Resentment and History in the Scottish Enlightenment

Neil Hargraves
Newbattle Abbey College
Midlothian, Scotland

N. Hargraves, «Resentment and History in the Scottish Enlightenment», Cromohs, 14 (2009): 1-21
< URL: http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/14_2009/hargraves_resentment.html >

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which Scottish Enlightenment writers such as Lord Kames, Adam Smith, David Hume and William Robertson used the concept of ‘resentment’ as a means of understanding and, hopefully, taming the Scottish past. It argues that historical narrative was crucial to the process of analyzing the role of the passions in human relations, and that while it drew on the developing social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, it also provided a distinctive and nuanced account of the various operations of resentment that more theoretical formulations could not adequately represent.

I. Resentment and Scottish History

1. The Scottish Enlightenment is usually associated with the idea of sociability, its very conviviality a crucial component of its project to modernize Scottish society.The Scottish literati hoped to provide a model for social relations that would root out the coarseness and bellicosity that, they believed, had too often characterised Scotland’s past. Yet the Scottish Enlightenment’s emphasis on a philosophy of sociability was not without a pained awareness of the limitations of that sociability.^[1] This was most obvious in the attempt to write narrative history. Indeed, for many the Scottish past was a storehouse of memorialized conflict, and had a power to perpetuate a sense of grievance and tribal hatred that seemed to threaten to undo the entire project of the Scottish Enlightenment. In choosing to write his enormously popular History of Scotland (1759) largely in a language of resentment, William Robertson was openly confronting one of the key problems of the Scottish Enlightenment: the extent to which the mere recital of Scottish history fostered factional resentment in contemporary society, and therefore served to undermine the culture of politesse and magnanimity that the literati had striven to create. The use by Robertson, and to a lesser extent David Hume in his History of England (1754-1762), of resentment as a signifier of character and motive can too easily be dismissed as a linguistic tic or a barren convention. Robertson’s prose in particular has sometimes been criticized as too abstract and formulaic.^[2] With the exception of Gibbon, the language that composed much of eighteenth-century historical narrative has received little sustained attention, too often overlooked or assumed to be lacking in interest. Yet a study of the actual workings of resentment as a passion in these narratives can help to disclose a more complex and nuanced picture of the relation between passions, motives and historical action. This paper will argue that it constituted a deliberate and sustained attempt to link historical narrative with the emerging study of resentment as a passion in the work of social theorists such as Lord Kames and Adam Smith, and thereby to enrich it. More importantly, in addressing the question of resentment historians were seeking to make sense of one of the most disturbing forces in human history, and one that in the eighteenth-century might still pose a serious threat to the order and progress that the Scottish Enlightenment championed.

2. Narrative history was problematic to an eighteenth-century audience for a number of reasons. Its affective quality- its ability to excite passion- was obviously intended to be used for good effect: to stimulate virtue, or patriotism, or in the more modish formula of eighteenth-century historiography, sympathy and compassion. It was a profoundly moral function of the historian to arouse strong feeling in the reader. Yet this could lead the historian into falsification or excessive rhetoricisation. Mark Phillips has shown the extent to which the appeal of eighteenth-century historical narratives lay in what the novelist Elizabeth Hamilton termed the “instructive portrait of the human passions” that they provided. In this way, history was analogous not only to classical rhetoric but also to the emerging forms of the novel and of biography, especially in its interest in the delineation of character.^[3] J. Paul Hunter has noted that in the case of biography, the development towards more complex and interior representations of character was inexorable, “chronicling movements of the mind, offering deep explanations of behaviour”. History underwent a similar progress. Chantal Grell has made the point, echoing indeed Adam Smith in his Lectures on Belles-Lettres, that it was the novelistic or quasi-biographical models of historical composition, such as Tacitus and Sallust, that appealed most to an eighteenth-century audience.^[4] The language of character employed by the historian was often strikingly similar to that used by the novelist, and likewise grounded in a precise study of the passions: thus, the critic Henry Steuart wrote of Sallust that his work constituted

an attempt to penetrate the human heart, and to explore, in its recesses, the true springs, that actuate the conduct of men. By a study of character, he perceived that habits and propensities might be traced to their source; that secret motives, and busy passions, might often be seen at work, and the whole human mind, as it were laid open and anatomized, by the acute observer.^[5]

Historical characterisation was increasingly not merely self-enclosed portraiture, but was instead communicated through “a language of unseen inner motivations”, as Frank Shuffelton has described it, which contrasted with the ‘language of the external world’, but served also to illuminate it.^[6] The eighteenth-century historian faced the problem of how to participate legitimately in the new modes of characterisation, without forfeiting the essential identity of the historian with truth. Certainly, there was a concern, reiterated throughout the critical writings of the period, that history was becoming corrupted by the techniques of fiction, and that this new history of motives gave too much scope for the penetrative talents of the historian to invent an unsubstantiated internalised narrative of motives.^[7]

3. Historians’ representations of character and motive frequently led to the assumption of starkly partisan positions, a tendency felt to be deeply damaging to British political culture. Gibbon, with the bitter dispute concerning Hume’s History of England very much in mind, expressed his own objections to the writing of modern British history entirely in terms of the problems presented by the representation of character.^[8] One answer to this problem was the cultivation of a fastidious impartiality. Yet this too could be problematic. In his essay ‘On the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ Hume expressed the view that the historian himself should naturally both feel and express resentment, as well as prompt it:

APPIAN'S history of their civil wars contains the most frightful picture of massacres, proscriptions, and forfeitures, that ever was presented to the world. What pleases most, in that historian, is, that he seems to feel a proper resentment of these barbarous proceedings; and talks not with that provoking coolness and indifference, which custom had produced in many of the GREEK historians.^[9]

Hume’s nice irony, “a provoking coolness and indifference”, is intended to show that the neutral style of absolute impartiality and moral abdication did not produce the desired effect of quietening the reader, or removing his prejudices. Robertson made a similar point in upbraiding Knox and Buchanan for lacking the indignation natural to a historian in recording the crimes of the past, although this could be partly excused by contextualizing them as part of a society of unrefined manners, lacking modern sensibility and humanity.^[10] Thus, while resentment was in some senses an unrefined, primitive passion, properly belonging to a disordered past, conversely a restrained and proper resentment towards the injustices of the past could also be the signifier of modernity, and a crucial duty for the historian.

4. Every critic was aware that the power of affect could be used negatively, to distort and manipulate. Then it could be accused of rousing party feeling, of fuelling the resentments and discords of the Scottish past. This was what made Scottish narrative history so particularly combustible; it was a tradition which, according to David Allan, “remained, at bottom, a vehicle for factional bickering and the fiercest polemic”. ^[11] This was especially true in accounts of the Reformation period that Robertson tackled^[12], although it remained a constant in all Scottish history. The playwright John Home had Lady Randolph, his female protagonist in Douglas, lament the way in which “implacable resentment” had stamped itself irremovably on her features. Walter Scott, in the preface to Old Mortality, picked up this same phrase in another passage from Douglas as part of Peter Pattieson’s plea for mutual understanding between the descendants of the Covenanters and Episcopalians:

“‘O rake not up the ashes of our fathers!
Implacable resentment was their crime,
And grievous has the expiation been’ ”.^[13]

The ‘enlightened’ narrative histories of William Robertson and David Hume attempted not so much to mediate between conflicting partial accounts as to supervene, to raise the level of historical writing far beyond this grubby political squabbling and provide Scotland (and Britain) with authoritative and polite syntheses of their pasts. Since the writing of history could so easily accused of perpetuating resentment, this enlightened history had to be equipped to quieten or eliminate the destructive resentments aroused by Scottish history.
Nonetheless, the cult of impartiality that the ‘enlightened’ historians cultivated could be seen merely as another form of partiality, one more refined but no less pernicious for that.^[14] A good example of this concern is William Tytler’s response to both historians, published in 1759, An Inquiry, Historical and Critical, into the Evidence against Mary Queen of Scots and an Examination of the Histories of Dr Robertson and Mr Hume, with respect to that evidence.^[15] His motive in writing this tract was explicitly to provide “an apology or vindication” of Mary Stuart. He aimed to “rescue from infamy an illustrious, injured character” against the attacks on her fostered by these “pleasant, eloquent, and plausible” histories.^[16] His view of Robertson and Hume was respectful: he acquiesced in the prevailing opinion that they had raised Scottish historiography to a higher literary plane. Yet his ultimate verdict on them both is damning. Tytler’s response to Robertson in particular is worth following for the assumptions it reveals about the nature and purpose of historical narrative; and for its explicit references to the operation of resentment in historical writing (and reading).

