’s justification for becoming Under-Secretary of State to General Conway: ‘The explication of a few points might have prevented’ the war; and maybe even someone in his position ‘might have prevented’ it.
54 The Life and Works of John Home, I, 180f.
55 The Works of Jonathan Swift (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1814), vol. 6, 4.
56 Supplement to the Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames (Edinburgh, 1809), 18.
57 Correspondence, vol. 2, 433.
58 Letter to William Strahan, March 11, 1771. Letters, II, 237.
59 ‘Of Public Credit’, Essays, 351.
60 Letter to William Strahan, March 25, 1771. Letters, II, 242.
61 Letter to Earl of Bath, October 21, 1762. Quoted in Jeremy Black, Pitt the Elder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 226.
62 British Library Add MS 48803A, fol. 43. I did not know that Strahan had both printed and published Sister Peg until a few months after my edition had been published. I also did not know that it had been highly successful, so mistakenly speculated that it had been humiliatingly unsuccessful, and that this would have been one reason why Hume had suppressed it.
63 The Critical Review 10 (December 1760): 451–3.
64 NLS MS. 16523, f.18v.
65 Letter to Lord Minto, May 1, 1760. Letters, I, 325. The remainder of this letter consists of a detailed account of Frederick II’s recently published Oeuvres du philosophe de Sans-Souci. This book is alluded to in an important but cryptic letter from Hume to Strahan, to be discussed later.
66 Mossner, Life of Hume, 84–8. Hume’s library included copies of Arbuthnot’s An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning (1723) as well as The Miscellaneous Works of Dr John Arbuthnot (1770). His library apparently also contained two copies of Sister Peg. See David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, The David Hume Library (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 1996), 60, 72, 90.
67 Letter to John Crawford, August 29, 1768. New Letters, 184.
68 Letter to the author, July 22, 1979: Dacre Archive, Christ Church, Oxford. I am grateful to his literary executor, Blair Worden, for permission to quote from this letter.
69 ‘The Militia Question’.
70 ‘To the Right Honourable the Lord-Chief-Justice Reason, and the Honourable the Judges, Discretion, Prudence, Reserve, and Deliberation, the Petition of the Patients of Westminster against James Fraser, apothecary.’ This satirical allegory is printed in Letters, II, 340–2. That it is political is evident from the fact that Fraser’s Jacobite ‘medicines’ are opposed to those prescribed by ‘graduate Physicians, as Dr Pelham, Dr Fox, Dr Pitt’; and that it was composed during the 1750 election. This election in Westminster was ‘one of the most fiercely contested elections in the first half of the eighteenth century.’ House of Commons, 1715–1754, under Constituencies: Westminster. I do not understand how Sher can characterize this skit as ‘not overtly “political”’ and totally ignore its literary form (LMS, 313). It is a satirical political allegory.
71 The Natural History of Religion, Part 5.
72 David Raynor, ‘Who Invented the Invisible Hand?’, Times Literary Supplement, August 14, 1998, 22.
73 Letter to William Rouet, July 6, 1759. Letters, I, 309ff. Compare the satire: ‘Lewis Baboon had no more ado, but to give out that he was going to pay a civil visit to John, in order to put the whole house in a pannic; and this word pannic was grown so familiar to John, that he had it always ready as an excuse for running away upon the slightest occasion’ (SP, 57).
74 Letter to Gilbert Elliot, February 18, 1751. Letters, I, 153.
75 Sher has suggested that this work is not a satire but rather ‘a serious polemical pamphlet’ (LMS, 313). But John V. Price writes that it ‘is a broadly satirical treatment of an unjust accusation against a friend, while the pamphlet, Sister Peg has some fairly trenchant satire in it, though it is often too topical to respond to a historically naïve reading.’ He adds that ‘Raynor’s case for admitting [Sister Peg] into the canon is convincing.’ David Hume. Updated Edition (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1991), 133, 154n.10.
76 ‘We have here got down some Copies of a Pamphlet publish’d in London, in Defence of our Friend, Archy Stewart. The Author seems to have been engag’d by the Tyes of private Friendship; and as the subject was rather too particular, as well as for other Reasons, does not choose to own it. Perhaps, your Lordship may be able to guess who it is.’ Letter to Elibank, January 8, 1748. E.C. Mossner, ‘New Hume Letters to Lord Elibank, 1748–1776’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 4 (1962): 437f.
