Let us begin by recalling the best-known facts about Catharine Macaulay.¹ She wrote a number of works, of which by far the most prominent is a History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (i.e., that of George I), which appeared in eight volumes between 1763 and 1771 and, after an interval of ten years, 1781. During that interval she began a separate history of England from the revolution of 1688 to her own time in a series of letters to a friend; but she fell out with the friend (on account of her second marriage) and only one volume of this appeared, in 1778. She wrote several political pamphlets, one attacking Edmund Burke for not being radical enough in his criticism of the policies of George III in the 1760s, another for being too conservative in his Reflections on the Revolution in France; there is one essay in straight political theory, in the shape of some reflections on Thomas Hobbes, and some reflections on education which show she had been reading Rousseau. This last may be considered feminist in the limited sense that it is concerned with the education of women, but is of course one of many works written on the same subject, by both women and men, of which some are not to be considered feminist at all and several consider history, her chosen subject, as a branch of literature which women should read. Macaulay is not much interested in this question, but she devoted her life to writing history and did this so well that the historians of her time—nearly all male—were obliged to take her very seriously. She was primarily a woman who crashed her way into the writing of history, normally defined as a specifically masculine activity, and made other readers and writers respect her; not, I submit, because her writing of history has anything specifically female about it but because it is politically most outspoken in ways that caught attention, and still more because she was, quite simply, very good at it. She died aged sixty in 1791, and would certainly not have enjoyed the next ten years if she had lived to see them. There is a growing literature about her,² and a prize has been named after her, but the only detailed study of her historical writings I know is the work of an Italian historian.³

To understand her correctly there is one thing we must constantly bear in mind: she was primarily a historian rather than a social or political theorist; not that she had not political principles of the most articulate kind, or that she could not express them in theoretical form when she wanted to, but that they were in themselves of a kind best articulated in the writing of history. In formal terms, she was a humanist and rhetorician, not a philosopher, theologian, or lawyer. She would have been most eloquent in denying that she was either of the latter two. We must attend to the proposition that the writing of history, as a branch of political argument in eighteenth-century Britain, is the historical context which has to be reconstructed as a field of study if we want to understand Catharine Macaulay's utterance and reception—her discourse in her time.

Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham bore three surnames at different times in her life, one derived from a father and two from husbands. Her contemporaries referred to her as “Mrs. Macaulay,” and certainly no one thought she was, except in law, included in or subject to her husband of that name. We can learn most about her politics by attending to the first of her surnames, the patrilineal name of Sawbridge. The Sawbridges were a London aldermanic family of considerable means, active in City of London politics in ways normally opposed to the ministry in office, whatever it was. They attacked the alliance between high politics and high finance, which usually dominated both London and national politics through the structure of public credit that kept governments solvent and the government's creditors powerful. These governments were usually Whig, conducted by the great families of the Whig aristocracy, and when we call the politics of the Sawbridges and those like them “radical Whig,” we are implicitly appealing to usages of the term like “Old Whig,” “True Whig,” “Real Whig,” “Honest Whig,” which indicated that there was a faction of purists according to whom the Whig aristocracy had deserted the principles of their ancestors. What these principles had been, and how this desertion had happened, was perhaps the main question which Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay wrote her History to answer; but the problem is complicated for us, and for her, by the facts that opposition to Whig ministries was regularly termed Tory, many of the principles of radical-Whig criticism of the regime had been adopted by Tories, and not a few of the authors on whom she relied in writing parts of her history were Tory authors—Davenant, Swift, and Bolingbroke. At the same time, of course, she regarded the Tories as the party of Charles I and James II, the High Church-and-King supporters of non-resistance, hereditary monarchy, and the Church of England ascendancy which excluded dissenters from public life. Her attitudes toward both Tories and Whigs are therefore deeply ambivalent, and she was a good enough historian to know this and to write her History to find out why. We have to understand and in our own way share the ambivalence to understand her; and it needs to be said that she was in no way alone in perceiving that English party history had followed this tangled and contradictory course. The Huguenot historian Paul Rapin Thoyras knew it;⁴ her great antithesis, the sceptically conservative Scot David Hume knew it;⁵ her fellow radical, the London Scottish novelist and historian Tobias Smollett, knew it.⁶ She was sharing a discourse, and a problematic, with others, but the names I have just given indicate that she was, through sheer ability, the only English historian of her generation capable of dealing with the problems. This is why one writer of the day remarks that, “though one of the more delicate part of the creation,” she is one of the only two English historians currently doing serious work—the other was Lord Lyttleton, who had written a life of King Henry II—and that it was her militant adherence to the principles of liberty which had made her one of them.⁷ Edward Gibbon and his friends, about the same time, preferred to advance the names of David Hume and William Robertson, both of whom were Scots.⁸

