## 1. Life and works



Sources for Catharine Macaulay's early life are scarce, and modern
historians have relied on the account published by Mary Hays in her
*Female Biography* (Hays 1803, 5.287-307; Hill 1992,
1-24). Hays represents Macaulay's childhood as a romance of
miraculous self-education. She was born Catharine Sawbridge on April
2, 1731 (March 23, 1730, old style) the second child of John Sawbridge
and Dorothy Wanley, at Olantigh in Kent, a property that had been a
gift from her grandfather, who had made a fortune, and then lost much
of it as well as his reputation, as a result of his position as one of
the directors of the South Sea Company. Having given birth to two
daughters and two sons, John and Wanley, Catharine's mother died
leaving her and her siblings to the care of their father, who was often absent, while their uncle Jacob, who was married to Anne Brodnax from the neighboring Godmersham, remained at Olantigh. Though Macaulays cousins by this marriage appear to have had a greater claim, Godmersham was later inherited by Jane Austen's brother, Edward (Green 2017). According to Hays, Macaulay was educated by "an
antiquated, well-recommended, but ignorant governess," who could
not satisfy her intellectual curiosity, and "having
found her way into her father's well-furnished library, she became her
own purveyor, and rioted in intellectual luxury" (Hays 1803,
5.288-9). It is here, according to Hays, that she first became
interested in the history of the Greeks and Romans, "their laws
and manners interested her understanding, the spirit of patriotism
seized her, and she became an enthusiast in the cause of
freedom." (Hays 1803, 5.289-90) While perhaps exaggerated,
this rather romantic account can be accepted as in essence accurate,
since Hay's informant, "Mrs Arnold of Leicester" was the
sister of Macaulay's second husband. It echoes Macaulay's own
assertion, in the introduction to the first volume of her *History
of England* that,



> 
> 
> From my early youth I have read with delight those histories which
> exhibit Liberty in its most exalted state, the annals of the Roman and
> the Greek republics. Studies like these excite that natural love of
> Freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being.
> (Macaulay 1763-83, 1.7)
> 
> 
> 



At the age of twenty-six, she spent an afternoon conversing with
Elizabeth Carter, who was then soliciting subscriptions for her
translation of Epictetus, and subscribed to her translation. This
friend and correspondent of the Bluestocking, Elizabeth Montagu,
initially represented Macaulay quite favourably as "more deeply
learned than becomes a fine lady" who "between the Spartan
laws, the Roman politics, the philosophy of Epicurus, and the wit of
St Evremond" had formed "a most extraordinary
system." (Carter 1808, 2. 260; Hill 1992, 11)




Although Macaulay has been associated with the Bluestockings, and
along with Montagu and Carter, was included in Richard Samuel's,
1779, painting, "The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain",
she was too radical for their taste (Guest 2002; Eger and Peltz 2008;
O'Brien 2009). This, despite the fact that Montagu and her
sister, Sarah Scott, were acquainted with the Sawbridges, who were
neighbours in Kent. On hearing of the publication of the first volume
of Macaulay's history, Montagu commented dismissively, "If
she took her sentiments from her Father, & her language from Mrs
Fuzzard it must be an extraordinary performance" (Elizabeth
Montagu to Matthew Robinson-Morris, 2nd Baron Rokeby, 4 December 1763,
Newcastle. Huntington Library MSS MO 4763). After her second marriage
to the twenty-one year old William Graham, even Carter was shocked,
dubbing her "a genius of [a] very eccentric a kind" while
Sarah Scott wrote to her sister that they, being "pure virgins
and virtuous matrons", should "drown her in the Avon, and
try if she can be purified by water" (Carter 1817,
3. 88-9; Sarah Scott to Elizabeth Montagu, 27 November 1778,
Bath. Huntington Library, MSS MO 5391).




Macaulay was almost thirty when she married her first husband, a
Scottish physician, George Macaulay, on 18 June 1760. Their marriage
lasted only six years; he died in 1766. But during these years,
Macaulay began to write her histories with his encouragement and with that of their neighbor Thomas Hollis. The first volume of *A History of England from
the Accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick Line* appeared
in 1763, the following three volumes were published at regular
intervals in 1765, 1767 and 1768; these were printed for the author
and sold by various booksellers. There was then a gap in production.
Volume five was published by Edward and Charles Dilly in 1771.Volume
six and seven did not appear until ten years later, in 1781, and they
were published with a slightly different title, *A History of
England from the Accession of James I. to the Revolution*, as was
the last volume, which came out in 1783*.* In 1767 she
published her *Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in
Mr. Hobbes's Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society*,
and in 1770 her first attack on Edmund Burke, *Observations on a
Pamphlet entitled "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present
Discontents".*



Macaulay's brother John Sawbridge, a member of parliament, who was
elected a London Alderman in 1769, became in the same year a founding
member of the Society of the Gentleman Supporters of the Bill of
Rights. This society was established with John Horne Tooke and others
to support John Wilkes, who had been denied the parliamentary seat he
had won for Middlesex, as a result of being outlawed for having
published articles criticizing the ministry and the King (Hill 1992,
55-62). However, by 1771, Sawbridge and Tooke had left this
society because of its too narrow focus on Wilkes's interests.
Macaulay's early volumes of history constitute a thinly veiled
critique of contemporary political events, and set out the broader
principles of the Society of the Bill of Rights, by rehearsing the
arguments for the rights of the parliament and the liberties of the
people that fuelled the English Revolution.



During the decade in which she let her major history lapse, she lived
for about two years at Bath in the house of a Reverend Wilson, who
adopted her daughter, and had a statue made of the historian as Clio,
which was controversially placed in the nave of the church of St
Stephen's Walbrook. During this period her health was not good, and in
1777 she travelled to France with Elizabeth Arnold. While their aim
was the South of France, they did not get further than Paris, where
Macaulay enjoyed the vibrant cultural life, though she was shocked by
the extent of French social inequality (Hays 1803, 5.295-96).
She wrote *A History of England, from the Revolution to the present
time, in a series of letters to the Reverend Doctor Wilson* during
this period, but the friendship came to an abrupt, bitter end with her
second marriage to twenty-one year old William Graham in 1778. Graham
was the younger brother of Elizabeth Arnold and Dr James Graham, whose
unconventional remedies Macaulay had followed as a cure for her
continual ill health. This act brought a storm of gossip and
recrimination; she was accused by Wilson and Wilkes of having had an
affair with the older Graham, and generally ridiculed for marrying a
man who was her inferior in status and twenty-six years her
junior.



