Analysis: An Address on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs

Date: 1775

Author: Macaulay, Catharine Sawbridge

Genre: political tract; address

Summary Overview

In historical analysis, much is made of the influence that British and French political theorists and philosophers of the Enlightenment period had over American revolutionaries. As colonial leaders in America attempted to recast their relationship with Great Britain’s Parliament and Crown, they drew inspiration from the writings of republican philosophers whose ideas had circulated for two generations. Yet the independence movement also took inspiration from more contemporary English writers and thinkers, who used books and pamphlets to criticize specific British government policies in North America. Catharine Macaulay’s “Address to the People” is an excellent, if often-overlooked, example of pro-American and anti-British sentiment that emanated from 1770s England. Macaulay, a celebrated historian, a staunch advocate of republican governance, and a leading voice for parliamentary reforms, considered her government corrupt and its policies tyrannical. Disillusioned by the political apathy of her countrymen, she criticizes the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland for their indifference to the plight of the British subjects in the American colonies.

Document Analysis

Though many on both sides of the Atlantic would have disagreed, in early 1775 Macaulay believed civil war between Britain and its North American colonies was inevitable. Six months earlier, Parliament had passed a series of measures designed to punish the people of Boston for their 1773 Tea Party. These measures, referred to by colonists as the Intolerable Acts, went to an extreme, and Macaulay believed they elevated the intra-imperial conflict to the point of no return. She expected that American independence would result, but while lamenting the impending loss of the colonies, she both anticipated and celebrated the rise of an American republic. A leading critic of Parliament and the Crown, she seized the moment to remind fellow citizens in England, Scotland, and Ireland of the need for political reforms at home. While the American colonies were all but lost, it was not too late to establish republican governance and save much of the remaining empire from tyranny. Her essay “An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs” is an attempt to spark a reform movement in Britain. Chastising inhabitants of the British Isles for their indifference to government abuses in North America, Macaulay warns that they will be the next victims of tyrannical rule. She argues that the time to act on reforms is at hand.

Like any historical document, An Address to the People is a reflection of the period in which it was written. By the 1760s, Macaulay, like other radicals and some Whigs, had grown less tolerant of constitutional monarchy. Formally established under the Glorious Revolution eight decades earlier, this new governmental system had replaced the absolute authority of the Crown and vested power in an elected Parliament. Since that shift, monarchs had remained the heads of the British government and retained significant influence over imperial policies, but they were required to defer to the elected assembly as the voice of the people. In line with republican principles, both the royal and legislative branches were expected to uphold the constitution—a body of laws and legal traditions that served as a roadblock to arbitrary rule and guaranteed subjects’ liberties. From Macaulay’s perspective, however, the practice of governance did not match the ideal. Instead of a “glorious” balancing of power in the interest of liberty, the system bred tyranny. Corruption within Parliament and the royal court as well as collusion between these government branches made a mockery of republican ideals. Campaigning for reforms, Macaulay and others demanded that Parliament be the representative voice of the people and that the Crown protect the constitutional rights of its subject.

Macaulay’s “Address to the People” was published at the height of her fame as a historian and political reformer. The first of the eight volumes of The History of England from the Accession of James I. to That of the Brunswick Line had appeared in 1763. This was the very year that the Treaty of Paris settled the French and Indian War and that Parliament, facing postwar debt and economic crisis, began to impose new taxes on the American colonies in the interest of balancing the imperial budget. Though focused on the seventeenth century, Macaulay’s History of England offered implicit commentary on the present. As the first history of the nation told from a republican perspective, it was highly critical of the absolute monarchs of the earlier century. Asserting that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had failed to adequately restrict the power of the Crown and to guarantee liberty, Macaulay emerged as a leading republican and antimonarchist at a critical moment for the British Empire. Written with intent to uphold republican principles and specifically responding to David Hume’s defense of monarchy—the Scot had finished his own multivolume history of England in 1762—Macaulay’s history was agenda driven. Yet while its critics dismissed it as propaganda, it sold remarkably well and soon grounded an emerging political movement. Embraced by reformers and radicals at home, the series also received a warm reception from many in the American colonies. With several volumes published by the mid-1770s, Macaulay’s series inspired bold demands for government reforms, increasingly harsh critiques of monarchy, and rebellious activism on both sides of the Atlantic.

