* Hume had his many critics, but he had defenders as well, with one, Lord Hertford, recruiting as staff for the King's embassy in Paris, where Hume was greeted by the French aristocracy as a conquering hero. After leaving Lord Hertford's service, Hume was tempted to remain in Paris, but he felt he had overstayed his welcome, and returned to Britain -- assisting the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was fleeing persecution.
However, Rousseau was unbalanced and turned on Hume, making the Scotsman's life thoroughly miserable until Hume was able to distance himself from the lunatic dispute. In compensation, Lord Hertford arranged a government position for Hume, which did not last long but proved profitable in all respects. On completion of his service to the King, Hume returned to Edinburgh to live very comfortably in effective retirement.
* Aside from the ongoing sniping of his enemies in Scotland, Hume indeed found Edinburgh much more congenial than London. The revenue returned by the HISTORY allowed him to enhance his lifestyle there, with David, his sister Katherine, and his housekeeper Peggy Irvine moving upscale to a more elegant flat in 1762.
Although settled in Edinburgh, Hume increasingly gave thought to Paris. While he felt unwelcome in London, French intellectuals were praising him to the skies; Hume had resided in France in his youth and liked it there. Of course, there was the problem of the ongoing war between Britain and France, which ruled out relocating across the Channel, at least as long as the shooting continued. However, he was being given encouragement by the Comtesse de Boufflers, a prominent young French noblewoman, who began to write him letters of admiration in 1761.
Hume carried on a correspondence with the comtesse; following the end of the war in early 1763, in the spring of that year she went to London, moving in the circles of the British upper class and the intelligentsia, becoming something of a celebrity and being popularly tagged "Madame Blewflowers". However, though she encouraged Hume to come to London and meet with her, he was not keen on doing so. It appears he was hesitant to press his familiarity with the comtesse, particularly in a city he regarded as hostile.
That summer fate intervened, putting him on a course that would bring him to the comtesse, Hume writing in his autobiography:
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... I received, in 1763, an invitation from the Earl of Hertford, with whom I was not in the least acquainted, to attend him on his embassy to Paris, with a near prospect of being appointed secretary to the embassy; and, in the meanwhile, of performing the functions of that office. This offer, however inviting, I at first declined, both because I was reluctant to begin connexions with the great, and because I was afraid that the civilities and gay company of Paris, would prove disagreeable to a person of my age and humour: but on his lordship's repeating the invitation, I accepted of it.
END QUOTE
Lord Hertford was not a man of great distinction beyond his title, but he had a reputation for being honest, sensible, civilized, and agreeable. Why he asked Hume to be his personal secretary remains a bit mysterious; it seems he did so on the suggestion of others, the Comtesse de Boufflers being one moving in high circles who would have made such a recommendation, so possibly it wasn't a trick of fate after all. Having learned, if he did not know already, of Hume's popularity in France, Lord Hertford no doubt perceived that Hume would be an asset to a diplomatic mission there. The fact that Hume had diplomatic experience, thanks to his work with General St. Clair, no doubt also recommended Hume to Lord Hertford.
In August 1763, having agreed to the assignment, Hume went to London to meet with Lord and Lady Hertford, all involved hitting it off very well. Any misgivings on Hume's part evaporated, with Hume commenting:
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Even that Circumstance of Lord Hertford's Character, his great Piety, ought to make my Connexions with him more agreeable, both because it is not attended with any thing sour & rigid, and because I draw more Honour from his Choice, while he overlooked so many seeming Objections which lay against me on that head.
END QUOTE
Indeed, on Hume's acceptance of the position, Gilbert Eliot proclaimed that Hume was "clean and white as the driven Snow", and that were Hume now nominated for a bishopric, "no Objections could henceforth be made" to oppose the appointment. Hume was greatly amused.
Objections actually were raised, but the shield of Lord Hertford's favor took the edge out of them. In London, Hume was invited to dinner at the Royal Chaplain's table at Saint James on 20 August, one of the other attendees being Samuel Johnson -- who, this time, could not in any civility storm out in one of his grumps, and just had to suffer the company of the odious Hume. Jokes went around that Hume would now have to attend prayers twice a day, and that a chaplain would accompany Lord Hertford's entourage to keep Hume on the straight and narrow. As a gentle rejoinder to the mockeries, Lord Hertford obtained a state pension for Hume of 200 pounds a year for life.
When Hume finally set foot in Paris, on 18 October 1763, as a member of a embassy that had been in suspension for the course of the war, he was soon swept up in an enthusiastic welcome by the French upper class and intelligentsia. Although he had expected to see the Comtesse de Boufflers soonest, unfortunately she was indisposed by measles at the time.
