Thomas Babington Macaulay

English politician and historian

• Born: October 25, 1800
• Birthplace: Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, England
• Died: December 28, 1859
• Place of death: Holly Lodge, Campden Hill, London, England

Macaulay was a prominent Whig politician and popular essayist, but his greatest achievement was The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, a work of enduring popularity and influence.

Early Life

Thomas Babington Macaulay (mah-KO-lih) was the first child of Zachary Macaulay, a descendant of Scottish highland chiefs, a merchant, a ship owner, a member of the Clapham Sect of Evangelical Anglicans, and a campaigner against the slave trade. Macaulay grew up in an atmosphere of stifling religious observance and self-examination that he rejected in later years, although still maintaining conventional Christian morality. He was a child prodigy who began to read voraciously at the age of three, thus beginning early to accumulate that vast array of facts with which he delighted his friends and belabored his enemies. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1818, and proceeded to win debating triumphs in the University Union and numerous academic prizes, including an award for his “Essay on the Life and Character of William III,” who was to be the great hero of his historical masterpiece. After graduation, Macaulay studied law and was called to the bar in 1826, but he never put much effort into becoming a practicing lawyer.

In 1825, Macaulay began to contribute to the Edinburgh Review, the prestigious quarterly journal for intellectual Whigs. His second essay, discussing the poet John Milton and defending his radical politics during the English Civil War, made him an instant celebrity and star guest at Holland House, the very center of Whig society. Over the next twenty years, Macaulay wrote thirty-six articles for the Edinburgh Review, most of them ostensibly beginning as book reviews, but soon turning into long and independent essays. Macaulay at the age of twenty-five had mastered the style he was to wield for the rest of his life. The essays were vigorous and assertive, abounding in paradox and contrast, intimidating in their command of facts, confident in judgment, and exciting to read. His literary fame brought him some unexpected rewards. In 1828, Lord Lyndhurst made him a Commissioner of Bankruptcy, and in 1830, Lord Lansdowne used a pocket borough, Calne, which was under his control, to send the young Macaulay to Parliament.

Macaulay the public figure seemed assured and successful, but the private man was sometimes troubled and uncertain. He never married and concentrated his emotions completely on two younger sisters, Hannah and Margaret. By the 1820’s, Macaulay’s father, at one time very wealthy, had lost most of his money, and thereafter, Macaulay, though sometimes short of funds himself, felt obliged to help. He was, for a time, in much demand at fashionable dinner tables, and yet he often failed to impress at first sight. Many described him as a short, squat man with vulgar, though energetic, features, who talked interminably. He was also unusually clumsy and often had trouble tying his cravats properly or shaving without drawing blood.

Life’s Work

Macaulay entered Parliament as a Whig, a member of the party of moderate reform, led by liberal aristocrats, proud of their descent from the families of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, which had overthrown King James II, brought in William III, and asserted parliamentary supremacy. Macaulay was a man of the political center, or slightly left of center, but he asserted his moderate views with combative zeal. He delivered his maiden speech in April, 1830, in defense of a bill to remove civil disabilities from Jews. In March, 1831, he gave the first of a series of powerful orations supporting the Whig Reform Bill, which abolished many rotten or pocket boroughs (seats with few inhabitants, such as Calne, for which Macaulay sat), created new parliamentary districts, and gave the vote to most of the middle class, though not to the working class. It was a severely limited reform but was bitterly opposed by the Tories as threatening the social order.

The very reverse was true, argued Macaulay. The refusal to reform when reform was needed would create a justified discontent that would bring on revolution. “Reform,” urged Macaulay, “that you may preserve.” In June, 1832, the Reform Bill became law, and Macaulay returned to Parliament for one of the new constituencies, Leeds. He was acknowledged as a great orator and rising statesman. In December, 1833, he became the legal member of the newly created four-man Supreme Council of India at the amazing salary of ten thousand pounds a year. He planned to stay in India for five or six years, live splendidly on five thousand pounds a year (in fact he spent much less), and then return to England a rich man, able to follow his political and literary interests without financial concerns.

In February, 1834, Macaulay sailed for India accompanied by a small library of the Greek and Latin classics and by his adoring sister Hannah. His other favorite sister, Margaret, had, much to his distress, married the year before. Before the year was over, Hannah married Charles Trevelyan, a brilliant young official of the East India Company, and Macaulay received news that Margaret had died of scarlet fever.

