This absorbing and deeply researched biography begins with the disarming admission that ‘[William] Robertson's mind is a closed book’ and that this is ‘especially true of his religious views and intentions’ (p. vi). Yet after reading Jeffrey Smitten's study, the reader feels that the closed book has been prised open, at least to afford a partial view of a famously guarded divine. As a reserved and private man who was ‘reticent about his inner life’, Robertson ‘left no journals, diaries, memoirs, or personal notebooks (except financial accounts)’ (p. vi). There are, however, almost 800 letters, manuscript notes on his sermons, his famous histories, lesser known publications and numerous references to Robertson in contemporary sources. Moreover, over the past generation, Robertson's published works have been scrutinised by numerous historians working on the Scottish Enlightenment. Smitten synthesises this material, weaving it into a biography that is admirably precise and succinct.

Readers of this Journal will be particularly interested in what the book tells us about Robertson's ecclesiastical career and his religious position. As the leader of the Moderate faction in the Kirk and an eminent historian of Scotland, Europe, the Americas and India, Robertson epitomised what is now termed ‘the religious Enlightenment’ (though, oddly, he isn't even referenced in David Sorkin's landmark book of that title). He was an object of suspicion among more orthodox or Evangelical Protestants. The Anglican Evangelical MP, William Wilberforce, corresponded with Robertson about the abolition of the slave trade, and for many years was a keen reader of his histories. Yet in his popular book on religion, Wilberforce felt obliged to take the historian to task, even though it gave him ‘pain’ to do so. He placed Robertson among the class of those who had shown ‘lukewarmness in the cause of Christ’ by their avowed friendship with Christianity's critics, notably David Hume. Robertson's ‘phlegmatic’ account of the Reformation contained none of the ‘warmth’ one might expect from a pious Protestant divine; he had cast doubt on the Mosaic chronology; and he had been much too sympathetic to the religious culture of India (Wilberforce, A practical view of the prevailing religious system of professed Christians [1797], 386–7). Of course, it is precisely such characteristics that secured Robertson's reputation as a historian. As for the charge of ‘lukewarmness’, it is harder to sustain after reading Smitten's sympathetic account. He presents a figure whose ‘identity as a churchman was essential to his personal life as well as his historical vision’ (p. 143), and whose religious thinking was shaped by ‘underlying conservative principles’ (p. 196).

Smitten does not neglect the worldly and urbane side of Robertson. As a parish minister he was not altogether assiduous, and he devoted great energy to the pursuit of literary fame. He took understandable pride in his institutional achievements as the Principal of Edinburgh University, and was delighted that on the publication of his History of Scotland ‘that virtuous Heathen David Hume … runs about praising my work’ (p. 117). He was accused (by the actor David Garrick no less) of ‘persecuting’ James Beattie by blocking his appointment to the chair of moral philosophy because of his vituperative attack on Hume (p. 188). Robertson warned of ‘a spirit of fanaticism’ within the Kirk (p. 178), and he had responded to George Whitefield and the Cambuslang revival by preparing an unfinished translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. He shuddered at Evangelical enthusiasm, dogmatic Calvinism, popular anti-popery and credulous tales of exorcism. He ‘observed with pleasure, the rapid progress of liberal sentiments in this enlightened age’ (p. 193). Wedded to the ethos of politeness, he developed a prose style that in its balance and refinement matched the reasonableness of his faith. In a long clerical career he published a single sermon, and no work of theology. Instead, he dedicated his literary efforts to four major works of profane history: the History of Scotland (1759), History of the reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), History of America (1777) and Historical disquisition concerning India (1791). These stood in stark contrast to an older kind of overtly providentialist history.

Yet Smitten is persuasive in arguing that Robertson was more theological and more devout than critics like Garrick and Wilberforce understood. He begins with William Robertson Sr, himself a parish minister who Robert Wodrow identified as one of the fashionable young preachers drifting from Calvinist orthodoxy. Smitten rightly stresses the Arminian influences (both Dutch and English) that were seeping into the Kirk, though he perhaps exaggerates the Enlightenment credentials of this transitional generation, and underplays the currency of late Reformed orthodoxy as propounded by sophisticated continental theologians like Witsius and Pictet (whose textbook Robertson had to study as a student). At times, the theological phrasing in Robertson's writings cries out for a closer reading, but Smitten is not an expert in historical theology: the Book of Acts is not ‘a gospel’ (p. 66), and the idea of assurance of faith is characteristic of orthodox Calvinism rather than alien to it (p. 68). Yet he does make very good use of manuscript notes on Robertson's sermons, showing his close engagement with the biblical text and his articulation of the doctrines of sin, redemption and sanctification. We are reminded that the pulpit of Old Greyfriars was not the only thing that Robertson shared in common with the Evangelical John Erskine, who admired his colleague's piety and even vouched for his orthodoxy. Smitten overlooks the fact that Erskine and Robertson were co-signatories to John Warden's A system of revealed religion (1769), but this confirms Erskine's claim that Robertson did not favour Arian and Socinian heterodoxy. Both Erskine and another Evangelical, Sir Henry Wellwood Moncrieff, emphasised that Robertson was opposed to the push (led by some of his fellow Moderates) to end clerical subscription to the Westminster Confession. This reflected his determination to manage rather than inflame party divisions within the Kirk, and his reluctance to make an open breach with Reformed theology, even if he preached in a distinctly neo-Arminian voice. Moreover, for all his secular impartiality, Robertson wrote historical works that still carried a providentialist undertone; David Hume complained of ‘the godly Strain of his History’ (p. 122).