¹ Letters of Eminent Persons addressed to David Hume, ed. J. H. Burton (Edinburgh and London, 1849), 214 (my own translation). The letter is undated, but the fact that Hume is in Britain demonstrates it is from the later period of Wilkite agitation.

² Bongie, L. L., David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (Oxford, 1965), 30Google Scholar.

³ For examples of Hume's thinking in the late 1760s see Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1969), 2: 178–235. On the relationship between Hume and Wilkes see Forbes, D., Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), 187–92Google Scholar; Miller, D., Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought (Oxford, 1981), 182–4Google Scholar; Stewart, J. B., Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 269–71Google Scholar; Livingston, D. W., Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago and London, 1998), 256–89Google Scholar. See also Pocock, J. G. A., “Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Briton”, in idem, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 137–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Hume, Letters, 2: 208 (16 Oct. 1769).

⁵ For general accounts of the Wilkite movement see Christie, I. R., Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform (London, 1962), 25–67Google Scholar; Brewer, J., Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), 3–25, 163–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dickinson, H. T., “Radicals and Reformers in the Age of Wilkes and Wyvill”, in Black, J., ed., British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt: 1742–1789 (Basingstoke and London, 1990), 123–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, K., The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 206–36Google Scholar. For a discussion of the Wilkite crowd see George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763–1774 (London, 1962). For Wilkes himself see Thomas, P. D. G., John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cash, A. H., John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven and London, 2006)Google Scholar; J. Sainsbury, John Wilkes: The Lives of a Libertine (Aldershot, 2006).

⁶ North Briton, no. 12 (12 Aug. 1762); England's Constitutional Test for the Year 1763 (London, 1763), 24.

⁷ Towers, J., An Enquiry into the question, whether juries are, or are not, judges of law, as well as of fact (London, 1764), viGoogle Scholar; St. James Chronicle, 1 March 1764. The title page of the former publication also contains an inscription from Hume's essay. In Towers's pamphlet the attack on the Wilkes prosecution is made explicitly, in the St. James Chronicle letter the critique is implicit in the timing of the publication of a defence of a free press (a week after the verdicts).

⁸ Churchill, C., The Journey (London, 1765), 6–7Google Scholar.

⁹ This footnote contains all the references to Hume to be found in the North Briton (1768–71). The nature of the material from Hume is indicated in square brackets. The term “credited” will be used to refer to those passages where the paper acknowledges Hume as the author; those where the borrowing is not noted will be listed as “un-credited”. Page reference are to the specific passages referred to by the North Briton. The editions used are Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1998); Essays Moral Political and Literary, ed. E.F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985); The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis, 1983). North Briton 47 (10 May 1768) [credited quotation from Hume, “Of the Liberty of the Press” in Essays, 12–13, 605]; North Briton 57 (16 July 1768) [credited paraphrase of “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals” in Enquiries, 183 passim]; North Briton 58 (23 July 1768) [uncredited quotation from “Of Public Credit”, Essays, 360–61]; North Briton 60 (6 Aug. 1768) [uncredited quotation from “That Politics Might be Reduced to a Science”, Essays, 18–21]; North Briton 61 (13 Aug. 1768) [credited general reference to The History], [credited quotation from The History, 6: 404], [uncredited paraphrase of “Of the Parties of Great Britain”, Essays, 67], [uncredited quotation from “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm”, Essays, 78]; North Briton 73 (5 Nov. 1768) [credited paraphrasing of “Of Money”, Essays, 281–94]; North Briton 105 (6 May 1769) [credited paraphrasing of The History, 4: 84–94]; North Briton 195 (8 Dec. 1770) [credited quotation from “Of Some Remarkable Customs”, Essays, 374–5].

