Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge, later Graham; 23 March 1731 – 22 June 1791) was an English historian. She was the first Englishwoman to become a published historian and during her lifetime the world's only published female historian. Macaulay was the first English radical to visit America after independence, staying there from 15 July 1784 to 17 July 1785. Her visit included a visit to Mount Vernon where she met with George Washington. Macaulay's most prominent work was an eight-volume Whig history of England in which she argued that the people have the right to overthrow their monarch for their own natural rights.
Life Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge) was born in Olantigh, Wye, Kent. She was the daughter of John Sawbridge (1699–1762) and Elizabeth Wanley (died 1733) of Olantigh. Sawbridge was a landed proprietor from Wye, Kent, whose ancestors were Warwickshire yeomanry. Catherine's grandfather was a well-known and wealthy man who left her property, located at Olantigh in Kent. Her grandfather eventually ruined his reputation and lost much of what he had.
Macaulay was educated privately at home by a governess. This governess was not able to meet all of Macaulay's interests and curiosity and Macaulay read and developed her skills on her own.
In the first volume of her History of England, Macaulay claimed that from an early age she was a prolific reader, in particular of "those histories which exhibit liberty in its most exalted state in the annals of the Roman and Greek Republics… [from childhood] liberty became the object of a secondary worship".
However this account is at odds with what she told her friend Benjamin Rush, to whom she described herself as "a thoughtless girl till she was twenty, at which time she contracted a taste for books and knowledge by reading an odd volume of some history, which she picked up in a window of her father's house". She also told Caleb Fleming that she knew neither Latin nor Greek.
Little is known about her early life. In 1757, a Latin and Greek scholar, Elizabeth Carter, visited a function at Canterbury where she met Macaulay, then 26 years old. In a letter to a friend, Carter described Macaulay as a "very sensible and agreeable woman, and much more deeply learned than beseems a fine lady; but between the Spartan laws, the Roman politics, the philosophy of Epicurus, and the wit of St. Evremond, she seems to have formed a most extraordinary system".
On 20 June 1760Marriage Register for St Gregory & Martin, Wye, Kent she married a Scottish physician, Dr. George Macaulay (1716–1766), and they lived at St James's Place, London. They remained married for six years until his death in 1766. They had one child together, Catharine Sophia."Born February 24th 1765", baptism register, St James Piccadilly With Dr. Macaulay's encouragement, Macaulay began to write her history of England. Her first volume was published in 1763. Nothing was published from 1768-1771. Macaulay moved to Bath in 1774. At age 47, she married her second husband, William Graham (then 21 years old), on 14 November 1778Entry in marriage register All Saints Church, Leicester. The marriage caused some scandal but seemed to be a happy marriage despite outside opinions. Together they toured the United States and met with George Washington at Mount Vernon.
The second marriage coincided with the publication of the first volume of The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, in a Series of Letters to the Reverend Doctor Wilson (1778) in which she argued that the English Civil War had not gone far enough to eliminate the prerogatives of the crown. Her arguments against monarchy challenged moderate elements in the Whig party. Macaulay insisted that the civil war is a defense of the rights of the people against monarchs.
According to Mary Hays, Macaulay "had been furnished by general Washington with many materials" for a history of the American Revolution but that "she was, by the infirm state of her health" stopped from doing so. Macaulay wrote to the American writer Mercy Otis Warren in 1787: "Tho' the History of your late glorious revolution is what I should certainly undertake were I again young, yet as things are I must for many reasons decline such a task"..
She later lived in Binfield, Berkshire. She died in Binfield in Berkshire on 22 June 1791 and was buried in All Saints' parish church there.
The History of England
Between 1763 and 1783 Macaulay wrote, in eight volumes, The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line. However, when completing the last three volumes she realised she would not reach 1714 and so changed the title to The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution. Being practically unknown before the publication of the first volume, overnight she became "the Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay". She was the first Englishwoman to become an historian and during her lifetime the world's only published female historian.
The History is a political history of the seventeenth century. The first and second volumes cover the years 1603–1641; volumes three and four cover 1642–1647; volume five covers 1648–1660; volumes six and seven cover 1660–1683 and the last volume spans 1683–1689. Macaulay chose this period because, as she wrote in the first volume, she wanted "to do justice...to the memory of our illustrious ancestors". She lamented that her contemporaries had forgotten that the privileges they enjoyed had been fought for by "men that, with the hazard and even the loss of their lives, attacked the formidable pretensions of the Stewart family, and set up the banners of liberty against a tyranny which had been established for a series of more than one hundred and fifty years".
