BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Catharine Macaulay was a prominent eighteenth-century British defender of Enlightened republican views, the first woman to write an extended history of England, and perhaps the first British woman to spend her adult life in public political controversy. Unusually well-read in history, theology, and philosophy, she was a fervent polemicist on many subjects—taxation, copyright, education, divine benevolence, the French and American Revolutions, constitutional rights, and the subjection of women. Before 1760 few educated women hoped for change in the state of women's legal and domestic submission, or opportunity to influence public opinion on political issues.¹ Catharine Macaulay became one of the first exemplars of an important career for women in the next century: that of polemicist and social reformer.

Catharine Sawbridge was born in 1731 in a wealthy country family near Canterbury. Her father, John Sawbridge, was a recluse and anti-monarchist who had married the daughter of a wealthy London banker; her mother, Elizabeth Wanley Sawbridge, died soon after bearing her four children, when Catharine was still an infant. Virtually nothing is known of her upbringing; a friend who knew her in the 1770's reported that John Sawbridge seldom visited his children, and refused to provide tutors for his two daughters;² the Dictionary of National Biography reports only that at her father's wish she was “privately educated,” an expression which could refer to almost any degree of training or neglect. It is possible that the elaborately schematized program of private co-education which Macaulay later advocated actually represented the form of education she would have liked to receive, but did not. She was however permitted the use of her father's library, and absorbed there the love of classical history and passion for reform which were to direct her life. Her writings reveal a good knowledge of Latin, eighteenth-century French and English literature, some interest in earlier literature (Shakespeare, Chaucer), and wide reading in historical, political, and philosophical works. She was also aided by her younger brother and lifelong intellectual and political ally, John Sawbridge the Younger (1732?-1795), who later became a radical Whig, member of the “Bill of Rights Club,” partisan of the policies of John Wilkes and Charles Fox, and in succession alderman, sheriff, Lord Mayor of London, and member of Parliament. Catharine was forced to pursue kindred political goals in her study.

What may be the first contemporary account of her is the pleased surprise expressed by the more conservative woman intellectual, Elizabeth Carter, when she was approached by a “fine lady” during a Canterbury public assembly:

To be sure I should have been mighty cautious of holding any such conversation in such a place with a professed philosopher and scholar, but as it was a fine, fashionable well-dressed lady, whose train was longer than anybody's train, I had no sort of scruple.³

At twenty-nine Catharine Sawbridge married and moved to London to live with her husband, Dr. George Macaulay. He was a physician in his mid-forties, who served as treasurer to the Brownlow Lying-In Hospital, wrote articles for the London Medical Society, and seems to have had many literary and clerical friends. Remarkably for a man of his time, he did not discourage his learned wife from writing on her favorite subject of history. Three years after her marriage, at thirty-three, she published the first volume of an eight-volume work, The History of England, from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, and volume two followed three years later.⁴

After six years of marriage in 1766 Dr. Macaulay died, leaving his wife to raise their young daughter. Between 1767 and 1771 she completed volumes three, four, and five of the History, and began a series of radical pamphlets which embodied some of her best prose and ideas, including a refutation of Hobbes' authoritarianism in Loose Remarks on … Mr. Hobbes' Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society (1767), and an attack on a pamphlet of Edmund Burke in Observations on a Pamphlet Entitled “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770). These tracts on narrowly defined topics forced her to brevity and provoked a vigorous combination of sarcasm and moral fervor. Her eminence as a reforming historian and her brother's political success brought a wide range of social and intellectual contacts. Contemporary political cartoons often posed “defenders of liberty” by volumes of Macaulay's History, and Pitt is said to have eulogized her work in the House of Commons;⁵ she met and corresponded with contemporary proponents of political reform, such as the exiled Corsican General Paoli and the American patriots Benjamin Franklin, James Otis Warren, John Adams, and George Washington. In the 1770's she moved for her health to Bath, like London a popular social gathering place, and during 1775 visited Paris and met American and French radicals.