Hannah was to remain Macaulay’s closest friend and intimate, although she could not be as close as before. Macaulay felt lonely and devastated. He saved himself by rereading a good portion of Greek and Latin literature and by entering into hard and controversial work. He was fortunate in enjoying the backing of a reforming governor-general, but still had to fight harsh opposition in convincing the Supreme Council to abolish press censorship and to end certain privileges held by Englishmen appearing in Indian courts. He became president of the General Council of Public Instruction, which was bitterly split between the Orientalists, who wished to continue subsidizing native schools teaching traditional learning in Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, and the Anglicists, who wished to support only European learning taught in English. With his usual vigor and with even more than his usual intolerance of folly, Macaulay argued for English. In his famous “Minute on Indian Education” of February 2, 1835, he summed up Indian learning as:

Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school—History, abounding with Kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long—and Geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.

Macaulay despised Indian culture, but he did not despise Indians. He believed that Indian students could master the same curriculum as English students. His position became policy, and before the end of the century, several hundred thousand Indians were studying modern subjects in English. In May, 1835, Macaulay became head of the Law Commission that proceeded in two years to draw up a new, rational, and humane penal code, in large part composed by Macaulay, to replace the jumble of different systems in the various regions of India. The code was not put into operation until January of 1862, after the death of its creator, but it has remained the basis for Indian criminal law ever since. The rather inactive English barrister had become the lawgiver for India.

Macaulay returned to England in June, 1838. An uncle had left him a legacy of ten thousand pounds in 1836, which meant that Macaulay was able to accumulate the sum he was aiming at more quickly than he had expected. While in India, he had written his longest and one of his most celebrated essays for the Edinburgh Review, a defense of Francis Bacon, whom Macaulay extolled as one of the fathers of inductive reasoning and experimental science. He also began to plan a large-scale history of England from 1688 to 1830.

Macaulay began to write the history in March, 1839, but returned to Parliament in September representing Edinburgh and entered Lord Melbourne’s cabinet as secretary at war. The government fell in August, 1841, and Macaulay, while still in Parliament, now had more time to write. In 1842, he published Lays of Ancient Rome , vigorous ballads, written as if they were ancient Roman poems. Like all of his writings, they were an instant success. In 1843, he published Critical and Historical Essays , which brought together most of his articles from the Edinburgh Review and that sold several hundred thousand copies in England and in the United States in the next few decades. In 1846, the Whigs again formed a government, and Macaulay accepted the post of paymaster general because it would not take much time. In July, 1847, Macaulay lost his seat and decided to leave politics.

In 1849, Macaulay published the first two volumes of The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1849-1855) to the acclaim of scholars and the appreciation of general readers. He had said earlier, “I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.”

Tens of thousands of copies of Macaulay’s book were sold within months and several hundred thousand before the end of the century. In 1852, Macaulay, with great reluctance, allowed the Whigs of Edinburgh to return him to Parliament, but he refused to take office again. He suffered a heart attack soon after, gave only a few speeches in the next few years, and resigned from Parliament in January, 1856. In December, 1855, volumes 3 and 4 of his historical study appeared. His publisher presented him with a check for twenty thousand pounds—a sum equivalent to more than one million dollars in modern U.S. currency.

Honors of all sorts showered upon Macaulay. In September, 1857, he became Baron Macaulay of Rothley, though he never spoke in the House of Lords. Macaulay did not live to complete his masterpiece. He died December 28, 1859, at Holly Lodge, Kensington, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His sister, Hannah, now Lady Trevelyan, put together his final chapters to form volume 5, which appeared in 1861, and brought the story up to the death of King William III in 1702.

Significance

Thomas Babington Macaulay was an important essayist, politician, and parliamentary orator. He achieved lasting importance, however, by providing India with an educational system and a law code, while he earned fame and recognition by writing The History of England from the Accession of James the Second. It is, first, an extraordinary work of literature. The characters, both heroes and villains, come alive as if in a novel. His battle scenes—Sedgemoor, Killiecrankie, Londonderry, the Boyne—are virtually refought as one reads them. The sympathetic reader, moreover, can almost believe that he is at the deathbed of Charles II, in the court rooms of the ferocious Judge Jeffries, at the trial and execution of the noble Argyle, and in the crowd that welcomes William of Orange as he enters Exeter.