She believed that the Anglo-Saxons had possessed freedom and equality with representative institutions but that these were lost at the Norman Conquest. The history of England, in Macaulay's view, was the story of the struggle of the English to regain their rights that were crushed by the "Norman yoke". She viewed the Commonwealth of England as "the brightest age that ever adorned the page of history...Never did the annals of Humanity furnish the example of a government, so newly established, so formidable to foreign states as was at this period of the English Commonwealth". The Long Parliament was "the most patriotic government that ever blessed the hopes and military exertions of a brave people". The Parliamentarian army's fighting "was not a trade of blood, but an exertion of principle, and obedience to the call of conscience, and their conduct was not only void of insolence but benevolent and humane".
Macaulay justified the execution of King Charles I by claiming that "Kings, the servants of the State, when they degenerated into tyrants, forfeited their right to government". Following the argument of John Milton's Defence of the People of England, she argued that "the oaths of allegiance were to be understood as conditionally binding, according to the observance of the oaths kings made to their people. And neither the laws of God nor nature were against the peoples laying aside Kings and Kingly government, and the adopting more convenient forms".
She was heavily critical of Oliver Cromwell, who she denounced as "the vain-glorious usurper" and as an "individual, no ways exalted above his brethren in any of those private endowments which constitute the true greatness of character, or excelling in any quality, but in the measure of a vain and wicked ambition". He was responsible for ending a "period of national glory...when England after so long a subjection to monarchical tyranny bad fair to out-do in the constitution of its government...every circumstance of glory, wisdom and happiness related of ancient or modern empires".
Her view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was critical. She acknowledged that the Revolution Settlement limited the power of the crown and had rejected "hereditary indefeasible right" in favour of "a contract with the people" as the basis of the monarchy's power. However, she also claimed that patriots had neglected "this fair opportunity to cut off all of the prerogatives of the crown", to which they had "justly imputed the calamities and injuries sustained by the nation". The Revolution Settlement had failed to "admit of any of those refinements and improvements, which the experience of mankind had enabled them to make in the science of political security".
Macaulay shared her fellow radicals' anti-Catholicism, writing in the chapter covering the Irish Rebellion of 1641 of the Papists' "never-ceasing attempts by every kind of means, to bring all things again to subjection to the Church of Rome; their avowed maxim that faith is not to be kept with heretics; their religious principles calculated for the support of despotic power, and inconsistent with the genius of a free constitution".
Throughout her History, Macaulay showed a concern for her subjects' moral character and conduct. Self-interest was in her eyes the worst fault a king or politician was capable of. She criticised "their apparent devotion to politics for personal gain rather than for the advancement of liberty". Her approach was a moralising one as she believed that only a virtuous people could create a republic.
Whigs welcomed the first volumes of the History as a Whig answer to David Hume's "Tory" History of England. However, in 1768, relations between her and the Whigs cooled. Volume four of the history was published; this dealt with the trial and execution of Charles I. Macaulay expressed the view that Charles's execution was justified, praised the Commonwealth of England and revealed republican sympathies. This caused her to be abandoned by the Rockingham Whigs.
Thomas Hollis recorded in his diary (30 November 1763) that "the history is honestly written, and with considerable ability and spirit; and is full of the freest, noblest, sentiments of Liberty". Horace Walpole wrote to William Mason, quoting with approval Thomas Gray's opinion that it was the "most sensible, unaffected and best history of England that we have had yet".
Early in 1769, Horace Walpole recorded dining with "the famous Mrs. Macaulay": "She is one of the sights that all foreigners are carried to see".. However, Walpole later changed his opinion: "The female historian as partial to the cause of liberty as bigots to the Church and royalists to tyranny, exerted manly strength with the gravity of a philosopher. Too prejudiced to dive into causes, she imputes everything to tyrannic views, nothing to passions, weakness, error, prejudice, and still less to what operates oftenest and her ignorance of which qualified her less for a historian—to accident and little motives".
William Pitt praised the History in the House of Commons and denounced Hume's Tory bias. Also approving were Joseph Priestley and John Wilkes. Around 1770, Lord Lyttelton wrote that Macaulay was "a very prodigy", with portraits of her "on every print-seller's counter". There was a Derby figure of porcelain made of her and one of Patience Wright's first life-sized wax figures was of Macaulay. James Burgh wrote in 1774 that Macaulay wrote "for the purpose of inculcating on the people of Britain the love of liberty and their country". The French statesmen Mirabeau, Jacques Pierre Brissot and the Marquis de Condorcet admired the History as a corrective to Hume. In 1798, the French Ministry of the Interior recommended the History in a list of works suitable for school prizes.
Her fame came to an end in 1778 when she remarried, with many of her friends and supporters dropping her. She henceforth disappeared into obscurity, only occasionally re-emerging into the public eye.
Macaulay also wished to write a History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, however only the first volume (covering 1688–1733) was completed.
Politics