Scholarly Writing #7: Regrounding Liberty: Moral Philosophy in Catharine Macaulay’s Later Thought

Having examined in earlier reflections Macaulay’s authority, public image, and the politics of her reputation, this essay argues that her later turn to moral philosophy was not a departure from her historical and political writing, but a crucial attempt to secure its intellectual foundations. Writing in the aftermath of public scandal and the destabilization of her authority, Macaulay increasingly foregrounded questions of virtue, free will, and moral truth as a means of grounding her earlier commitments to liberty and reform. By reading the final volumes of her History (1781–3) alongside the Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), this essay contends that her philosophical writing provides the ethical and metaphysical framework that underpins her political thought, culminating in her Letters on Education (1790). 

Central to this argument is Macaulay’s account of the will. Engaging with longstanding debates associated with John Locke and his critics, she developed a doctrine of “moral necessity” that preserves a role for rational agency while avoiding both strict determinism and an unintelligible notion of absolute freedom. This essay argues that the apparent ambiguity in her position, often noted by modern scholars, is not a flaw but a productive inheritance of Locke’s own unresolved tensions. In this light, Macaulay’s late work reveals a coherent project: the claim that political liberty depends upon moral agency, and that both must be cultivated through education and self-discipline.

Final Volumes of History

Macaulay’s return to complete her History reveals both a response to public criticism and an increasing turn toward philosophical reflection. In 1781, some short years after the scandal surrounding her 1778 marriage to William Graham, Macaulay returned to complete the eight-volume series of her History. In the preface to her sixth volume, Macaulay ruminated over the reception of her writing and returned at length to Charles I’s death. Whereas some 13 years earlier in the fourth volume of her History she remained stoic, in this later preface she adopts a more emotional register, writing that she “was so far from feeling” herself “the bloody-minded republican” that she had shed “many tears” in writing about his death [1]. Perhaps this shift in tone suggests a conscious attempt to recalibrate her public image in response to criticism, her description of her tears functioning as an awkward attempt to appear sensible. Indeed, Macaulay seems almost defensive at the beginning of her preface, as she writes that she was “animated with the love of liberty, and an enthusiastic regard to English patriotism, [she] ventured to take the pen in hand, with the intention of vindicating the insulted memories of our illustrious ancestors, and of exposing to the public the evils which this country has suffered from the intrigues of faction and the rage of party” [2].

At points in the eighth volume, Macaulay’s growing interest in philosophy shines through her account of history. In a note, she anticipates what would become her solution to the problem of evil, later developed more fully in her Immutability of Moral Truth: namely, that the misery which prevails in the world has induced among the good and wise in all ages the belief in a future state of more perfect existence [3]. She postulates that such a future state exists wherein the injustices of existence can be made compatible with the wisdom and benevolence of God. She takes this to be the core message of Christianity, corrupted when the church began to obtain “power and riches by the influence they had over the easy credulity of man” and “in defiance of that severe text of scripture which shuts the gates of heaven against the rich, on account of the almost necessary vices which accompany this state of temporal felicity” the members of the Church hierarchy themselves emulated the civil powers and did not make an attempt to “suppress the unbounded luxuries and pride of courts, with the vain glorious pomp of the opulent, by fixing the attention of mankind on the rational pursuits of mental enjoyment” [4]. In this way, her historical writing begins to incorporate explicitly philosophical concerns about morality, providence, and human suffering. She represents the Reformation as cleansing the filth that the Church was steeped in, but not as significantly transforming English morals until the republican period. However, the Restoration is framed as an age wherein real progress toward a more just future.

Alongside these philosophical developments, the reception of Macaulay’s History reveals the gendered constraints under which she wrote. As a radical female historian and pamphleteer, the criticism, responses, and satire on Macaulay’s History illuminate her impact on the social construction of gender in the period. The leading reviews of the time attempted to judge her work while simultaneously grappling with the question of whether a woman could publish such subjects. When her first volume was published, both the Monthly Review and Critical Review considered her publication notable and devoted substantial articles to it. The Monthly Review focused on the gender issue, acknowledging Macaulay’s “abilities and industry,” but insisting that the subject matter of history was not “suitable” for a woman and, gallantly, declining “to recommend” competition “in the more arduous paths of literature … to the practice of our lovely countrywomen” [5]. In doing so, the reviewer exposes an inability to reconcile Macaulay’s intellectual authority with contemporary ideals of femininity.