Aside from her marriages to Scotsmen resident in London, Catharine Macaulay is thoroughly an English figure; is this part of what I have meant by styling her a patriot historian? Not really, because though her sense of nationality is certainly strong, the meaning of the word “patriot” has changed a great deal since she used it of others and it could be used of her. In more than one European language of the eighteenth century, “patriot” had a measurably subversive significance. It meant in the first instance one who loved his or her country more than its ruling family or even its institutions, and might be found rebelling against the king in the king's name, as had happened in the English Civil Wars, or against the monarchy in the name of the nation or the people. As late as 1820, in Byron's Vision of Judgment, the ghost of Junius sums it all up, when confronted with the ghost of George III, by crying to the heavenly hosts: “I loved my country and I hated him.” It is not certain that she hated George III, but she was not far distant from those who did. Richard Price, whom she did know and admire, provoked Burke to write Reflections on the Revolution in France by publishing a Sermon on the Love of our Country, in which he presented this love as a duty and made it clear that it might entail strong support for the French National Assembly and the March to Versailles. The patriot, then, was one who loved his country according to definitions of his own and demanded that others should share the definitions as well as the love. Since Bolingbroke, writing in the 1730s, if not earlier, the term had denoted one opposed on principle to the actions of the king's ministers; this was what moved Dr. Johnson to define patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. The patriot was one whose patria was a common possession, easily identified with those who possessed it; the commonweal or commonwealth, the res publica or republic; and this is the sense in which Catharine Macaulay could be and was described as both a “patriot” and a “republican.” She was what Caroline Robbins taught us to recognize as The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, a term for which no feminine equivalent has been found.

To call her a “republican” does not mean that she desired a kingless form of government, though she admired these when she saw them. She strongly supported the trial and execution of Charles I, and she adopted an interpretation of the revolution of 1688 which affirmed that James II had been deposed by his people and that, in both 1688 and 1714, new kings had been chosen and elected by them. But she had no objection to lodging the executive power in a single person accountable to the law and people, and not much to making that office hereditary instead of elective at every vacancy. It is true that she mistrusted hereditary monarchy as likely to produce dynastic loyalties and court politics, but she thought these defects remediable by the virtue of the people if that could be maintained. To discover in what sense she was a “patriot” and a “republican” we have to look elsewhere, and we can do this by turning to the introduction to her History's first volume.⁹ Here it will appear that she defines the res publica, or political community, as a community of virtue; that the raison d'être of a republic or a democracy is to maintain the level of public virtue; that histories are written in order to praise the memory and hold up the examples of those who have it; that this must be done because any republic contains many—normally including the ignorant vulgar or multitude—who cannot be trusted to maintain virtue, as well as the morally weak who will probably, and the wicked who will certainly, betray it. It will further appear that liberty, which is the liberty to practice virtue, is as much threatened in the England of 1763 as at any other time; and that the historian's function is exemplary and exhortatory, to remind her readers what virtue is and to oblige them to maintain it.