77 See David Raynor, ‘Hume’s Authorship of the Abstract Revisited’, Hume Studies 19 (1993): 213–15.
78 See David Raynor, ‘Hume and Robertson’s History of Scotland’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 10 (1987): 59–63; ‘Hume’s Abstract of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 22 (1984): 51–79.
79 Robert McRae, ‘Review of Sister Peg’, University of Toronto Quarterly 52 (1983): 419–20.
80 Letters, I, 341f.
81 ‘Review of Henry Mackenzie’s Life and Works of John Home’, Quarterly Review 36 (1827): 198f.
82 Alexander Carlyle, Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 183, 208. Hereafter Anecdotes.
83 See Bute to William Mure, February 27, 1762, The Caldwell Papers: John Home ‘wrote me last year about the Conservatorship, that I could not give him, for Parliamentary reasons. I hope he is not out of humour!’: James Stuart MacKenzie to Lord Milton, February 19, 1763, NLS MS. 16728, f.96.
84 Carlyle, Anecdotes, 140, 206f.
85 Ibid., 208.
86 Letter to Adam Ferguson, November 9, 1763. Letters, I, 410.
87 Letter to the Comtesse de Boufflers, January 12, 1766. Letters, II, 10.
88 Anecdotes, 195.
89 See Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years War 1757–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 74–85.
90 Townshend spearheaded the English militia bill prior to, and during, the short-lived Devonshire-Pitt ministry (6 December 1756 to 6 April 1757) and was also charged with managing the inquiry into the loss of Minorca. An early biographer claimed that ‘though Pitt had formerly shown the greatest zeal for these objects, he now seemed comparatively indifferent to their accomplishment’: these projects were ‘taken in hand with such dilatoriness that the one [re-establishing a militia] was only carried out after Pitt's [firing by the King on 6 April 1757], and the other [the inquiry into the loss of Minorca] not at all. Both projects were only the means to an end … . Now that Pitt’s object had been fulfilled these measures could be thrown into the background, if not entirely laid aside.’ Albert von Ruville, William Pitt, Lord Chatham (London: Heinemann, 1907), II, 95. Horace Walpole once expressed scepticism about Pitt’s ostentatious pro-militia speeches: ‘ … since the Militia Act of 1757 [Pitt] had fancied himself its champion. Yet Walpole at least thought that “This was all grimace: he did not care a jot about the militia.”’ Paul Langford, The First Rockingham Administration 1763–66 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 231. Marie Peters notes that ‘In the chequered but eventually successful progress of a militia bill Pitt played no part’ (The Elder Pitt (London: Longman, 1998), 68).
91 Letter to Andrew Millar, March 22, 1760. Letters, I, 322.
92 Sher has objected against this hypothesis that ‘There is no evidence that Hume was told (as he asserted in his letter to Carlyle) that Carlyle had learned of Hume’s authorship of Sister Peg from a duplicitous printer or that Carlyle had publicly revealed that information … ’ (LMS, 334). Of course there is no evidence because these two events never happened. My hypothesis is that it was a prank that Hume fell for and only discovered that it was a prank after writing Carlyle.
93 We will let Hume himself tell the story: ‘two days ago I was in the House of Commons, where an English gentleman came to me, and told me, that he had lately sent to a grocer’s shop for a pound of raisins, which he received wrapped up in a paper that he shewed me. How you would have turned pale at the sight! It was a leaf of your History, and the very Character of Queen Elizabeth, which you had laboured so finely, little thinking it would so soon come to so disgraceful an end. I happened a little after to see Millar, and told him the story,,,,But the story proves more serious than I apprehended. For he told Strahan, who thence suspects villany among his prentices and journeymen; and has sent me very earnestly to know the gentleman’s name, that he may find out the grocer, and trace the matter to the bottom.’ Letter to William Robertson, March 1759, Letters, I, 300.
94 For details of General Murray’s role in this crucial battle see D. Peter MacLeod, Backs to the Wall: The Battle of Sainte-Foy and the Conquest of Canada (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2017).