The sanctions against any open attack on the institution of the monarchy were however overwhelming, and eventually helped obscure Macaulay's reputation, in spite of her acclaim by intellectual and political allies. Enemies reported that she was a disfigured hag (she was in fact rather handsome), given to excessive ostentation and use of cosmetics (conventional for both upper-class women and men), and a neglectful mother (no evidence). The double affront of intellectual woman and reforming Whig seems to have been peculiarly infuriating to Macaulay's opponents, among them David Hume and the writer, lexicographer, and conversationalist Samuel Johnson, whose opinion of Macaulay in 1776 Boswell recorded as follows:

It having been mentioned, I know not with what truth, that a certain female political writer [Macaulay] whose doctrines he disliked had of late become very fond of dress, sat hours together at her toilet and even put on rouge:—

Johnson: She is better employed at her toilet than using her pen. It is better she should be reddening her own cheeks than blackening other people's character.⁶

Earlier Boswell had patronized Macaulay with the remark that after a “very cordial, polite meeting” with her on legal matters, “She gave me a good breakfast, like any other woman.”⁷ The most frequently recounted anecdote about Macaulay, however, reverberates with the biases of all concerned: Johnson's proud narration of his ‘refutation’ of her views.

He again insisted on the duty of maintaining subordination of rank. ‘Sir, I would no more deprive a nobleman of his respect, than of his money. … Sir, there is one Mrs. Macaulay in this town, a great republican. One day when I was at her house, I put on a very grave countenance, and said to her, “Ma'am, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, Madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us.” I thus, Sir, shewed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine. She has never liked me since.⁸

Johnson's biographers do not record her response, so to what extent Johnson “shewed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine” is left to the reader's imagination. It is of course true that she advocated abolition of aristocratic wealth and privilege but was no Digger. Her “equality” offered little hope to the nineteen out of twenty British subjects who were illiterate and impoverished.⁹

An oblique answer to Johnson may nevertheless have been provided by her second marriage in 1778 to William Graham, a twenty-one year old surgeon's mate without rank or wealth. Almost all who knew her were scandalized and affronted by this union, and it virtually ruined her public career. Only the American Mercy Otis Warren made the obvious defense in a letter to John Adams:

Doubtless that lady's Independency of spirit led her to suppose she might associate for the remainder of her life with an inoffensive and obliging youth with the same impunity with which a gentleman of three-score and ten might marry a damsel of fifteen.¹⁰

William Graham seems to have been a helpful and attentive companion who defended her reputation after death, and later became a clergyman. After her marriage, Macaulay retired to Berkshire, where she completed volumes six, seven, and eight of the History.

During the 1780's Macaulay was diverted from her original plan by the desire to write a history of the American revolution, and to this end she continued correspondence with many American patriots. She travelled to America in 1785 and visited for ten days with George Washington and his wife at Mt. Vernon. It is particularly sad that she did not live to complete her history of the revolution, for it was an ideal topic for someone with her erudition, extentsive knowledge of earlier seventeenth and eighteenth century revolutions, and passionate committment to the republican cause. In 1791-92 the History of England was translated into French under the impetus of the French Revolution, but received almost no attention from historians after the late eighteenth century.

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

The preface to volume one of The History … mixes republican fervour with apologetic concern for the work's reception: she wishes to narrate parliament's resistence to the Stuarts' many efforts to consolidate royal prerogative, and in the process “excite that natural love of freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being …” (vii). She is confident of her motives, and her ability to “measure the virtue of … characters” (I, ix):

There remains nothing now but to assure my readers that I … shall finish this morsel of history having nothing so much in view as the investigation of truth …

(I, xvii)

If the goodness of my head may justly be questioned, my heart will stand the test of the most critical examination.

(I, ix)

She expresses one justified fear, that bigotry against her as a woman will discount her accomplishment:

The invidious censures which may ensue from striking into a path of literature rarely trodden by my sex, will not permit a selfish consideration to keep me mute in the cause of liberty …

(I, x)

The History's chief defect and hindrance to repriting is its overwhelming length (3549 pages), a problem it shares with David Hume's History of Great Britain.¹² Incidents, even whole volumes, are dramatic in themselves, but repetition numbs, and the reader is soon convinced that monarchy is often oppressive and ruinous.

Nevertheless the History is an impressive work. Macaulay blends overwhelming documentation with vigorous argument, and the fluent periods of her style adjust skillfully to shifts in topic and fortune. Her prose is precise and impassioned, and she enters past controversies with a carefully differentiated sense of administrative and legal reality. Macaulay's History is essentially a moral allegory, which often convinces by its persistent acuity and narrative skill. She is good at recording ironies: that the Presbyterian faction which repressed Independent opposition to the restoration of Charles II was ruthlessly destroyed by Charles in turn; or that the open and stolidly consistent behavior of James II, not the more extravagant and personally vindictive policies of his brother, brought ruin to the Stuarts. She finds it especially bitter that Parliament ceded to William of Orange at the peak of its power rights denied his predecessors in sixty years of struggle. She also condemns Cromwell's betrayal of the democratic impulses that had helped create him:

He deprived his country of a full and equal system of liberty, at the very instant of fruition … and, by a fatal concurrence of circumstances, was enabled to obstruct more good and occasion more evil than has been the lot of any other individual.