I suspect that it was this character of moral exhortation which made her see the writing of history as the best possible way for a woman to practice public virtue. She did not expect to see women as actors in public affairs, but since at latest the turn of the century they had increasingly been readers of history, histories were by now normally written with women readers in mind; and what they read might teach them to speak, and keep up the flow of exhortations and examples on which the practice of virtue depended. The enterprise was that of involving women in the communication of morally important information which humanist literature had aimed at since the Renaissance; the word was supplementary to the deed, and this was crucial to the gender-relations involved. If women could not act, they could speak and write; and “parole femminili, atti maschi” is a motto of the State of Maryland to this day¹⁰ (the public command of Italian not having got around to challenging it). Macaulay's history, therefore, is strictly and purely humanist, and so are her politics. The end of history is to teach examples of public virtue; the end of politics and liberty is to act on those examples and supply them. The study of character is very important, and so is the study of action; not just because these are the keys to history, but because politics exists to generate people whose virtue is fulfilled in action.

But there are still some unanswered questions. What was a Sawbridge, and what was a woman, doing adopting so unreservedly an ideology based wholly on ancient civic virtue, on a reading of the Greek and Roman classics which she tells us formed her second religion (she does not go into details about her first)? The Sawbridge males were aldermen, Londoners, merchants, and investors; their political radicalism ought therefore—at least if you follow Professor Isaac Kramnick¹¹—to have been bourgeois and progressive, based on the virtues of thrift and industry and on contempt for the leisured class which employed itself in politics. Catharine ought therefore to have written as a modern, a despiser of slaveholding and unproductive antiquity, and to have dismissed admiration of ancient citizenship as the nostalgia of an undercapitalized provincial aristocracy and gentry, hungering for a lost world of patriarchalism, deference, and hierarchy. Now there were value systems abroad in eighteenth-century Britain which were modern in precisely these senses, and though these were mainly deployed on the side of the Whig aristocracy and its new world of commerce and empire, it is possible to find critics of their regime who expounded modern values and wanted to put the ancient world behind them. Had she made her home not in London, but in Birmingham or the Potteries—the homeland of those provincial dissenting industrialists of whom Kramnick writes—she might have written very differently. But she was a Londoner and a republican; she considered civic virtue to be the end of political life and the end of writing history, and it was a consequence that she was both a strong democrat and a strong elitist. She wanted the people to be free of monarchical, aristocratic, and clerical control, in order that they might practice an active civic virtue; but she did not expect them to produce more than a limited number of patriot leaders to set examples to the others. She wanted England to be a republic in order that these patriots might come to the head of affairs, and she wrote history in order to celebrate the patriots of Charles I's reign, the Long and Rump Parliament, and the opposition to Charles II. She was quite clear that the mob, the vulgar, the unlettered multitude, had no virtue of its own and could not be trusted to support the patriotic elite; and in both London and Birmingham, Church-and-King mobs, shouting for constituted authority and burning down dissenting chapels, were phenomena which appeared from time to time. She believed in liberty, but not in equality in our sense of the term, and as for fraternity nobody in England appears to have heard of it before 1789. This is not because she was this or that kind of snob, but because her notion of politics was exclusively centered on the moral personality. She wanted people to be free, not because of what they were but of what they might become: morally free and politically self-determining agents. In a free society, there would be an elite of such citizens; it existed to produce them.

If we enquire from what rank or class in society the patriot elite are to be drawn, we shall probably receive the Aristotelian answer that they will be of the middling sort; neither the aristocracy, great enough to be corrupted by the pursuit of power over others, nor the dependent poor, indigent enough to be corrupted by the power of others over them. Some democrats of the period wanted to extend the franchise in order to bring in more free and independent electors, others wanted to restrict it in order to keep out more who were neither free nor independent; we may wonder which way Macaulay would have leaned. Now this is the eighteenth century, and there are sentences here and there which indicate that the middling rank capable of citizenship will be drawn from those who have created their own wealth by thrift, industry, and the other virtues of capital accumulation. One may of course seize on these sentences to insist that she was a bourgeois radical in an increasingly capitalist society; but perhaps we should wait until we know what she had to say about the gentry, yeomanry, and freeholders of the country, whose liberty and virtue might be grounded on the independence of their tenures and estates. But if we choose to apply the overworked term “bourgeois” to Catharine Macaulay, we will have to admit that it is wholly compatible with a total commitment to a value-scheme of the austerest civic virtue and active citizenship. The strategy of opposing these values to those of urban radicals, and presenting them as the regressive nostalgia of a pre-capitalist landed class, was indeed invented in the eighteenth century itself; but in the twentieth, it has been a historiographical mistake. Catharine Macaulay furnishes an excellent warning against committing it.

