David Hume or Home of Godscroft (1558–1629) was a Scottish historian and political theorist, poet and controversialist, a major intellectual figure in Jacobean Scotland. It has been said that "Hume marks the culmination of the Scottish humanist tradition."
Confusion is possible with David Hume or Home, Scottish minister at Duras in France, a contemporary: they had quite different views on the union with England.
Life
He was the second son of Sir David Hume or Home, 7th Lord of Wedderburn, a Roman Catholic traditionalist of the Merse (now Berwickshire), who had married an active Calvinist wife in Mary Johnston of Elphinstone. He studied at Dunbar grammar school, under Andrew Simson. He then entered the University of St Andrews in 1578, and after a course of study there travelled on the continent. From France he went on to Geneva, intending to travel to Italy.
Hume was recalled to Scotland by the serious illness of his elder brother George, returning about 1581. Both brothers supported the Ruthven raid of 1582. In 1583 he was residing as private secretary with his relative Archibald Douglas, 8th Earl of Angus, who was ordered, after James VI withdrew his confidence from the Ruthven Lords, to remain in the north of Scotland.
During the exile of the Ruthven party at Newcastle, Hume was in London, ostensibly studying, but actively interesting himself in Angus and his cause. The Lords, with Hume, returned to Scotland in 1585, and between that date and 1588, when Angus died.
In later life Hume devoted himself to literature on his property of Gowkscroft, a farming hamlet 2 miles to the north of Abbey St. Bathans, in the Lammermuir Hills, Berwickshire, which he renamed Godscroft, and styled himself Theagrius when he figured as a Latin poet.
Works
Political and religious writings
Hume supported his patron Angus's policy in a series of letters (preserved in the History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus) on the doctrine of obedience to princes. A discussion of a sermon on the same theme by the Rev. John Craig is the subject of Conference betwixt the Erle of Angus and Mr. David Hume, which is printed in David Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland. Hume contests in this dialogue, based on actual conversation, the political theories of Jean Bodin and Adam Blackwood.
In 1605 a union tract by Robert Pont suggested Hume's treatise De Unione Insulæ Britanniæ, a study in how to effect the closer political union of Scotland and England. The first part Tractatus I. was published in London (1605). In terms of the Jacobean debate on the Union, Hume went further than anyone else in looking to a unified "British society" to result from the Union of the Crowns of 1603.
On the relative values of episcopacy and presbytery, Hume was a persistent polemicist in discussing the theme: first with James Law, bishop of Orkney, from 1608 to 1611; and secondly, in 1613, with William Cowper, bishop of Galloway. He was also responsible about the same time for De Episcopatu, 1 May 1609, Patricio Simsono, to Patrick Simson. Hume's other major Latin prose writings are his unpublished attack on William Camden for his depreciatory view of Scotland, written in 1617—Cambdenia; id est, Examen nonnullorum a Gulielmo Cambreno in "Britannia,"—and a work dedicated to Charles I (Paris, 1626), entitled Apologia Basilica; seu Machiavelli Ingenium Examinatum, in libro quem inscripsit Princeps.