95 Gideon Murray to James Murray, November 9, 1759: James Murray Papers, Library and Archives Canada.
96 George Murray to James Murray, March 3, 1761: Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh, La.II.601.
97 ‘Since Murray notes that “Jowler” (Pitt) is roughly treated in this production, Raynor believes he is talking about Sister Peg. But by March Sister Peg would be old news, and from an earlier reference to “Jowler” in Murray’s letter it may be inferred that the epithet for Pitt used in Sister Peg was already known to James Murray by this time. These factors suggest that Murray’s “huomorous thing” is not Sister Peg but some subsequent pamphlet or broadside which has never been identified. However, supposing for the sake of argument that the “huomorous thing” is indeed Sister Peg, Murray’s letter indirectly corroborates Carlyle’s story about Hume spreading the rumour that he was the author but adds no new evidence to support Raynor’s contention that Hume was the author. In short, this source is so ambiguous and inconclusive that it is worthless.’ Richard B. Sher, ‘Review of Sister Peg’, Philosophical Books 24 (1983): 85–90. It is evident that Sher did not realize that the Saint Lawrence River is frozen over until May, so General Murray could not have heard of Sister Peg until the ice broke up.
98 George Murray to James Murray, May 29, 1760. Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh, Gen. 1429/18/19. Sher never mentions this letter and John Robertson overlooks its significance, perhaps because he mistakenly believes Elibank to be the father, rather than the brother, of George and James Murray. Scottish Militia, 123n. 39.
99 Alexander Murdoch, ‘Andrew Fletcher, Scotland, and London in the Eighteenth Century’, 2013, http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/staff/supporting_files/amurdoch/andrew-fletcher.pdf.
100 Newcastle to Hardwicke, March 15, 1760. BL Add MSS 32,903, ff. 296–7. Horace Walpole believed that ‘Unluckily for that menace the man who had most weight in that country, the Duke of Argyll, was not cordial to the bill, and it was rejected 194 to 84.’ Memoirs of George II, vol. 3, 108. But Argyll does not seem to have been able to sway any Scottish MPs to vote against the bill.
101 ‘The Militia Question’.
102 Sher, ‘Review of Sister Peg’, 86.
103 ‘Of the Protestant Succession’, Essays, 509.
104 Letter to William Mure, October 27, 1775. Letters, II, 302.
105 John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A. Allardyce, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1888), vol. I, 334n; emphasis added.
106 Diary of George Ridpath, Minister of Stitchel, 1755–1761 (Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable, 1922), 126.
107 Selection from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, Esq (London: Macmillan, 1879), 22. Sher notes that Lee in 1824 identified Ferguson as the author of Sister Peg and wonders what was his evidence: ‘it is quite possible that his source was a letter to Ferguson, or a draft, note, or other manuscript of Ferguson’s which no longer survives’ (LMS, 336). But to leave possible evidence for real evidence, it is sufficient to note that Lee served as amanuensis to Carlyle: ‘John Lee (1779–1859) became amanuensis to Alexander Carlyle in 1804, who entrusted him with the manuscript of his autobiography.’ Correspondence, II, 511 n.1. Evidently Lee’s evidence was Carlyle himself.
108 Letter to Hugh Blair, February 11, 1766. Letters, II, 12. By this date Robert Lowth had been Professor of Poetry at Oxford for a decade and had written a well-received Short Introduction to English Grammar. For Hume’s objections to the book see David Raynor, ‘Why Did Hume Dislike Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society?’, in Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 45–72, 179–88.
109 Letter to William Robertson, March 19, 1767. Letters, II, 131f.
110 An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), xxivf.
111 Colin Kidd, ‘Bastard Gaelic Man’, London Review of Books, November 14, 1996.
112 Letter to Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, July 8, 1768. Letters, II, 183.
113 D.D. Raphael and Tatsuya Sakamoto, ‘Anonymous Writings of David Hume’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 28 (1990): 271–81; reprinted in Sakamoto’s David Hume and Adam Smith: A Japanese Perspective. (London: Routledge, 2020).
114 Emphases added. Sher believes that this sentence ‘reinforces’ Sir John Dalrymple’s claim that Ferguson had published more than three political pamphlets. But it does nothing of the sort, since it only asserts that ‘many’ pamphlets had been attributed to him. ‘We may never know the titles of Ferguson’s other pamphlets,’ Sher adds (LMS, 331). But there is no reason to believe that any of the many pamphlets attributed to him were written by him, except for the pamphlets of 1756 and 1757, already noted. Indeed, when a friend suggested that he write a pamphlet on American affairs he refused and gave as his excuse that he was ‘sensible of the disadvantage of being at a distance’: ‘I am not at hand to repel first attacks or replys. In short I cannot write a pamphlet … .’ Letter to Sir John Macpherson, 1772. Correspondence, I, 96.