Macaulay did more than write extremely well. His research was on a far more thorough scale than that of English historians before him. He sought out new archives and walked over old battlefields. Macaulay’s work also is an analysis of important political actions, their causes, and their consequences, written with the acute understanding of a man who had spent time in cabinet meetings as well as libraries. Macaulay did indeed see politics as central, but in the famous chapter 3, he devotes more than one hundred pages to the state of England in 1685, its towns, clergy, roads, stage coaches, highwaymen, inns, newsletters, wages of workers, female education, and much else. Much has been written on these topics since Macaulay, but no one before him had attempted anything as comprehensive. Macaulay, who has sometimes been criticized as too political in his interests, virtually invented social history.

Macaulay writes Whig history. It is sometimes Whig in a narrow and partisan sense as when Macaulay favors the Whigs, the liberal aristocrats who drove James II from the throne, and attacks the Tories who so often opposed them. It is also Whig history in the broader sense that traces, explains, and celebrates progress in human societies. It looks to the past for the origin of what men value in the present. Macaulay linked men and causes of the present with those of the past and brought new significance to both.

In his history, Macaulay only reached the year 1702, but he had planned to go to 1830, the eve of the battle over the Reform Bill in which the Whigs, this time with Macaulay among them, saved the nation once again, producing the right kind of fundamental constitutional change. Macaulay often refers in the multivolume study to later and even contemporary events. Thus, at the conclusion of the first two volumes that appeared in December, 1848, the end of the year in which revolutions had broken out in most of Europe, Macaulay states triumphantly,

Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the whole importance of the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House of Stuart. All around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations.

England, in contrast, has been at peace. “It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth.”

Macaulay had critics in his day and afterward. He painted in primary colors. He was vigorous but not subtle and never appeared to doubt or even hesitate before pronouncing judgment on men and causes. At times, Macaulay was as partisan in writing history as when delivering parliamentary speeches. This lent passion to his work but sometimes produced bad judgments. He was clearly unfair to the Jacobite Viscount Dundee, the Quaker William Penn, and the great General Marlborough. Macaulay’s critics have found flaws, but none that seriously diminishes the work. There are blemishes, but blemishes on a still great and imposing structure.

Bibliography

Beatty, Richmond Croom. Lord Macaulay: Victorian Liberal. Reprint. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1971. A good middle-sized biography (almost four hundred pages); friendly, but critical.

Clive, John. Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. A magnificent full-scale biography covering Macaulay up to his return from India. It is both appreciative and critical. The definitive study for the early years.

Firth, Sir Charles. A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of England. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1938. A full-length book, based on a series of university lectures, that evaluates and comments on Macaulay’s history. Respectful, but critical.

Hamburger, Joseph. Macaulay and the Whig Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. An interesting though not always convincing study of Macaulay’s political thought that asserts that he was too pessimistic to be a true Whig.

Levine, George. The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. About a third of the book is a thoughtful analysis of Macaulay’s history as imaginative literature.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The History of England from the Accession of James the Second. 4 vols. Reprint. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1972. A reprint of Macaulay’s best known work.

Millgate, Jane. Macaulay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. An excellent short biography and analysis of the major writings.

Paget, John. The New “Examen.” Reprint. Manchester, England: Haworth Press, 1934. This is an unusual book that was first published in 1861, though some parts appeared in the last two years of Macaulay’s life. It is a vigorous and extended attack on Macaulay for misusing evidence in order to blacken William Penn, Viscount Dundee, and the duke of Marlborough, and to whitewash William III of responsibility for the Glencoe massacre. Paget goes too far, but he does score some valid points.

Thomas, William. The Quarrel of Macaulay and Croker: Politics and History in the Age of Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Describes a long-standing literary feud between Macaulay and John Wilson Croker, the editor of Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson. The feud began in the House of Commons in 1831, when Croker accused Macaulay of being ignorant about the French Revolution; eighteen years later, Croker wrote a scathing review of Macaulay’s History of England. Thomas contrasts the two men’s approach to history, and concludes that Macaulay was not the typical Whig historian of legend.

Trevelyan, George Otto. The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1876. An important and basic book, written by the son of Macaulay’s beloved sister Hannah, who was himself a good historian. It is admiring and uncritical, limited naturally enough by familial piety.

Trevor-Roper, Hugh. Introduction to Macaulay’s Critical and Historical Essays. London: Collins, 1965.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Introduction to Macaulay’s History of England. New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Two excellent introductory essays by a distinguished historian of the seventeenth century.