(V, 213-14)

She is adept at portrayal of courageous victims of repression—Algernon, Sidney, Henry Vane, John Hampden, Robert Greville, and members of the Long Parliament—and her sympathy for those who face pain and death crosses ideological and confessional lines. She is angered when Quakers are forced to submit to oaths, Millenarians and Covenanters shot by royal soldiers, and Levellers destroyed by Cromwell; in general she sees small evangelical groups as heroic, if unwise, victims of their more propertied and sophisticated opposition. She is respectful of Charles I's conduct on the scaffold, but no more distressed by royal than other execution, and her portrait of James II as a weak but suffering man evokes unexpected sympathy. She contemns the petty viciousness of the captors of the Duke of Monmouth:

… he trembled, fainted, and burst into tears; circumstances calculated to extract sympathy from beings liable to similar imperfections, and similar misfortunes, but which served as matters of insolent triumph to the bitterness of faction, who had the meanness to insult over the transient weakness of a man harassed with terror and vexation, and who had not slept for three nights, nor tasted food for three days.

(VIII, 99)

She also condemns Charles II for raising the price of food for the poor by prohibiting importation of Irish cattle, and expresses disgust at praise for the Duke of Albermarle's willingness to blow up his ship rather than surrender, accurately noting that “an idea of military honour … can exist in an individual, without the association of any other principle of honour …” (VI, 200). She is an opponent of nascent British imperialism, who favors the Dutch republic in their war with Charles II and writes several-hundred page accounts of the subjugation of Ireland, Scottish resistence to British religious domination, and the wars between Dutch republicans and William of Orange, all small histories in themselves.

She often pauses to comment on previous interpretations: she disapproves of Clarendon's defense of royal absolutism,¹³ is impressed by Andrew Marvell's history of the Long Parliament,¹⁴ and evenhandedly attacks David Hume's unequivocal sympathy for William of Orange and Whig enthusiasm for Oliver Cromwell. In the final volume she expresses her judgment of the fall of the Stuarts:

If we take a view of the turbulent reign of Charles the First, and the government of Charles the Second, it will lead us to discover, that of all moral evils, the convulsions of civil discord not excepted, there are none which bear any proportion to those which arise from the stability of power in corrupt hands …

(VIII, 64)

Pointedly, she also notes that the long and painful struggles between parliament and the Stuarts have been succeeded by similarly protracted conflicts between parliament and the heirs of William and Mary:

… as it is impossible for an historian not initiated in the sacred mysteries of ministerial craft to give any satisfactory account of that complicated system of corruption by which the affairs of this country has been conducted through the seventeenth century, it is fully sufficient to observe that it has banished from the helm of government every species of abilities but those which belong to financiering; that is, a dexterity in devising new modes of pecuniary oppression, and a skillful use of the public money for the destruction of that independence in parliament on which the security and safety of the people necessarily depend.

(VIII, 334)

Her preface to the sixth volume (published in 1781), is much blunter than that to the first (1763). She protests that her History has been attacked for its honest depiction of evil in power: were the ideal historian to arise, “… all the imperfect sons of earth among the living would clamor in behalf of the guilty dead” (v). With asperity, she remarks that the biases of David Hume's history are largely the accepted view because they “fall in with the prejudices of the prevailing faction in this country” (VI, vi), and suggests a reason for the later discontinuance of her own History: her hopes that it would persuade others to follow “our illustrious ancestors” in their attempts to curtail royal privilege have been disappointed:

… I vainly hoped that the conviction of uncontrovertable argument, founded on fact, would, in a series of time, … incline the people to consider the objects of their proper interest, and that all ranks would unite in the laudable and generous attempt of “fixing dominion's limits to its proper end” of realizing all those advantages in our mixed form of government, which experience has found to be only theoretical … This, without any unconstitutional design, or any wild enthusiastic hope of being able to influence the minds of a nation in favour of a democratic form of government, … is the grand aim of my writings …”

(VI, vii)

Later, she suggests that England's political liberties in the 1760's are more abridged than under the Stuarts—a century of history wasted in impasse—and the final remarks of volume eight contemplate revolution:

… our large armies on the continent, our numerous subsidies to German princes, and the corruptions which prevailed through the whole system of administration, whilst they have filled the pockets of needy contractors, and swelled to an enormous heighth the lucrative appendages to office, oppressed the nation with such an additional burden of taxes and debt, as to forbid hopes of salvation, but from a circumstance so out of the ordinary course of sublunary affairs as to render it a perfect miracle in political history, viz. a patriot king and a patriot ministry co-operating with the body of the people to throw off the shackles of septennial parliaments, to reinstate the people in their constitutional right of election, and, by this means, to introduce such a rigid plan of economy, as may, in a process of time, in a great measure, restore the wasted finances of the country.

(VIII, 335-36)

In summary, Macaulay's History was the first comprehensive anti-royalist history of its time, and by far the most detailed vindication of English opposition and dissent. With great skill, she succeeded in integrating millions of facts into an interesting and coherent narrative; much of her material was new to her audience, and the forthrightness with which she set forth her biases was exemplary. Documents are usually permitted to speak for themselves, and obvious interpretation acknowledged. The work's emphasis on individual character inevitably simplifies history, but she exhibits an unusual ability to grasp the human meaning of complex and painful facts. Often when she is homiletic, as with such figures as Charles II and Cromwell, her sense of justice and judgments have been largely confirmed by subsequent historians. Her revisionist History provided an alternative both to the narrowly sectarian religious accounts of the previous century and to more accepted royalist histories, and was an important achievement in eighteenth century historiography and political thought.

LETTERS ON EDUCATION

Shortly before her death at sixty in 1791, Macaulay wrote her most reflective and original work, Letters on Education (1790): its vigorous Whig radicalism and appearance in a period of personal disfavor and political reaction no doubt helped contribute to its neglect. The revolutionary advocacy of equal education for women in Letters on Education, Part I (pp. 1-234), substantially influenced Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.¹⁵ Part II (pp. 235-336) contains the longest sustained statement of her views on history and the proper nature of society, and Part III (pp. 367-407) is a revision of an earlier theological treatise On the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783).

In addition to its revolutionary prescription of sexual egalitarianism, Part I of the Letters offers a thorough discussion of the relationship between learning and society, in the tradition of Milton's Of Education (1644), John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1696), Rousseau's Emile (1762), Helvetius' De l'Homme, … de son education (1773), and Madame de Genlis' Adele et Theodore (1782). Macaulay consciously debates her predecessors, itemizes points of difference and agreement, and offers an urbane and reflective Whig alternative to their educational ideals.

The Letters are of course indebted to Locke, Rousseau, and de Genlis. Macaulay discusses similar topics and shares certain assumptions: children should not be beaten, bundled, overprotected, permitted luxuries, or made dependent on servants, but taught through encouragement of natural interests; like Locke and others, she identified such preferences with prescripts of “nature.” Macaulay is more lenient than Locke, but more programatic and scholarly than Rousseau. Like Locke she emphasizes the efficacy of personal example, the need to adapt education to temperament, and the importance of trusting children as rational beings. Like Rousseau she would limit meat-eating, encourage compassion for animals, and postpone religious discussion, but warn children in advance of the evils of the world. Unlike Rousseau, she credits children with judgment and emotions: they are to be treated with kindness, and befriended in an expectation that they will behave as responsible and significant beings. Locke's ideal student might become an entrepreneur, Rousseau's a scientist, and Macaulay's a humanitarian intellectual like herself. All three schemes assume tutors, servants, books, travel, and leisure, and clearly are designed for people of wealth; nevertheless, Macaulay's unusual mixture of highminded ambition and simple benevolence makes Part I of the Letters an independent contribution to the history of educational thought.

Like most contemporaries who surveyed the field (including Wollstonecraft), Macaulay condemns almost all literature written for children, but she reserves special contempt for the “virtue is the path to success” genre. She is conscious that the good do not seem to inherit much of the earth, and argues against Helvetius, Rousseau, and others that children should not be taught to perform for extrinsic rewards. She is similarly suspicious of “the constant union of virtue with personal charms,” which “… teaches the young mind always to look for virtue where it is, perhaps, for very obvious reasons, the seldomest to be met with” (p. 54).¹⁶

The most radical and original feature of this scheme is its demand for coeducation. The Letters contained the most comprehensive analysis thus far of the crushing legal, social, intellectual, and moral disability of women of all classes:

For with a total and absolute exclusion of every political right to the sex in general, married women, whose situation demand [sic] a particular indulgence, have hardly a civil right to save them from the grossest injuries. …

(p. 210)

She was also very likely the first writer in western cultural history to draw up a sustained indictment of the assumption that there are innate sexual differences. Timidity and inanity, alleged as evidence of women's incapacity for education, simply reflect its denial:

… all those vices and imperfections which have been generally regarded as inseparable from the female character, do not in any manner proceed from sexual causes, but are entirely the effects of situation and education.