The Monthly Review’s article on Macaulay’s second volume received an even more glowing response than the first. They wrote, wrote, “the farther we advance the more we approve,—nay, in defiance of Mr Pope, the more we admire the spirit and judgment of the fair and ingenious Writer” [6]. The more conservative Critical Review, while disagreeing with many of the political principles that Macaulay argued for, did not challenge her womanhood to attempt historical writing, producing long and intelligent reviews of each of her volumes.

Yet not all responses were so measured. Edmund Burke produced one of the more scathing reviews of Macaulay. He called her an “Amazon” and labeled her writing as “the patriotic scolding of our republican Virago” in private correspondence to Richard Shackleton [7]. In Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), he associated the “sublimer” and “great” virtues of “fortitude, justice, wisdom” with men and “lesser” virtues such as “compassion, kindness and liberality,” with women [8]. Reviewer William Rose welcomed Macaulay. Nevertheless, he still questioned whether another history of the period was necessary, and warned that while “the fair sex have powers to keep pace with, if not to outstrip us, in the more arduous paths of literature; yet we would by no means recommend such laborious competition to the practice of our lovely countrywomen” [9]. Rose saw Macaulay’s assessment of Francis Bacon’s character as praise worthy, but suggests Macaulay’s “zeal in the cause of Liberty” may have led her to bias [10].

Macaulay’s History was long condemned by British Tories for the radical gloss it gave to the constitutional history of the 16th and 17th centuries. Reviewing volume three, the Critical Review famously described her as “the female Galileo in history, whose work now lies before us, was born within the compass of that century which adopted this miraculous gift into its religious worship; and she writes with the professed design of recalling her readers to the exercise of sense and reason, without respect to sounds and prepossessions. We by no means profess ourselves Mrs. Macaulay’s panegyrists. We have formerly observed, that her history must speak for itself; and it is with no small degree of surprize we have perceived it hitherto not only unanswered, but unattacked; a circumstance the more mortifying to us, as we are thereby deprived of an opportunity to shew our impartiality, by giving full weight to the facts and arguments which may be urged in behalf of doctrines once deemed almost national” [11]. The review finds that Macaulay’s opposition to the distribution of honors by the crown went too far. Indeed, the critics are mortified that there had not been more criticism of Macaulay contending that, while advocating for reason, she did not give enough care to reason’s “sounds and prepossessions” [12]. In other words, they allege that Macaulay lacks a truly grounded understanding of philosophy: she stretches too far in calling for liberty or human equality.

The review concludes that “with respect to the execution of this volume, it seems to improve both in stile and composition… —Vires acquiret eundo.” The Virgilian passage refers to the Roman goddess, Rumor. The lines preceding the text refer to Rumor as she raced through Africa, asserting that of all the pests Rumor is the swiftest. The motto translates roughly to “we gather strength as we go,” suggesting a touch of irony, and that the review saw Macaulay as the voice of a popular, but ill-founded belief in human equality [13]. 

So too when she wrote on Charles’ death did she encounter intense criticism for lacking feminine sensibility. Objections to Macaulay’s demystification of Charles the Martyr came not just from conservative periodicals like the Gentleman’s Magazine (which in 1774 published a series of short articles entitled ‘gross misrepresentations in Mrs Macaulay’s History of England) but also from the publications which had earlier applauded her politics [14]. By 1778, condemned and ridiculed for her extravagance, vanity, and overall savagery, Macaulay became Britain’s belle sauvage, a wild beauty [15]. In this framing, her intellectual radicalism was recast as personal excess, and the historian who was as cold as Brutus in her condemnation of Charles I and radical enough to encourage political dissent in her Address to the People (1774), became increasingly legible to her critics as the ungrateful Amazonian republican.

Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth

If the reception of her History exposed the limits of her authority as a female historian, her Treatise represents an attempt to reassert that authority on explicitly philosophical grounds. Despite these critiques, Macaulay set out to tackle once and for all some of her most contested philosophical problems; the nature of moral truth, the power of evil, and the freedom of the will in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783). As the reviews would attest, her positions were not entirely original (or even clear) [16]. 