5. Tytler’s focus on Mary Stuart established the field of battle, that of character controversy. He aligned himself with those pro-Marian historians and antiquaries who preferred to cast the history of Mary in a mixed language of martyrology and sentiment.^[17] Robertson himself occasionally employed the language of sentiment to depict more vividly and affectingly Mary’s plight, but this did not in his judgement inoculate her from the criminal motives that he believed actuated her.^[18] Tytler is constantly exasperated by what he regards as a perverse even-handedness in Robertson’s handling of Mary, which in any case (he believes) amounts to a full-blown condemnation. His complaint against Robertson is essentially twofold: that the treatment of Mary in Scotland is partial, despite Robertson’s strenuous attempts to mediate between conflicting positions; and that, as a result of this misplaced effort of mediation, the resulting picture of Mary is inconsistent and indeed monstrous, unnatural, “a phenomenon scarce to be accounted for”.^[19]  Focusing on the mismatch between Robertson’s narrative and his explicit characterisations, Tytler imputes Robertson’s failure of perspective to his “ingenuity”, his delight in “establishing systems”, and to his method of inferring or conjecturing motive from actions, thereby elevating the history of motives above that of facts. To Tytler, this sophisticated narrative of motives, and the intricate “chain of argument” that it produced, was not mere conjecture but outright deception.^[20] Nonetheless, Robertson had a saving fault: the bias of his narrative method was overturned by his “sketches of character”. Indeed Tytler’s argument is essentially grounded in questions of character: “Robertson’s system is contrary to human nature & utterly inconsistent with the character which he himself had drawn of the Queen Mary”.^[21]

“Merciful heaven! can such a character have ever existed? Yet such, according to Dr Robertson, is the gentle, tender-hearted, & affectionate Queen Mary! now the inhumane, deliberate, & remorseless murderess of her husband” ^[22] .

 Tytler also- and crucially- sets up a polarity between the imperatives of ‘resentment’ and those of ‘pity’. He implicates Robertson’s narrative in a resentment against Mary, inherited from her first opponents, and altogether typical of Whiggishly inclined historians.^[23] Indeed, Tytler implies, the entire historiography of Scotland has been marred by this intrusion of resentment, which Robertson’s apparent equability cannot disguise. This, essentially, is the failure of these elegant histories: they are not free of the errors they condemn in their predecessors, and thus they merely perpetuate what they claim to expel. Furthermore, one of the principal sources of error in Robertson’s Scotland is the way in which it not only arouses resentment against Mary through careful use of language, but also imputes it to her, invoking it as one of her principal motives. By weaving resentment into his language of motivation, Robertson has cast upon Mary one of the great destructive forces of Scottish history. Tytler absolutely rejects this. For him, Mary is in fact free of resentment to a remarkable, even heroic degree. Indeed, reading Robertson’s narrative attentively, Tytler shows how Mary’s entirely justified resentment against her opponents “dissolves into tears”; her “sensibility” triumphs over her impulses to revenge; and her susceptibility to feeling results in open expressions of “grief and sorrow” rather than betraying symptoms of anger, aversion, resentment or hatred, the natural feelings towards which she is provoked. ^[24]  This compelling vision of the dissipation of resentment into pity by an historical actor sways even the partisan historian himself; the reason for the inconsistency of Robertson’s account lies in his inability to sustain his resentment against Mary. Just as her “resentment for the most atrocious offences committed against her soon melted away, and left not a trace behind”, so we are compelled to do likewise by contemplating the facts and circumstances of her story. ^[25]
Tytler and Robertson shared the desideratum of a history purged of resentment. For the former, this would occur through the metaphor of a dissolution through tears, sentiment, ‘sensibility’, adopting Mary as the model for a heroic rejection of the privilege of revenge. For the latter, it would work through a more complex and nuanced reinterpretation of the events of Scottish history, through the medium of a polite and pure style, and a more detached and analytical rhetorical stance, neutralising resentment by distancing the reader from the events depicted, rather than by placing them within the events, and by exposing what Robertson termed “the groundless murmurs of antiquated prejudices”.^[26] Interestingly, however, others connected Robertson with the Tytlerian stance, as Horace Walpole noted: “some have thought that, tho’ he could not disculpate her, he has diverted indignation away from her by his art in raising up pity for her and resentment against her persecutress”.^[27] As Walpole implied, however, this diversion of resentment was not in fact its dissipation, but merely a perpetuation of the game of partisanship (and this despite Walpole’s earlier praise for Robertson’s impartiality). The imperatives of pity and resentment dominated the way in which many people, already well-versed in the events, responded to any new intervention into the historical record.

II. Resentment, Philosophy and Philosophical History

6. The word resentment, from the French ressentiment, originally signified nothing more than strong feeling, either “for good or ill”. Thus unqualified it was the essence of passion, and could attach itself to all other passions. Gradually, it was refined into a “deep sense of injury”, and closely associated therefore with the idea of justice. It possessed a positive force as a “just resentment” against injury, or a “manly resentment” at slights against a person’s dignity and consequence. However, the “resentful” man, one with a marked tendency towards resentment, was held by Samuel Johnson to be “malignant, easily provoked to anger and long retaining it”. Thus, resentment, even more than most passions, required qualification and specific contextualisation.^[28] By the eighteenth-century, it had gained an association heavily in contrast to its original meaning of deep feeling, that of pettiness, triviality, evanescence, often being associated with trifling amours and acquiring thereby a cast of ‘womanly’ impotence, although, as in the case of Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment, female resentment could still be a powerful, if lurid and disorderly passion.^[29] As a means of grasping psychologically the nature of apparently irreconcilable opposition, the notion of resentment has provided a remarkably enduring and flexible explanatory model. Yet it remains deeply ambiguous: either a fundamentally illegitimate and misguided reaction against social change (as in the case of racist resentments), or a perfectly rational response to injustice, loss of status, and the structural contempt of elites. Eric Gans has explored the role that he sees resentment has played in the formation of culture, viewing indeed culture as in a sense a strategy by emerging elites to sublimate (or otherwise contain, neutralise or cow) the resentment created by the progressive differentiation produced by ever more complex social forms. For Gans, resentment is the inevitable product of social and political change, and is so powerful in its effects (or threatened effects) that it is fundamentally constitutive of western literature and cultural forms. ^[30]  To an eighteenth-century historian such as Hume or Robertson, this class or social dimension of resentment was less apparent: rather, resentment was something that could only really be held to exist between comparative equals whose claims pressed against each other in a shared political world. Hume had indeed adumbrated this position in his earlier philosophical work.^[31] Thus, for Robertson, resentment exists within a narrow framework of interaction and observation, which encompasses such elements as the crown, nobility, clergy and the nation itself (the idea of a “national resentment”). The resentments of ‘the people’ are occasionally invoked, but not as those of the poor against the wealthy, who are held to exist, as Don Herzog has observed, as too distant to be capable of this level of interaction with their superiors. ^[32] It was as if they were almost another species altogether: no one would attribute the passion of resentment, however basic it might otherwise be held to be, to a dog or a cow. Only after the French Revolution did elites become concerned- to the point of hysteria- at the lower orders feeling effectual resentment towards them. Even then, these resentments were fractured and individual, and certainly did not function as that of a collective agent demanding justice. Hume and Robertson are interested as historians in the flux and reflux of individual resentments between actors in his narrative, princes, nobles, bishops, politicians; but that is not to say that they do not detect structural resentments buried deep into the political system, which to an extent predetermine the pattern of resentment in the narrative history. Indeed, this is in part the purpose of Robertson’s account of the Scottish feudal polity in Book I of Scotland, and of Hume’s discursive essays on constitution and government.

7. Resentment figures only intermittently in the early classic works of the Scottish Enlightenment. Francis Hutcheson, in his account of the passions and affections, mentions it only in passing, in a discussion of the way in which resentment forms one of the sources of salutary shame.^[33] In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue Hutcheson, ever the moderate, is at pains to assure us that the resentment we feel towards others naturally ebbs in us once we see that it has had its admonishing, corrective effect. To persist with resentment beyond this limit is a perversion and an error.^[34] Yet he also posits “sudden resentment” as one of those petty but corrosive principles that can give us unjustly negative views of our fellow men, thus weakening our natural benevolence and providing an inlet to viciousness.^[35] Similarly, Hume’s philosophical work includes resentment only in various obiter dicta. When it does surface, as on occasion in the Enquiries, Hume’s view of it is notably benign, despite describing it as one of the “darker passions” (alongside enmity).^[36] It is in fact one of the  social passions, a moral force, a necessary antidote to coldness and narrowness of heart. Indeed, Hume classifies it alongside justice, “love of life” and “attachment to offspring” as “a simple original instinct in the human breast, which nature has implanted for like salutary purposes”.^[37] It is usually invoked as a generous, noble instinct of sympathy with another’s suffering or misery; we feel resentment on the behalf of the wronged. Moreover, in a striking thought-experiment on the nature of inequality, Hume makes it clear that resentment is what enables justice:

Were there a species of creatures intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords. ^[38]