Hume was well-received in the salons of Paris; his French was rusty to the point of nonfunctional at first, but he quickly regained his capabilities in the language. He would never speak it at all like a native, but the French generally liked his Scots accent. English expatriates in the city sneered at him in letters as a fat bumpkin, but the Frenchwomen who ran the salons found him charming and amusing, one saying of him: "He is gay, simple, and good." The French called him "le bon David".
Underlying Hume's activities in Paris as an undercurrent was the formidable Comtesse de Boufflers, a woman of affairs, wife of one nobleman, mistress to another, who had determined to add Hume to her collection in one capacity or another. She could be very determined, and he could not really resist -- the comtesse being judged by those familiar with her as charming as "Dresden china". Hume ended up being utterly smitten. However, the changing winds of the comtesse's romantic machinations shifted away from Hume, and he had no choice but to give up his desires. He did not become embittered, that wasn't his style, and the two would carry on a correspondence for the rest of his days.
BACK_TO_TOP* The comtesse was also not close to being all that Paris had to offer Hume; of course, being praised by the French intelligentsia, he moved among them freely. Foremost among Hume's contacts were the polymath Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert, who Hume would make a beneficiary in his will, and the philosopher Denis Diderot, who greatly warmed to Hume, affectionately comparing him to a fat Benedictine monk. Hume, however, never encountered Voltaire, though the Comtesse de Bouffler also included him in her circle. Voltaire thought highly of Hume's work, while Hume regarded Voltaire as, if not very meticulous in his work, highly entertaining -- no doubt Dr. Pangloss and his: "Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds!" -- must have brought roars of laughter out of Hume.
Hume's social activities in Paris were not purely an amusement. His presence there was in support of British interests of state, and though his popularity greatly overshadowed that of Lord Hertford, that wasn't a difficulty. Hume's popularity with the French was all for the good of restoring amicable relations with France, and the ambassador encouraged Hume's interactions with the French. As Hume wrote of his superior:
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He has got an Opinion, very well founded, that the more Acquaintance I make, & the greater Intimacies I form with the French, the more I am enabled to be of service to him: So he exacts no attendance from me; and is well pleased to find me carryd into all kinds of Company. He tells me, that if he did not meet me by Chance in third Places, we should go out of Acquaintance.
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That would not happen, Hume being a beloved member of Lord Hertford's official family, David writing his brother John: "I can count on Lord Hertford's friendship, as much as on any man's in the World." One visitor wrote of dining with Lord and Lady Hertford, with Hume in as part of their official family, the visitor saying:
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[Lord & Lady Hertford] are extremely agreeable people and ... have infinitely less Ceremony, and behave to you with more attention and familiarity that a poor Country Laird and his Lady. Mr. Hume makes a good honest droll good-natured sort of figure at their Table, and really puts you in mind of the mastiff-Dog at the fire side. I had like to have bursted out two or three Times at the notion of it.
END QUOTE
The sniping over Hume's appointment as Lord Hertford's personal secretary had not ended with the departure of the party to France, an anonymous letter being printed in two London papers complaining of the matter -- it seems the biggest complaint being that Hume was a Scot, not that he was a nonbeliever. The House of Lords looked into the matter, judged the letter slanderous to the nation, and penalized the publishers for their bad judgement in printing it. A friend of Hume wrote him: "I was in London, when a man was fined 100 pounds for taking your name in vain."
From the spring of 1764, Lord Hertford lobbied to elevate Hume from being the lord's personal secretary to secretary of the embassy, enlisting Hume to call in favors from well-placed friends to assist in the effort. The exercise went nowhere, but Lord Hertford tried again a year later, writing a letter to the prime minister, George Grenville, to make the case -- the French were aware of the controversy, and it was an embarrassment to Lord Hertford that his authority could be so arbitrarily circumscribed. The request was bluntly refused, with unkind comments about Hume included in the refusal, but Lord Hertford persisted; the Grenville ministry was on very shaky political ground at the time and could not resist, with Hume being appointed embassy secretary in July 1765.
Hume had been living comfortably at the embassy, his personal quarters being more luxurious than any place he had ever lived in his life; now he could add to his lifestyle a prominent and well-paid position of authority. Hume, knowing how far-reaching the "murmour" against him in Britain really was, had been cynical about the prospects of Lord Hertford's attempts to elevate him, and so was all the more astonished when it came to pass. Hume wrote in a mix of irony and appreciation:
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So that in spite of Atheism & Deism, of Whiggism & Toryism, of Scoticism & Philosophy, I am now possess'd of an Office of Credit, and of 1200 Pounds a year; without [my] Dedication of Application, from the Favour alone of a Person, who I can perfectly love & respect. I find it has cost my Lord a very hard Pull; and when I consider the Matter alone, without viewing the Steps that led to it, I am sometimes inclined to be surprizd how it has happen'd.