Perhaps part of the reason for both the negative attention paid to her Treatise in her lifetime, and later scholarly neglect, lies in the perception, particularly by male commentators, that she was overreaching herself in moving from history, where she had achieved some success and acclaim, to philosophy. For example, review in The British Magazine and Review in 1783 began, “This lady, whose talents for historical writing have been universally acknowledged, even by those who have suspected her impartiality, seems desirous to appear in a new character, that of the moral philosopher: and though we cannot so far permit our politeness to get the better of our reason, as to assert that Mrs. Graham the Philosopher seems very likely to rival Mrs. Macaulay the Historian, she has certainly succeeded as well as could be expected, considering the abstruse and unfeminine nature of the subject” [17].

For modern historians, however, the difficulty lies less in her ambition than in interpreting her philosophical position, and more specifically in clearly delineating her understanding of the will. A brief overview of prior scholarly work helps to clarify how Macaulay’s conception of the will has been interpreted thus far. Scholar Karen O’Brien, for example, argues that Macaulay’s concept of the will “derives ultimately from Samuel Clarke” (despite that Macaulay claims to have read Clarke only after having completed her work) [18]. Yet, after aligning Macaulay with Clarke, who believed in libertarian rational agency, O’Brien goes on to describe Macaulay as offering a “psychologically naturalistic updating of the old Calvinist idea of providential predestination,” thus attributing to her, within the space of two pages, two diametrically opposed positions on the will [19]. Mary Hilton, who frequently compares Macaulay to William Godwin, similarly suggests that Macaulay argued humans do not have free will, thus agreeing with O’Brien that Macaulay was a hard determinist (the philosophical position that all events, including human actions and choices, are predetermined by prior causes, making free will an illusion), rather than a compatibilist (defining freedom as acting on internal desires without external constraints, rather than requiring the ability to have chosen otherwise in a deterministic universe) [20].

Building on these interpretations, Karen Green and Shannon Weekes challenge both O’Brien and Hilton by arguing that Macaulay’s position is neither straightforwardly libertarian nor strictly deterministic, but instead reflects a fundamentally Lockean ambiguity. While they agree with Hilton that Macaulay endorses a form of “moral necessity,” they reject the conclusion that this amounts to hard determinism, emphasizing her distinction between moral and physical necessity and her commitment to rational agency. At the same time, they critique O’Brien’s reading as internally inconsistent, suggesting that the apparent contradictions in Macaulay’s thought stem less from confusion than from her inheritance of Locke’s own unresolved tensions on the will. In this sense, Green and Weekes reposition Macaulay as occupying a middle ground, one that preserves the determining role of reason while still allowing for meaningful moral agency. I find myself to align with the latter, and will spend the following section making sense of Macaulay’s use of the will, which will later support her argument that virtue can be cultivated through education and self-discipline.

Macaulay’s Treatise works to establish her authority as a serious philosophical thinker, while also laying the groundwork for the arguments she develops more fully in her later writing. Drawing on long-standing philosophical debates, she opens by articulating a version of eudaimonism (literally happiness) rooted in Aristotle but reshaped through a Christian lens: “virtue, which … includes all the relative duties which man owes to his Creator and his fellow-creatures, must, from the necessary connection of things … produce the summum bonum of his ultimate happiness” and “as far as he deviates from the strict line of moral rectitude … so far [man] recedes from the rational interest of his nature” [21]. Here, she establishes a crucial link between virtue, rationality, and happiness: she argues that virtue, encompassing duties both to God and to others, necessarily leads to ultimate happiness, while any deviation from moral rectitude represents a departure from humanity’s true rational interest.

Macaulay’s focus on virtue is not unlike other writers of her time. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provided an account of different systems of moral philosophies at the end of his text, as well. In her pamphlet, it seems as though Macaulay believes virtue is consistent in directing one’s behavior to conform with ‘immutable moral truths’ that flow from nature and that is recommended to human beings through reason, and, drawn out more clearly in her Letters, sympathy. 

In what follows in her writing, it is clear that, though there is some ambiguity in her position, she likely defends a Lockean doctrine, and inherits his own ambiguities, as well. Indeed, she asserts that “Mr. Locke’s incomparable Treatise on the Human Understanding, opens to the moderns such an insight into this mystery of nature, that nothing but an obstinate prejudice, arising from an ill grounded apprehension of the consequences which follow the ascertainment of truth on this subject, could prevent the question from being amicably decided on that part of the dispute, which must necessarily lead to the perfection of mental discipline” [22]. Indeed, in the second edition of Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke rejects the idea that the will itself can meaningfully be described as “free.” Instead, he reframes freedom as a property of the person, arguing that what is often called “free will” is really the capacity to pause or delay before acting on one’s desires [23]. For Locke, we can suspend action in order to decide whether we have made a correct choice.

