ABSTRACT
David Hume of Godscroft (1568-1629/31?) was the most impressive thinker of the second wave of Genevan Reform in Scotland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He is an exceptionally formidable arguer, but a witty and engaging one. Like George Buchanan, he was a distinguished Latin poet, and like him also a distinguished historian and political theorist. But he has never had his due. Nowadays among literary people he is better known as the father of Anna Hume, the translator of Petrarch’s Trionfi, than for his own writing. In his own day, he could not get his major works published or did not wish to. The Marquis of Douglas, for whom Godscroft had written The History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus, his most sustained piece of writing, held back publication because of its Presbyterian views on kings and subjects. In 1644, the year of the Solemn League and Covenant, when its political views might have chimed with the mood of the moment, Anna Hume tried to bring it out, but the Marquis managed to stay publication for two years and the moment passed. Anna Hume edited away much of her father’s expressive style and its Scots forms. A great deal of its material, abridged and revised, found its way into David Calderwood’s History of the Kirk of Scotland, and it is naturally to this factually more reliable source that professional modern historians turn, Godscroft’s contribution lying unnoticed.