But the problem of gender remains. Why should a woman admire the Greco-Roman ideal of citizenship? It was male-centered; it was warrior; it was slaveholding—many London merchants owned West Indian plantations, but I dare say Macaulay disapproved of slavery. It was above all patriarchal, and assumed a rigid separation between the public and private spheres, which (at least in Athens) left the woman confined within the household while the male went out into the assembly to practice citizenship. We might bear in mind that Macaulay read more Roman than Greek history, and that the position of Roman ruling-class women was rather different; but the values were at bottom the same. There of course exists a modern feminist strategy which consists in denying the separation of private from public and—what is not quite the same thing—decentering the primacy of the political on which so much in Western values and philosophy has been founded. Not just the interactions between citizens and decision-takers at the level of public power, but the interactions between humans at all levels of social existence, are shown to have had their political dimension, and the notion of politics as taking place at the public level is exposed to deconstruction as having been a male preserve—which it has been—and as having been invented as a form of male domination¹²—which is not quite as certain.

None of this can be imagined as appealing in the least to Catharine Macaulay. If she had heard of it—which was probably not possible in her time—she would have suspected something sinister behind it. There is no sign that she knew of Mary Astell, but Astell's High Church Toryism would have come under her strongest disapproval, and since she was a militant anti-clerical I can imagine her regarding Astell's feminism as a product of that power of priests, confessors, and spiritual directors over female weakness which she could denounce as readily as any anti-clerical and misogynist male. But the decentering of the political was going on in her time, for reasons not immediately connected with gender (though the connections can be found). It was implicit in the debate over commerce and virtue, which carried with it the suggestions that in a world increasingly commercial, all manner of transactions and interactions between human beings were becoming as important as the classically political and were developing politics of their own. New conceptions of liberty were needed, and the individual might find his or her freedom in the ability to move in this new, sociable, and polite world, developing new cultural and productive capacities under the protection of a stable government which extended over wide areas.¹³ It cannot be too much emphasized that the great writers who expounded this new primacy of social over political—Defoe, Addison, Hume, on the whole Adam Smith—were all supporters of the Whig financial aristocracy which Macaulay incessantly denounced, or that they leant visibly toward the view that women were better placed in modern than in ancient civilized life. David Hume, for example, writes somewhere that modern conversation is superior to ancient, for the reason that women are admitted to it instead of being excluded. I suggest that this is one reason why he could write quite amiably, and not very patronizingly, to Macaulay about their profound differences over English history, remarking in his letter that her notion of liberty was very different from his.¹⁴ That indeed was the point. The decentering of politics had begun, not as a feminist but as a Whig strategy, and was seen as having a relevance to women which Macaulay altogether rejected. There is a question where that leaves her.

I am arguing that she was a patriot, committed to the ancient primacy of civic virtue among the defining human values. Modern feminism on the other hand, in so far as it bases itself on a decentering and redistribution of politics, might seem to derive more from the other side of the great eighteenth-century debate, that which asserted the primacy of commerce over virtue and the social over the political.¹⁵ The advocates of women's education and women's rights might claim a place among the radical bourgeois intellectuals, if you think that term of much use in historical analysis, but Catharine Macaulay will not fit in there. She begins to look like an eighteenth-century Hannah Arendt, a woman wholly committed to the ancient ideal of active citizenship and wholly undeterred by its hyper-intense masculinity. I am tempted to suggest that women political thinkers have faced a hard choice since her time: whether to claim and conquer citizenship, or to deconstruct it; and it is a choice more philosophical than tactical.