¹⁰ It was common for eighteenth-century newspapers to copy material from their competitors. Entries marked with a * are those which reprint material from the periodical immediately prior to them in this list. North Briton 47 (10 May 1768); St. James Chronicle, 9 June 1768; Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, 13 June 1768* Middlesex Journal, or Chronicle of Liberty, 5 Oct. 1769; Middlesex Journal, or Chronicle of Liberty, 16 June 1770; Public Ledger, 16 June 1770, quoted in The Repository: or Treasury of politics and literature for MDCCLXX (London, 1771), 40; St. James Chronicle, 18 Nov. 1773; General Evening Post, 18 Nov. 1773* Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 19 Nov. 1773* London Evening Post, 8 March 1774. Extracts from the essay also appear in Essays, Historical Political and Moral (Dublin, 1774), 233.

¹¹ For references to Hume's History see Middlesex Journal, or Chronicle of Liberty, 11 April 1769; General Evening Post, 24 May 1770. A more negative verdict on Hume's History in relation to opposition politics is to be found in St. James Chronicle, 9 June 1768. Repeated in Public Advertiser, 13 June 1768; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 14 June 1768. References to “Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic”: Lloyd's Evening Post, 31 July 1765; St. James Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 18 May 1769. Reference to “That Politics Might be Reduced to a Science”, London Chronicle, 2 Dec. 1769. References to “Of Taxes”, London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 9 March 1765; N. Forster, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions (London, 1767), 49–66; Considerations on the Policy, Commerce, and Circumstances of the Kingdom (London, 1771), 63.

¹² North Briton 6 (10 July 1762).

¹³ North Briton 10 (7 Aug. 1762).

¹⁴ For Country modes of political argument see Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1977), 163–94Google Scholar; Harris, B., Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), 67–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Simpson, K., “Home, John (1722–1808)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar, available at http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/13646 (accessed 19 Jan. 2008).

¹⁶ North Briton 12 (12 Aug. 1762).

¹⁷ England's Constitutional Test, 24.

¹⁸ The Wilkites’ positive attitude towards Hume might be seen, in part, as a product of the association that Wilkes and Hume enjoyed during this period. Having corresponded with one another ten years earlier (see Hume, Letters, 1: 194–5 (8 Oct. 1754)) they were thrown together in Paris in 1764 by Hume's appointment and Wilkes's exile. In a letter of 9 Jan., Wilkes informed his friend Humphrey Cotes that he had left a card for Hume and subsequently “met him at Baron D'Holbach's where we laughed much” (Hume to Cotes, 9 Jan. 1764, BL Mss 30867). The two were in frequent contact over the next five months as they regularly attended the ambassador's chapel for Sunday services (a move both wrongly attributed to a turn towards religious piety in the other). For Hume's view, see Hume, Letters, 1: 444 (23 April 1764). For Wilkes's view see Wilkes to Onslow, 9 Jan. 1764, BL Mss 30868.

¹⁹ For discussions of Bingley's life see Plomer, H. R., Bushnell, G. H. and Dix, E. R. McC, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (Oxford, 1932)Google Scholar; Bowyer, W., Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 6 vols. (London, 1812), 3: 631–4Google Scholar; E.S., “A Forgotten Journalist”, Athenaeum, 20 May 1899, 626. Bingley provides some information in his A Sketch of English Liberty (London, 1793). See also Brewer, J., “Commercialization and Politics”, in Kendrick, N. Mc, Brewer, J. and Plumb, J. H., eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1983), 256–7Google Scholar.

²⁰ Born c.1738 in New Romney, Bingley spent his early years working for a series of respectable printers, among them William Nicoll, Charles Say and Hume's friend and correspondent William Strahan. In 1767 he set up as a bookseller and publisher in his own right producing an edition of the Quaker tract Observations on the late anonymous publication in vindication of Robert Barclay (London, 1767). From 1768 the focus of his work turned to political matters as he put out an extensive selection of political pamphlets, Wilkite poetry and scandalous memoirs (mostly chronicling the immoralities of ministers and their mistresses), as well as printing a number of periodicals, among them the North Briton, Bingley's Journal, or the Universal Gazette and the Constitutional Magazine. See Bowyer, Literary Anecdotes, 3: 631–4; Bingley, A Sketch.