(p. 202)

A ‘separate-but-equal’ education must be rejected. Mingling the sexes works against prudery, and helps make it clear to male children that their sisters are their equals:

Your sons will look for something more solid in women, than a mere outside; and be no longer the dupes to the meanest, the weakest, and the most profligate of the sex. They will become the constant benefactors of that part of their family who stand in need of their assistance; and in regard to all matters of domestic concern, the unjust distinction of primogeniture will be deprived of its sting.

(p. 50)

Perhaps her lifelong friendship with her brother seemed to her a model of enlightened contrast to such “unjust distinction[s].”

Macaulay begins Part II of the Letters on Education with an interpretive summary of past cultures. Opposed to aristocratic indulgence and waste, she uncritically accepts other distinctions of rank and wealth: the “bulk of people” need an education to prevent injurious behavior, but “the great and opulent,” the “higher class of citizens” (p. 237) must be educated so that they may set a good example and frame just laws. An oblique virtue of her class-bias is the refusal to patronize the “sauvagerie” then fashionable in reforming circles; she is immune to arguments such as Rousseau's that peasants digest food more rapidly than their masters, and ‘savages’ lead lives free of demanding labor or significant occupation.

In Whig-reformist juxtaposition to this unconscious elitism are the many sincere professions of belief in human equality. She derides philosophical attempts to rank varieties of human beauty or habitation, and castigates racist notions of merit and beauty:

Others … give to their one colour only, the quality of external beauty; and they persuade themselves, that the swarthy inhabitants of India and Africa, are a degree below them in the scale of intelligent Nature.

(p. 257)

The Society for Effecting Abolition of the Slave Trade was established in 1787, and contemporary reformers were preoccupied with the barbarism of slavery; even Samuel Johnson opposed slavery and is reported to have once offered a toast to the next insurrection in the West Indies,¹⁷ and Macaulay correctly cites West-Indian slavery as perhaps the most savage atrocity of her time (p. 254).

Macaulay's tone throughout Part II of Letters is an interesting mixture of robust puritan theism, admiration for Scipionic virtue, and gentle, almost pietistic benevolence. The prose warms noticeably when she turns to more practical forms of ‘art’: cooking is an art of “judicious mixture” and “adding flavour by fire” (p. 301) and gardening, “the pleasing art of ornamenting nature by a judicious arrangement of its rich productions” (p. 303). Adornment of the landscape is a civic duty: every cottager should plant a garden, and every aristocrat a park. In other passages she condemns the “frivolity” of art (pp. 299, 309-10), but her belief in the moral utility of beauty emerges when more important sensibilities are touched. Her ardor for the eighteenth-century englischen Garten at times approaches a pre-Romantic view of the renovating power of Nature, though she conventionally prefers it “in a pleasing dress” (p. 304):

… nothing more tends to chase away that melancholy enthusiasm which is always attendant on the serious passions, than the beautiful face of nature in a pleasing dress. If a whole country was ornamented to the highest point of perfection which art can attain, it might operate to bring into being that golden age which never did yet exist but in the dream of poets.

(p. 304)

Part III of Letters on Education is a revision of her earlier A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1784) and contains a heated attack on contemporary theodicies, an appreciative critique of the Stoics, and a defense of “moral necessity” against free-will. It is rather striking how easily this eighteenth century “Christian” theist was able to define her religion in Boethian detachment from Christ, sin, Jewish history and revelation. Christianity becomes a synonym for the “… abstract fitness of things, the unlimited power, wisdom, and goodness of God, and a future state of reward and punishment” (p. 453).

The most passionate arguments in Part III are directed against William King¹⁸ and Henry St. John Viscount Bolingbroke. Each had argued that human and divine morality are unrelated, and that God in the fulness of his nature may sanction evil. Bolingbroke had also denied immortality, which excited Macaulay's anger, and she is as preoccupied with her own vindication of immortality as with King's theodicy or the “immutability of moral truth.”