The ideology of commerce in her active years was still working on the side of Whig commercial aristocracy, which was supposed to be a major force replacing ancient with modern values. When there first came to be a democratic or feminist radicalism basing itself on the modern and the suppression of the ancient is a complicated question; Mary Wollstonecraft knew Macaulay's works, and greatly admired her. The lines along which we organize the history of eighteenth-century thinking, and of these women as part of it, may seem more important to us than they did to them.

What has Macaulay's History of England to say about women in general or the women who appear in it? The majority of these allusions condemn rather than praise the individuals concerned. This can be largely explained, of course, by noting that most of the women she needs to mention were princesses and queens—Elizabeth I,¹⁶ Henrietta Maria, Mary of Orange, Anne—and therefore involved in upholding that Tudor regime in church and state of which Macaulay heartily disapproved, both because it was monarchical and absolutist and because it was Anglican and ecclesiastical. But she can be equally scathing about women of less than royal rank who intervene in politics or political writing on what she considers the wrong side. There is such an allusion to Margaret duchess of Newcastle,¹⁷ and another to a 1643 riot of London women against the war, which are altogether contemptuous, though counter-balanced by the one woman praised at length—predictably Lady Rachel Russell,¹⁸ wife of the Whig martyr of 1683. It is these cases which make me confident that I know what Macaulay will have thought about Astell if she knew of her; party mattered to her a good deal more than gender. But we find also several disapproving remarks about women in general; there are observations about female weaknesses which strike me as integral and not just conventional in her rhetoric. What I think we have here is that common enough phenomenon, the woman of great character and intelligence who can hold her own anywhere and rather despises the generality of women because they can't, or don't if they can. In Macaulay's case, it is of the same order as her democratic elitism, which made her worship liberty and despise the mob. She believed in the equality of human capacities, and felt contempt for the inequality of human performances. She knew what human virtue was and never altered her definition of it; either you had it, therefore, or you had not. This is more a patriot than a liberal attitude, and large questions open up from that point; a cultural pluralist she certainly was not.

I want now to turn to a rather different historical framework, and examine Macaulay in the context of the literary activity in which she was chiefly engaged, that of English historical and political writing between the accession of George III and the end of the American War. We can look at her in the context of the history of historiography, the craft of historical writing, and here it jumps to the eye that she was a very able practitioner indeed. The rules of historiography in her time were different from what they later became—one worked from printed authorities far more than from manuscript archives—and here she covered the ground; there were very few printed narratives or collections of documents she did not use, and she was one of the first to work in what became the British Museum and Library, and may have had some access to the great Thomason Collection of Civil War and Interregnum pamphlets. As a result, her account of the Army's revolution between 1647 and 1649 is very likely to prove the best written in the eighteenth century and perhaps well into the nineteenth. There are gaps in her knowledge; she does not seem to know that The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth—which she cites—is by John Milton, a hero of hers; but by the standards of 1771 this is to judge her by an exacting set of criteria. She began to publish her History in 1763, the year after David Hume published the final collected version of his History of England—which is the greatest work of its kind in the century—and engages Hume in vigorous and sometimes acid debate. It is clear that Hume took her seriously and that others did. No historian tried pronouncing on her the kind of judgment which John Adams passed on Mercy Otis Warren,¹⁹ that history was no pursuit for a lady; but the point there is that Warren was trying to write history of the most classical kind there was, the narrative of the acts and decisions of statesmen still living, and that Adams, objecting quite justly to her account of his own motivation, was telling her that, as a woman, she hadn't been there and didn't know what it had been like. This kind of history was supposed to be written by a statesman, out of experience. Macaulay, basing on documents and narratives a history of events a century before, was not open to that criticism, and there was nothing about the writing of documented history that she did not know as well as anybody knew it then.