To make sense of how Macaulay interpreted Locke, it becomes necessary to look at Macaulay’s broader political commitments, grounded in what J.G.A Pocock called the ‘patriot’ citizen or historian tradition (to which Locke belonged, as well) [24]. In his writing, Pocock argued that Macaulay was a patriot, committed to the primacy of civic virtue among modern human values, placing Macaulay within the history of political rhetoric and ideology [25]. However, he struggled to reconcile Macaulay’s admiration for classical antiquity with its exclusion of women. In doing so, Pocock effectively separates her republican commitments from any meaningful feminist perspective, treating these as incompatible rather than mutually constitutive.

Nonetheless, regardless of whether Macaulay was “allowed” a republican perspective, I argue that she actively created space for herself within that tradition. More importantly, it remains clear that she turned late in her career from history to moral philosophy, a move that works to justify the progressive political outlook that animates her histories. We can recall that in the introduction to the first volume of her History (1763), Macaulay states that she is motivated by that “natural love of Freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being,” and that her history is written with a moral purpose, to praise the virtuous defenders of political liberty and condemn those she casts as corrupt and self-seeking villains [26].

Across her eight volumes, Macaulay’s narrative links aspirations for political liberty with the growth of some virtue and enlightened reason: her aim in writing was always as much moral as political. Perhaps this is best illustrated in her interaction with the early United States. When, in 1775, she published her Address and critiqued the British treatment of the American colonies, she urged Britons not to be motivated by narrow self-interest, but to respect the rights of Americans [27]. Again, in her correspondence to American revolutionaries, she urged them to follow “the general principles of the rights of mankind” [28]. Even after her tour of the newly independent United States, her letters reflect, as I’ve considered, that she was worried the political constitution of the new nation would not prevent the growth of inequality, luxury and new forms of aristocratic wealth, and a concern which may well be behind her turning her attention more explicitly to questions of moral agency and educational reform [29]. So, truly, this pamphlet on moral truth marks Macaulay’s move toward philosophical writing that would set her up for her final publication. 

Reflecting her conviction that political liberty alone could not produce genuine moral improvement, what she associated with Enlightenment progress, Macaulay turned increasingly toward philosophical and educational writing. In her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, she makes this point explicitly, observing that “no real and universal melioration of the state of morals can reasonably be expected, whilst men are fettered with illiberal prejudices,” even if political developments might contribute to broader enlightenment [30]. This writing indicates Macaulay does not take political liberty to be an end in itself, especially if it fails to result in virtue and wisdom, which she identifies with moral freedom. Elsewhere, she further suggests that inequality undermines virtue, indicating that while a more egalitarian and representative political order is a necessary means for the development of virtue, it is not sufficient on its own [31].

It is worth noting that by human ‘rational interest’ Macaulay means the cultivation of the sovereign good, and in doing so distinguishes herself sharply from any Hobbesian ideas of rational self-interest. According to her, “self-love, in the grosser sense of the word, is of a very opposite nature to rational interest” [32]. For her, our rational interest coincides with living in accordance with the immutable moral truth, and her concern for America, for example, rests in the fear that its institutions would not guarantee the progress of its people toward an enlightened morality. So her turn toward moral philosophy, and her later Letters on Education, would result from the fact that she saw a just political constitution as promoting the moral character of the people, while also emerging from progress in morals, and in this aspect, which makes political reform truly valuable. 

To make this claim in her writing, Macaulay felt she needed to provide a secure philosophical foundation for her progressive politics. She argued, for instance, that there was no superiority among different people: although the Romans were fortunate enough to have lived under good Republican laws, this was not sufficient to prevent them from descending into inequality, luxury, and dissipation [33]. Thus, for Macaulay, a republican government cannot be relied on to preserve moral excellence unless it is bolstered by a system of public or private education, which can train citizens to acquire virtue. In other words, virtue and republicanism are self-supporting. An acceptance of egalitarian and representative government will be the natural outcome of virtue, once people have undergone an appropriate moral reformation. At the same time, a virtuous citizenry is necessary in order to preserve a republican form of government.