Dr. King's treatise, De Origine Mali, (1702) was translated into English as An Essay on the Origin of Evil … (1731). In it King attempted to reconcile evil with the alleged omnipotence and benevolence of the deity; a fifth edition of the translation had appeared in 1781, so it was evidently an influential work. Bolingbroke's Fragments or Minutes of Essays had been published posthumously in 1754, and an edition followed in 1777. Macaulay saw King as a chief source for Bolingbroke, and the latter in turn as one of orthodoxy's most powerful and dangerous opponents (pp. 360-61). She asserted that Pope's “Essay on Man” derived from Bolingbroke's arguments, an assumption which stood for many years until recently refuted by Maynard Mack.¹⁹

In The Great Chain of Being, Arthur Lovejoy trenchantly comments on the bizarre interpretations given to principles of plenitude and continuity by King and other necessitarian optimists of the period, and ironically compares King's optimsim with early Buddhist pessimism.²⁰ No one who has read Parts I and II of Letters on Education will doubt that Macaulay was deeply stirred by a perception of the suffering and cruelty of sentient life. Her arguments against King's smug acceptance of evil are the more impassionate and bitter for their own disquiet. Part I opens with an aggressive attack on human cruelty, conceit, and the refined selfishness of philosophers who admire the brutality of nature from the detachment of their writing desks:

… it raises in me a mixed sentiment of contempt and anger, to hear the vain and contradictory creature, man … dealing out a severe and short mortality to the various tribes of his fellow animals, and assigning to himself an eternity of happiness, beyond even the reach of his imagination.

(p. 2)

In Part I she also urges restricted consumption of meat and the invention of less brutal methods of slaughter.

If brutes were to draw a character of man, … do you think they would call him a benevolent being? No, their representations would be somewhat of the same kind as the fabled furies and other infernals in ancient mythology. Fortunately, for the reputation of the species, the brutes can neither talk nor write …

(p. 121)

If humans are destined for immortal life, she argues, why not animals? Does ‘reason’ count for all that?

She argues further in Part I that children should have the opportunity to practice kindness on animals, for remembrance of benevolent actions provides “a kind of store, on which the mind feeds, when in want of consolation from the pressure of present pain” (p. 124). Later she asserts that young people should be warned of human deception, greed, and savagery, in language whose pessimism does not fall far short of Hobbes':

Man, in the early ages of society, fed on man; and there is no violence which this being, who boasts that he is governed by reason, has not committed against his own species, whenever they have been found in opposition to his fancied interest … Not to mention the treatment given by some of [sic] own countrymen to their African slaves …

(p. 190)

Here she insists that she does not despair of reforms, for “God has made man capable of arriving at a high degree of perfection,” but her theistic meliorism founders utterly on the cold and obvious perception that slaughter pervades all of nature:

That line of destruction which regularly runs through animal nature is a phenomenon the most difficult to be accounted for of any which the divine economy presents.

(p. 196)

In Part III, Macaulay responds to King's notorious arguments that all existence is a blessing, all life a gift, and wars God's ordination for population control: “… some creatures live so short a time that they may be said to be born only to die” (p. 335), and the good shepherd does not decimate the flock. In fact, she suspects with others that those who calmly rationalize others' sufferings may be content to see them unrelieved (p. 417). Lovejoy's Voltairean comments on the eighteenth-century intellectuals' placet for endless cycles of natural suffering are in the same spirit:

As for the lion's victim, if it were a rational animal it doubtless would, or at all events should, rejoice as does its Maker in the thought of the agreeable exercise which it is affording the “genius” of the lion. If the victim be not endowed with reason, or be too mean-spirited to take a large philosophical view of the matter, the consoling insight into the higher meaning of its sufferings is still, through the happy ordering of things, left to be enjoyed vicariously by optimistic archbishops.²¹

Macaluay's strictures against divine evil are successful, but they involve her in the ancient necessity of claiming that this is in some arcane sense a ‘good’ world, or accepting that a beneficent deity does not exist. She herself has just argued with considerable eloquence against the former, and takes refuge against the latter in the classical defense of obscurum per obscuriora, “… that this part of the system of providential government lies quite outside of the depth of human knowledge to comprehend …” (p. 356). The central arguments of Part III in fact resemble the necessitarian ones she has just rebutted, and tend to support the argument of necessary vitiation she has attacked: “… evil was intentionally mixed with the draught of life to produce good …” (p. 387). The question is obviously begged; why did not God create beings both perfect and immortal? She canvasses the usual arguments that suffering may be intended to improve the virtuous, but cannot repress an observation that such intervention may be rigoristic and ill-timed: “But this happens at a period of … life [just prior to death], when the correction of his nature can be of no service to himself or to others on this stage of existence … (p. 393).