²¹ Indeed, the moniker was of such value that 10 May saw the launch not only of Bingley's North Briton, but also of Staples Steare's Extraordinary North Briton. The two remained in competition until the demise of the latter at the very end of 1769. For the social composition of the Wilkites see Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty.

²² The classic account of Hume's view of liberty is Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 125–92.

²³ For Hume's endorsement of British political achievements see “Of the Protestant Succession”, Essays, 508. For his views on France and absolute monarchy see “Of Civil Liberty”, Essays, 87–96.

²⁴ Hume, “Of the Origin of Government”, Essays, 40.

²⁵ Hume, “Of the Origin of Government”, Essays, 40–41. This essay was not published until 1777, but the principles it uses are central to much of Hume's analysis.

²⁶ See Hume, “Of the Independency of Parliament”, 42–6; “Of the Parties of Great Britain”, 64–72.

²⁷ Hume, “Of the Liberty of the Press”, Essays, 12–13. This section was used on nine of the ten occasions Hume's essay appeared in the periodical press between 1768 and 1774.

²⁸ See North Briton 61 (13 Aug. 1768).

²⁹ For Hume's views on justice see Enquiry, 183–204; A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978), 477–500. The North Briton is referring to the Enquiry.

³⁰ Hume, Enquiry, 186–7.

³¹ Hume, “Of Passive Obedience”, Essays, 489.

³² By 1768 Mansfield had been a bête noire for Wilkes for a considerable period of time, having contributed in some way to almost all of the many and varied legal difficulties he had experienced through his career. As early as 1757, Mansfield had ruled against Wilkes when he had tried to suspend alimony payments to his estranged wife. Mansfield was also heavily involved in securing Wilkes's conviction when he was tried in absentia for the North Briton 45 and The Essay on Woman in February 1764. Prior to the trials he had altered evidence, and when presiding over it he ordered the jury to deliver a guilty verdict if they believed Wilkes had published these texts. The matter of whether the material was or was not a libel, Mansfield argued, was for the judge to decide. In 1768, after Wilkes had given himself up to the courts, Mansfield had been instrumental both in delaying the delivery of his sentence and in refusing him bail.

³³ See North Briton 50 (28 May 1768). It was this edition of the North Briton that led to Bingley's prosecution and two-year imprisonment. For discussion of Bingley's prosecution see Lloyd's Evening Post, 3–6 June 1768, 6–8 June 1768; St. James's Chronicle, 7–9 June 1768. For a later and more partisan view see Bingley, William, The Case of William Bingley Bookseller (London, 1773)Google Scholar. The arguments from North Briton 50 were quoted from and discussed at length in The Westminster Journal and London Political Miscellany, 11 June 1768, 18 June 1768. This number also prompted a pamphlet—A Letter to the author of the North Briton No.50 (London, 1768)—which provided an angry rejoinder to the attack on Mansfield.

³⁴ A Complete Collection of State Trials and proceedings for High Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanours from the earliest period to the present time, ed. T. B. Howell, vol. 19 (London, 1813), 1112.

³⁵ North Briton 57 (16 July 1768). A footnote informs us the extract the writer has in mind is “Of Justice” from The Dissertation of the Passions. See Hume, Enquiries, 183.

³⁶ Hume, Enquiries, 183.

³⁷ Miller, Philosophy and Ideology, 183.

³⁸ Hume, “Of the Middle Station of Life”, Essays, 547.

³⁹ See Hume, “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science”, Essays, 16.

⁴⁰ Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”, Essays, 522.

⁴¹ Ibid., 516.

⁴² North Briton 48 (14 May 1768).

⁴³ The quotation is from Hume, “Of the Liberty of the Press”, Essays, 12.

⁴⁴ Middlesex Journal, or Chronicle of Liberty, 16 June 1770; North Briton 47 (10 May 1768); North Briton 73 (5 Nov. 1768).

⁴⁵ Public Advertiser, 14 Oct. 1765.