Her History of England, covering a century and published over nearly twenty years, is perhaps the only full-length history of the Stuart period to the Hanoverian accession written from the patriot or Old Whig standpoint; its only competitor from that standpoint is Tobias Smollett's attempt to carry the narrative from 1688, where Hume left off, past her stopping-point into 1714, down to 1760 or later. Macaulay's history has to be compared with Hume's, to which it is antagonistic, and here it must appear less innovative. Hume does employ very complex and sophisticated models of social and mental change in his attempt to account for the seventeenth-century crisis, and Macaulay does not. The reason is that her historiography is still rhetorical and humanist, whereas his is philosophical; she celebrates the triumphs of civic virtue in England and analyzes its corruption, where Hume is seeking the historical causes which established a modern world in which civic virtue is (he believes) no longer possible nor desirable.²⁰ The effect is that the more conservative ideologue is the more innovative historian.

This is not to say that there is anything merely conventional about her volumes; they are very independent indeed. Especially in her history of the Commonwealth period, she is attempting something not undertaken by Hume and not attempted again until William Godwin:²¹ a history of the English republic written by one in sympathy with republican principles. The difficulty here, most of us would say, is to find anyone in regicide England who had a clear set of republican principles, but she boldly asserts that between the execution of the king and Cromwell's dissolution of the Rump Parliament, there was a shining moment in which it would have been possible to erect an English republic and reform the nature of the English people so that they became capable of sustaining one, as in the fallen world of reality they never have been.²² Macaulay does not identify the virtuous patriots, the potential philosopher-legislators of this window of opportunity, but I suspect that we are looking at a Miltonic moment, and that they are the individuals later celebrated by Wordsworth as

the elder Sidney, Marvell, Harrington,
Young Vane and others who called Milton friend,

to whom she would have added the names Marchmont Nedham and Edmund Ludlow. These are the so-called “Commonwealth canon,” brought together about 1700 by John Toland, who wrote Milton's biography, edited the works of Harrington and Sidney, and rewrote Ludlow's memoirs;²³ there is probably a continuity between their religious heterodoxy, Toland's, and the radical unitarianism to which Macaulay may have subscribed. But she describes the closing of the window by the essentially reactionary dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, which was bound to lead to a restoration of the monarchy sooner or later. Macaulay had no insight into Cromwell's character or motivation, but she was not so far wrong about the ultimate effects of his actions.

If Oliver Cromwell is the first lost leader or grand betrayer of Macaulay's radical history, the second is William III. She belonged to a current of thinking that has been traced back very close to 1688 itself,²⁴ according to which the Revolution of that year had disastrously failed to seize the opportunity of reforming politics and renegotiating the powers of the crown. In some hands, such as Smollett's but not hers, this came close to a nostalgic Jacobitism; perhaps it would have been better to keep James II as king and impose limitations upon him, rather than letting William enlarge the crown's authority in an entirely new direction by transforming Britain into a powerful military monarchy perpetually engaged in European wars, which is what republicans like Andrew Fletcher, Tories like Jonathan Swift, and Jacobites like Thomas Carte all came to believe had happened. Macaulay held that the danger of a Stuart despotism by absolute prerogative rule had given way to the much greater, more subtle, and more subversive danger of the corruption of parliamentary virtue by the influence of the crown, exercising the awesome patronage which it derived from a civil list, the maintenance of a professional army, and a system of public credit which kept the nation forever in debt. These were the themes of eighteenth-century political argument, and there were few—even David Hume himself—who did not accept this thesis to some extent.