Fear of resentment is what compels justice. This is a crucial insight, and a pointer to the more extensive uses that Lord Kames and Adam Smith were to make of resentment. There is an interesting disjunction here in the uses of the term resentment; in formal philosophy it was a relatively neglected passion, yet in daily discourse, resentment was constantly invoked as an animating factor, an explanatory tool, part of the ever-present common currency of human relations. Resentment was a dominant fact of social life, but one rarely acknowledged or analysed.^[39]

8. In the late 1750’s, at the same time that David Hume and William Robertson were completing their narrative histories of England and Scotland, there appeared two works by two closely linked writers working in different genres, both of which testify to the increasing interest of the Scottish Enlightenment in creating what might be called a natural history of resentment: Lord Kames’Historical Law-Tracts (1758) and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Both strove to use the idea of resentment to make sense of history, law and social relations. The first was an attempt to transform Scots law into an object of “rational study” performed by “men of taste”, by applying philosophical and historical perspectives to what had previously been regarded as a “crabbed” and illiberal discipline.^[40] In the first tract, Kames used resentment as a means of tracing the principles and evolution of criminal law, punishment and jurisdiction. In this he was very probably influenced by Adam Smith’s unpublished but hugely influential Lectures on Jurisprudence, which also gave resentment a crucial explanatory place in the development of justice. Indeed, Smith had invoked resentment as the psychological foundation of criminal law: “Now in all cases the measure of the punishment to be inflicted... is the concurrence of the impartial spectator with the resentment of the injured”.^[41] Smith’s own wider interest in the workings of resentment as a passion was demonstrated fully in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where it figured as both an inescapable cog in the elaborate mechanism of sympathy, propriety and judgement that Smith sought to describe, and more dubiously as a residual threat to the sociability that regulated Smith’s moral world.
Kames and William Robertson had both attended and been deeply influenced by Smith’s lectures.  Moreover, Robertson had apparently read and composed a review of the HistoricalLaw-Tracts for the Critical Review shortly after the publication of The History of Scotland, a review which especially foregrounded Kames’ treatment of resentment.^[42] Certainly, if Robertson wrote the review, it shows that he and Kames converged on the subject of the importance of resentment to the progress of law and society, whatever the reciprocal influences might have been, and whatever their mutual debt to Smith. As the reviewer commented, Kames’ method was to ground the formation of legal systems and laws in the examination of human nature and “those passions which render them necessary”, so that institutions which had “formerly appeared to be inexplicable, accidental, or capricious are seen to be the natural effects of powerful causes”^[43]. The first step, therefore, was to arrive at an accurate delineation of the passions, in order to establish their qualities, variations and mutual influences. Thus, in seeking to understand the nature of the origin of criminal law, Kames recurred to first principles, “the foundation of resentment in human nature”, before examining more fully its operation, “coregularities” and “irregularities”.^[44] For Kames, “a cursory view of this remarkable passion is not sufficient. It will be seen...that the criminal law in all nations is entirely founded upon it; and for that reason it ought to be examined with the utmost accuracy”.^[45]

9. The first point to emerge unequivocally from such discussions of resentment is its sheer power. As Robertson maintains in The History of Scotland, “Resentment is, for obvious and wise reasons, one of the strongest passions in the human mind”.^[46] Kames wrote, and the Critical Review eagerly echoed, that “No passion is more keen or fierce than Resentment; which, at the same time, when confined within due bounds, is authorised by conscience”.^[47] The latter point is also important: resentment possesses a two-fold nature, both disruptive and yet capable of being directed towards, and made to serve, order and justice. Resentment can be seen as a Providential passion (and Kames, much more readily than Robertson, invokes Providence as a direct explanation of its peculiar operation and nature), because of its extraordinary and unintended effects. That one of the most destructive, turbulent and uncontrollable passions should be so tamed as to become the foundation of order and justice is proof of both deep irony and deep wisdom in the construction of the universe. Indeed, in this way the operation of resentment becomes one of the clearest illustrations of the doctrine of unintended consequences.^[48] Smith described it as both natural and beneficial: “Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only. It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence”.^[49]
Most importantly, like all of the passions, but perhaps most evidently and consequentially, it is possessed of a history. Resentment amongst savages is qualitatively different from that felt by people in “a civilized State”.^[50] It also shapes that history: it “makes a great figure in the history of mankind”.^[51] Adam Ferguson showed how resentment was the natural principle of the savage, a social glue and a supremely communicative, energizing force, closely linked to friendship and productive of unity within a small, tightly-knit society. ^[52] By learning to control and refine their resentments, through the medium of the impartial spectator (as Smith would have it), resentment became transformed into almost a completely different motive. Before this benign progression from blind impulse to an essentially just order can be created, however, the dangers inherent in the passion of resentment first have to be mastered and neutralised. This is difficult, since resentment is especially prone to excess and “irregularities”: “The man who is injured, having a strong sense of the wrong done him, never dreams that his resentment can be pushed too far”; he feels “that natural partiality which magnifies every injury done to a man himself, and which therefore leads to excess in revenge”.^[53] For Kames, there are different species of resentment: principally, the “rational and useful passion” which answers to our basic desire for justice, and which, to be effectual, must remain moderate; and the “savage and irrational” passion which while responding to trangressions itself transgresses, and which can become “absurd” if unchecked.^[54]  Unlike other active passions, such as love, gratitude, friendship (all “social passions”, of course), the excess of resentment does not simply extend its operations, but in reality changes it into something quite other, almost a different passion entirely. There seems, on occasion, to be little in common between a ‘proper’ resentment and its improper corollary other than an accident of nomenclature.  

10. The dissocial nature of improper or excessive resentment distorts observation, preventing objects from being correctly perceived. While the key question to which Kames and Smith both addressed themselves was how resentment could be brought under restraint, it was clear that in the early stages of mankind’s development it was simply allowed free rein. For Kames, it was “too fierce a passion to be subdued till man be first humanized and softened in a long course of discipline”^[55]; “the passion of resentment, fortified by universal practice, is too violent to be subdued by the force of any government”.^[56] Its peculiarly commodious nature enabled it to dominate all social and political arrangements: “resentment, allowed scope among Barbarians, was apt to take flame by the slightest spark”.^[57] Where government is weak, or virtually non-existent, the objective of fledgeling judicial authorities was not the restraint of resentment but the correct identification of its object, so that the injured could then “gratify his resentment to the full”.^[58] If no object were found, it would demand- and find- one, however irrational or unsuitable: most egregiously, animals and inanimate objects. Resentment is also regarded by Kames as, in a sense, a form of property, possessed by the individual against whom wrong is committed: what he termed the “privilege of resentment”.^[59] Private punishment thus resembles a debt, the exaction of which is, in terms of justice, a “natural right”.^[60] This property is antecedent to, and forms the psychological basis for, all other forms of property. It also has a peculiar inverse relationship to the history of property: as other forms of property are acquired and multiply, the property of private resentment must be surrendered. This process, of the restraint of resentment, its passage into public hands, is extremely slow: the history of unrestrained resentment extends until very recent times, as all Scots were aware. Assassination, the “crime in fashion” of the sixteenth century, is invoked as an example of how resentment continued to possess individuals even after the establishment of more regular government. Nonetheless, Kames seems sanguine that resentment has, by the eighteenth century, been tamed and no longer poses a significant threat to the social order: “Resentment was no longer allowed to rage, but was brought under some discipline”. This discipline, “however burdensome to an individual during a fit of passion, was agreeable to all in their ordinary state of mind”. ^[61]

11. This is the key to modern resentment, that it is always brought into an “ordinary state of mind”, and it is the workings of resentment in this modern, domestic condition that Adam Smith investigates in theTheory of Moral Sentiments. Smith retains a sense of the horror to be attached to unqualified, bare resentment: “though, in the degrees in which we too often see it, the most odious, perhaps, of all the passions, [resentment] is not disapproved of when properly humbled and entirely brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the spectator”.^[62] However, as Smith shows, resentment can be an extremely variable passion, requiring complex qualification and contextualisation. Resentment can be raised in different degrees, depending upon perspective and especially the connection of he who feels resentment with the person injured.^[63] It is emphatically not an absolute. The distinction between just and unjust resentment depends not simply on cause, but on effect: excessive resentment, however justly grounded, cannot be approved of by an impartial observer. Smith paints an extremely pessimistic picture of the potential effects of unchecked resentment. Mutual resentment can dissolve the bonds of society:

Society, however, cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another. The moment that injury begins, the moment that mutual resentment and animosity take place, all the bands of it are broke asunder, and the different members of which it consisted are, as it were, dissipated and scattered abroad by the violence and opposition of their discordant affections. ^[64]