⁴⁶ As Reed Browning has observed, this “was surely the most frequently cited if substantively impoverished classical dictum of the era”. Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), 60. For examples of its use see Hume, “Of Passive Obedience”, Essays, 489; Sidney, Algernon, Discourses concerning government (London, 1751), 318Google Scholar; John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato's Letters: or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, And other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamovy, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, 1995), 1: 87. The quotation appears on the title page of Locke's Treatises of Government in most eighteenth-century editions. See, for example, Locke, John, Two treatises of government (London, 1764)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For the paper's use of Bolingbroke see North Briton 74 (8 Nov. 1768), 90 (11 Feb. 1769), 131 (21 Oct. 1769), 153 (3 March 1770), 162 (5 May 1770), 182 (22 Sept. 1770). For its use of Montesquieu see North Briton 47 (10 May 1768), 48 (14 May 1768), 61 (13 Aug. 1768), 130 (14 Oct. 1769), 156 (24 March 1770), 163 (12 May 1770). The quotation from North Briton 61 does not acknowledge Montesquieu as its source. For Locke see North Briton 80 (17 Dec. 1768), 87 (28 Jan. 1769), 104 (29 April 1769), 120 (12 Aug. 1769). For Temple see North Briton 94 (4 March 1769). For Rousseau see North Briton 208 (2 March 1771), 213 (6 April 1771).

⁴⁸ Hume, History, 5: 59.

⁴⁹ Public Advertiser, 7 Jan. 1768; St. James Chronicle, or the British Evening Post, 9 June 1768. The latter article is reprinted in Public Advertiser, 13 June 1768; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 14 June 1768.

⁵⁰ Whitehall Evening Post, or London Intelligencer, 19 Jan. 1769. This piece is reprinted in Public Advertiser, 20 Jan. 1769. A very similar argument can be found in Public Advertiser, 22 Feb. 1769.

⁵¹ North Briton 61 (13 Aug. 1768); North Briton 195 (8 Dec. 1770). See also the comments following the quotation from Hume in North Briton 47 (10 May 1768).

⁵² The Whole Proceedings on the Trial . . . against Thomas Paine for Libel upon the Revolution Settlement (Dublin, 1793), 107; The Trial of the Rev. Thomas Fyshe Palmer. . . on an indictment for suspicious practices (Edinburgh, 1793), 131. Parts of Hume's essay also feature in The Manual of Liberty: or Testimonies on the Rights of Mankind (London, 1795), 398.

⁵³ On pre-Wilkite extra-parliamentary politics see L. Colley, “Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (fifth series) (1981), 1–19; Dickinson, H. T., “Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole”, in Black, J., ed., Britain in the Age of Walpole (Basingstoke, 1984), 45–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rogers, N., Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ See Brewer, “Commercialization and Politics”, 197–264.

⁵⁵ See Rea, R. R., The English Press in Politics 1760–1774 (Lincoln, NB, 1963), 141Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Arthur Murphy and Tobias Smollett were commissioned by Bute to defend the Ministry in the Auditor and the Briton respectively; the Monitor was edited by John Entick and Arthur Beardmore for William Beckford, himself an MP and prominent Pittite; while the North Briton was financed by Temple and a number of his Whig cohorts. For an account of the relationship between these four papers see Spector, R. D., Political Controversy: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Propaganda (London, 1992) and Rea, English Press, 28–41Google Scholar. The North Briton is discussed in detail in Nobbe, G., The North Briton: A Study in Political Propaganda (New York, 1939)Google Scholar, and the Monitor is given similar treatment in M. Peters, “The ‘Monitor’ on the Constitution, 1755–1765: New Light on the Ideological Origins of English Radicalism”, English Historical Review 86/341 (Oct. 1971), 706–27.

⁵⁷ For early Whig writing see J. G. A. Pocock, “The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse”, in idem, Virtue, Commerce and History, 215–310. For an account of political writing in the first half of the eighteenth century see Phillipson, N., “Politeness and Politics in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians”, in Pocock, J. G. A., ed., The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993), 211–45Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ For “Patriot” views on party see Kramnick, I., Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca and London, 1992), 26–7Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ North Briton 23 (6 Nov. 1762).