The success of her History of England series brought Macaulay both celebrity and notoriety. As a woman asserting herself in the male worlds of politics and publications, she was a novelty, a curiosity, and often an object of scorn. Among republicans, radicals and reformers, however, she was a well-respected leader. Many sought her counsel and encouraged the publication of her arguments and analyses on contemporary political questions. Printed as a pamphlet, her “Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland” was widely circulated among reformers in London. Her publishers also included it with the book orders they sent to the American colonies. Across the Atlantic, it was republished in New York and reprinted in a newspaper in Boston, where its arguments were embraced by both radicals and moderates.

The Intolerable Acts and the Quebec Act

Macaulay’s intent in circulating her address was to foster support among the English, Scottish, and Irish people for broad reform of Parliament. Toward that goal, she uses the American case to define the problems facing subjects within the empire. Two recent parliamentary measures, the Intolerable Acts and the Quebec Act, are critiqued. Enacted in 1774 after the Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts forced the closure of Boston’s harbor, revoked Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter, and indemnified British soldiers or officials accused of crimes. After a decade of tensions with Parliament, the acts proved the final straw that brought Massachusetts and other North American colonies to the brink of war. However, reaching the point where they would no longer tolerate “innovations . . . continually made on their liberty” had, from Macaulay’s historical perspective, taken too long. She notes that colonists have been deprived of their constitutional liberties for generations and that they have until recently demonstrated “an almost blameable patience” with their government. Cheering the Americans’ change of attitude and approach, she makes clear to the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland that they should learn from the American example. Republican governance requires an active citizenry to jealously safeguard its liberties, she argues; patience in the face of challenges to liberty constitutes “guilty acquiescence” to tyranny.

Significantly, Macaulay also reacts to the Quebec Act, which Parliament had enacted at the same time. Canada had been ceded to Britain at the conclusion of the French and Indian War, and the act was designed to facilitate better administration of that colony. Attempting to neutralize resistance among the large French Catholic majority, Parliament took a pragmatic approach: It recognized the rights of Catholics and allowed French civil laws to continue. In contrast to elsewhere in the empire, Catholics in Canada were now allowed to hold elected office at the local level. Still, the colony was denied a legislature, and its governor was appointed by the British king. In addition, the act extended the boundaries of Canada to the south and west, and in doing so, it ignored the western land claims of the New England and mid-Atlantic colonies.

As she communicates in her essay, Macaulay is particularly incensed by the Quebec Act. As a republican, she objects to the lack of legislature and the absolute power vested in the appointed governor; she rails that “Canadians are deprived of the right to an assembly, and of trial by jury.” She sees the fact that “English laws in civil cases [have been] abolished, the French laws established” as a realistic concession, but most republicans loudly rejected the approach. In the 1770s, France remained under rule of an absolute monarch, and Macaulay claims that this absolute model is being replicated by the British Crown in Canada. Indeed, she believes that extending the borders of the colony has the “purpose of enlarging the bounds where despotism is to have its full sway.”

Macaulay reacts most strongly to official tolerance of Catholicism in Canada. Following the schism between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, Catholics in Britain and its colonies faced varying levels of persecution and civil restrictions. Through the early nineteenth century, it was illegal for most Catholics to hold elected office, and this had a tremendous impact on governance in Catholic Ireland. The Quebec Act made an exception for Canada and reversed long-standing tradition. Though Macaulay adamantly supports the extension of voting rights to all males, she remains opposed to extending elected office to Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church is, after all, headed by an absolute monarch, the pope. In her view, Catholic culture cultivates obedient monarchists who block republican progress.

Reforms and the Responsibility of Republican Citizens

The bulk of the address is a reprimand of English, Scottish, and Irish subjects’ indifference to the plight of their American countrymen, and it is coupled with a defense of the parliamentary reforms advocated by republicans. Macaulay is blunt in her criticism; as she sees it, these subjects have allowed free reign for tyranny in distant corners of the empire. Many who might have been influential in reforming governance have shown little concern for liberty and constitutional guarantees in the colonies. Blinded by the benefits of colonial trade, generations have overlooked the failed promises of the Glorious Revolution and accepted the actions of Parliament uncritically. As a result, Macaulay argues, these subjects are willfully ignorant of issues that are their “business to be acquainted with.”