This Hobbesian state cannot last: even a society of robbers and murderers would have to restrain themselves. Smith shows in acute psychological detail the internalization of a socially sanctioned ‘just resentment’, an inherently social passion that we, as individuals, are keen to communicate to others. It is in the nature of the sufferer of resentment to reach out to others, to have them understand the causes of this disagreeable passion that we are exhibiting before our fellow men. Thus, with an emphasis slightly different from that of Kames, Smith argues that resentment searches out not only its own gratification but also the sympathy of others: this is crucial if our resentment is not to repel others, and be branded unjust or ill-grounded. The apparently unsocial passion of resentment is thereby socialised. This process effectively irons out the excesses of resentment, providing that essential balance that seems lacking in its nature. Indeed, we resent the man possessed by excessive resentment: “this too violent resentment, instead of carrying us along with it, becomes itself the object of our resentment and indignation... Revenge, therefore, the excess of resentment, appears to be the most detestable of all the passions”.^[65] Only resentment sympathised with is at all justified, or effectual. The positive power of this mediated, socially sanctioned resentment is every bit as remarkable as that of its primitive analogue: it can erase prejudices; it eclipses estimates of character; it is a powerful social adhesive:

We enter into the resentment even of an odious person, when he is injured by those to whom he has given no provocation. Our disapprobation of his ordinary character and conduct does not in this case altogether prevent our fellow-feeling with his natural indignation. ^[66]

Smith’s highest conception of resentment is that of a judge who “appears to resent the greatest injuries, more from a sense that they deserve, and are the proper objects of resentment, than from feeling himself the furies of that disagreeable passion”: an impersonal, distant and muted sense more than a furious, clamouring passion.^[67] This intellectualised notion of resentment is far removed from the original meaning of resentment as pure feeling; it is more apprehended than felt. It is perhaps in this sense that Hume meant to depict the ‘proper’ resentment of the historian; not possessed by disorderly feeling, but filled with an abstracted sense of it.
Smith however is far from complacent about the possibility of inappropriate resentment entrenching itself and frustrating all the beneficial effects that can flow from a proper resentment. Indeed, he seems at times to underline the self-reinforcing nature of incorrect resentment, the way in which it entwines with the “mysterious veil of self-delusion”:

Rather than see our own behaviour under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavour to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavour by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so. ^[68]

For Smith, it is not merely time and distance that lessens resentment (or any feeling), but society and conversation. However, here too there is the contagion of example to deal with. This is perhaps the reason that, of all resentments, national resentment- being entirely tribal in origin, and reinforced by all society- is the most intractable.

12. Kames and Smith both view the history of society through the medium of resentment. They are perhaps unusual amongst eighteenth-century thinkers in placing so much stress on this difficult, contradictory passion. Adam Ferguson and John Millar both treated it more perfunctorily, but nonetheless with interesting insights. Ferguson linked it closely with the savage state of society. He saw a dichotomy between “love and compassion” and “resentment and rage”, as well as their peculiar kinship as powerful motives and as essentially irrational impulses apt to be “urged by the most irresistible vehemence” and characterised by a willing “sacrifice of interest”.^[69] Like friendship, resentment is the natural principle of the savage: “The simple passions, friendship, resentment, and love, are the movements of his own mind, and he has no occasion to copy. Simple and vehement in his conceptions and feelings, he knows no diversity of thought, or of style, to mislead or to exercise his judgement”.^[70] In a sense, in savage society, resentment is the natural product of friendship, a token of the feeling that friendship arouses. More novel is Ferguson’s discussion of the sense in which resentment has two temporal aspects. It can be an immediate and unmediated instinct, a fugitive motive that must be satisfied instantly. Or, in a more sinister fashion, it can take on a quality of smouldering subterranean endurance. Thus, Ferguson wrote that “the friend of the deceased knows how to disguise, though not to suppress, his resentment; and even after many years have elapsed, is sure to repay the injury that was done to his kindred or his house”.^[71] There is an interesting point here about the relationship between resentment and disguise. Resentment, in Ferguson’s reading, is something supremely authentic, even if it has to be driven underground and take on a mask. The mask of civility is inauthentic, but not the resentment itself, which survives all the falsehood it is forced to generate in order to protect and eventually fulfil itself. Ferguson is peculiar only in his insistence that the savage is actuated as much by love as by resentment; yet even here he underlines the crucial role of resentment as a social cohesive and a supremely communicative, energizing force in savage society.
John Millar showed how the operation of resentment could work to circumscribe potentially harmful actions. While Millar invokes infanticide, “the most barbarous of all actions”, as the natural result of the savage’s intemperate and overbearing resentment, “easily kindled and raised to an excessive pitch”;^[72] he also illustrates the use of resentment as a moderating force. Here the idea of propriety is crucial: men “became extremely cautious, lest by any insinuation or impropriety of behaviour, they should hurt the character of another, and be exposed to the just resentment of those by whom she was protected”.^[73] This is important, as it shows that the state’s ability to rein in the effect of resentment relied on an internalized fear of the effects of the resentment of others. Resentment enables the respect due to another’s character to be upheld, through the mechanism of mutuality: that is, the belief that by eroding respect for another’s character, you are threatening the respect that others would have for you. Millar thus shows how issues of resentment were bound up even in the earliest societies with questions of character.
William Robertson, in his lengthy theoretical preamble to theHistory of Charles V known as A View of the Progress of Society in Europe (1769), makes a similar point to that of Ferguson concerning the relationship between resentment and social cohesion:

The insults of an enemy kindle resentment; the success of a rival tribe awakens emulation; these passions communicate from breast to breast, and all the members of the community, with united ardour, rush into the field in order to gratify their revenge, or to acquire distinction. ^[74]

13. In the dark ages, however, private resentment undermines public order, subverting it from within: “Private wars were carried on with all the destructive rage which is to be dreaded from violent resentment, when armed with force and authorized by law”.^[75] Resentment is one of the constitutive social forces of early society, but in more extensive modern societies it is a fractious force. How to deal with resentment is therefore the first task of the modern state (or proxy for the state); indeed, it is the key to the process of state formation itself. If an authority cannot master the impulses of resentment of its subjects, then it is rightly speaking no authority, but rather a shell. The nature of the expression of resentment becomes therefore the sign of a successful, or a failed state; and the curbing of resentment a sign of progress. At first the state’s task is modest: it interposes itself between individuals, for the purpose of buying time, to allow the violence and “rage” of resentment to subside.^[76] Gradually the state acquires more force with which to subdue the private resentments of its subjects. In Robertson’s account of the development of the European state, the French King Louis XI plays a crucial, pivotal role. He represents the triumph of policy, interest, and public order over the traditional, individual rights of the noble order. In more abstract terms, he represents the victory of public over private resentment. The nobility are unable to act in concert or sustainably against the king, except “during one short sally of resentment at the beginning of his reign”.^[77] Resentment here is easily dissipated; its capacity to stimulate social action is weak, since it is naturally divided and distracted. By the modern era, therefore, the ‘sallies’ of individual resentment are too sporadic to enable them to compete against a modern monarch, armed with policy and interest. Resentment does not disappear, of course, but it is controlled and regulated by an authority that deprives the individual of his property of resentment. The nobility may be left initially with an impotent, self-torturing resentment at this act itself that leaves the monarch untouched, while their resentments (individual and corporate) are branded illegitimate. Eventually, prudence and a sense of self-preservation will dictate the stifling of this vestigial, passive, unfulfilled resentment.^[78] Thus, we arrive at a reversal of Ferguson’s paradigm of the savage society: instead of the sacrifice of interest to resentment, modernity has given incentives to sacrifice resentment for interest or policy
Yet this is not the entire story. The power of resentment remains, ineradicable if distracted. In the modern era, resentments can no longer build, but they can still dissolve. The burden of Robertson’s argument is that in modern society resentment can no longer play the cohering role, because there is “little intercourse between the distant members of the community”. A passion like resentment cannot create the basis of a “united strength”.^[79] The implication, worked out in the History of Scotland, is that it can only work to fracture and fissure the community. Resentment in the modern world is still a powerful force, occasionally overwhelming all others, but it is one primarily at the service of factionalism and disunity. Robertson, elsewhere in the View, outlined the near apocalyptic consequences of a predominating resentment: “perpetual private wars, which were carried on with all the violence that usually accompanies resentment, when unrestrained by superior authority. Rapine, outrage, exactions, became universal. Commerce was interrupted; industry suspended; and every part of Germany resembled a country which an enemy had plundered and left desolate”.^[80] Resentment is a force inimical to authority or unity; it is disorder incarnate. It may be, in Ferguson’s terms, a simple passion, but it in a more complex society its communication can only be divisive, since a single cohering resentment cannot be shared by the entire community. Without the role of the state to manage resentment, to convert it to a proper, salutary end, its consequences are potentially disastrous. That in a sense is the burden of narrative history, to dramatise this effect.