END QUOTE
The Comtesse de Boufflers had also written a prominent English friend to lobby for Hume's case. The matter had been resolved by the time her friend inquired into it, but Hume could still take satisfaction in the comtesse's loyalty to him.
BACK_TO_TOP* Hume's time as the charge d'affairs in Paris turned out to be brief. Only days after being notified of the appointment, Lord Hertford requested leave from his superiors to return to England for personal affairs, with the request being granted; he left Paris on 21 July. Once in London, Lord Hertford was offered the post of the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, somewhat reluctantly accepting the offer on the 1st of August 1765, with the Duke of Richmond to take his place in France.
The duke would of course make his own decisions about his staff -- meaning that Hume had just effectively lost his job -- but Lord Hertford wanted Hume to come with him to Ireland as secretary of the office. The outcry against Hume went up again, again mostly on the basis that he was a Scot, and it was clearly not going to happen. Hume hadn't been enthusiastic about the idea in the first place, writing his brother John: "It is like Stepping out of Light into Darkness to exchange Paris for Dublin."
Lord Hertford was reluctant to leave Hume empty-handed, and so arranged for the Crown to increment the earlier pension by another 200 pounds a year, free of deduction, to begin once Hume left the service of the embassy. Lord Hertford arrived in Dublin in mid-October, earnestly writing to Hume to come for a stay, an apartment having been set up for him. However, the cry went up against Hume in Ireland, with both Hume and Lord Hertford forced to give up the idea. Lord Hertford was dismayed, writing Hume: "If you had come to Dublin, you must have grown popular ... in spite of all prejudices."
As if to spite those prejudices, with the departure of Lord Hertford in July, Hume was left as the head of the embassy in Paris, acting as charge d'affairs until the Duke of Richmond arrived, which would not be until 17 November. Hume served credibly in the role, having a good grasp of diplomatic procedure and also being well-informed on the issues that Lord Hertford had been dealing with. Fortunately, Hume enjoyed the confidence of the Secretary of State, General Conway, who did not share in the hostility against Hume. Hume remarked in August: "As I am the only English Minister here at present, I live in a great Hurry of Business."
Hume was effectively superfluous at the embassy after the arrival of the Duke of Richmond, but remained in Paris into the new year, 1766 -- during which time the high-handed duke and his entourage were busy undoing all the good will built up by Lord Hertford during his stay. By that time, Hume was ambivalent about France. Certainly, his reception in Paris had been far warmer than in his native Edinburgh, much less London, but he wasn't entirely comfortable with living on a foreign shore. He was a person who found his sociability in select clubs, and had tired of playing the social gadabout; it appears that he particularly wanted to distance himself from the Comtesse de Boufflers, less out of any ill-will than because he had all he wanted of an ambivalent personal relationship.
There was also a clash of styles between Hume and the French philosophes. Hume had plenty of reservations about religion, but they were ultimately retrained by his intellectual caution -- Hume realizing that, for all the foolishness generated in the name of religion, he could not think of any fundamental objection to it in principle. His French colleagues had no such restraint, and absurdly accused Hume of really being a closet believer. A Briton in Paris wrote home: "So that poor Hume, who on your side of the water was thought to have too little religion, is here thought to have too much."
Indeed, in a 1763 visit to Paris, Edward Gibbon noted the "intolerant zeal" of the philosophes, writing that they "laughed at the skepticism of Hume, preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt." The philosophes were confident in the inevitable progress of their new rationalism, proclaiming that religion had no future; Hume saw rationalism as limited in its powers, understood there was nothing new or realistic about taking unlimited faith in it, and saw no reason to think religion was going to die out any time soon.
The skepticism of the philosophes was one-sided, lacking in skepticism of themselves, and so foreign to Hume's ways of thinking. There was a wide gulf between Hume and his French counterparts that he could not bridge, and really didn't try to. The real irony was that the mitigation of Hume's skepticism bought him nothing among his critics in Britain; mitigation be hanged, he was inevitably just as damned by them as a skeptic.
Hume's calculations on where he wanted to reside were complicated by the arrival of the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau in mid-December 1765, then fleeing persecution in Switzerland. He was yet another favorite of the Comtesse du Boufflers, and so it was all but inevitable that Hume would encounter him. Hume had been warned by mutual acquaintances that Rousseau was unbalanced, quick to see plots against himself in the most innocent trivialities, but on meeting Rousseau Hume could not help liking him. Hume returned to London in January 1766, to report to the King, escort Rousseau to a place of refuge, and to work on publication of the latest volume of the HISTORY.