The years of her second marriage appear to have been happy and
fruitful; during this period she completed her *History of
England* and wrote the *Treatise on the Immutability of
Truth*, which was published in 1783. With her husband she toured
the United States, made a particular friend of Mercy Otis Warren, and
visited George Washington at Mount Vernon. Her last works were *The
Letters on Education* and her response to Burke's *Reflections
on the Revolution in France* both of which appeared in 1790. She
died on 22 June 1791.


## 2. Republican Liberty and *The History of England*



Although Macaulay did not write explicitly about the nature of freedom
until quite late in life, her histories should be read as a
contribution to the theory of republican liberty, though not quite as
that idea has been outlined by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit
(Skinner 1998, 2008; Pettit 1997). Skinner argues that, as a result of
his intention of refuting the political doctrines which lay behind the
English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes made innovations in the concept of
freedom of the will, and introduced the idea that one acts freely
whenever one's act is caused by one's own deliberations, and is not
impeded by some external constraint. Thus Hobbes simultaneously
supported the metaphysical view, according to which freedom and causal
determinism are compatible, and introduced the political concept of
negative liberty, thought of as freedom from external constraint. He
overthrew the then dominant metaphysical concept of human
freedom--which had descended from Plato via the later Stoics,
Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius--according to which we are
unfree when our acts are caused by the passions, and free only when we
act according to reason, as well as the view that political freedom
involves freedom from arbitrary domination.



However, the concept of freedom as rational self-government did not disappear, John Locke, in his *Two Treatises
Concerning Government*, accepted that we are
politically free only when governed by a rational law. He argued that
the reason why a man only attains to the status of a freeman at the
age of maturity is that to be free is to be guided by reason (Locke
1689[1967]). Thus political freedom corresponds to being governed by a
rational law, which is the law of nature. However, Locke undermined
the epistemological basis of his political principles, which require
that there is a moral "law of nature" discoverable by
reason, when he insisted, as part of his empiricism, that there is no
innate knowledge of principles. While Locke himself thought that
reason could discover the rational validity of the law of nature, by
reflecting on ideas that we have acquired through sensation and
reflection, only a few subsequent writers were convinced by his
reasoning. Some, such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson reintroduced a form
of innate knowledge, which nevertheless seemed respectably empirical,
by developing the idea of a moral sense. Another anonymous "Remarker", whose identity is unclear,
argued that the closest that an empiricist such as Locke could get to
a moral doctrine was a form of Epicureanism, which would reduce
morality to enlightened self-interest (Burnet 1989; Walmsley 2016). Hume, following
the logic of empiricism, would come to essentially the same
conclusion, without seeing this as problematic. The Remarker's critique of
Locke was answered by Catharine Trotter Cockburn, whose attempt to
defend Locke was praised by him, but not ultimately fully worked out.
Nevertheless, the position that Cockburn developed in later works has
some similarities with that which Macaulay defends (Cockburn 1702;
Green 2014, 34-39, 172-79). According to Macaulay, there
is an immutable moral truth that can be discovered by reason, and as
Cockburn will come to do, she uses the concept of
"fitness" to explain this process of discovery. Macaulay's
language is also very close to Samuel Clarke's. But, while Cockburn
was directly influenced by Clarke (Bolton 1996; Sheridan 2007),
Macaulay claims that she did not read his works until after she had
completed her *Treatise* (Macaulay 1783, viii). She proposes
that there is a rule of eternal right grounded in,



> 
> 
> ... a necessary and essential difference of things, a fitness and
> unfitness, a proportion and disproportion, a moral beauty and a moral
> deformity, an immutable right and wrong, necessary independent of the
> will of every being created or uncreated, explained by the philosopher
> Plato under the form of everlasting intellectual ideas, or moral
> entities, coeval with eternity, and residing in the divine mind; from
> whence, by irradiating rays, like the emitting of the sun-beams, they
> enlighten the understanding of all those intellectual beings, who,
> disregarding the objects of sense, give themselves up to the
> contemplation of the Deity; whilst modern philosophers, in a lower
> strain of reasoning, assert an abstract fitness of things perceived by
> the mind of God, and so interwoven in the nature of contemplative
> objects, as to be traced like other abstract truths, by those
> faculties of the mind which enable us to compare and perceive the
> agreement and disagreement of our sensitive and reflex ideas.
> (Macaulay 1783, 30-2)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, a free people will be governed by a law that is not arbitrary,
but rather corresponds to what is fit, and is able to be apprehended
by reason. Her history is an account of the struggle of the English
people to maintain their freedom in this sense, against the
pretensions of Stuart absolutism and the imposition of arbitrary
sway.


### 2.1 Macaulay's republicanism



While it is clear that Macaulay was a supporter of some form of
"republican" liberty, it is less clear whether she was an
out and out supporter of republicanism, in the constitutional sense,
according to which republicans are opposed to monarchy. In the context
of James Boswell's visit to Corsica, and his subsequent support of the
leader of the Corsican independence movement, General Paoli, Macaulay
outlined a republican constitution for Corsica, in a letter to Paoli,
which she published with her reflections on Hobbes (Macaulay 1767).
She does not seem to have thought that, in general, monarchical
governments are incompatible with republican liberty, so long as the
monarch is constrained by a constitution, governed by law, and the
liberty of the people is protected by parliament. She was not opposed
to the mixed English constitution, but her design for a republic is
interesting for the principles on which she thought government should
be founded.