III. Resentment and Historical Narrative: Hume and Robertson

14. Moral philosophy and philosophical history could show how mutual resentments locked into a stasis, and how true or ‘just’ resentment became the property of the state. The depiction of uncontrolled resentment, and its disastrous effects, was left to the field of narrative history. The flexibility of resentment as a motive, and its capacity for modulation when combined with other motives, certainly enhances its uses for narrative purposes. In Hume’sHistory of England, resentment features as a powerful motivating force, an explanatory tool, and perhaps also an imprisoning category. Contrary to his own maxim, Hume preserves a distance from the feeling of resentment precisely by invoking it regularly as a spring of action: by naming it, and to an extent exposing it, with the forensic (and potentially ironic) attention of the philosophical historian, he forestalls any complicity in the passions he presents. There is no room for sympathy in such a distanced account of resentment. For Hume, resentment in the political world is a dangerous element, which needs to be restrained: he shows how easily it can transform itself from a form of ‘piety’- a just resentment- into a “barbarous and unrelenting” force, and a deeply imprudent one. Thus, Philip II of Spain is “transported by resentment and ambition beyond his usual cautious maxims”.^[81] Too great a show of resentment can lead to the proliferation of resentments in others, and it is the task of the prudent politician to temper his resentments. James VI suppresses what might be seen as a just resentment at his mother’s execution, partly out of prudential considerations, but partly also because of James’ “peaceful, unambitious temper”.^[82] In his account of the wars of the Roses, Hume shows how resentment could be deployed as a political tool to goad an enemy into imprudence. Clarence’s enemies attempt to provoke resentment in him: if he did not rise to the provocation, he would be humiliated as a coward; if he gave way to it “and expressed resentment, his passion would betray him into measures, which might give them advantages against him”.^[83] Resentment is thus a crucial point of weakness in the armour of any politician, and one that must be handled carefully.
In the medieval volumes of his History, Hume shows resentment in delicate interplay with authority. Kings threaten resentment in order to assert their authority over their subjects; they feel resentment if denied the obedience that is due to them. Thus resentment and the fear of it is a crucial part of the king’s attempt to secure his authority. Given however the limited nature of medieval kingship, kings are also vulnerable to the resentments of their subjects, particularly the nobles and the clergy, and to a great extent they are hemmed in by this consideration.^[84] Kings are forced to preside over “an unruly aristocracy, always divided by faction, and...inflamed with...resentments”.^[85] The tension between public resentment and private resentment is particularly marked in the medieval period, characterised as it is in Hume’s account by the intimate histories of aristocratic cliques, necessarily intertwined with the ongoing history of particular resentments. Medieval society allows the easy gratification of resentments, and actively promotes their transmission and inheritance from generation to generation. William the Conqueror is propelled into his conquest by the interaction of ambition with personal resentment, and his later history continues to be governed by an “implacable” resentment towards his sons, which overcomes any familial tenderness.^[86] Resentment motivates unnatural actions- disloyalty towards a father, the murder of a brother- and it incites the mob or “common people” to fury and outrages without bounds. Richard’s I’s strong propensity to resentment opens up the prospect of a “perpetual scene of violence and bloodshed”^[87], and he is caught in a constant flux and reflux of resentment and ambition with the French King Philip Augustus. Resentment makes a mockery of the concept of mutuality, and in the relations between kings it destroys the basis of confidence. For instance, of the interaction between Edward III and the French king, Hume writes: “Thus resentment gradually filled the breasts of both monarchs, and made them incapable of hearkening to any terms of accommodation”.^[88] Resentment has the power to deepen conflict, infecting all relationships and reducing them to chaotic conflict. Resentment moreover breeds factionalism within the kingdom. The origin of the wars of the Roses is located the “strong attachments” forged by aristocratic houses, in combination with the “vindictive spirit” which was “considered a point of honour”. All of this “rendered the great families implacable in their resentments” and made civil war virtually unavoidable.^[89] Hume thus uses resentment as a means of explaining and dramatising the dysfunctions of the medieval polity, so dependent upon the “personal character of the prince”, and hence a “government of will, not laws”.^[90] He also invokes the language of resentment to undermine conventional, or pious, attributions of motivation, which in a Scottish context take on a revisionist aspect. For instance, he shifts the motives for the Scots to resist the English in their struggle for independence from patriotism, or love or zeal for the kingdom, towards a resentment towards Edward I and the English- pathologised as an ‘inflammation’.

15. Nonetheless, one sign of an effective king in Hume’s treatment is how effectually he can convert his resentment into action. The absence or impairment of resentment is profoundly disabling for a medieval monarch. Henry III is too feeble for his resentments (hasty and violent though they are) to be dreaded; they lack constancy.^[91] Edward II lacks sufficient resentment: he is less constant in his enmities than his friendships. Thus, while his initial resentment at Gavaston’s murder is commensurate with his affection for his favourite, it is much less enduring.^[92] Edward is therefore trapped into granting to the murderers an inappropriate forgiveness, and into sacrificing his proper and just resentment. This can only be interpreted as irredeemable weakness. Indeed, Hume frequently adopts a dual view of resentment: it can be enduring, deep and powerful; on the other hand, it can also be represented as weak, fleeting, evanescent, and certainly less effectual than a secure attachment to interest. As Hume argues, “it is in the nature of passion to decay, while the sense of interest maintains a permanent influence and authority”.^[93] Yet Hume’s actual narrative shows time and again how a passion such as resentment, unstable as it may be, can frequently act against the dictates of interest, subverting or frustrating a proper regard to policy. On occasion though they can work in tandem. Policy and resentment combine together as a motivating force in Hume’s interpretation of Bruce’s murder of Comyn, and of the two motives resentment appears the more justifiable, the more easily entered into and sympathised with. Hume places Bruce’s act in the context of the history of manners; while it would be condemned in the eighteenth-century, it was praiseworthy by the standards of the middle ages, the product of “manly vigour and just policy”.^[94] The justice here is contained in the provocation Bruce suffers, and therefore in his resentment. National resentment can also act as a means of cementing the unity of the nation: political leaders thus seek to persuade the people to share their resentments, to “take part” in them. Therefore, resentment can be partially exculpatory, and even constructive.
In Hume’s classic account of the English civil wars, resentment plays an occasional but significant role. Hume treats this period differently from that of his volume on Elizabeth (written later), where resentment is typically “sacrificed” to public interest.^[95] James I is depicted in markedly less prudential terms than as James VI in Hume’s Elizabeth volume. He is in some ways more clearly a creature of resentment, to the extent that it becomes a spur to his attempted exertion of authority over the puritans: “If he had submitted to the indignity of courting their favour, he treasured up, on that account, the stronger resentment against them, and was determined to make them feel, in their turn, the weight of his authority”.^[96] It is his resentment that leads him, in Hume’s nuanced account, to challenge the constitution in such violent terms, and to open the way to the conflict that follows, by exposing the “inconsistent fabric, whose jarring and discordant parts must soon destroy each other”.^[97] James’ constitutional arguments are thus merely a rationalization of an overweaning and pre-existing resentment, the real underlying spring of his actions. Resentment is thus the catalyst to action. Resentment’s destructive role is depicted even more fully in the account of Buckingham, whose doom is sealed by his careless arousal of resentment, culminating in his assassination by Fenton: “private resentment was boiling in his sullen, unsociable mind” (here resentment is aided by “religious fanaticism”).^[98] The confrontation between Charles I and parliament displays the confining, strangulating role of resentment in preventing either side from breaking out of the downward spiral of internecine conflict. Resentment acts to “inflame” the situation, and to polarize the antagonists.^[99] Strafford’s change of sides exposes him to “implacable hatred and resentment”, which stokes the fires of conflict.^[100] While Charles refuses to sacrifice Laud to the “resentment” of his enemies, his actions nonetheless irritate and spread that resentment. Interestingly, Charles is more often the object of resentment than himself a resenter, and Hume shows how Charles cannot avoid arousing it even by acts of magnanimity and ‘honour’, such as the refusal to abandon Laud or to sign the warrant to execute Strafford, that truly impartial observers should applaud, not resent.^[101] Resentment is thus associated with peremptory intolerance and extremism, implacability, and unreasonableness: the city of London is triggered into action against the king, “inflamed with resentment”. On Strafford Hume writes, with a marked absence of provoking coolness, that “the sentence, by which he fell, was an enormity greater than the worst of those, which his implacable enemies prosecuted with so much cruel industry. The people, in their rage, had totally mistaken the proper object of their resentment”.^[102] Resentment is peculiarly prone to error, and mistakes both its “proper” function and its appropriate targets. Hume as historian is in an interesting position here, attempting to make the reader appreciate the injustice perpetrated towards Strafford (a revisionist task, overturning the verities of conventional Whig history) while also warning the reader of the dangers of resentment. He condemns, while leavening the condemnation with a sense of the limitations of resentment. In his historical-magisterial role, he permits resentment towards the “people” who committed this “enormity”, but at the same time invites contemplation on the origins of this error. Charles’ fault above all, like Buckingham, is to be careless of the consequences of arousing resentment, doing little to appease this terrible passion. In general, Charles himself is depicted as remarkably resistant to resentment himself, to an extraordinary degree of restraint, but this does not save him from becoming implicated, eventually, in the mutually destructive cycle of resentment. Hume chooses to represent one of the key turning-points in the drift towards civil war as a provocation that even Charles cannot ignore: he is subjected to “a method of address...not only unsuitable towards so great a prince, but which no private gentleman could bear without resentment”.^[103] The negative burden of resentment is largely thrown on the opponents of Charles (the Scots, for instance, are “violent” in their resentment towards the King)^[104], while Charles- if animated by resentment- is shown to be partially justified. This does not save him.