Unfortunately, the warnings Hume had been given were proven entirely correct, Rousseau quickly deciding Hume was indeed plotting against him and throwing hysterical accusations in Hume's face, one of Hume's friends writing him that the charges of malign intent leveled by Rousseau were a "heap of confusion of which I can make neither head nor tail ... perfectly astonishing ..."
Hume did what he could to defend himself in hopes of extricating himself from the pointless dispute, though due to Rousseau's obsessiveness that proved difficult. The Countess Stanhope, a distant relative of Hume, commented in a correspondence with him of Rousseau: "If there is a Hell, that man will fry; bad as you are, I think you'll not go to the same place."
Hume, caught flat-footed by the vicious attacks, was of the same opinion at first, complaining bitterly in his letters. Later, after cooling off, he became more charitable, seeing Rousseau as a victim of sickness instead of a villain, writing that "this poor Man is absolutely lunatic and consequently cannot be the Object of any Laws or civil Punishment."
Rousseau would return to France in 1767, but well before that Hume had moved on, Rousseau becoming nothing but an unfortunate memory. In September 1766, Hume returned to Edinburgh, to receive a warm welcome from his circle of friends, thoughts of returning to France falling by the wayside -- as it turned out, forever.
BACK_TO_TOP* Although Hume's distaste for London had become ingrained by that time, he ended up going back there once again, thanks to the good offices of the faithful Lord Hertford. Lord Hertford had quickly moved on from his post as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to the highly influential position of Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Court of King George III. When the position of undersecretary of state for Britain's Northern Department -- a diplomatic bureaucracy that handled affairs of state with "Northern" countries such as Russia, with some domestic duties relative to northern Britain thrown in -- came open, Lord Hertford suggested Hume for the job; General Conway had a favorable opinion of Hume and agreed. Hume had his doubts about taking the job, but he was loathe to snub Lord Hertford -- and besides, he felt a bit of an obligation to give service to the state.
Hume was back in London in February 1767 to take up the office; he hardly found the job burdensome, writing the Reverend Hugh Blair:
BEGIN QUOTE:
My way of Life here is very uniform, and by no means disagreeable. I pass all the Forenoon in the Secretary's House from ten till three, where there arrives from time to time Messengers that bring me all the Secrets of this Kingdom, and indeed of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. I am seldom hurry'd; but have Leisure at Intervals to pick up a Book, or write a private Letter, or converse with any Friend that may call for me; And from Dinner to Bed-time is all my own ... I am far from complaining.
END QUOTE
The position was nonetheless influential; most ironically, the department had a degree of oversight of the Scots church, with Hume helping out some of the Moderate clergy that he was on good terms with. He remained most welcome in the house of Lord Hertford, while acquiring a similarly warm relationship with General Conway, Hume's visits to their tables bringing him in wide contact with British aristocracy. He also furthered his relationships with London intellectuals, most notably Edward Gibbon.
On the minus side, the outcry against the Scots in England had not died down, with Hume's temper against the "rascally Mob" growing ever shorter. He also took a keen and contrarian interest in the Crown's actions in the American colonies, having rejoiced at the repeal of Britain's "Stamp Act" in 1766, and suggesting early on that the rebellion of the Colonies was appropriate in the face of the inflexible and patronizing attitude of the mother country.
General Conway quit his office as Secretary of State in January 1768, with Hume out of a job after less than a year in service. It is unclear how much he made during that time, since he didn't have a salary, with monies mysteriously described as "fees and gratuities" divided up among the staff. Records suggest that he obtained 500 pounds, a reasonable pay for an easy job with lots of perks that generated useful contacts. More significantly, Lord Hertford and General Conway successfully lobbied for another augmentation of 200 pounds to Hume's pension, for a total of 600 pounds a year -- though this third increment, unlike the previous two, wasn't free from deduction. Hume could neither complain about the work nor the compensation.
Hume did not return to Edinburgh right away, being preoccupied with the preparation of another edition of his HISTORY -- Hume grousing of the effort "which I oversee as anxiously, as if any body were concern'd about it, or ever woud perceive the Pains I take in polishing it and rendering it as accurate as possible." Hume was a craftsman, however, and knew that came with the territory: "I can only say, that I do it for myself and that it amuses me."
Hume finally returned to Edinburgh in August 1769 after over two years of absence, happy to be back to what he knew was home, with no inclination to seek any other place to live. He was now essentially finished with writing, having accomplished what he wanted to do, being "done with all ambition".
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