Macaulay begins her letter to Paoli with a strong statement in favour
of democracy,



> 
> 
> Of all the various models of republics, which have been exhibited for
> the instruction of mankind, it is only the democratical system,
> rightly balanced, which can secure the virtue, liberty and happiness
> of society. (Macaulay 1767, 42)
> 
> 
> 



Her use of the phrase "the democratical system, rightly
balanced" suggests the influence of James Harrington's *The
Commonwealth of Oceana* on her thinking, and the Hills have
suggested that one might consider her an "aristocratic
republican" with similar views to Harrington (Hill and Hill
1967, 398; Hill 1992, 177). This does not, however, sit well with her
general opposition to the inequalities of wealth and power consequent
on aristocracy, which we will see are at the heart of her opposition
to Burke. She is serious when she claims that,



> 
> 
> The very nature of slavish dependence and proud superiority are
> equally baneful to the virtues inherent in mankind: the first, by
> sedulous attention and mean adulation to please its master,
> undermines, and at last subdues the innate generous principles of the
> soul; and the fond delights of superiority extinguish all the virtues
> which ennoble human nature, such as self-denial, general benevolence,
> and the exalted passion of sacrificing private views to public
> happiness.
> 
> 
> 



According to Macaulay, inequality is one of the factors which
militates against a populace being motivated to act in accordance with
the immutable moral truths. And, she will later call monarchy
supported by aristocracy "the very worst species of
government" (Macaulay 1778, 311). A democratical system requires
not simply constitutional arrangements, but also mechanisms to ensure
that the populace are sufficiently virtuous so as not to be motivated
to undermine those arrangements. This will lead to her later interest
in education. But in the letter to Paoli she suggests only economic
and procedural mechanisms in order to protect the democratic
constitution from dissolution.



Her model for a democratic constitution is a bicameral government made
up of a senate and a house of representatives. The relatively small
senate, of about fifty members, debates and proposes laws. The larger
house of representatives, elected by the people, from the people, also
debates but does not propose, but rather rejects or accepts the
proposals of the senate. The members of the senate are elected, by the
representatives, from among their number, for three-year terms, with
no re-election within a three-year lapse of time. One third of the
senate is replaced yearly. Generals, admirals, magistrates and other
civil officers are to sit in the Senate and vote, but are elected by
the representatives to one-year terms from among those who have
achieved senatorial rank. The two houses of Parliament are also to act
as courts of appeal for the administration of justice. Two mechanisms
are proposed to prevent the corruption of the constitution by the
accumulation of power in individual hands: the strict rotation of
functions, and the "right balancing" of wealth.



Macaulay argues that it was the failure to guard against the growth of
inequalities in wealth that led to the downfall of the Roman
republics.



> 
> 
> Had the Agrarian been ever fixed on a proper balance, it must have
> prevented that extreme disproportion in the circumstances of her
> citizens, which gave such weight of power to the aristocratical party,
> that it enabled them to subvert the fundamental principles of the
> government, and introduce those innovations which ended in anarchy.
> Anarchy produced its natural effect, viz. absolute monarchy (Macaulay
> 1767, 35).
> 
> 
> 



The right balancing of wealth is to be ensured by estates being
equally divided among sons, and if there are none living, between the
closest male relatives. She suggests no female inheritance, and the
abolition of dowries, though unmarried women are to be supported by
annuities provided by their brothers (Macaulay 1767, 37). Since this
appears to deprive women of any economic power, and presumably
excludes them from parliamentary representation, this feature of her
proposals has been disappointing to feminists, and it has been claimed
that she was no defender of women's rights (Staves 1989). Her later
works show that she was nevertheless sympathetic to women's plight,
and she might be excused, in a context in which women's power was
closely associated with luxury and aristocratic privilege, for
sacrificing women's apparent interests for the sake of equality.


### 2.2 Macaulay's *History* and her response to Hobbes



Macaulay has been called a "patriot historian" and her
history is certainly intended to praise the English
"patriots" who stood up for their fundamental rights
against the absolutist tendencies of James I and Charles I (Pocock
1998). Her account of the years leading up to the Civil War
constitutes a litany of acts of illegal taxation, abuses of power,
arbitrary arrest and inhumane punishments. She praises in particular
Sir John Elliot, "as the first martyr to the pre-eminent cause
of liberty," mentioning in particular a manuscript by him in
which he argues that kings are subject to laws (Macaulay
1763-83, 2.81). But she is not simply a blind defender of the
ancient constitution, or committed to English liberty for its own
sake. She believes in the possibility of moral progress, and, as is
already clear from her letter to Paoli, she sees the maintenance of a
just political constitution, and the development of individual virtue,
as inseparably intertwined. Thus she asserts in her response to
Burke's *Reflections on the Revolution in France* that English
liberties are not simply grounded in customs associated with the
English monarchy.



> 
> 
> I have myself always considered the boasted birthright of an
> Englishman, as an *arrogant* pretension, built on a
> *beggarly* foundation. It is an arrogant pretension, because it
> intimates a kind of exclusion to the rest of mankind from the same
> privileges; and it is beggarly, because it rests our legitimate
> freedom on the *alms* of our princes. (Macaulay 1790,
> 31-2)
> 
> 
> 



In her *Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr.
Hobbes's Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society* she
rebuts Hobbes's purely political conception of the state, countering
it with her own more moralised conception of the nature of political
authority, which also informs her account of the Civil War
(Gunther-Canada 2006).



She begins with Hobbes's claim that humans are not sociable by nature,
which she renders as his denial of the proposition that "man is
a creature born fit for society." According to Hobbes, as she
represents his doctrine,



> 
> 
> ... man cannot desire society from love, but through hope of
> gain: therefore, says he, the original of all great and lasting
> societies consisted, not in the mutual good will men had toward each
> other, but of the mutual fear they had of each other. (Macaulay 1767,
> 1)
> 
> 
> 



But she accuses Hobbes of contradicting himself, because, according to
what he also accepts, man *is* a creature fit for society.
Hobbes allows that there is a law of nature, which is the law of right
reason. This is the same law of nature that Locke recognises, and is
fundamentally the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have
them do unto you." Humans need only to acquire reason in order
to be able to recognise this rule. And while they may not be born with
the capacity to reason, just as they are not born with the capacity to
walk, they are born with the means to acquire that capacity. Macaulay
concludes:



> 
> 
> Therefore man, by being born with the necessary means, is born a
> creature apt for reason; and a creature apt for reason is a creature
> fit for society. (Macaulay 1767, 3)
> 
> 
> 



Since moral principles are immutable truths grounded in the nature of
things, and discoverable by reason, humans as rational creatures are
born capable of discovering these truths, and while their natural
rationality may need to be developed by education, this potential for
rationality is all that is needed for humans to be deemed naturally
sociable.