⁶⁰ The significance of Locke's ideas within eighteenth-century political thought has been and remains a highly contentious area. However, while it is generally accepted that Locke's Treatises of Government were not entirely neglected before 1770, it is still fair to argue that Lockean resistance theory enjoyed something of a renaissance in the late 1760s and 1770s. For a good summary of debates about the reception of Locke's thought see A. Gibson, “Ancients, Moderns, and Americans: The Republicanism–Liberalism Debate Revisited”, History of Political Thought 21/2 (2000), 261–307.

⁶¹ While they offer very different verdicts on his politics, there are some similarities between the interpretation of Locke presented by an early eighteenth-century Tory like Charles Leslie, and that offered by the Wilkites. For both, Locke is a radical exclusionist whose work questions the legitimacy of the established government. For Leslie see Phillipson, “Politeness and Politics”, 219–22.

⁶² For Wilkes's representation in popular prints see Wilson, Sense of the People, 214; C. Churchill, The Duellist: A Poem (London, 1764), 9.

⁶³ Public Advertiser, 7 Jan. 1768.

⁶⁴ For the Middlesex election see Thomas, John Wilkes, 70–89; Cash, John Wilkes, 204–36. For the reporting of parliamentary debates see P. D. G. Thomas, “The Beginning of Parliamentary Reporting in Newspapers, 1768–1774”, English Historical Review 74 (1959), 623–36; Thomas, John Wilkes, 125–40; Rea, English Press, 201–11.

⁶⁵ North Briton 214 (13 April 1771).

⁶⁶ See Livingston, Melancholy and Delirium, 256–89.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 280.

⁶⁸ For Hume's comments to Turgot see Hume, Letters, 2: 180 (16 June 1768).

⁶⁹ Hume, Letters, 2: 178 (24 May 1768).

⁷⁰ For the embarrassment Hume thought the Ministry should feel see Hume, Letters, 2: 184 (22 July 1768).

⁷¹ Hume, Letters, 2: 197 (28 March 1769).

⁷² For Hume's letter to Smith see: Hume, Letters, 2: 217 (Feb. 1770).

⁷³ See Hume, Letters, 2: 213 (25 Jan. 1770), 2: 214 (6 Feb. 1770).

⁷⁴ Hume, Letters, 2: 218 (13 March 1770).

⁷⁵ Because of the nature of the material, this section makes reference to the original editions of Hume's work. Where appropriate, page numbers for the Miller edition will be placed after the main reference. Hume, “Of the Liberty of the Press”, Essays and treatises on several subjects, 4 vols. (London, 1770), 1: 9–13; Miller, 604–5.

⁷⁶ Hume, “Of the Liberty of the Press”, Essays and treatises on several subjects, 2 vols. (London, 1777), 1: 12; Miller, 13.

⁷⁷ Compare Hume, “Of Taxes”, in Political Discourses (Edinburgh, 1752), 118; Hume, “Of Taxes”, in Essays and treatises on several subjects (1770), 2: 128; Miller, 345, 635.

⁷⁸ Hume, “Of Taxes” (1770), 2: 128; Miller, 345.

⁷⁹ Hume, “Of Taxes”, (1770), 2: 131; Miller, 347.

⁸⁰ Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”, Political Discourses (1752), 285; Miller, 647.

⁸¹ See Miller, 647. I have not been able to locate the 1753–4 edition Miller discusses. However, the 1758 edition does contain the changes referred to above. See, Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”, Essays and treatises on several subjects (London, 1758), 273.

⁸² Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”, Essays and treatises on several subjects (1770), 2: 335; Miller, 516.

⁸³ Hume, Letters, 2: 191–2 (23 Dec. 1768).

⁸⁴ Hume, Essays Moral and Political (Edinburgh, 1741), 17.

⁸⁵ Hume, Letters, 2: 216 (21 Feb. 1770).

⁸⁶ Hume, Letters, 2: 216 (21 Feb. 1770).

⁸⁷ The claim that Hume is providing “adolescent Enlightenment celebration” comes in Livingston, Melancholy and Delirium, 282.