The doctrine of the will that Macaulay adopts to ground her belief in the possibility of human moral and political progress is one of moral necessity. Yet “moral necessity” was used in a variety of ways in the eighteenth century, and Macaulay does not systematically define her own position. Instead, her view must be reconstructed indirectly, through the positions she rejects as much as those she explicitly endorses

Macaulay’s first target in her Treatise was the work of William King (1650–1729), an influential Irish Anglican philosopher best known for De Origine Mali (1702), which addressed the problem of evil. King’s account formed part of a broader early modern debate over providence, freedom, and moral responsibility, a debate that had been shaped by figures like Hobbes and Locke. By engaging King, Macaulay does not simply respond to a single author but intervenes in this longer debate about necessity, agency, and moral accountability.

To situate her intervention, it is necessary to outline the contrasting positions represented by Hobbes and Locke. In Hobbes’s writings, originally composed in opposition to defenders of Parliament and popular political rights during the (English) Civil War, the link between individual freedom and the right to participate in or influence government, so central to republican theories of liberty, was effectively severed.

Locke, by contrast, offers a sharply different account. He famously claimed in The Second Treatise that a free man governs himself in accordance with rational principles, and that a person therefore can only be free in those states where law conforms to the law of nature [34]. For Locke, knowledge of the natural law is not innate but can be reached through the proper use of reason, meaning that a free person is ultimately one governed by rational judgment. His understanding of political liberty therefore goes beyond Hobbes’s notion of mere negative liberty. This political framework is tied to a corresponding account of the will, in which freedom involves the capacity to suspend action and reflect on one’s desires [35]. However, Locke’s position remains ambiguous, since it is unclear whether this power of suspension is itself determined or genuinely free.

Macaulay aligns closely with Locke in holding that moral truths can be established “on such grounds of apparent certainty, as shall render them capable of as clear a demonstration as mathematical problems” [36]. Like Locke, she rejects the idea that mere negative liberty is sufficient for genuine political freedom and is similarly critical of Hobbes’s account of liberty. In targeting William King, she is therefore not only advancing her own position but also responding to one of Locke’s early critics, situating her argument firmly within a Lockean framework [37]. Macaulay counters, then, that will is determined by judgement, that judgement motivates, that God chooses what is best, and that there is no limitation on His power and that there is an immutable moral truth to which his choices conform.

Macaulay further claims that she only read Samuel Clarke (1675-1729, an English philosopher and Anglican priest) after completing her Treatise, yet found herself in broad agreement with his position. As she explains, Clarke aims to free human agency not only from “physical necessity” but also from the kind of moral necessity that arises from “the dictates of the understanding, or the impulse of ill regulated passions,” a view she sees as largely consistent with her own [38]. At the same time, however, Macaulay’s account does not fully align with Clarke’s, and instead positions her theory of the will between competing extremes.

She makes this clear in her critique of both popular and philosophical accounts of freedom, noting that the “vulgar” understand liberty simply as acting as one pleases, while proponents of “absolute liberty” fail to make their position intelligible [39]. Against both, Macaulay advances a third position, in which the mind plays an active role in shaping volition through the evaluation of competing objects of choice. She underscores this point by appealing to the social importance of education: if the mind could not direct action in this way, efforts to cultivate virtue would be unintelligible. This framing suggests that her doctrine of the will occupies a middle ground between arbitrary free will and strict necessitarianism (the metaphysical doctrine that everything in the universe is necessary, meaning nothing could have been otherwise and the actual world is the only possible world).

Crucially, Macaulay reinforces this intermediate position by distinguishing between “physical” and “moral” necessity. Physical necessity, she explains, is a form of constraint imposed on the will either by divine force or by the individual’s inability to resist desires arising from bodily and mental causes [40]. By contrast, moral necessity is “that necessity which arises from the irresistible force which the understanding has on volition,” directing action through judgments about good and evil rather than external compulsion [41]. This distinction is key to interpretations that reject reading Macaulay as a hard determinist, highlighting instead her effort to preserve a meaningful role for rational agency.