Macaulay moves on to criticize Hobbes's strange doctrine in relation
to contracts, according to which the people contract with each other
to be governed by the sword of an absolute monarch. Implicitly relying
on the moral conception of a just contract, Macaulay argues that a
contract requires at least two parties. If one of those parties were
to dissolve after the contract, as Hobbes suggests the sovereign
people do, then the contract would be null and void (Macaulay 1767,
6-7). While this response may not satisfy defenders of Hobbes,
it allows us to understand Macaulay's conception of the social
contract as an implicit or explicit contract between the people and
some individual or assembly, according to which the people transfer a
limited power for the sake of the common good, and retain the right to
declare the contract null, in case the other party fails to keep up
their end of the bargain. It is in this light that she represents the
execution of Charles I.



> 
> 
> That the government is the ordinance of man; that, being the mere
> creature of human invention, it may be changed or altered according to
> the dictates of experience, and the better judgment of men; that it
> was instituted for the protection of the people, for the end of
> securing, not overthrowing the rights of nature; that it is a trust
> either formally admitted or supposed; and that the magistracy is
> consequently accountable; will meet with little contradiction in a
> country enlightened with the unobstructed ray of rational learning.
> (Macaulay 1763-83, 430-1)
> 
> 
> 



Her text at this point is liberally sprinkled with references to
Locke, one of her major sources for the doctrine of republican
liberty, which underpins the people's right to overthrow a monarch who
has made himself a tyrant, and in effect reinstituted a state of
nature.



She objects also to Hobbes's claim that there are no natural moral
rights and obligations which connect parents and children. Parents
have an obligation to care for their children which derives from the
nature of the relationship between them,



> 
> 
> ...reason and morality strongly urges the care and preservation
> of an existence by themselves occasioned as a duty never to be
> omitted; by the law of justice, therefore, they, being thus bound to
> this act, cannot have it in their option whether they will do it or
> not: but Mr. Hobbes will rather advance any absurdity, than own that
> power has its rights from reasonable causes. (Macaulay 1767, 10)
> 
> 
> 



Children's obligations to parents, by contrast, are grounded in
gratitude, which is appropriate in relation to the benefits conferred,
and so are not binding if parents have not fulfilled their duties to
their children.



The bulk of the rest of Macaulay's response to Hobbes consists in
arguments against his defence of monarchy. In general these do not add
much to the principles that she has already laid down, but they do add
some practical reasons for thinking that monarchical governments will
nearly always be defective, which are echoed in Macaulay's histories.
She points out that it is almost impossible to give advice to absolute
monarchs, and they are likely to be surrounded by favourites, placemen
and flatterers. In her histories she provides many examples of the
inconveniences that accompany monarchical power. Commenting on the
death of Buckingham she points to him as



> 
> 
> ... an everlasting monument of the contemptible government that
> magnanimous nations must submit to, who groan under the mean, though
> oppressive yoke of an arbitrary sway.
> 
> 
> 



For, as a result of the power of individual monarchs, he



> 
> 
> ... with no other eminent qualities than what were proper to
> captivate the hearts of the weakest parts of the female sex, had been
> raised by these qualities to be the scourge of three kingdoms; and, by
> his pestilent intrigues, the chief cause of that distress which the
> French protestants at this time languished under. (Macaulay
> 1763-83, 2.7-8)
> 
> 
> 



Elsewhere she sums up the reign of Queen Anne with the comment that
she



> 
> 
> ... was a glaring example to shew the ticklish state in which
> society is involved, whose welfare depends on the conduct of an
> individual; since a high share of virtue and understanding, those
> choicest gifts of heaven, are dispensed by the Creator with so sparing
> a hand, that we find a very few individuals in any age whom we can in
> this respect mark as the favourites of heaven. (Macaulay 1778,
> 271)
> 
> 
> 


### 2.3 Macaulay's *History* as a response to Hume



It has often been noticed that Macaulay's history was read as a
response to the popular history of the period published by David Hume,
and certainly, Macaulay's understanding of the significance of the
English Civil War, the virtues of the republicans, and the grounds of
morality, challenge Hume. Their ideas belong to two diametrically
opposed strands of Enlightenment thought. Her religious and ethical
views belong to the "moderate enlightenment", as
characterised by Jonathan Israel, while her politics are radical. By
contrast, Hume is a naturalist and sceptic whose religious views are
in line with those that Israel associates with the "radical
enlightenment", yet he is a political conservative (Israel 2010,
2011; Green 2011; Green 2020). As mentioned above, a tension exists in Locke's
philosophy between his political ideals, which propose the existence
of a natural law, which can be known by reason, and his general
commitment to an empiricist epistemology. Hume develops Locke's
empiricism in the direction of its sceptical implications, resulting
in rejection of the existence of God, immutable moral truth and causal
necessity. By contrast, Macaulay follows Locke the political
philosopher, and accepts the existence of God, and immutable moral
truth, without concerning herself too deeply with regard to the
question of how it is that an "abstract fitness of things"
can "enable us to compare and perceive the agreement and
disagreement of our sensitive and reflex ideas".



Famously, Hume had criticised those moral theorists whose doctrines
Macaulay continued to assert,



> 
> 
> ... who affirm that virtue is nothing but a conformity to reason;
> that there are eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things, which are
> the same to every rational being that considers them; that the
> immutable measure of right and wrong impose an obligation, not only on
> human creatures, but also on the Deity himself: (Hume 1964,
> 2.234-5)
> 
> 
> 



He goes on to argue that moral injunctions motivate, and that since
only the passions can motivate, moral injunctions must be grounded in
the passions. Ultimately, for Hume, what is good is what is useful, a
modern version of the Epicureanism, which Burnet had argued, follows
from empiricism. For Hume, political constitutions are not grounded in
immutable truths, but are based in convention. Since the functioning
of a set of conventions depends on people agreeing to abide by certain
rules, which are in themselves arbitrary, it is important that people
revere authority. For him, the execution of Charles I was a tragedy,
brought about by deluded enthusiasts. And he comments in relation to
this act:



> 
> 
> Government is instituted, in order to restrain the fury and injustice
> of the people; and being always founded on opinion, not on force, it
> is dangerous, by these speculations, to weaken the reverence, which
> the multitude owe to authority, and to instruct them before-hand, that
> the case can ever happen, when they may be free'd from their duty of
> allegiance. (Hume 1754, 1.470)
> 
> 
> 



Macaulay's fundamental attitude to Hume's history is evident in a
short correspondence, which took place in 1764, after a copy of the
first volume of her history had been sent to him. Here Macaulay
succinctly argues that Hume's conventionalism implies an obligation to
conservatism. Hume suggests that he and Macaulay do not differ as to
the facts, but rather on the interpretation that they place on them
and he continues: 



> 
> 
> I look upon all kinds of subdivision of power, from the monarchy of
> France to the freest democracy of some Swiss cantons, to be equally
> legal, if established by custom and authority. ("Account of the
> Life" 1783, 331; Macaulay 2019, 38)
> 
> 
> 



Macaulay's response is: 



> 
> 
> Your position, that all governments established by custom and
> authority carry with them obligations to submission and allegiance,
> does, I am afraid, involve all reformers in unavoidable guilt, since
> opposition to established error must needs be opposition to authority.
> 
> 
> 
> 



As a serious reformer, she believed in objective universal standards
of justice, which were not being upheld in the Great Britain of her
day, just as they had not been during the period that led up to the
Civil War.


## 3. The *History in Letters* and Macaulay as a critic of Burke



Her criticism of contemporary politics is the subject of *A History
of England, from the Revolution to the present time, in a series of
letters to the Reverend Doctor Wilson* in which she argues that,
far from having been an advance in English constitutional
arrangements, the Revolution of 1688 was a missed opportunity.
Although



> 
> 
> ... the power of the Crown was acknowledged to flow from no other
> fountain than of a contract with the people ... the new monarch
> retained the old regal power over parliaments in its full extent; he
> was left at liberty to convoke, adjourn, or dissolve them at his
> pleasure; he was able to influence elections, and oppress
> corporations; he possessed the right of chusing his own council, of
> nominating all the great officers of the state, the household, the
> army, the navy, and the church; the absolute command over the militia
> was reserved to the crown; and so totally void of improvement was the
> Revolution system, that the reliques of the star chamber was retained
> in the office of the Attorney-General, who in the case of libels has
> the power of lodging a vexatious, and even false information, without
> being subjected to the penalty of cost or damage. (Macaulay 1778,
> 4-5)
> 
> 
> 



The argument developed in this history is that without appropriate
constraints on the power of the crown, parliament had inevitably
become a tool of court policy. In the second volume of her
eight-volume history, she had given an extended account of Wentworth's
manipulation of the Irish parliament, during Charles I's reign,
commenting that it showed "that parliaments are noxious things
when they become the dupes of ministers" (Macaulay
1763-83, 2.184-5). The relevance of this reflection for
contemporary politics would not have been lost on her readers, and she
had anticipated the argument developed in *A History of England,
from the Revolution to the present time* in her first response to
Burke.


### 3.1 Response to *Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents*



Burke's pamphlet was prompted by two proposed pieces of legislation,
which he argued would, if passed, have undermined the independence of
Parliament. One, a consequence of the controversy concerning Wilkes,
would have allowed Parliament to expel any of its members at its
pleasure. The other committed the Parliament to paying the debts
accumulated in the Civil List. These bills, he suggested "must
establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament
the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was
invented by the wit of man" (Burke 1770, 94). He looks back with
some nostalgia to the time of Queen Anne, when the Whig party had
control of the parliament, and argues that it is only through the
power of parties, grounded in aristocratic influence, that the
parliament can exercise an effective control over the executive (Burke
1770, 109). Macaulay does not disagree with Burkes' analysis of the
contemporary situation, nor that the increasing dominance of the court
was in effect making parliament a tool of court policy, but she rounds
on Burke for his inadequate analysis of the causes of the contemporary
state of affairs. It was in fact the aristocratic factions, jostling
for power, which had enabled the court to deprive the parliament of
effective means of controlling the monarch. The Whigs had played a
more destructive role in this process than the Tories, because they
had concealed their desire for power under the rhetoric of
liberty.



> 
> 
> A system of corruption began at the very period of the Revolution, and
> growing from its nature with increasing vigor, was the policy of every
> succeeding administration. To share the plunder of a credulous people,
> cabals were formed between the representatives and the ministers.
> Parliament, the great barrier of our much boasted constitution, while
> it preserved its forms, annihilated its spirit; and, from a
> controuling power over the executive parts of government, became a
> mere instrument of regal administration. (Macaulay 1770, 13)
> 
> 
> 



What is required, according to Macaulay, in order to restore some
independence and authority to parliament, is triennial elections, in
place of the septennial ones, which had been brought in during
William's reign, and which placed parliamentarians in a position to
accumulate too much power of patronage, as well as "a more
extended and equal power of election" (Macaulay 1770, 28).


### 3.2 Response to *Reflections on the Revolution in France*



Macaulay's last published work goes to the heart of her disagreement
with Burke over the source of political legitimacy. Although Burke did
not share Hume's religious scepticism, like Hume he claimed government
to be grounded in opinion, tradition, and respectful awe of
superiority, and he wrote his *Reflections* to lament the way
in which the French revolutionaries had debased the monarchy, in terms
reminiscent of Hume's accusation that the Civil War levelers had,
"weakened the reverence, which the multitude owe to
authority". Burke's immediate target was a sermon preached by
Richard Price at the Old Jewry, on the anniversary of the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, in which Price declared that the king of Great
Britain owes his crown to the choice of the people (Burke 2004,
96-7). Against this, Burke argues that the intention of the
*Declaration of Right,* which established William II on the
throne, was to declare the rights and liberties of the subjects of
Great Britain, and to settle the succession of the crown. So, despite
a small deviation in the line of succession, British kings continued
to owe their crowns to inheritance in the royal line (Burke 2004,
100). He quotes the earlier *Petition of Right* to show that it
is inherited custom that grounds and legitimizes the government.