115 Sir John Dalrymple wrote Lord North that ‘Ferguson (author of the history of Sister Peg which I had the honour to give your Lordship) is alone worth all the rest I mentioned to you; on account of his talent for ridicule equal to that of Swift & Arbuthnot, at the same time that he is master of the other powers of writing.’ Correspondence, I, xxxv. Robert McRae maintained that Hume ‘is at his best in treating the characters of his main victims’: ‘Chapter xiii, “How Bumbo discoursed with John Bull’s Nurse and found her not so great a fool as he thought her,” is very funny indeed.’ ‘Review of Sister Peg’.
116 True Account, 11f.
117 My edition unfortunately omitted these seven words from this sentence: ‘without end, to vie with our neighbours.’
118 Scottish Militia, 208.
119 Ibid., 67, 71.
120 Mossner, Life of Hume, 238f.
121 Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 79.
122 In Sister Peg the English militia is presented as a great success, though Hardwicke refused to believe it, even if it had been sworn ‘on all the four evangelists.’ Nor could he bear to see his dire ‘predictions equally falsified’ in Scotland as they had been in England (SP, 83). As a correspondent in London wrote: ‘England, in which a militia is not only established, but embodied and employed in actual service, now knows by experience how frivolous and ill-grounded were many of the arguments made use of against it. It appears to have been productive of none of the ill consequences so clearly foreseen, and so strongly insisted on by a certain set of men; industry is not checked, neither are manufactures diminished or destroyed, nor idleness or debauchery become one whit more frequent than they were before’ (Scots Magazine 22 (1760): 168).
123 Sher claims that this tract was written by a ‘supporter of Dundas’ (LMS, 332). But that it is a satire against Dundas would have been recognized by any contemporary familiar with the fact that a committee already had spent many weeks adapting the English militia bill to Scotland. One of Dundas’s objections was said to be that the bill was ‘clearly not adapted to Scotland, but a servile copy of the English bill.’ He allegedly also argued that ‘As Scotland had waited so long, why not wait another year? And then, if an amended English bill answered, we might take it; or have one adapted to the state of our country.’ But there is no evidence that Dundas’s speech made these claims. Gilbert Elliot reported that Dundas ‘made a long & warm speech against militia going to Scotland at all & said that tho’ he was instructed by his County to be for militia in general, yet he had since received instructions from a third of that meeting (that is the minority) to oppose this bill.’ Gilbert Elliot to Lord Minto, April 16, 1761. NLS MS. 11001 fol. 63. Alexander Carlyle claimed ‘that Dundas sincerely thought that arming Scotland was dangerous, though he rested his argument chiefly on a less unpopular topic, viz. a militia would ruin our rising manufactures.’ Anecdotes, 204. That ‘Suck-Fist’ does not represent Colonel Watson is evident because, though he may have been a good military surveyor, he was not ‘a very learned man of that age.’ It is dangerous to follow the ‘key’ given in earlier editions of Sister Peg.
124 Letter to William Strahan, Letters, I, 335ff.
125 Strahan told a close friend that ‘the printing trade is by no means a very profitable one’ and ‘requires great industry, oeconomy, perseverance, and address, to make any great figure in it.’ That determined him to become a bookseller as well as a printer: ‘I quickly saw, that if I confined myself to mere printing for Booksellers I might be able to live, but very little more than live.’ By 1771 he owned property in more than 200 books. Letter to David Hall, June 15, 1771, Pennsylvania Magazine of History 12 (1888): 117f.
126 The project probably had to do with the Philological Miscellany. Hume may have advised Dr Rose about the selection of essays by French writers that were translated in it. These included essays by Levesque de Pouilly, Hume’s host at Reims in 1734. Adam Smith contributed an essay on the origin of languages to this work, and Strahan printed 1000 copies of it in April 1761. See Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 198. Maybe Rose and Strahan wished Hume to contribute an essay to the volume so that it would have at least two essays by British authors.
127 Letter to Andrew Millar, October 21, 1766. Letters, II, 98.
128 ‘Hume and the American Revolution’, 338f.
129 Oeuvres du philosophe de Sans-Souci had been published on April 5th and Hume had given a detailed account of its poems to Lord Minto in a letter of 1st May. Horace Walpole said of them: ‘How contemptible they are! Miserable poetry; not a new thought, nor an old one newly expressed. I say nothing of the folly of publishing his aversion to the English at the very time they are ruining themselves for him; nor of the greater folly of his irreligion.’ Letter to Horace Mann, May 7, 1760, Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. W.S. Lewis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), vol. 21, 403f.