Macaulay suggests that during recent periods of economic growth, opportunities to limit the monarchy and build a representative assembly have been squandered by general indifference to politics. Now the economy has shifted, she notes. With the end of the French and Indian War, “commerce has been declining with hasty steps for these last ten years” and conditions will only worsen with the loss of American colonies. Thus, to bolster her republican appeals, Macaulay targets her audience’s sense of economic vulnerability. She notes that incomes are “yearly sinking from bare sufficiency to poverty.” None were immune from the negative effects of the economic crisis of the time, not the “once-opulent trader,” the “starving mechanic,” the “numerous half-famished poor,” nor the “needy gentry.” The loss of the American colonies will bring new focus on inhabitants of England, Scotland, and Ireland as alternative sources of tax revenues. In warning tones, she predicts that once officials “pick the pockets of your American brethren,” they will come after the British people. Connecting politics and economics, she made clear that only a proactive approach to parliamentary reforms could prevent such an outcome.

Though American grievances against Parliament and the Crown were many, both radicals and moderates in the colonies eventually coalesced in opposition to “taxation without representation.” No single written document encapsulated all the rights granted to the British people, and thus, the right of Parliament to levy taxes in the American colonies was heavily debated. Interpretations varied, but republicans in London were among the most vocal advocates for representation as the condition of taxation. In her address, Macaulay echoes others in republican circles in asserting that the Americans cannot be taxed because they are “neither adequately or inadequately represented.”

As the “Address to the People” demonstrates, the looming crisis with America gave republicans in Britain a relevant context in which to frame a radical campaign for reform. Their efforts, however, were not limited to questions of taxation. To make Parliament truly representative of the people, Macaulay and others advocated a variety of measures designed to eliminate corruption and to elevate concern for the public good over private interest. Among their initiatives were the redistribution of seats in Parliament to reflect population shifts, more frequent elections to increase turnover, and restrictions on leadership to break monopolies on power. More controversially, Macaulay championed the efforts of radicals in and around London who proposed new measures of accountability for elected officials. To ensure that parliamentarians were “obeying the mandates of their constituents,” republicans proposed a variety of “tests” to ensure greater transparency in electoral and legislative politics. These proposals were met with heavy criticism, but in her address, Macaulay dismisses critics who considered constituents “too ignorant to be adequate judges of your own business.” Demands for accountability challenged the opposition who suggested that constituents should extend “unlimited obedience” in exchange for protection by Parliament and the Crown. Such submission seems preposterous to Macaulay, who argues that it subjects constituents to a form of “unlimited slavery.”

Hope and an American Republic

While a war with their mother country would be regrettable, Macaulay sees no other option for the American colonies. Fighting for republican principles and parliamentary reforms at home, she understands that peaceful resolution between the two sides is most improbable. Her writings were well known in the colonies, and her celebrity gave her access to America’s leading republicans and rebels; regular letters she received from Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia informed her conviction that “an extensive empire of freemen” was already forming and that American tolerance for a corrupt Parliament—as for monarchy in general—had already passed. Though disappointed by the impending loss of the empire, Macaulay readily embraces the thought of American independence as a victory for republicanism. By their example, she hopes Americans will inspire their former countrymen to reform governance in what then remained of the British Empire.

To Macaulay, America represents something new. It is a laboratory in which republican principles, theories of natural rights, and guarantees of liberties can be put into action, tested, and refined. Less restrained by tradition, it is free of the shackles of monarchist history. Macaulay remains ultimately committed to reforming the British system at home, however. Challenging the indifference of the electorate on the “foggy islands” off the European continent is her priority, along with the cultivation of an active and informed citizenry.

Bibliography

Davies, Kate. Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

Fox, Claire Gilbride. “Catharine Macaulay, An Eighteenth-Century Clio.” Winterthur Portfolio 4.1 (1968): 129–42. Print.

Hicks, Philip. “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain.” Journal of British Studies 41.2 (Apr. 2002): 170–98. Print.

Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Print.

Macaulay, Catharine. An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs. Bath: Cruttwell, 1775. Print.