> 
> 
> In the famous law of the 3d of Charles I. called the *Petition of
> Right*, the parliament says to the king, "your subjects have
> *inherited* this freedom," claiming their franchises not
> on abstract principles "as the rights of men," but as the
> rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their
> forefathers.
> 
> 
> 



Macaulay responds that, if the rights of Englishmen are not ultimately
grounded in abstract right, they are no rights at all. For if they
ultimately rest on the weakness or generosity of previous kings, then
they can with equal right be overturned by subsequent powerful or less
kindly monarchs (Macaulay 1790, 30-1). So, if there are rights
they must be grounded in universal rights.



Just as she had done in her earlier response to Burke, Macaulay
attacks his claim that an aristocracy is necessary for civilized
society, and necessary in order to defend the state. There is no need
to have an opulent class for there to be elements in the population
who care about the nation, for "every citizen who possesses ever
so *small* a share of property, is *equally* as
tenacious of it as the most opulent member of society" (Macaulay
1790, 40-1). Inequality, she argues, in fact leads to envy, and
ultimately civil disturbance. And while she agrees that different
classes have different interests she asserts:



> 
> 
> ... I know of no *rational* objection; nor can I think of
> any expedient to remove the well-grounded apprehensions of the
> different interests which compose a commonwealth, than a *fair*
> and *equal* representation of the *whole* people;
> (Macaulay 1790, 48)
> 
> 
> 



The French have moved far closer to this ideal, with a broad
franchise, than the English, with their pocket boroughs, which can be
bought and sold, and their very limited representation.



Macaulay concludes her pamphlet with a dilemma for all those who claim
that authority resides in conventions, which cannot be questioned or
overthrown.



> 
> 
> For if we say that *lawful* governments are formed on the
> authority of conventions, it will be asked, *who gave these
> conventions their authority*? If we grant that they derived their
> authority from the *assent of the people*, how came the people,
> it will be said, to exert such an authority at *one* period of
> society, and not at another? If we say it was *necessity* that
> recovered to the social man the full rights of his nature, it will be
> asked, *who is to be the judge* of this necessity? why
> *certainly* the people.
> 
> 
> 
> Thus, in *every* light in which we can place the argument, in
> every possible mode of reasoning, we shall be driven back to elect
> either the first or the second of these propositions; either that an
> individual, or some privileged persons, have an inherent and
> indefeasible right to make laws for the community, or that this
> authority rests in the unalienable and indefeasible rights of man.
> (Macaulay 1790, 94-5)
> 
> 
> 



Since she takes it as accepted that the doctrine of the indefeasible
right of kings is dead, she is able to conclude that, government,
"can have no *legitimate* force, *but in the*
*will of the people*" (Macaulay 1790, 95).


## 4. Macaulay and America



Applying the principle that rights, if they exist at all, are
universal, it is not surprising that Macaulay attempted to get her
fellow country-men to see that injustice of taxing the colonies, while
they were not given any representation in the British Parliament. In
her *Address to the people of England, Scotland and Ireland on the
present important crisis of affairs*, she called on the British
people to support the rights of the Americans, and to join with them
in order to protect themselves from the encroachment of their own
liberties. She held out to Britons what a loss it would be if, as a
result of a war of Independence they were to be deprived of all the
commercial advantages that flowed from the Empire, and were left
possessing only their own "foggy islands" (Macaulay 1775,
27). But her fundamental appeal is not to the self-interest of her
country-men, who she suspects may think that their own burden of
taxation is lightened by that placed on the Americans, but to the
principle that it is only by supporting the rights of others that one
can in the long run support one's own rights. For her pains she was
represented in the *Westminster Magazine* as a dagger-wielding
hybrid of Roman matron and Indian chief, about to plunge her weapon
into Britannia's breast (Davies 2005, 152).



During this period she corresponded with John and Abigail Adams, James
Otis and Mercy Otis Warren, Benjamin Franklin and Sarah Prince-Gill,
among numerous other colonists (Davies 2005, 127-9; Letzring
1976; Macaulay 2019). In the second edition of her *Loose Remarks* she printed
an exchange of letters with Benjamin Rush, in which he praised her
political principles as well as offering some minor criticisms.
Macaulay concludes her response to him by promoting to the Americans
"the general principles of the rights of mankind inculcated in
my great work" (Macaulay 1769, 35). Indeed, it is clear that the
first five volumes of her eight volume history very clearly spell out
the principles that justified the War of Independence, and she was
feted when she travelled through nine of the thirteen states with her
second husband. Despite her support for the Americans, as the actual
Constitution was developed, she was not convinced that it would not be
corrupted, and in a correspondence with Mary Otis Warren the two women
expressed, with some prescience, their concerns that the arrangements
did not sufficiently protect against tendencies which would allow
aristocratic wealth, and the consequent corruption of the principles
of liberty, to re-emerge (Hay 1994, 314).


## 5. Thoughts on progress, liberty and education



Macaulay believed in the existence of moral truths, which are
"interwoven in the nature of contemplative objects" and
which exist independently of God or human will. Like other abstract
truths, they can be discovered through the use of reason. She defends
this intellectualism in her *Treatise on the immutability of moral
truth*, and also sets out to refute the libertarian account of
freedom of the will developed by Dr William King in his *Concerning
the Origin of Evil*, as well as the philosophy set out in
Bolingbroke's *Philosophical Works*.



In *The Treatise* she also puts forward her objections to all
those theories of the source of moral injunctions, which, like
Bolingbroke's account, attempt to reduce them to rules which are in
our rational self-interest, arguing that "... those who
only regard virtue as a principle, convenient for general use, will
discard it whenever that general interest comes in opposition to
self" (Macaulay 1783, 77). Against such views she argues that
the genuine rational interest of a rational being is to act in
accordance with the dictates of reason. Had God intended us simply to
maximise our own selfish pleasures in this life, he would have given
us appropriate instincts, for



> 
> 
> ... that power of combining and generalizing his ideas, in such a
> manner as to apprehend truths of the most abstract nature, with the
> power of memory in the large extent in which it is found in human
> existence, are superfluous and mischievous gifts on the principle of
> human mortallity. (Macaulay 1783, 98)
> 
> 
> 



But the fact that we have reason, and can appreciate the abstract
principles of right, implies that our true self-interest is to act in
accordance with the principles of reason, which are the principles of
moral obligation.