Moral necessity, for Macaulay, involves the determination of the will by judgment and is therefore central to her understanding of freedom as grounded in the exercise of reason. The key question, however, is whether this determination by judgment is itself causal. While Samuel Clarke had defended a libertarian version of moral necessity arguing that judgment motivates but that action ultimately stems from an independent power of self-motion, Macaulay explicitly rejects this account in her critique of his metaphysics of mind.

This, however, is not the end of the story. As Green and Weekes argue, there are two main ways of interpreting Macaulay’s doctrine of the will. On one reading, her position can be understood as a form of intellectualist libertarianism, an agency-based account that closely resembles that of Samuel Clarke, differing primarily in how agency itself is exercised. On the other, her view can be read as a version of rationalist compatibilism, in which agency is preserved through a distinction between higher (rational) and lower (passionate) faculties of the mind [42].

Interpreting Macaulay as an intellectualist libertarian and follower of John Locke is relatively straightforward, as suggested by the following passage:

“The doctrine of a moral necessity… [holds] that if man has not a power of suspending volition, he has a power of suspending the motion of a corresponding action, till he has taken into due consideration the good or the bad… [and that] a constant discipline of the mind… will keep the passions and appetites under such due subjection, as to give the best motives… power to impel the best volitions” [43]

This passage emphasizes the mind’s capacity to pause, reflect, and regulate its motivations, aligning closely with Locke’s view that freedom consists in the ability to suspend action and deliberate. It also suggests a form of agency in which the individual can intervene in the process of motivation, something that brings Macaulay closer to Clarke’s concern with preserving genuine agency. However, unlike Clarke, who posits a distinct power of self-motion independent of causal determination, Macaulay locates this agency within the structure of rational deliberation itself.

Like Locke, she therefore treats freedom as being governed by reason, while implicitly adopting a hierarchical model of the mind, drawn from Platonic and Stoic traditions, in which rational judgment ought to govern the passions [44]. In this view, a person is most free when their actions are directed by reason rather than by impulse or desire.

However, it is precisely this account that generates ambiguity. If reason determines the will by identifying what is best, then freedom may appear to consist simply in acting in accordance with that judgment, an account that aligns with compatibilist views, where freedom means acting on one’s own reasoning even if that reasoning is itself shaped by prior causes. Yet because Macaulay also allows for reflection, deliberation, and the ability to pause before acting, her position can equally be read as preserving a limited form of libertarian agency, that is, the idea that individuals can genuinely choose between alternatives and could have acted otherwise. The result is a conception of freedom that can be interpreted in either direction.

So, we are left with somewhat inconclusive evidence, compatible with interpreting Macaulay as either an intellectualist libertarian or a rationalist compatibilist. However, even if we accept the latter reading, her position does not exclude the possibility that individuals can knowingly act wrongly. Indeed, it is at least implicit in her framework that individuals may recognize what is morally best yet fail to act accordingly, because stronger, competing motives intervene [45]. In this sense, actions remain voluntary even when they conflict with rational judgment, reflecting the persistent influence of passions, habits, and other non-rational forces on human behavior.

Given this, it is difficult to determine definitively whether Macaulay’s account of rational agency is fully deterministic or whether it preserves some element of libertarian freedom. Passages emphasizing the suspension of action and the deliberate choice of objects of thought suggest the latter; yet because these appear within broader discussions of necessity, they do not decisively resolve the issue. Instead, her position remains fundamentally ambiguous – an ambiguity that closely mirrors that found in Locke. As Green and Weekes argue, she ultimately appears committed to a broadly Lockean account of freedom, though without fully adopting later, more explicitly compatibilist interpretations [46].

This ambiguity is not merely theoretical but underpins her broader moral and educational project. In the second chapter of the Treatise, Macaulay turns to the problem of human depravity and begins to propose self-discipline and education as necessary elements to cultivate virtue, the key facets of her final work. She briefly recounts her understanding of the historical corruption of Christianity that every misconception on the subject of Divine Attributes, and in particular those of the moral kind, must involve a confusion on the nature of moral truths, as to “form one of those many insuperable difficulties which have hitherto prevented the fixing moral truths on such a firm basis of certainty, as is necessary to engage the mind of man to a proper attention to that rational interest which forms his sovereign good, and from which alone, he can ever attain happiness in every probable stage of his existence” [47]. Macaulay does not assume that human beings are perfectly rational; rather, she acknowledges that passions are a necessary part of human nature, providing motivation even as they threaten to mislead [48]. In fact, she admits that no system can escape the consequence that God is the author of sin, but observes all disputants must agree evil is admitted to induce a greater good [49]. 

