An Historical View of the English Government: From the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688 (review)

It is high time that John Millar’s most substantial work received some attention, as it has too often been seen as secondary in importance to his lesser effort, the Origins of the Distinctions of Rank. Aptly, this edition is introduced by Mark Salber Phillips, and Millar’s book illustrates fully one of Professor Phillips’s chief points regarding eighteenth-century historiography, that traditional narrative history was increasingly found inadequate by eighteenth-century literati for writing about subjects like commerce and manners, which were seen as essential for history written in a modern commercial age. As a result, new, largely non-narrative ways of seeing and writing about history were developed.

The older Scottish historians, David Hume and William Robertson, had stuck to detailed political narrative, with occasional short digressions. Discursive treatments of commerce, law, and the arts were confined to clearly marked portions of their works, like the preliminary section of Robertson’s Reign of Charles V or the appendices in Hume’s History of England. Political narrative, however, is comparatively thin in Millar, and what there is, is more general overview than detailed account. Much of the work reads like a series of dissertations on aspects of English history, including property relations, parliament, commerce, and law, and the fourth volume, which was published only after Millar’s death, makes no pretence of being anything other than a collection of essays.

As Phillips says in his introduction, Millar produced the Historical View largely to provide a Whiggish response to Hume’s Tory-royalist interpretation of English history. Accordingly we find Millar asserting that the Saxon Witenagemote was a far more inclusive institution than the predominately aristocratic body as Hume and his seventeenth-century Tory source Robert Brady saw it. He also believes, as seventeenth-century Whigs did, and Hume did not, that the events of 1066 were not conquest, and that there was a substantial continuity in English institutions from the Saxon to the Norman periods. Dealing with the seventeenth century, Hume contended that the Tudors had possessed virtually absolute power, and that the Stuarts had only followed their predecessors. The turbulence of the 1600s was therefore due to Parliament’s claiming unprecedented rights. Millar, on the other hand, denies at length that Tudor England (except briefly under Henry VIII) was an absolutist state, and even falls into the ‘vulgar’ Whig view of Elizabeth I’s reign as a golden age, with the result that he sees Stuart actions in the seventeenth century as deliberate, innovative attempts to establish absolutism, leading to civil war.

An interesting feature of the Historical View is that it shows how much some late-eighteenth-century Scottish Whigs came to identify themselves as ‘Britons,’ with England. Millar speaks of historical English political arrangements as ‘our ancient constitution’ in a way that Hume or Robertson would have found problematic. Robertson’s first work was a history of Scotland. Hume set out to write a history of ‘Great Britain,’ and, although this became unavoidably Anglocentric, he still gave due attention to Scottish events. The Historical View is entirely English in focus, and its longest treatment of Scotland is a single chapter that gallops through Scottish history to 1603 in forty pages. However, Millar also presents a picture of the early Scottish parliament that makes it seem even freer than England’s, using as a source a polemical work written by the Scottish Whig Presbyterian pamphleteer George Ridpath in 1702, at a time of heightened tension between England and Scotland. He also suggests that there may be substantial foundation to the traditional view that feudalism was established in Scotland during the reign of Malcolm II in the early eleventh century, upon which two distinguished jurist-historians, Lords Kames and Hailes, had cast grave doubts. In addition...