William Robertson

William Robertson 1721-93, Scottish churchman and historian. As moderator (1762-80) of the general assembly of the Church of Scotland, he led the moderate party and enforced the right of the state to make clerical appointments. Robertson was one of the first to approach history as an empirical science. His History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and King James VI (1759), a factual, pragmatic history, was praised by Edmund Burke, David Hume, and others. Soon after its success, he became principal of the Univ. of Edinburgh (1762) and historiographer royal (1764). His masterpiece was The History of the Reign of Charles V (3 vol., 1796; ed. by W. H. Prescott, 2 vol., 1857), though it has long been dated. His History of the Discovery and Settlement of America (1777) was the first sympathetic treatment in English of the Spanish in America.

Robertson, William (1721–93). Historian. Son of a presbyterian minister, educated for the kirk at Edinburgh University, Robertson became the leader of a group of moderate presbyterian clergy who took control of the General Assembly of the kirk in 1752 and dominated its politics until 1805. Their power base lay in the universities and in the support they received from government. Robertson became the greatest of Edinburgh University's principals in 1762; it was under his leadership that the university became the most admired of the enlightened world. His History of Scotland (1759), History of the Reign of Charles V (1769), and the History of America (1777) constituted a vast history of the modern world set in the context of a general history of the progress of civilization, notable for the elegance and sophistication with which Robertson employed the so-called ‘conjectural history’ of the Scottish Enlightenment as a context for the history of great events. They established Robertson as a historian of the first rank, regarded as the equal of Voltaire and Hume, and much admired by Burke and Gibbon.

Nicholas Phillipson

Robertson, William (1721–93), Scottish historian, educator, and Church of Scotland leader, whose masterpiece, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth (1769), was republished (1857) with an appendix by W.H. Prescott, an enthusiastic follower of Robertson's concepts of historical writing. An outgrowth of Robertson's interest in the New World, awakened by his research for this work, was his History of America (2 vols., 1777), interrupted by the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Although criticized for its omissions and inaccuracies, this vivid and moving narrative was very popular in its time.