> 
> 
> Independent of those pleasurable sensations which attend the refined
> affections, and the elevated sentiments and passions, there is a
> principle of rational agency, which corresponds with the precise
> admeasurement of every action, with a rule of right; although the
> conduct it directs, militates against natural inclination, against the
> interest of natural affection, and where every pleasurable sensation
> is sacrificed to the conviction of judgement, and to the rigid
> dictates of a well informed understanding. (Macaulay 1783, 129)
> 
> 
> 



She concludes that, by considering what a rational moral being would
desire, "we gain an idea of rational interest which must ever
attend on rational nature ..." (Macaulay 1783, 130).



Rather than solving the problem of evil by allowing that there are
uncaused choices, Macaulay attempts two alternative solutions. One
involves the thought, which she also attributes to Addison, that since
we cannot be assured that virtue is rewarded in this world, we should
deduce the existence of a future state of happiness in which the
apparent injustices in this world are made good (Macaulay 1783,
94-6). The other rests on her understanding of the circumstances
necessary for the perfectibility of humanity. Man, she claims



> 
> 
> ... is placed on this terrestrial globe, as in a nursery, or soil
> aptly fitted to give strength and vigour, and a more advanced maturity
> to his young and infirm reason; that he is placed on this terrestrial
> globe as in a school adapted to the advantages of a practical
> experience; and that he is surrounded with difficulties and hostile
> powers, for the purpose of enlarging his experience, and inducing a
> state of trial of that virtue which his reason and his experience
> enables him to acquire. (Macaulay 1783, 234)
> 
> 
> 



However, she is forced ultimately to admit that neither of these
doctrines entirely relieves God of the responsibility for evil, and
consoles herself with the observation that the believers in arbitrary
free will are in no better position than those who accept the doctrine
of the will which she calls, "moral necessity" (Macaulay
1783, 232).


### 5.1 Freedom of the will



Those who have published commentaries on Macaulay's views on freedom
of the will are divided over exactly how the doctrine she develops
fits into standard categories. Martina Reuter has argued that what
Macaulay offers is a version of rationalist compatibilism, while
others have presumed that she is a hard determinist or modern
Calvinist (Reuter 2007; Hilton 2007, 67-72; O'Brien 2009, 168;
Green and Weekes,2013). Part of the difficulty of understanding
Macaulay's position stems from the fact that she writes in opposition
to those who make free choice arbitrary, and so concentrates on
establishing that choices are caused by motives, thus seeming to be
committed to compatibilism, as is Hobbes, and yet she also wants to
accept, with Plato and the Stoics, that we are only truly free when
our acts are caused by reason, rather than by ill-conceived passion.
She understands individual moral progress as involving the
strengthening of reason, so that it can guide the passions, and lead
the individual to virtue. Political progress is intertwined with this
individual progress. Political structures compatible with the
rationally perceptible moral law would be upheld were people virtuous,
so education for virtue becomes a necessary means for effecting
political progress, yet at the same time, the effects of faulty
constitutions militate against the capacity of people to attain
virtue, since in circumstances of excessive inequality, or where
corruption is endemic, both the poor and the rich are subject to
overwhelming temptations to vice.



According to Macaulay the necessitarian takes freedom to reside
in,



> 
> 
> ... those distinctions which the mind frames on the essential
> difference which lies in those objects which present themselves to her
> perception, and which form the objects of her volition: else why have
> schools to train our youth in knowledge and in habits of virtue?
> (Macaulay 1783, 194)
> 
> 
> 



So education is necessary in order to help people distinguish the
essential differences between things, but she argues that it is also
necessary in order to counter the development of unhelpful
associations, and to train the mind to curb its passions, for Macaulay
is heavily influenced by the associationist psychology of Edward
Hartley, Joseph Priestley and Jonathan Edwards. These metaphysical and
psychological views inform her *Letters on Education*.


### 5.2 Thoughts on Education



The *Letters on Education* is a rather loosely structured work
that contains, as well as letters on the appropriate form of
education, discussion of vegetarianism, and our duties to animals, a
significant portion of the *Treatise on the Immutability of Moral
Truth*, which takes up all of the third part of the later work. In
the *Letters* Macaulay sets out her rather sensible
prescriptions for raising robust children, who are neither rendered
too timid nor too bold, and she argues that given the differences in
individual character, educators may have to take different approaches
depending on the temperament of the child. She suggests that, although
she has dreamed of schemes of public education, she has come to the
conclusion that the government of her time could not be trusted to
provide appropriate care, and so she advises a private education in
which boys and girls are educated together and taught exactly the same
curriculum, with some concessions to sexual difference in the choice
of exercise and sports.



The educational advice that Macaulay offers is remarkably practical.
She recommends that those who can afford it should have their children
taught dancing from a young age, as a means of acquiring grace, but
she also observes that in order for the lessons to be effective they
should be a pastime, not a task. Similarly, if children are given the
impression that being allowed to read is a privilege and
entertainment, they will be happy to acquire the skill. While dancing
and music are excellent sources of amusement, they should not take up
too much time, and there are other amusements that Macaulay considers
beneficial, such as needlework for girls and handicrafts for boys. She
disapproves of punishments and practices that are intended to
terrorize children, such as "shutting up in dark closets",
or being told tales of ghosts and ghouls who are coming to get them.
Children should be encouraged to be as independent as possible, since
self-sufficiency is a great source of confidence and peace of mind.
Her prescriptions for the early education of children concentrate on
making them physically and emotionally robust, and on avoiding both
the extremes of timidity and cruel insensitivity. Up to the age of
twelve formal learning should be made pleasant and involve writing,
arithmetic, Latin grammar, geography, French learnt by the simple
method of hiring some French domestic servants, and as much physics as
can be easily understood by children.