16. While resentment plays a crucial role in some of the key points of Hume’s History of England, it is not however an insistent feature of Hume’s historical work, in the way it is for Robertson in The History of Scotland. Robertson focuses from the beginning on the notion of resentment and its structural role within the Scottish political and social system. Thus, he prefaces Scotland with a short dissertation on the nature and causes of political assassination, which Robertson sees as a striking feature of sixteenth-century political life, and the most vivid symptom of its dysfunctional nature and lack of refinement. It is an age of easily-gratified revenge, both because of the prevalence of the cult of honour, and also because of the feebleness of the Scottish monarchy. This crucially connects resentment with the burden of Robertson’s principal theme in Scotland, the failure of the Scottish polity to adapt to modern conditions. Part of this is its inability to convert resentment and revenge into public rather than private affairs, regulated by authority. Therefore, private resentment is not constrained in any enforceable way; indeed, public law at first strengthens rather than restrains private resentment. Robertson embeds his discussion of resentment in a social and political context. Ironically, he asserts that his explicit aim is to move his narrative away from the obsession with private passions that had distorted previous histories of Scotland. Robertson tries to pick his way through the model of narrative history as merely the fluctuation of passion: “This conduct of our monarchs, if we rest satisfied with the accounts of their historians, must be considered as flowing entirely from their resentment against particular noblemen; and all their attempts to humble them must be viewed as the sallies of private passion, not as the consequences of any general plan of policy.”^[105] To write a history merely of resentment is meaningless, as well as distorting.
In a sense what he is trying to do is to show that Scottish monarchs perceived their interest as lying precisely in attempting to raise the monarchy of Scotland beyond their vulnerability to such destructive passions. Yet because the story is essentially one of their failure, the resulting work is largely a rehearsal of precisely these resentments, with the added perspective of Robertson’s institutional analysis of the dysfunctional Scottish monarchy and its over-mighty nobility. Robertson believes that by approaching resentment in this highly conscious manner, he is in fact inoculating us from our immersion in just these passions: this is part of what makes it a ‘philosophical’ history, in that, like Hume, Robertson is seeking to encourage a reflection on the role of resentment in political life.

17. Thus, throughout the subsequent narrative, resentment is the master-passion of the age, typical of the primitive, disordered nature of the Scottish polity. Resentment stands at the centre of all of Robertson’s narrative themes, associated with disappointed ambition, thwarted passions, the aristocratic ethic of honour, party rage, the weakness of the state and the essentially tribal nature of Scottish politics.^[106] In explaining the ubiquity of resentment, Robertson refers to “the violent spirit of the age”; it is “an age accustomed to license & anarchy”^[107]; “the maxims of that age justified the most desperate course which he could take to obtain vengeance”.^[108] The background to political action is the existence of “men inflamed with resentment & impatient for revenge”.^[109] Resentment is also a hungry, colonising passion, swallowing up and transfiguring other lesser passions and principles such as religious zeal, patriotism, liberty and even romantic love. It is striking that in his account of the reformation in Scotland, religious motives are often downgraded in favour not only of interest, but also of “private revenge” and “resentment”. Resentment is frequently the handmaiden of religion: men are “animated with zeal & inflamed with resentment”.^[110] The precise nature of this conjunction is often unclear, except of course that they each act to strengthen and intensify the motive. Resentment also explains the disordered shape of the narrative and the wild uncontrollability of character: it is not a stable motive, but subject to what Robertson terms (in connection with Henry VIII of England) a “fantastic inconsistence”. At times, Robertson seems to invoke resentment as a motive when no rational interest can be discerned: “the spirit which some of them discovered during the subsequent revolutions, leaves little room to doubt, that ambition or resentment were the real motives of their conduct”.^[111] The symbiotic relationship between resentment and ambition is also striking: often they co-exist, but resentment also operates when ambition is blocked, frustrated, or disappointed. Resentment then can be a displacement activity for effectual ambition itself.
Robertson’s brief portrait of James V sets the scene here. James possesses a remarkable mixture of qualities. He combines love (for the people), and zeal for “the punishment of private oppressors”, with sagacity and penetration. Thus he is a model for the ambitions of the Scottish monarchy, rooted as Robertson claims in a shrewd assessment of the interests of the state. Yet James is “uncultivated”, an essentially passionate man for all his positive political qualities. Above all he is a man of “violent passions” and “implacable resentment”. James strongly resents the nobility for their stranglehold on power which should, legitimately, be his. ^[112]  The nobles however resent any attempt on his part to curb their traditional authority.^[113] Thus Scotland faces a deadlock, assured by the operation of mutual resentments. Robertson shows James’ intense and embittered awareness of this crucial fact. Previous monarchs had been trapped by their fear of arousing the resentment of the nobles. James nonetheless tries to satisfy and appease his own resentment by taking on the nobility. He is simply, temperamentally, incapable of accepting the situation that he has inherited; but also incapable of dealing with the results of the situation that he creates through his “immoderate desire of power”: “Incapable of bearing these repeated insults, he found himself unable to revenge them”. In ceasing to concern himself with arousing the resentment of his subjects, he abandons both prudence and propriety. James’ collapse into pathological despair, those “diseases of the mind” that are the “known effects of disappointment, anger and resentment”, establishes a pattern of great importance: the sinking of all ambitions and qualities into an all-absorbing and highly destructive resentment. Disappointed ambition time and again collapses into sullen or furious resentment.^[114] In the case of James V, resentment has no outlet, its target being the entire noble order, in fact the entire Scottish political system. This is as far from a petty resentment as we can get, yet it is not elevated either. It is simply destructive, raging, impotent, furious.

18. Resentment can also be an energising force, supplying a motive for action where defects of character would otherwise prevent or frustrate it. Thus, Huntly is characterised as feeble, slothful, ‘inactive’, a decayed relic of a declining order; but capable of the most furious spasms of activity prompted almost solely by resentment. This indeed is what makes him dangerous to the political order.^[115]It is this susceptibility to resentment that is at the core of Robertson’s recharacterisation of the Scottish nobility, an essential part of his revisionist, pro-monarchist stance. The nobles are self-interested, dangerous and turbulent, and primarily responsible for the enervating distractions of Scottish government in the sixteenth-century, and it is the strength of their collective resentment that prevents the state from accumulating authority. At the same time their particular resentments ensure constant struggle and turmoil between competing factions. By contrast, the dispassionate, almost Stoic figure of Regent Moray- symbol of the state- is not himself a resentful figure (rather he is a quintessential homme politique), but he cannot insulate himself from the effects of resentment; like Charles I, he is a figure guaranteed to stir up resentment in others, and this is very directly the cause of his death.^[116]
The central narrative of Mary Stuart needs therefore to be located in this context. Although partly written in a sentimental register, Mary is also very much a player in the drama of resentment that Robertson has already established. The relationship between Mary and Elizabeth is an anti-friendship, bound together by complex ties of fear and resentment. Mary fears Elizabeth’s resentment; Elizabeth later is haunted by the spectre of Mary’s resentment. Fear of the effects of this mutual resentment is the reason for the pattern of their relations, for the dissimulation that dominates their actions towards each other, and for the absence of forgiveness or mercy between them. Robertson carefully explains the origins of this. He switches back and forth between imputing the passions of ordinary mankind to these women, while continually emphasizing the impossibility of any amity or concord between princes. Thus, indignation, mutual distrust and, eventually, resentment, are inevitable.^[117] Mary’s love for Darnley dramatically turns into resentment; indeed the two co-existed from the first, as she is led to enter into her disastrously imprudent match, “blinded by resentment as well as by love”.^[118] This resentment was in turn triggered by Elizabeth’s attempt to block the marriage, itself the fruit of “Elizabeth’s resentment” towards Mary.^[119] As the marriage turns sour, so frustrated, “disappointed love”- like ambition- seems to lead inevitably to a corrosive resentment.^[120] Resentment battens onto other passions, ready to absorb them when they sour or fail. Indeed, in this as in other cases resentment acts as a kind of dumping-ground for all other passions, their unfulfilled dead-end. Mary’s “inexorable resentment” effectively chokes off her prudence;^[121] this is Mary’s essential tragedy, since Robertson is at pains to emphasise her early reign as an enlightened example of politic moderation. Darnley too is a resentful figure; his ambition is irrational and ineffective, and interacts dangerously with resentment at his failures: “Such various and complicated passions raged in the King’s bosom, with the utmost fury”.^[122] It is the cause of Rizio’s bizarre murder.

