The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay

First published:The History of England from the Accession of James II, books 1 and 2, 1849; books 3 and 4, 1855; book 5, unfinished, 1861

Type of work: History

Time of plot: 56 b.c.e.-1702 c.e.

Principal personages

• Charles II,
• James II,
• William III,
• Mary, William’s wife
• John Churchill, the duke of Marlborough
• William Penn,

The Work:

Thomas Babington Macaulay knew little about English history before the seventeenth century. He knew almost nothing about foreign history. He was not interested in art, science, philosophy, or religion. As a Whig, he had no sympathy with the Tories and little understanding of James II. He overlooked many of the authoritative books covering the period about which he was writing. Therefore, in The History of England he is sometimes unfair to certain figures or mistaken in facts and interpretations. Overall, however, he has created an eminently readable history with vivid pictures of the actors and the social and cultural background against which they performed.

Macaulay was a child prodigy who started writing at an early age. Before he was eight years of age, this future historian, poet, and essayist had completed an outline of history and a poem in three cantos modeled after the poetry of Sir Walter Scott. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, intending to enter law. Before he passed his bar examinations in 1826, he had attracted attention with a critical essay on John Milton, the first of many he contributed to the influential Edinburgh Review. His essays about the Indian question earned him an appointment on a commission to India.

While in India, he wrote in his diary his intention to compile a five-volume history, the first part to cover the thirty years from the revolution of 1688 to the beginning of Horace Walpole’s administration. It would end with the death of George IV and achieve unity by covering “the Revolution that brought the crown into harmony with the Parliament and the Revolution which brought the Parliament into harmony with the nation.” Further planning convinced him of the need to precede his account of the revolution by the story of the reign of James II.

When he returned to England, he had barely begun his project before he was named secretary of war. This post gave him no time for literary work, until the elections of 1841 turned him out of office and into his study. He progressed slowly on his history until the return of his party to power in 1846, when he was appointed paymaster general. In spite of public demands on his time, the first two volumes of The History of England appeared within three years of this appointment.

The ten chapters begin with an account of Roman times and bring the story of England down to the crowning of William and Mary on February 13, 1689. Diary entries reveal Macaulay’s worry about how to begin. He had to start somewhere, and so, in the first paragraph, he bravely announces his purpose to “offer a slight sketch of my country from the earliest times.” Romans, Saxons, and Danes move through the first chapter, bringing the reader up to the general elections of 1660 and the return of Charles II to England. In the next chapter, Macaulay follows the career of Charles II until his death in 1685. At this point, the historian is ready to begin his task in earnest. His announced purpose in the third chapter is to “give a description of the state in which England was at the time when the crown passed from Charles II to his brother, James.”

First, Macaulay stresses the small population of the British Isles in 1685, perhaps five million, with half living in England. Then he discusses the revenue available. Excise taxes, taxes on chimneys, and the rest brought in hardly a fifth as much to the crown as France was collecting. Then follows a study of the army and the navy, on which the money was largely spent. A discussion of agriculture and mineral wealth introduces the country gentlemen and the yeomanry, with a glance at the clergy. Next, the historian’s attention fixes on the towns and their growth, following the expansion of trade and manufacturing, with special attention to London. Discussion of communication with London leads to a section on the postal system, inns, and highwaymen. A study of England’s cultural status, both literary and scientific, precedes the final section on the terrible condition of the very poor.

The description of the death of Charles II, in chapter 4, is a sample of Macaulay’s style. The ten pages read like a historical novel, except that the historian has footnotes available for the details of the palace room, the visitors at the bedside, and such bits as the king’s dying comment about winding the clock at his bedside. The surreptitious visit of the priest, John Huddleston, and the reaction of the crowd outside the palace bring vividness to the event.

The succession of James II to the throne is the theme of the other six chapters of the first two volumes. The new monarch lacked the political acumen and the general knowledge of the world possessed by Charles II; otherwise, he might not have been so easily duped by his Jesuit adviser, for he did possess administrative ability, more, perhaps, than Macaulay grants him.

The exciting part of this section tells of James’s following the invasion of England by William of Orange and of his capture by “rude fishermen of the Kentish coast,” who mistook the royal party for Jesuits and the monarch for his hated adviser, Father Petre. Then came his flight to France, the convention that formulated the Declaration of Rights, and the coronation of William and Mary. Because of this stirring material, excitingly told, thirteen thousand copies of the history were sold in four months.

Such success worried Macaulay. Attempting to make the other volumes dealing with William as colorful, he provided himself with a timetable: two book pages a day, two years to finish the first draft, and another year for revision and polishing. He felt the need for making every sentence clear and precise, for seeing that his paragraphs had continuity. Such labor took longer than he had planned. It was nearly seven years before he had the manuscript of volumes 3 and 4 ready for the printer. Their twelve chapters brought England’s story to the end of the war with France in 1697. The public acceptance justified the time taken in its composition. Within two months, 26,500 copies were sold, and Macaulay’s royalties amounted to twenty thousand pounds.

Macaulay’s diary frequently voiced his desire for fame and immortality. “I really think that posterity will not willingly let my book die,” he wrote in 1838. In addition to the wealth it brought, the success of the work replaced the Tory view of English history, as voiced by David Hume in The History of England (1754-1762), with the Victorian concept originated with Macaulay.

In the new volumes, Macaulay shows himself kindly disposed toward Mary in her trying position between her Catholic father and her Protestant husband, William of Orange, who divided his attention between her and Elizabeth Villiers. William did love Mary, however. The last lines of Macaulay’s history tell about “a small piece of black silk ribbon,” found next to William’s skin when his remains were being laid out. “The lords in waiting ordered it to be taken off. It contained a gold ring and a lock of the hair of Mary.”