130 Sher states that ‘none of the known evidence suggests that Hume had any communication with Strahan about Sister Peg’ (LMS, 308). He then argues that ‘The fact that neither Ferguson nor Hume is known to have communicated with Strahan before, during, or after the publication tilts the scales towards Ferguson because he was not acquainted with Strahan at this time, whereas Hume was Strahan’s friend and correspondent’ (LMS, 335).
131 Letter to William Strahan, February 22, 1772, Letters, II, 260.
132 Letter of William Strahan to David Hume, February 27, 1772. Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), Letter LX.
133 Strahan’s Travel Journals, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, B/St 83. Strahan vacationed in Edinburgh in 1766 and 1768 without contacting Ferguson.
134 Ferguson to Shelburne, February 3, 1762. Correspondence, II, 533.
135 Ferguson to Carlyle Bell, July 21, 1810. Correspondence, II, 513; emphasis added.
136 Church and University, 232. At LMS, 319 n. 118, Sher turns this myth into an argument: if Ferguson named the club, and if the name of the club is derived from Margaret throwing her ‘poker’ at the Jacobite rebels in the ’45, then this is ‘more evidence that Ferguson wrote Sister Peg.’ Jane Fagg, however, like myself was sceptical about Carlyle’s claim that Ferguson had given the club its name. See Introduction, Correspondence, I, xxxv.
137 Letter to Gilbert Elliot, November 6, 1760. Correspondence, I, 42f.
138 ‘Review of Sister Peg’, English Historical Review 100 (1985): 191f.
139 The Works of John Home, ed. Henry MacKenzie, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co., 1822), vol. 1, 27f. Donald Livingston writes: ‘That Hume had begun a piece on the militia provides some corroboration for attributing Sister Peg to Hume.’ Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 413 n. 27. However, Sher argues that MacKenzie’s text involves a typo of ‘Hume’ instead of ‘Home’, so that it was not Hume who had written the ‘warm paper’ but rather the dramatist. Sher backs this speculation up with the claim that ‘there is no evidence that [MacKenzie] ever saw’ Hume’s papers (LMS, 320). But we know that MacKenzie consulted them, for he wrote that he was ‘indebted’ to David Hume secundus ‘for a communication of his uncle’s papers and correspondence’ (Op. cit., vol.1, 154). And MacKenzie’s text prints a codicil from Hume’s will concerning the dispute about the spelling of their surnames, together with a note from Hume’s nephew concerning this dispute.
140 Scottish Militia, 343 n.9.
141 ‘Review of Sister Peg’. See also Scottish Militia, 237ff.
142 That Robertson’s interpretation may now be the accepted view is suggested by Bob Harris’s endorsement: ‘Opponents of the militia (David Hume was one) always argued that it was an anachronism and detrimental to commercial and manufacturing activity.’ Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 191.
143 ‘For I go around doing nothing but persuading both old and young among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul’: Apology 30a-e. As Hume wrote: ‘Who admires not Socrates; his perpetual serenity and contentment, amidst the greatest poverty and domestic vexations; his resolute contempt of riches, and his magnanimous care of preserving liberty, while he refused all assistance from his friends and disciples, and avoided even the dependence of an obligation?’ An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section VII. Hume was known as ‘the Socrates of Edinburgh.’ See Mossner, Life of Hume, 391.
144 ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, Essays, 269.
145 A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 2, 1.7.3.
146 O.M. Brack Jr. in The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. J. C. Beasley and O. M. Brack (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 446f.
147 The Bill of Rights (1689) ‘did not hinder some persons, in both families, who had a hankering after Squire Geoffry, from being mad enough once and again, to think of restoring him to his office’ (SP, 49). Soon after the Union of Parliaments, ‘Peg’s affairs went on so tolerably, that every body was pacified, except the few who would be pleased with nothing, unless Squire Geoffry was restored.’ A Jacobite ‘originally meant any person who was for restoring Squire Geoffrey to the management of John Bull's business’ (SP, 50, 84. Emphases added).
148 Life of William, Earl of Shelburne, Afterwards First Marquess of Lansdowne (London: Macmillan, 1875), I, 36.
149 See Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s “Blue-Water” Policy, 1689–1815’, International History Review 10 (1988): 33–58.