Macaulay deserves sympathy for the enormity of her task, and her discussion of the problem of evil embodies most of the ambiguities and difficulties of Enlightened theism; some defenses are anguished, others evasive, and still others vigorous and ingenious. She cooly observes and describes many aspects of a vicious social order and yearns for a hypostatically rational and benevolent Being to right them, but refuses to accept that this can be the capricious demiurge of King and Bolingbroke. Her rhetorical phrases about the goodness of creation are dutiful and sincere, but her pleas for the necessity of benevolence against the horrors of existence more intensely felt. Such controlled distress makes this obscure pedagogical-theological treatise by a troubled and discerning woman at times a strongly moving document. Catharine Macaulay failed to find answers to the familiar question:

How came the beneficient giver of so many rich and valuable gifts, to suffer mental and bodily disease? how came he to suffer guilt, remorse, and all the numerous train of evils which accompany sin and death, thus to deform his works?

(p. 338)

Her quest was obviously foredoomed to fail, but not for want of restless energy and discursive intelligence in the search. Macaulay was a cogent moralist, and her indignation at human perversity was compassionate, immediate, and precise. Her theism is an intense but idiosyncratic effort to reconcile Christian thought with Enlightened principles, and her remarkable fusion of pioneering feminism, ‘Roman’ virtue, cautious egalitarianism, and Russellian “kindly feelings” make Letters on Education a striking document of British intellectual history.

AN EVALUATION

Catharine Macaulay's position in the history of eighteenth century political and cultural life has never been adequately recognized. She remained a somewhat isolated figure in Enlightenment and radical thought, possibly in part because of her sex and feminist views, possibly because she died before she could confront the more dramatic events of the 1790's. Only one brief biographical sketch of her has appeared in the twentieth century, and this is vitiated by obvious distaste for both her principles and her writing.²² Her History of England is a convincing and eloquent attempt to interpret a moral pattern within history, a work of striking sophistication by a virtually self-instructed woman, and her political, social, and theological views reveal both erudition and an ability to apply it to contemporary issues. Her political interests and reforming spirit distinguish her from most scholars and ‘Bluestockings’ of the period such as Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Montague, and Hannah More,²³ and from all but a few of the many women writers of gothic and sentimental fiction. All political activity was closed to her, but her scholarly defense of republicanism and constitutional liberties did significantly affect English radical and pre-French revolutionary thought in the 1760's and 70's.

As a major influence on Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and exemplar for Wollstonecraft's career as a radical woman polemicist, Macaulay was an original contributor to the rise of feminist ideas. Wollstonecraft writes of her in the Vindication that:

The very word respect brings Mrs. Macaulay to my remembrance. The woman of the greatest abilities, undoubtedly, that this country has ever produced.—And yet this woman has been suffered to die without sufficient respect being paid to her memory.

Posterity, however, will be more just; and remember that Catharine Macaulay was an example of the intellectual acquirements supposed to be incompatible with the weakness of her sex.²⁴

Posterity has not been more just, and Catharine Macaulay remains a significant but unacknowledged contributor to feminist thought and persuasive advocate for human liberation and social justice.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the views of educated women before 1760, see Myra Reynolds' comprehensive The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920).

2. The only contemporary biographical account of Macaulay appears in Mary Hay's Female Biography: or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, Of All Ages and Countries (Philadelphia: Byrd and Small, 1807), who states that she obtained information for her memoir from ‘the late Mrs. Arnold of Leicester’ (III, 158).

3. Elizabeth Carter, A Series of Letters Between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from the Year 1741 to 1770 … (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1809), III, 261.

4. London: J. Nourse, 1763-83. Only a few copies of this work are available in the United States, mostly in libraries in the original thirteen colonies; the University of Iowa generously ordered a microfilm copy for $300.00. Reprinting of selections from the History would seem both desirable and appropriate.

5. Thomas Gray, The Works of Thomas Gray, ed. Edmund Gosse (New York: Worthington, 1890), III, 238. In 1766 the poet Thomas Gray wrote to his friend the Rev. James Brown, “You have doubtless heard of the honour done to your friend Mrs. Macaulay. Mr. Pitt has made a panegyric of her History in the house.”