19. Robertson blurs the languages of sentiment and resentment by making Mary’s tears- the signifier of sentimental sorrow- also an index of resentment; they are tears as much of bitter resentment, prompted by both failed ambition and failed love, as of any nobler motive: “She burst into tears of indignation and...utmost bitterness”. ^[123] Indeed Robertson seems to associate Mary’s tears with bitterness: “She uttered the most bitter complaints, she melted into tears...”;^[124] “Mary...was bathed in tears, and while she gave away the sceptre which she had swayed so long, she felt a pang of grief and indignation...”.^[125] Mary is clearly a sensible creature. Indeed, Hume had associated resentment (a seemingly primitive, savage passion) with the more refined, modern notion of sensibility: “There is a certain Delicacy of Passion, to which some People are subject, that makes them extremely sensible to all the Accidents of Life. And when a Person, that has this Sensibility of Temper, meets with any Misfortune, his Sorrow or Resentment takes entire Possession of him”.^[126] This insight helps to reconcile Mary’s resentment with her known delicacy and refinement, and also aids our understanding of her susceptibility to it.
In an interesting twist, however, at the height of Mary’s crisis Robertson adduces as proof of her guilt her very absence of any signs of resentment at the injuries that had been openly inflicted upon her. This could not, Robertson says, be the stoical or virtuous suppression of resentment: “Such moderation seems hardly to be compatible with the strong resentment which calumniated innocence naturally feels; or with that eagerness to vindicate itself which it always discovers”. ^[127] This has a number of implications. Firstly, it seems to indicate that just resentment is incapable of being suppressed; it is an irresistible principle of inflexible justice, unsusceptible to moderating influence, and hence always implacable. Secondly, the expression of resentment therefore becomes almost a duty of the innocent to perform. Finally, the historian’s role is that of an interpreter of these signs of resentment, using them as an entry-point into the interior of the historical actor. Through this, seemingly impenetrable questions of guilt and motive can be broached. This strong vindication of resentment sits awkwardly with Robertson’s general condemnation of it, and might seem to supporters of Mary to be convenient sophistry. Indeed, Tytler’s criticism of Robertson’s pretend systems of uncovering motives seems to have some validity here. Yet it certainly adds to a complex picture of the operation of resentment. Robertson is also interested in explaining why there is a mismatch between the eighteenth-century response to Mary’s plight- essentially sympathetic if not exculpatory- and the decidedly hostile responses of the people of Scotland in the sixteenth-century: “A woman, young, beautiful, and in distress, is naturally the object of compassion”. Yet “her sufferings did not mitigate their resentment” or “procure that sympathy which is seldom denied to unfortunate princes”. This, Robertson explains, is due to their insensibility (a quality often associated with savages) and perhaps, he implies at one point, to their rigorous sense of justice. ^[128]  When Mary is finally executed, the English nation is condemned harshly for being “blinded with resentment”, for giving the “appearance of justice to what was the offspring of jealousy and fear”; here even the mask of justice is stripped away from the operation of resentment.^[129] Thus, the historian judges between proper and improper expressions of resentment. This close monitoring of resentment enables Robertson at once to criticise Mary for her susceptibility to resentment, and for her absence of it, and the peoples of Scotland and England for their excessive indulgence of it. This highly modulated approach has the effect of complicating the reader’s responses, and especially of creating a suspicion of resentment that prevents the reader from participating in it, at least straightforwardly. Tytler saw this as merely a cover for the condemnation of Mary; Walpole as a complex means of vindicating her. Yet Robertson was attempting to sidestep altogether the need to take sides.

20. James VI possesses his own curious relationship to the paradigm of resentment, one strikingly different from that of either James V or Mary. Where his grandfather and his mother had imprudently and disastrously indulged resentment, and been devoured by it, James VI steps aside and forces himself to “stifle” his resentment, strikingly in the case of his mother’s judicial murder.^[130] This suppression of resentment against England is even more remarkable given the history of mutual antipathy, kindled by “long emulation, and inflamed by reciprocal injuries”,^[131] that Robertson has sketched between the English and the Scots. Indeed James assumes the paradoxical figure of sovereign justice unable to command the forces of public resentment, and forced to become instead spectator of the boiling resentments that distract his realm. This should make James a almost a tragic character for the Enlightenment: a man of “moderation”, a force for reconciliation and mediation, who stoically conquers his own personal resentments in the service of his kingdom, and who is nonetheless paid back by his less enlightened subjects with derision or contempt.^[132] Robertson himself is ambivalent about this: in a carefully judged phrase he claims that James is “extremely ready to sacrifice the strongest resentment to the slightest acknowledgement”.^[133] The power of the Crown must be sustained, however, and while James keeps himself safe from private resentments, he must not be ready to sacrifice the public resentment upon which his authority must be based.
The narrative of Scotland is a kind of wild carnival of resentment, which diverges significantly from the more purely philosophical treatments of Kames and Smith, in that the passion of resentment is in no real sense seen to be transformed into the public and ‘proper’ resentment of the painless development. Narrative history could, for this reason, appear to be unenlightening, if not depressing. Its purpose then for a historian like Robertson was to show how unchecked resentment could work to frustrate the development of society, and so to illustrate its dangers. It is part of Robertson’s strategy to distance his readers from the resentments that fill the narrative. Thus, in a note appended to a later edition of the History of Scotland, Robertson (a good unionist) writes that the “violence of national hatred can hardly be conceived by posterity”, and strongly implies that the “fierce resentment of Scots” towards the English that he depicts so vividly is very much of the past.^[134] This was perhaps wishful thinking. The attempt to banish ‘fierce’ resentment to a disordered past was at the centre of Robertson’s project. Despite his best attempts, however, some unreconciled souls sought to assimilate Robertson to the world of his own historical descriptors, describing him as a “Reverend Party-man”, and ascribing to him the one passion which he had sought to master: “To his resentment he fixes no bounds; yet he has not magnanimity enough to be an open enemy”.^[135] This partisan image of Robertson as a covert resenter, if widely adopted,  threatened to undo all the work of his historical writings, and reflected a sense that the taming and redirection of resentment, the great achievement of modern Scottish life, was simply a sham, permitting those with the flexible capacity to conceal and disguise their resentment to rise to the fore and predominate. In the language of the time, this would be a refinement of resentment, rather than an elimination of it. The language of motive and historical character tended of course to spill into the present, thus disrupting the attempt to corral off the past from the present, which was one of Robertson’s aims in the History of Scotland. In an interesting image, Benjamin Rush (who had observed Robertson in his pomp as Moderator of the Church of Scotland while a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1760’s) likened Robertson to Archbishop Laud, a comparison probably prompted by a reading of Hume’s history.^[136] This immersion of Robertson into the dark world of his own histories threatened to make him a character to be resented by a people jealous of their spiritual liberty. Thus, history could turn against the polite historians, and be used to invoke resentment against them.

Conclusion

21. Resentment serves as a bridge between philosophical and narrative conceptions of history. In the former, resentment provides a classic case study of the sublimation of the passions into a providential and spontaneous order, although one not without its unresolved tensions. In the latter, it represents a more ambiguous and threatening principle of action. In part, the motive of resentment allowed eighteenth-century historians to reflect upon what was most disruptive and disturbing about their relationship to the past, and by confronting it directly they sought to prevent it from distorting the principal reaction of eighteenth-century readers to vexed historical questions. They could not deny its importance and so attempted to understand it better. Recognising the seriousness with which historians such as Hume and Robertson took the passions that largely constituted their histories enables us to appreciate and understand the subtlety of the lessons taught by eighteenth-century historical narrative, one of the most vital and popular of its literary forms.

Notes

^[1] Istvan Hont, ‘The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the ‘4-stages Theory’’, in  Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 253-276.

^[2] To a modern critic such as James McKelvey he is simply “pompous and overblown”: ‘William Robertson and Lord Bute’, Studies in Scottish Literature 6 (1968-9), 238-247.

^[3] Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton University Press, 2000),  esp. 103-128.
^[4] J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York, 1990), 346. Chantal Grell, ‘Le Dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquite en France 1680-1789’, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 331, 992-999.

^[5] Henry Steuart, Works of Sallust (London, 1806), 1: 274.

^[6] Frank Shuffelton, ‘Endangered History: Character and Narrative in early American Historical Writing’, Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation 34, 3 (1993), 221-242. On the subject of character and historical narrative, see Neil Hargraves, ‘Revelation of Character in Eighteenth Century Historiography and William Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles V’, Eighteenth Century Life 27, 2 (2003): 23-48.

^[7] On the sceptical critique of historical narrative in the eighteenth-century, see Neil Hargraves, ‘The Language of Character and the Nature of Events in the Historical Narratives of William Robertson’, Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Edinburgh, 1999), 74-98.