150 Letter to John Clephane, 1747, Letters, I, 100.
151 Alexander Murdoch, ‘Andrew Fletcher’, 4. See also his ‘The People Above’: Politics and Administration in Mid-Eighteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980), passim. At LMS, 311, Sher mistakenly thinks that this passage is ‘a scathing critique of English politicians,’ but the most powerful English politicians get their comeuppance elsewhere in the satire, not here. (Sher’s transcription of this alteration by Ferguson differs considerably from my own.)
152 Letters, I, 164–7.Two years after being appointed keeper, Robert Dunda craftily attempted to force Hume to resign the office. Letters, I, 210ff. See Mossner, Life of Hume, 242f.
153 Hume employed the same distinction concerning Lord Bute: ‘I believe him a very good man, a better man than a politician.’ Letter to Hugh Blair, October 6, 1763, Letters, I, 404. Hume presumably got to know Bute when they were both part of a vacation party in May 1763. The party included Bute, his brother James Stuart MacKenzie and Gilbert Elliot, as well as Sir Harry Erskine and Lady Erskine. See James Stuart MacKenzie to Charles Jenkinson, May 15, 1763. BL Add MS 38200 ff. 332–3.
154 See Roger L. Emerson, An Enlightened Duke: The Life of Archibald Campbell (1682–1761), Earl of Ilay, 3rd Duke of Argyll (Killkeran: Humming Earth, 2013), 249–61. Hume carefully distinguished bribery from other forms of ‘influence’: ‘Pensions and bribes, though it be difficult entirely to exclude them, are dangerous expedients for government; and cannot be too carefully guarded against, nor too vehemently decried by every one who has a regard to the virtue and liberty of a nation. The influence, however, which the crown acquires from the disposal of places, honours, and preferments, is to be esteemed of a different nature. This engine of power may become too forcible, but it cannot altogether be abolished, without the total destruction of monarchy, and even of all regular authority’ (History, VI, 366). Sher claims that ‘Hume expresses admiration rather than animosity’ for Argyll (LMS, 303). But that entirely ignores Hume’s distinction between the man and the politician.
155 Letter to John Macpherson, January 15, 1778, Correspondence, I, 162.
156 ‘I have liv’d in the greatest Intimacy with Mr Ferguson for above twenty years; and tho’ I admir’d very much the Beauty of his Genius, known to all the World from his Writings; I assure you, that his Probity, Integrity, and Greatness of Mind, which are also known to everybody in this Country, have always been the chief Foundation of the Esteem which I bore him.’ Letter to Sir George Colebrook, July 30, 1772, Correspondence, II, 548. The recipient of this letter is unidentified by Merolle, but a note in Colebrook’s autobiography states that ‘David Hume recommended Dr. Ferguson to be Secretary, who was afterwards Secretary to the American Commissioners’ (Colebrooke, Retrospection, ii, 22n).
157 Mossner, Life of Hume, 86. Letter to Andrew Stuart, February 4, 1773. Letters, II, 271. This letter alludes to Arbuthnot’s satire and even quotes a distinctive phrase from it. See SP, 111 n. 44.
158 Letter to Adam Smith, July 28, 1759. Letters, I, 314.
159 Letter to Andrew Millar, March 22, 1760. Letters, I, 321.
160 William Robertson to Gilbert Elliot, April 30, 1760, quoted in Church and University, 229.
161 Scots Magazine 22 (1760): 168. Hume’s Anglophobia was at its height during and after the Wilkes and Liberty commotions but was less evident in 1760. For Hume’s Anglophobia in the late 1760s see Donald Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy, chapter 10.
162 ‘ … it was the fashion at this time to say, that the great Jowler would never stop, till every good work was accomplished; but historians do not mention any great things that he did in the matter’ (SP, 74).
163 Letter to the Abbe LeBlanc, September 12, 1754. Letters, I, 193.
164 ‘That Politics May be Reduced to a Science’, Essays, 31.
165 Letter to Robert Dundas, November 20, 1754. Letters, I, 211.
166 Letter to John Clephane, January 5, 1753. Letters, I, 171.
167 K.E. Smith, ‘Review of Sister Peg’, British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies 6 (1983): 282–3.
168 Letter to David Hume, April 17, 1767. Correspondence, I, 76. In this letter Ferguson complains of Mrs Montagu ‘for conjuring up the Spartan black broth against’ him, adding that he thought that he had ‘laid this Devil under the Genteeler appellation of Pottage, which you know is here a dish in great request.’ This appears to be an allusion to ‘the warm pottage [Lord President Dundas] had got from’ the Lord Chancellor (SP, 84).