6. The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Roger Ingpen (Bath: George Baynton, 1925), II, 630.

7. Boswell for the Defense, 1769-1774, ed. William Wimsatt and Frederick Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), April 12, 1773, 179.

8. Life of Johnson, I, 447-48.

9. Johnson's own political views are the subject of critical debate, and may have shifted in his lifetime. The seventh chapter of Donald J. Green's The Politics of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale, 1960), “The Reign of George III (1760-1784),” discusses Johnson's beliefs in this period, and J.P. Hardy has edited a short anthology, The Political Writings of Dr. Johnson, A Selection (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968).

10. Quoted in Lucy Martin Donnelly, “The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay,” William and Mary Quarterly, 6 (1949), 189.

11. The only discussions of Macaulay's History since the eighteenth century are in Donnelly, and Lynne E. Withey, “Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda,” Journal of British Studies (Fall, 1976), 59-83. For comments on Donnelly see note 22. Withey's article attempts to characterize attitudes toward history which recur in several of Macaulay's works.

12. The History of Great Britain, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill, 1754, 57).

13. Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, begun in 1641, with the precedent passages and actions that contributed thereto and the happy end and conclusion thereof by the King's blessed restoration …, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1704).

14. An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England. More particularly from the long prorogation, of November, 1675, ending the 15th. of February 1676, till the last meeting of Parliament, the 16th. of July 1677. Amsterdam, 1677.

15. For a further discussion of Macaulay's influence on Wollstonecraft, see Florence S. Boos, “Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education (1790): An Early Feminist Polemic,” University of Michigan Papers in Women's Studies 2, 2 (1976), 64-78.

16. Page numbers in parentheses are to Letters on Education (London: C. Dilly, 1790). Unavailable since 1790, the Letters were finally reprinted in 1974 (intro. by Gina Luria, New York and London: Garland Press).

17. The incident is recorded in Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George B. Hill (Oxford, 1934), vol. iii, p. 200. For a summary of Johnson's views on slavery, see also vol. ii, “Appendix A,” pp. 476-77.

18. William King (1650-1729), Archbishop of Dublin, was also the author of State of the Protestants in Ireland under the late King James's Government (1691).

19. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1950), xxvi-xxxi.

20. The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (1933; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 216-19.

21. The Great Chain of Being, p. 220. Samuel Johnson's critique of another theodicy, Soames Jenyns' A Free Inquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), is reprinted in Mona Wilson, Johnson: Prose and Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard, 1967), 349-74.

22. Donnelly's “The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay,” collects an interesting array of references to Macaulay in contemporary memoirs and letters, but her tone is intrusively belittling throughout, and she accepts prejudices of Macaulay's critics with no discount for male condescension or political bias. For example, she quotes John Adams:

    Adams none the less knew her learning to be superficial and her views “extremely mistaken of the true construction of government.” In a letter of 1789 to Dr. Price, Adams named her history among “the ill informed favorites” which set their country “running wild and into danger from a too ardent and inconsiderate pursuit of erroneous opinion of government.”

    (p. 194)

    A more conservative thinker, Adams might well have disagreed with a radical Whig, “superficial” or not. Donnnelly's apparent distaste for didactic, political, and religious literature also causes her to condemn Macaulay's moral argumentation out of hand:

    Mrs. Macaulay's Immutability of Moral Truth as a whole is, frankly, without merit—the ideas “borrowed,” the arguments “confused,” the style “embarrassed.” She, however, set great store by it …

    (p. 192)

23. It was Hannah More who later described Mary Wollstonecraft as “a hyena in petticoats.” In her Memoirs she also wrote that Macaulay's daughter, asked whether she liked Shakespeare's King John, replied, “I never read the Kings, ma'am” (2nd ed., 1834, ii, 234). Since “reading the Kings” was exactly what Macaulay had spent much of her life doing, More's anecdote seems dubious.

24. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Charles Hagelman (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 105-106. The passage continues:

    In her style of writing, indeed, no sex appears, for it is like the sense it conveys, strong and clear …

    When I first thought of writing these strictures I anticipated Mrs. Macaulay's approbation, with a little of that sanguine ardour, which it has been the business of my life to depress; but soon heard with the sickly qualm of disappointed hope; and the still seriousness of regret—that she was no more!

    Perhaps not coincidentally, Mary Wollstonecraft's first polemical work, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, was an attack on Edmund Burke, as was Macaulay's earlier “Reply to Burke's Pamphlet Entitled ‘Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’.”