Catherine Macaulay

English historian and pamphleteer

• Born: April 2, 1731
• Birthplace: Olantigh, Wye, Kent, England
• Died: June 22, 1791
• Place of death: Binfield, Berkshire, England

Macaulay, the first Englishwoman to write a major multivolume work in history, also was actively involved in politics. As an outspoken republican, Macaulay wrote antimonarchical evaluations of history, a protofeminist work on education, and works on politics, ethics, and philosophy. Her reevaluation and reinterpretation of seventeenth century history proved to be central to the development of radical politics in eighteenth century England, America, and France.

Early Life

Catherine Macaulay, née Sawbridge, was the second daughter and third child of John Sawbridge and his second wife, Elizabeth Sawbridge (née Wanley). She was born into a wealthy mercantile family that held an established Whig position. Not much is known about her earliest years. After her mother’s death during childbirth in 1733, when Catherine was only two years old, Catherine and her siblings faced neglect by their father, but Catherine and her only brother, John, did receive educations, at home, by a governess. Very early on, Catherine began to read extensively about Roman history in books from her father’s library and seemed to have developed a strong commitment to republican values and to liberty. Since she apparently received a domestic education only, it is not known where she learned Latin and history, which were unusual accomplishments for girls of her time.

In 1760, Catherine married George Macaulay, a Scottish physician, and moved with him from rural Kent to London. Their marriage was a happy one, with her husband giving strong support to her intellectual work. When George died, Catherine was left with one daughter, Catherine Sophia. By that time, Catherine Macaulay had already achieved fame as a historian.

Life’s Work

Catherine Macaulay was a prolific writer. Her major achievement was her eight-volume The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763-1783). She had instant success with the publication of the first volume in 1763. The work is considered outstanding in part not only because it conveyed a new methodology in history writing but also because it conveyed Macaulay’s politics.

Traditionally, historiography rested largely upon previously published sources, Macaulay’s History of England, however, is based on her extensive research in the collection of the British Museum among unpublished legal and parliamentary documents as well as private letters. The book chronicles English dissent and opposition and was intended to answer David Hume’s History, which was sympathetic to the Royalist cause in England. Macaulay, in contrast, provided a Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution, which had failed to produce the degree of liberty and sovereignty for the people that Macaulay, and other radical Whigs, demanded. Her reinterpretation—as well as reevaluation—of seventeenth century history proved foundational for the development of radical politics in eighteenth century England, America, and France. (Macaulay had visited France several times.) The History of England was particularly admired by colonial American politician Benjamin Franklin, and it convinced many other American colonists to reject monarchy.

Macaulay also was known for entering political and public debates through her written pamphlets; these debates, called the “pamphlet wars,” traditionally excluded women. Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr. Hobbes’s “Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society” (1767) rejected Hobbes’s arguments of contractual politics in favor of liberty. Her other pamphlets—A Modest Plea for the Property of Copyright (1774) and An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland, on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs (1775)—were concerned with avoiding war in the American colonies.

Edmund Burke was Macaulay’s primary opponent in the pamphlet wars of the eighteenth century. She wrote two replies to Burke: Observations on a Pamphlet, Entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents was published in 1770, and, in 1790, she attacked Burke’s conservative agenda in Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France.

Macaulay moved to Bath in 1774, hoping to improve her frail health. There, she was invited by one of her admirers, Reverend Doctor Thomas Wilson, to share his residence. A seventy-three-year-old widower, he formally adopted Macaulay’s daughter in 1775. Rumors spread about this unusual arrangement, particularly given Wilson’s age, and the two were considered possible lovers. Unfortunately, Wilson turned out to be an embarrassingly obtrusive admirer. He arranged an extravagant celebration for Macaulay’s forty-sixth birthday, complete with the unveiling of a marble statue of her in a church at Wolbrooke. This caused ridicule for them both, and it permanently ruined Macaulay’s reputation.

During her time in Bath, however, she was able to write one volume of The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend (1778). It was rather poorly received, probably because it lacked the meticulous research and good scholarship of her previous volumes. She did not write a sequel, perhaps because of circumstances from her breakup with Wilson, who aggressively circulated scandalous rumors about Macaulay when she married a second time in 1778. Her new husband, William Graham (brother of the quack doctor James Graham, who was called to cure Macaulay of a chronic illness), was twenty-six years younger than Macaulay and from a lower class. The age difference between the two, and their different social-class backgrounds, caused further negative and slanderous reactions from critics as well as friends.

In 1784, Macaulay traveled through parts of America with her husband, visiting prominent Americans, such as George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, and Mercy Otis Warren, discussing history and revolutionary politics. After her philosophical work Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), she published her last work, Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, in 1790. Her ideas on education were very much ahead of her time and covered a wide variety of subjects, such as nursing, the care of infants, and the upbringing and education of children. In the second part of this final text, she linked private and public education by detailing educational approaches in ancient Greece, Sparta, and Rome and by drawing connections among education, philosophy, and religion. As she had become very aware of the vulnerability of her gender, she demanded, particularly in “Letter XXII: No Characteristic Difference in Sex,” an equal education for boys and for girls. Macaulay died in 1791, after a long illness.

Significance

Catherine Macaulay was a rather unconventional eighteenth century intellectual. At a time when the writing of history was considered to be a masculine domain, her achievements and methodological innovations were unique. While many of her well-known contemporaries, such as Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray, praised her work, her reputation was ultimately marred by rumors about her private life, a common fate faced by women in the public realm. The rumors turned her into the object of satire and were especially harmful because she was accused of violating feminine propriety, an accusation that still affects how her work is received; she has yet to be included in the canon of important historians, and her historical work is not easily accessible, given that there are no modern reprints of her scholarship.

However, Macaulay is acknowledged now as a pioneer of protofeminist thought, and she is known to have inspired Mary Wollstonecraft’s equality feminism. Macaulay was praised in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and by Mary Hays in Female Biography (1803).

The change in political climate and the conservative backlash following the French Revolution limited the subsequent reception of her works, but her comprehensive and outstanding work of history is certainly deserving of more scholarly attention.

Bibliography

Gunther-Canada, Wendy. “The Politics of Sense and Sensibility: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay Graham on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.” In Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by Hilda L. Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Analyzes the rhetorical and argumentative strategies in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Hill, Bridget. “The Links Between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay: New Evidence.” Women’s History Review 4, no. 2 (1995): 177-192. Shows that the two influential English radicals—Macaulay and Wollstonecraft—corresponded with one another, and compares their feminist and political positions.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992. A well-researched and accessible study of Macaulay’s life and times, with thorough analyses of her works.

Pocock, J. G. A. “Catherine Macaulay: Patriot Historian.” In Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by Hilda L. Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Provides historical context and political background on Macaulay’s republicanism and patriotism.

Schnorrenberg, Barbara Brandon. “An Opportunity Missed: Catherine Macaulay on the Revolution of 1688.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 231-240. Focuses on Macaulay’s criticism of the Glorious Revolution and elucidates her radical Whig principles.

Wiseman, Susan. “Catherine Macaulay: History, Republicanism, and the Public Sphere.” In Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, edited by Elizabeth Eger et al. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Explores the ways in which republicanism and gender shaped Macaulay’s career as a historian, with particular attention to the dynamics between private and public spheres.