History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, Volume 1C

David Hume brought the same skeptical intelligence that made him a foundational philosopher to his monumental history of England. This volume sweeps through the Tudor dynasty's most dramatic century, from Henry VII's cunning consolidation of power through his son's catastrophic obsession with male heirs, the Reformation's violent rupture with Rome, the brief reign of the boy king Edward VI, and Mary's desperate, bloody attempt to turn back the clock on English Protestantism. Hume writes history as philosophy animated by narrative force - every succession crisis reveals something about the nature of political authority, every religious persecution illuminates the collision between conviction and power. His prose possesses a clarity and vigor that made eighteenth-century readers devour these volumes, and his analytical detachment gives the familiar story of Henry VIII's wives and the Marian persecutions an eerie, timeless quality. This is not the sanitized history of textbook legend but a living account by a mind that understood how power actually works, and why men kill for it.