Like others, Macaulay is not saying simply that an opportunity of limiting the crown's powers was lost in 1688-89; she is saying that a major historical change occurred then, with the result that these powers greatly increased. This change was in part the result of William of Orange's dynastic ambitions; you may find in her subtext the hint that the aim of putting a stop to the dangers presented by James II did not have to be attained by making William a king, least of all on his terms. This unites the Tory and Jacobite contention that James might have been kept on the throne with the ultra-Whig contention that the monarchy might have been made more truly conditional and elective than it had been. She further holds that this vast increase in the crown's patronage and influence was made possible by England's and Scotland's involvement in the great European war conducted by William against Louis XIV, an involvement which—as she rightly sees—it was William's objective to bring about when he landed in England with his army. Here she is carrying on what is known as the blue-water rhetoric which various Tory oppositions had kept up throughout the reigns of Anne and the first two Georges, insisting that Britain ought not to fight great wars in Europe, which corrupted the state and increased the public debt, but should grow great at sea and by commerce instead. As far back as 1620, speaking of the war which James I failed to fight for the liberation of Protestant Germany, she says it was the only continental war in which England should ever have been engaged.²⁵ This rhetoric upheld the republican dream of keeping the commonwealth virtuous and free from corruption, as well as the widespread perception that professional armies and systems of public credit were great new historical forces which were transforming and perhaps corrupting the political life of Britain and Europe. Macaulay perceived 1688 as beginning a process through which parliaments down to her own time had grown increasingly subject to the corrupting influence of an over-militarized and over-financed executive branch, but the rhetoric she is using was historically Tory rhetoric, though structurally unconnected with that of divine right and hereditary succession, and had been used by Tories since the reign of William III. Most of the authors she cites in tracing the growth of corruption are Tory, and she cannot quite admit how many of her republican doctrines have passed through a Tory filter before reaching her.

I am emphasizing all this because it is the way to placing Macaulay in the history of British political rhetoric and ideology. The Sawbridge connection were London commonwealth radicals who had long maintained political positions, shot through with republican Old Whig language, which were Tory in the sense that they were persistently hostile to the Whig parliamentary regime. They had been ardent supporters of the elder William Pitt,²⁶ whom they had seen as winning great victories in America for the patriot and blue-water cause, but had watched him being isolated, defeated, and bought off by George III and his new ministers. The last pages of Macaulay's History give an account of his corruption.²⁷ They identified the king with a sinister Scottish faction led by the earl of Bute, who were supposed to be restoring Stuart absolutism by means of Hanoverian corruption; this accounts for Macaulay's evident animus—in spite of her married surname—against the Scottish nation, and her insistence that the process of corruption has reached its climax as she is writing, and that virtue is making its last stand against the faction's plans to bring back despotism. In the United States thirty years earlier, the enemies of Alexander Hamilton would be talking in precisely the same way.²⁸ She was as hostile as ever to the Whig aristocracy now partly alienated from the crown, and her anger against Edmund Burke stems from her perfectly accurate perception that he was trying to mobilize opposition to George III in support of that group among the great Whig families who had been excluded from office; she saw all that as part of the system.

The Sawbridge connection and many others like them—David Hume called them “those insolent rascals in London and Middlesex,”²⁹ but they were important in Yorkshire and the provinces generally—emerged as a radical opposition in the years before and during the American crisis, the years in which the History of England was written and published. Their language was sometimes extremely violent, and a latent anti-Hanoverian traceable to their Tory antecedents merged with their insistence that England—they did not address the Scots except to detest them—was an elective monarchy and potentially a republic. There was no longer either a Jacobite or a republican alternative, and yet one feels that the throne of George III was not fully secure. In a valuable book called Disaffected Patriots³⁰ John Salisbury has traced how the London aldermanic opposition tried to unify their discontents with those of the American colonists, and how utterly destructive to their cause the Declaration of Independence turned out to be. Just what they were trying to achieve the student of Catharine Macaulay would have to decide—it may have more to do with the religious infrastructure to her thinking than I have found time to indicate—but whatever it was, they were defeated and there is a sense in which her History of England is part of the last hurrah of mid-Georgian radical opposition. The political nation rallied to George III; Hume had feared that the London democrats would provoke the absolutist response they were always talking about, but what happened was that by 1784 the king had recovered the leadership of Parliament and kept it for the rest of his life. Patriotism, in the sense in which one uses the term of Macaulay, was a lost cause. It did not disappear; it persisted as part of the rhetoric of the next fifty years; but the ideological climate of British politics was already changing by the time of the French Revolution, and after that—remember that she died in 1791—new kinds of radicalism and conservatism began to be born. The mental world of Mary Wollstonecraft is already very different from that of Catharine Macaulay—less classical, less rhetorical, less theatrical. One does not feel that Wollstonecraft wanted to be a Roman matron or a Goddess of Liberty, but Macaulay of course dressed the part; and in Wollstonecraft one finds an authentic feminism, born of Rousseau and her own revolt against Rousseau, which belongs to another world than Macaulay's. The heirs of the latter were the friends of Mr. Fox and the guardians of his flame, not Godwin's.