As children mature, Macaulay recommends a more formidable curriculum.
Among her recommended reading there is Plutarch's *Lives*,
Rollin's *Ancient History* in French, and Livy, works which
were surely early influences on her own thought. She puts off learning
Greek until fifteen, and moral philosophy in the form of works by
Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca and Epictetus until sixteen, but expects her
pupils, by the age of eighteen to be reading Plato, Demosthenes,
Sophocles, Euripides and Homer in Greek, as well as Caesar and Cicero
in Latin. Among modern philosophical texts she recommends two by James
Harris, his *Philosophical Arrangements* and *Hermes an
inquiry into universal grammar*, Lord Monboddo on language and
*Epea pteroenta* by John Horne Tooke, her and her brother's
friend. Political philosophy in the form of the works of James
Harrington, Algernon Sidney, Locke, and Hobbes is left until the age of
nineteen. There are two striking omissions from her curriculum; novels
and the Scripture. The second she leaves until the student has reached
the age of twenty-one and after she or he has been introduced to
metaphysics through reading Ralph Cudworth, Plato and more Monboddo.
She argues that early reading of the Scripture is likely to lead to
scepticism, and it is only after one has appreciated the morality of
the ancients that one can truly understand the moral advances of
Christianity. To cap off this education she particularly recommends
*The Light of Nature Pursued* by Abraham Tucker.



Macaulay does not approve of the popularity of novels, because of
their concentration on the passion of love, and her suspicion that by
reading them, young people, who are susceptible to this passion in any
case, will be encouraged to pursue it too early. Few novelists, she
thinks, really accurately portray human sentiments, and she is
particularly critical of Samuel Richardson. But she by no means
intends to deny the reading of novels for entertainment. Her position
is simply that they do not in general provide a solid moral
foundation.



The whole of this educational program is grounded on her understanding
of the foundations of morality and moral psychology. Education can
teach the moral truths, but it also has to take account of unhelpful
associations, and those emotional characteristics which result in
weakness of will, in order to form individuals who can act in
accordance with the dictates of reason. Macaulay also comments on the
need for public education and the abolition of spectacles such as
public executions and animal slaughter, which brutalize and corrupt
people's emotional responses.


### 5.3 Feminism



One reason why Catharine Macaulay's work has not received as much
attention as it arguably deserves, is that contemporary interest in
the writings of historical women has tended to be motivated by
feminism, and some earlier commentators suggested that Macaulay was
uninterested in the rights of women (Staves 1989). More recently, her
educational views, commitment to acknowledging the influence of
historical women, and recognition of her influence on Wollstonecraft
is resulting in a fairer assessment of her importance to the history
of English feminism (Gunther-Canada 1998, 2003; Hicks 2002; Hill 1995;
Titone 2004; Berges 2013).



In speaking of the education of girls, Macaulay asserts, "my
pride and my prejudices lead me to regard my sex in a higher light
than as the mere objects of sense" (Macaulay 1790, 62). Indeed,
she believes that both sexes ought to aspire to virtue, which, since
it involves understanding and acting on moral principles discernible
by reason, is the same for both sexes. In order to justify the
egalitarian educational program that she proposes, she argues against
Rousseau that there are no characteristic differences between the
sexes, that most of what is observed is the result of education, and,
turning Pope's words around, that "A perfect man is a woman
formed after a courser mold" (Macaulay 1790, 204). Against
Rousseau's attempt to make a single moral person out of the union of
the two sexes, she asserts that it outdoes, for contradiction and
absurdity, "every metaphysical riddle that was ever formed in
the schools" (Macaulay 1790, 206).



Mary Wollstonecraft favourably reviewed Macaulay's *Letters on
Education* in November 1790, commenting on Macaulay's chapter
titled, "No characteristic difference in sex" that
"the observations on this subject might have been carried much
farther" (Wollstonecraft 1989, 7.31; Hill 1995; Coffee 2019). Her
*Vindication of the Rights of Women* does exactly that,
extending Macaulay's critique of Rousseau, and adding a great deal of
further material criticising other authors who had contributed to
rendering women objects of contempt. She echoes in her formulations
the arguments which Macaulay had given for providing an equal
education, according to which "there is but one rule of right
for the conduct of all rational beings ... that true wisdom
... is as useful to women as men" and that, as in the next
world "our state of happiness may possibly depend on the degree
of perfection we have attained in this, we cannot justly lessen, in
one sex or the other, the means by which perfection ... is
acquired" (Macaulay 1790, 201-2).



Macaulay's belief that moral truth is not a matter of mere custom or
convention is central to her rejection of the contemporary situation
of women. For despite the near universal custom of the subjection of
women to the arbitrary power of men, she argues that



> 
> 
> ... justice, in its more abstract or general sense, should be
> little considered, or little understood, by those who can believe that
> it is agreeable to the wisdom and goodness of an all-perfect Being to
> form two species of creatures of equal intelligence and similar
> feelings, and consequently capable of an equal degree of suffering
> under injuries, and should consign one of these species as a kind of
> property to a different species of their fellow-creatures, not endowed
> with any qualities of mind sufficient to prevent the enormous abuse of
> such a power. (Macaulay 1783, 158)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, although feminist rhetoric was not central to her histories and
earlier pamphlets, she was fully convinced that the subjection of
women to men was not compatible with rational principles of justice.
Indeed, her assertion, in her response to Burke, that there should be
"a *fair* and *equal* representation of the
*whole* people" could be interpreted as implying that she
believed in the representation of women, for her choice in this
instance of sex-neutral language is surely intentional.


## 6. Conclusion



Catharine Macaulay was a significant contributor to eighteenth century
debates over human rights and republican liberty, who was celebrated
and influential during her lifetime, but her histories and political
works had fallen into obscurity by the first half of the twentieth
century. Interest in her was stimulated by Lucy Donnelly's pioneering
article and research by Florence and William Boos, Christopher and
Bridget Hill, and Lynne Withey (Donnelly 1949; Boos 1976; Boos and
Boos 1980; Hill and Hill 1967; Hill 1992; Withey 1976). Recognition of
the influence of her educational and political ideas has since grown
considerably (Hay 1995; Waithe 1987-95, 3.217-22; Looser 2000, 2003;
Wiseman 2001; Schnorrenberg 1979, 1990; Hutton 2005, 2007, 2009;
Gunther-Canada 1998, 2003; Gardner 1998; Gardner 2000; Hicks 2002;
Titone 2004; Hammersley 2010). Nevertheless, although beginning to be
better known, she is usually only mentioned in passing in standard
accounts of the development of democratic theory and feminism. Her
moralised understanding of the grounds of human rights and
justification for democracy provide an important counter-balance to
Hobbesian versions of the social contract and deserve a far more
central place in the history of liberal political theory than is
currently the case (Green 2018; Green 2020).