^[8] Edward Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works with Memoirs of his Life and Writings (London, 1837), 69.

^[9] David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1987), 414.

^[10] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 314-315.

^[11] David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1993), 165.

^[12]The key text was still that of a highly biased participant in the drama, John Knox. Mary Fearnley-Sander, ‘Philosophical History and the Scottish Reformation: William Robertson and the Knoxian Tradition’, Historical Journal 33, 2 (1990), 323-38

^[13] John Home, Douglas; A Tragedy (London, 1757), 3. Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality (Edinburgh University Press), 14.

^[14] Jeffrey Smitten, ‘Impartiality in Robertson’s History of America’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1985), 56-77.

^[15]Tytler was an Edinburgh lawyer destined to be the sire of a dynasty of Scottish historians, such as Alexander Fraser Tytler, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Patrick Fraser Tytler.

^[16] William Tytler, An Inquiry, Historical and Critical, into the Evidence against Mary Queen of Scots and an Examination of the Histories of Dr Robertson and Mr Hume, with respect to that evidence (2 volumes, fourth edition; Edinburgh, W.Creech, 1790), 1:27-28.

^[17] Thus, in his 1790 edition he endorsed Gilbert Stuart’s anti-Robertsonian History of Mary Queen of Scots (1782), for finally placing “the character of that unfortunate princess upon a solid basis”: Tytler, 1:14.

^[18] On Robertson and sentiment in connection with Mary, see Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan history from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114-122.

^[19] Tytler, 2:301.

^[20] Tytler, 2:52.

^[21] Tytler, 2:81.

^[22] Tytler, 2:81.

^[23] On Scottish ‘Whig’ history, see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish whig historians and the creation of an Anglo-British identity 1689-c.1830 (Cambridge University Press, 1993);  ‘The ideological significance of Robertson’s History of Scotland, in  Stewart J. Brown, (ed.), William Robertson and the expansion of empire (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 122-44.

^[24] Tytler, 2:67-68.
^[25] Tytler, 2:53.

^[26] William Robertson, The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI till his Accession to the Crown of England (London, A. Millar, 1759), 1: 87.

^[27] To Sir David Dalrymple. 3 February 1760. Horace Walpole, The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, ed. John Wright (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1842), 3: 40.

^[28] Samuel Johnson, A dictionary of the English language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations... (6th edition, London, 1785.), volume 2: ‘Resentment’.

^[29] Warren L. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 155.

^[30] Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment and other Mimetic Structures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 67-68.
^[31] Annette C. Baier, ‘Hume on Resentment’, Hume Studies 6, 2 (1980), 133-149.
^[32] Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 330.

^[33] Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 22.

^[34] Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianopolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 79.

^[35] Hutcheson, Inquiry, 90.

^[36] David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. P.H. Niddich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 302.

^[37] Hume, Enquiries, 201.

^[38] Hume, Enquiries, 190. See Annette C. Baier, ‘Hume on Resentment’, Hume Studies 6, 2 (1980), 133-149.

^[39] M.S. Pritchard has recently argued that Hume does not dwell on the significance of resentment precisely because it poses major problems for his theory of justice,  a weakness exploited by Thomas Reid in his more extensive account of resentment:  ‘Justice And Resentment In Hume, Reid, And Smith’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 6 (2008), 59-70.

^[40] Henry Home, Lord Kames, Historical Law-Tracts (2nd edition, Edinburgh, 1761), vi.

^[41] Adam Smith, Lectures On Jurisprudence, ed. R.. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1982), 117. Echoed in Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 343. On Smith on resentment, see Spencer J. Pack and Eric Schliesser, ‘Smith’s Humean Criticism of Smith’s Account of Justice’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 44, 1 (2006), 47-63.

^[42] William Robertson, Miscellaneous Works and Commentaries, ed. Jeffrey Smitten (London: Routledge, 1997), 95-114.
^[43] Robertson, Miscellaneous Works, 95-114.

^[44] Robertson, Miscellaneous Works, 95-114.

^[45] Kames, 5.

^[46] Robertson, Scotland, 1:311-312.

^[47] Kames, 4.

^[48] On  unintended consequences, see Daniele Francesconi, ‘William Robertson on Historical Causation and Unintended Consequences’, Cromohs, 4 (1999): 1-18; Christopher Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 39-47.

^[49] Smith, Theory, 123.

^[50] Kames, 13.

^[51] Kames, 20.

^[52] Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (6th edition; London, 1793), 291: “The simple passions, friendship, resentment, and love, are the movements of his own mind, and he has no occasion to copy. Simple and vehement in his conceptions and feelings, he knows no diversity of thought, or of style, to mislead or to exercise his judgement”.

^[53] Kames, 24.

^[54] Kames, 8-9.

^[55] Kames, 42.

^[56] Kames, 35.

^[57] Kames, 31.

^[58] Kames, 24.

^[59] Kames, 8.

^[60] Kames, 18.

^[61] Kames, 37.

^[62] Smith, Theory, 361.

^[63] Smith, Theory, 21.

^[64] Smith, Theory, 129.

^[65] Smith, Theory, 362.

^[66] Smith, Theory, 132.

^[67] Smith, Theory, 194.

^[68] Smith, Theory, 182.

^[69] Ferguson, Essay, 59-60.

^[70] Ferguson, Essay, 291.

^[71] Ferguson, Essay, 144-145.

^[72] John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, or an Inquiry into the circumstances which give rise to influence and authority in the different members of society (4th edition; Edinburgh, 1806), 111.

^[73] Millar, 79.

^[74] William Robertson, The History of the Reign of Charles V (London, 1769), 1:84.

^[75] Robertson, Charles V, 1: 277.

^[76] Robertson, Charles V, 1: 298-299.

^[77] Robertson, Charles V, 1:99-100.

^[78] Robertson, Charles V, 1:101-103.

^[79] Robertson, Charles V, 1:184.

^[80] Robertson, Charles V, 1:179.

^[81] Hume, England, 4:180.

^[82] Hume, England, 4:166.

^[83] Hume, England, 2:408-9.

^[84] Hume, England, 1:189: for instance, Hume writes of William the Conqueror’s situation after the conquest: “as the great body of the clergy were still natives, the king had much reason to dread the effects of their resentment”.

^[85] Hume, England, 2:286.

^[86] Hume, England, 1:199-200.

^[87] Hume, England, 1: 353.

^[88] Hume, England, 2:169.

^[89] Hume, England, 2:372.

^[90] Hume, England, 2:148.

^[91] Hume, England, 2:12.

^[92] Hume, England, 2:134.

^[93] Hume, England, 2:411.

^[94] Hume, England, 2:109.

^[95] Hume, England, 4:218.

^[96] Hume, England, 5: 11.

^[97] Hume, England, 5: 59.

^[98] Hume, England, 5: 203.

^[99] Hume, England, 5: 216.

^[100] Hume, England, 5: 222.

^[101] Hume, England, 5: 213: “he was resolved not to disarm and dishonour himself, by abandoning them to the resentment of his enemies”.

^[102] Hume, England, 5: 327.

^[103] Hume, England, 5: 364.

^[104] Hume, England, 5: 286.

^[105] Robertson, Scotland, 1:38.

^[106] He describes it as an “honourable resentment”.

^[107] Robertson, Scotland, 1:245.

^[108] Robertson, Scotland. 1:435.

^[109] Robertson, Scotland, 1:242. Robertson also conjoins the inflammation with resentment at 1:158 and 1:284.

^[110] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 198.

^[111] Robertson, Scotland, 1:362.

^[112] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 55-56.
^[113] Robertson, Scotland, 1:59.

^[114] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 62-63.

^[115] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 245-246.

^[116] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 435-436.

^[117] Robertson, Scotland, 1:219-224.

^[118] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 273.

^[119] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 267.

^[120] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 338.

^[121] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 289-290.

^[122] Robetson, Scotland, 1: 305-306.

^[123] Robertson, Scotland, 1:273.

^[124] Robertson, Scotland, 1:367.

^[125] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 375.

^[126] Hume, Essays, 3-4.

^[127] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 416.

^[128] Robertson, Scotland, 1:367-368.

^[129] Robertson, Scotland, 2: 136.

^[130] Robertson, Scotland, 2: 155.

^[131] Robertson, Scotland, 1: 103.

^[132]  Robertson, Scotland, 2: 193.

^[133] Robertson, Scotland, 2:190.

^[134] William Robertson, The history of Scotland during the reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI. till his accession to the crown of England. With the author's last emendations and additions. (Fifteenth edition, T. Cadell and W. Davies, London, 1797), 1:106-107.

^[135] ‘Sceptical observations upon a late character of Dr Robertson’, London Magazine, 41 (1772), 281-283.

^[136] Benjamin Rush, ‘Account of William Robertson’, Edinburgh University Library MS, M.28.

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