Produced by David Widger and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE INVASION OF JULIUS CÆSAR TO THE END OF THE REIGN OF JAMES THE SECOND, BY DAVID HUME, ESQ. 1688 London: James S. Virtue, City Road and Ivy Lane New York: 26 John Street 1860 And Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. March 17, 1901 In Three Volumes: VOLUME ONE: The History Of England From The Invasion Of Julius Cæsar To The End Of The Reign Of James The Second............ By David Hume, Esq. VOLUME TWO: Continued from the Reign of William and Mary to the Death of George II........................................... by Tobias Smollett. VOLUME THREE: From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria............... by E. Farr and E.H. Nolan. VOLUME ONE Part B. HENRY III. TO RICHARD III. CHAPTER XII. [Illustration: 1_155_henry3.jpg HENRY III.] HENRY III. {1216.} Most sciences, in proportion as they increase and improve, invent methods by which they facilitate their reasonings, and, employing general theorems, are enabled to comprehend, in a few propositions, a great number of inferences and conclusions. History, also, being a collection of facts which are multiplying without end, is obliged to adopt such arts of abridgment, to retain the more material events, and to drop all the minute circumstances, which are only interesting during the time, or to the persons engaged in the transactions. This truth is nowhere more evident than with regard to the reign upon which we are going to enter. What mortal could have the patience to write or read a long detail of such frivolous events as those with which it is filled, or attend to a tedious narrative which would follow, through a series of fifty-six years, the caprices and weaknesses of so mean a prince as Henry? The chief reason why Protestant writers have been so anxious to spread out the incidents of this reign, is in order to expose the rapacity, ambition, and artifices of the court of Rome, and to prove, that the great dignitaries of the Catholic church, while they pretended to have nothing in view but the salvation of souls, had bent all their attention to the acquisition of riches, and were restrained by no sense of justice or of honor in the pursuit of that great object.[*] But this conclusion would readily be allowed them, though it were not illustrated by such a detail of uninteresting incidents; and follows indeed, by an evident necessity, from the very situation in which that church was placed with regard to the rest of Europe. For, besides that ecclesiastical power, as it can always cover its operations under a cloak of sanctity, and attacks men on the side where they dare not employ their reason, lies less under control than civil government; besides this general cause, I say, the pope and his courtiers were foreigners to most of the churches which they governed; they could not