The result is a model of human agency that resembles a broadly Platonic or Stoic framework, in which rational judgment must contend with the opposing pressures of appetite and passion. Because reason does not automatically prevail, the cultivation of virtue requires conscious effort. For Macaulay, this makes self-discipline and education essential: only through proper training can individuals learn to regulate their passions and align their actions with rational moral principles. In this way, her doctrine of the will directly informs her educational theory, a connection she develops more fully in her Letters on Education seven years later, where she elaborates the institutional and pedagogical implications of moral necessity.

Works Cited

1. Macaulay, The History of England, VI:vii.
2. Ibid., VI: preface.
3. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 48.
4. Macaulay, The History of England, VIII:68-9.
5. The Critical Review 55 (1783), 216.
6. Macaulay, The History of England, II:216.
7. Edmund Burke to Richard Shackleton, c. 15 August 1770, in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, 10 vols. (Cambridge and Chicago 1958-78), 2:149-50.
8. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. Edited by David Womersley. Harmondsworth, 1998; Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War,” 141, 145–46, 172, 185.
9. Macaulay, The History of England, I:372.
10. Macaulay, The History of England, I:380.
11. “The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover. By Catharine Macaulay. Vol. III.” The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 23 (February 1767): 81–82.
12. Ibid.
13. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 68.
14. Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 148.
15. Ibid., 174.
16. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 152.
17. “A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth by Catharine Macaulay Graham.” British Magazine and Review, August 1783, 127–29.
18. Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2009), 166.
19. O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 168.
20. Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young, 72.
21. Macaulay, Catharine. A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth. London: Printed by A. Hamilton, jun. and sold by C. Dilly, G. Robinson, T. Cadell [etc.], 1783, 1–2.
22. Macaulay, Treatise, 169.
23. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford, 1975. II.21, 263; Darwall, British Moralists, 156–72.
24. For Macaulay as ‘patriot’ historian see Pocock, J. G. A. “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian.” In Women Writers, edited by Smith, 243–58.
25. Macaulay, Treatise, 251.
26. Catharine Macaulay, The History of England, I:vii.
27. Macaulay, Catharine. An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs. London, 1775.
28. Macaulay, Catharine. Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to Be Found in Mr. Hobbes’ Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society with a Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government in a Letter to Signor Paoli by Catharine Macaulay. The Second Edition with Two Letters One from an American Gentleman to the Author Which Contains Some Comments on Her Sketch of the Democratical Form of Government and the Author’s Answer. London, 1769, 35; Letzring, Monica. “Sarah Prince Gill and the John Adams–Catharine Macaulay Correspondence.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 88 (1976): 107–11; Hay, Carla H. “Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution.” The Historian 56 (1994): 301–16. Some of this correspondence is available at Bhttp://www.gilderlehrman.org/.
29. Hay, Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution, 313-14.
30. Macaulay, Treatise, 11-12.
31. Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 22.
32. Macaulay, Treatise, 128.
33. Ibid., 252-6.
34. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge, 1967. II.4.22, 301–2; II.6.54–59, 322–25.
35. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. II.21.47, 263.
36. Macaulay, Treatise, 17.
37. For King’s early objections to Locke’s Essay, see Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity, 424-3.
38. Macaulay, Treatise, ix-x.
39. Ibid., 194.
40.  Macaulay, Treatise, 171; Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London, 1790), 456.
41. Macaulay, Treatise, 171-72.
42. Green, Karen, and Shannon Weekes. “Catharine Macaulay on the Will.” History of European Ideas 39, no. 3 (2013): 419.
43. Macaulay, Treatise, 237-38. Repeated in Macaulay, Letters on Education, 482-83.
44. In a number of places Macaulay aligns Plato’s doctrines with those of contemporary Christians, following the trajectory of Andre Dacier’s Life of Plato, to which she refers. See Macaulay, Treatise, 31, 292-93, 313-16; Dacier, André. The Works of Plato Abridged: With an Account of His Life, Philosophy, Morals and Politics. 2 vols. 4th ed. London, 1749.
45. Green & Weekes, Catharine Macaulay on the Will, 423.
46. Ibid., 424.
47. Ibid., 222.
48. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 161.
49. Macaulay, Treatise, 232.