Macaulay admires William. The Dutch king had an enormous task, organizing England, reconquering Ireland, and subduing rebellious Scotland, all the while carrying on a war in France. Macaulay does seem to overestimate William’s political genius, and his account of the king’s yearning to return to Holland and leave England for Mary to rule is considered by some scholars an exaggeration of William’s basic disillusionment with English life. With a rosy picture of the prosperity amid which William rode into London on Thanksgiving Day in November, 1697, and with the promise of a happier age, the volumes published during the writer’s lifetime come to an end.

When Macaulay died, he had completed only three chapters of the concluding volume, bringing the story up to the prorogation of Parliament, April 11, 1700. His sister, Lady Trevelyan, prepared this material for publication exactly as Macaulay had left it, with “no references verified, no authority sought for or examined,” but she did include several fragments, among them six pages describing the death of William with which Macaulay had probably intended to conclude his work. She also compiled a fifty-page, double-column index of the five books.

In his presentation of his characters, Macaulay is often biased. As one who did not accept doubt, who decided on one of two conflicting stories and frequently did not mention the existence of the other, he saw a person as good or bad. Historians have pointed out his failure to do justice to William Penn. Being a Whig, Macaulay used more severe criteria toward Tories, as is evident in his discussions of James’s relations with Catherine Sedley, and William’s with Elizabeth Villiers. What was lamentable in William was a crime in James, whom he portrayed as a libertine and black monster.

His villains are sometimes caricatures. The crafty Robert Ferguson and Titus Oates, whose perjury about the Popish Plot brought death to the innocent, are made physically hideous. In chapter 4, Macaulay writes of Oates’s “short neck, his forehead low as that of a baboon, his purple cheeks, and his monstrous length of chin” and features “in which villainy seemed to be written by the hand of God.” For Marlborough, even when he was plain John Churchill, Macaulay turned to lampoons for details, although he must have known they were biased. Perhaps his dislike was based on the unproved accusation that Marlborough had tried to overthrow William.

In a work of such magnitude, errors of fact and interpretation are bound to creep in, but even some that were pointed out to Macaulay during his lifetime remained uncorrected. In other cases, he did not have access to the journals and scholarly research now available. Another source of error arises from Macaulay’s attitude toward everything outside the British Isles. Except for India, where he had lived for four years, he practically ignored the colonies. American history is brought in chiefly in connection with happenings in England. Captain Kidd and the piratical activities of New England and New York appear to explain the fate of an English ministry, while the Jamaica earthquake of 1692 serves only as one more reason for the unpopularity of William’s reign.

Macaulay’s style has also come in for some criticism. His efforts toward clearness lead at times to verbosity, and his attempts to emphasize sometimes create a paragraph where a sentence would serve. Its basic flaw is that Macaulay thought as an orator. His history is more impressive when read aloud than when read silently; it is more rhetorical than literary.

No book lacking in inherent worth can outlast its century, and The History of England has remained a landmark of its kind. As long as people are moved by an exciting story, interestingly told, they will continue to read Macaulay’s history for both enjoyment and profit.

Bibliography

Baker, Thomas N. “National History in the Age of Michelet, Macaulay, and Bancroft.” In A Companion to Western Historical Thought, edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006. Describes the influence of nineteenth century nationalism on the historical works of Macaulay, Jules Michelet of France, and George Bancroft of the United States. Traces how the era’s philosophical and political thought fostered a nationalistic historiography.

Burrow, J. W. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Defends Macaulay, who, as the most important historian of his day, reflected the historical ethos of the Victorians. Asserts that Macaulay’s work is largely unintelligible to modern readers.

Edwards, Owen Dudley. “The History of England.” In Macaulay. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Thorough analysis of The History of England, particularly in relation to Macaulay’s Whig principles and his conception of the need for a work to refute Tory historians such as David Hume, John Lingard, and Archibald Alison. Good introduction for the nonspecialist.

Hamburger, Joseph. Macaulay and the Whig Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Suggests that scholars have stereotyped Macaulay as a Whig or liberal Whig, ignoring his position as a classicist, whose highest priority was the reduction of the danger of civil war.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “Who Now Reads Macaulay?” In The New History and the Old. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987. Good general introduction that places The History of England in its contemporary context as a best seller. Defends its continuing importance as a liberal examination of the political life of England.

Knezevic, Borislav. “A Historian in the Literary Marketplace: T. B. Macaulay, the English Constitution, and Finance Capitalism.” In Figures of Finance Capitalism: Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens. New York: Routledge, 2003. Examines The History of England by Macaulay and works by other middle-class Victorian writers who depicted the workings of capitalism, often expressing middle-class misgivings about an economic system then dominated by upper-class patricians.

Lang, Timothy. The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Examines how Macaulay and other nineteenth century British historians recounted the events of the seventeenth century, particularly the regime of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans.

Madden, William. “Macaulay’s Literary Style.” In The Art of Victorian Prose, edited by George Levine and William Madden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Observes that Macaulay’s need to find the meaning and pleasure lost to him in private life led him to create a comprehensive public myth in The History of England.

Thomas, William. The Quarrel of Macaulay and Croker: Politics and History in the Age of Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Macaulay and John Wilson Croker began their disagreement in 1831, when they were both members of the House of Commons, and they continued to attack each other’s politics and writings. Thomas chronicles both men’s political views and activities and their work as historians.