Notes

1. Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

2. Barbara Brandon-Schnorrenburg, “The Brood Hen of Faction: Mrs. Macaulay and Radical Politics, 1767-75,” Albion 11, 1 (1979): 33-45; “Observations on the Reflections: Macaulay Graham v. Burke, Round Three,” in The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850: Proceedings, 1987, eds. Warren Spencer and Ellen Evans (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 215-25; “An Opportunity Missed: Catharine Macaulay on the Revolution of 1688,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 20 (1990): 231-40; Natalie Zemon Davis, “History's Two Bodies,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 231-40.

3. Rolando Minuti, “Il problema storico della liberta inglese nella cultura radicale dell'età di Giorgio III: Catharine Macaulay e la rivoluzione puritana,” Rivista Storica Italiana 98, 3 (1986): 793-860.

4. His Histoire d'Angleterre appeared in English translation in 1725-31; his Dissertation on the Whigs and Tories in 1721. See Rolando Minuti, “Il problema costituzionale nell'Histoire d'Angleterre di Rapin Thoyras,” Studi Settecenteschi 5 (1984): 49-107.

5. His History of Great Britain in six volumes appeared between 1754 and 1762. See Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (Historians on Historians Series; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989).

6. His History of England from the Revolution of 1688 to the Death of George II, intended as a continuation of Hume, appeared in 1763. I know no specialized study of Smollett as a historian.

7. James Parsons, Remains of Japhet, being historical enquiries into the affinity and origin of the European languages (London, 1767), xxi-xxii.

8. [Edward Gibbon and Georges Deyverdun], Mémoires Littéraires de la Grande Bretagne pour l'an 1767 (London, 1768), 29. For Macaulay see p. 27.

9. History of England, i, xii-xxviii.

10. It was previously the motto of the Calvert family.

11. Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

12. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Patricia Springborg, Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

13. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

14. R. Klibansky and E. Mossner, eds., New Letters of David Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 81-82.

15. Minuti (“Il problema storico,” 820, n. 91) quotes a passage in which her judgment on the moral and historical effects of commerce inclines to the negative side.

16. “The vices of this princess were such as could not exist with a good heart, nor her weaknesses with a good head: but to the unaccountable caprice of party-zeal she owes the reputation of qualities that would do honour to a masculine mind” (History, i, 2).

17. History, iv, 120-21 (footnote).

18. History, vii, 444-46. Lois G. Schwoerer, Lady Rachel Russell: One of the Best of Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

19. Author of A History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (Boston, 1805); correspondent and friend of Catharine Macaulay.

20. Phillipson, Hume, and Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

21. A History of the Commonwealth of England, 4 vols. (London, 1824-28). See John Morrow, “Coleridge and the English Revolution,” Political Studies 40, 1 (1988): 128-41.

22. The closest study of her treatment of this theme is in Minuti's article, “Il problema storico.”

23. Macaulay's Ludlow is certainly Toland's. See Blair Worden, ed. and intro., A Voyce from the Watchtower (London: Royal Historical Commission, 1978).

24. Mark Goldie, “The Roots of True Whiggism,” History of Political Thought, 1, 12 (1980): 195-236.

25. History, i, 148.

26. Marie C. Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

27. History, viii, 335.

28. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

29. J. Y. T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), ii, 303.

30. Disaffected Patriots: London Radicals and Revolutionary America (Kingston and Montreal: Queen's-McGill University Press, 1987).