Scholarly Writing #1: The Opening Lines of Macaulay’s History

You just read two of the three opening paragraphs of Volume One of Catharine Macaulay’s History of England, from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line. This is Macaulay’s first published piece of writing, and I believe for that reason we ought to study its opening lines. These lines are so important that historian Peter Moore would right that “people did not need to read further than Macaulay’s introduction to know that here was a bright, compelling new voice” when she hit the literary scene. [1]

In this reflection, I hope to introduce that by moving to place classicism as a central analytical device in making sense of Macaulay’s life and career, it is clear Macaulay’s commitment to republicanism and to the moral and political certainties of history allowed her to retain a sense of transhistoricalism, in which the values which she claimed had a historical transcendence – liberty, natural rights, a resistance to tyranny – had been present, and would continue to be present, in many moments throughout history, from antiquity, to her present, to the future. 

Inspired by actors in antiquity and looking back onto the ancient for examples of her principles of certainty, Macaulay found that the rediscovery of liberty was a part of an ongoing process. It was the politically responsible individual which lay at the heart of the vision of her history, embodying an ideal of meaningful responsibility and yearning to stand up and be counted. [2] Macaulay emphasized these principles in her History, her philosophical writing, and her treatises on education, synthesizing a Roman republican ideal of men sharing in the life of the state with the liberal Lockean idea of the natural equality of men and women, and the contractual duty of the state not to interfere in the private concerns of the individual. The act of writing her History and pamphlets was designed to spotlight these ideas and push individuals toward a future of republican freedom. These ideas particularly resonated, and were purposefully also directed toward English reformers, American colonists, and French revolutionaries, all of whom sought responsibility over their own political destinies.

Upbringing and Exposure to the Classics

Where would Macaulay have learned about the ancients she so referenced within the first few lines of her History that so freely exercised Liberty? It was her upbringing that allowed Macaulay access to the ancient world and exposed her to philosophies of republicanism and natural rights. It was because of these experiences Macaulay was able to create a community with the learned men and women around her and begin to shape her own political beliefs, patriotic or otherwise, about the country and global context in which she lived. Born in 1731 to John Sawbridge and Dorothy Wanley, part of a wealthy family in Kent, Macaulay, like other women of her status in England, she received little formal education but took advantage of her father’s extensive library where she could pursue her interests in classical history and politics. The Sawbridges were lucky in having acquired sufficient means to have amassed a substantial library and to have subscribed to many historical works, allowing young Sawbridge Macaulay to read extensively, her ideas formed by what was available to her in those libraries. [3] Her 1760 marriage to Scottish-born physician George Macaulay helped introduce her to London’s radical literary and political figures. 

There are no extant diaries or memoirs from Macaulay, and the correspondence of hers that does exist goes back only to 1762. In light of this, historians are forced to rely on more general evidence for the sudden emergence of Macaulay as a radical historian – her family history and the political and social environment of Kent in the 1740s and 1750s. So while her family background by itself may not explain entirely what inspired Macaulay to become a historian, the broader context of eighteenth-century sociability may help supplement it. 

The generation of women born towards the middle of the eighteenth century were beneficiaries of changing attitudes to women’s education and participation in the literary world. Still, especially women from noble or wealthy families still feared earning a reputation by going to print. Mary Mortley Montagu (1689-1762), for example, did not consent to her work being published until the end of her life, appearing in the same year as the first volume of Macaulay’s history. [4] Despite such constraints, numerous women published novels and plays. Thus, although Macaulay’s achievements may have been exceptional for her time, she was not without precedent. By the mid-eighteenth century, a number of educated women went to print, including Sarah Fielding (1710-67), Charlotte Lennox (née Ramsay, 1730/31–1804), and many others. 

Women writers and translators were familiar to Macaulay. Her father’s library included English translations of essays on Marcus Aurelius and the Iliad written by Anne Dacier (née Le Fèvre, 1651–1720); Macaulay later referred to André Dacier’s Life of Plato. [5] She was also in touch with Elizabeth Carter in August of 1757, who would become famous for her translation of Epictetus’ works. [6] Among her subscribers were Macaulay and her sister. The occasion when these were offered, related in a letter from Carter to her friend Catherine Talbot (1721-70), are as follows:

“Did I tell you I added about a dozen names to my subscription while I was at Canterbury? Among the rest a very fine lady, who … did me the honour this year to take to me mightily by way of conversation, which she introduced by subscribing in a very handsome manner to me, and railing very heartily at the Stoics. She is a very sensible and agreeable woman, and much more deeply learned than beseems a fine lady; but between the Spartan laws, the Roman politics, the philosophy of Epicurus, and the wit of St Evremond, she seems to have formed a most extraordinary system” [7]

So too do we know from Macaulay’s first biographer Mary Hays that Macaulay’s two major sources for her acquaintance with the classics and Roman politics were English translations of the Ancient History and History of Rome, the first by the Jansenist Charles Rollin (1661–1741), and the second, begun by him, but continued by Jean Crevier (1693–1765). [8] Rollin’s Ancient History was first published in 1734, and by the late 1780s was in its eighth edition, the History of Rome was less widely disseminated. Rollin was also one of the first authors Macaulay had her daughter read, along with Cicero and Conyer Middleton’s, The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero. [9] Rollin’s History of Rome draws heavily on Livy, Plutarch, and Cicero, and offers an account of Rome’s foundation, passages on political theory, and represents history as the workings of providence. The second volume begins with “Reflections on Polybius” that introduce the read to three forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and leaves the reader with the remark that the perfect government would “include all the advantages, and obviate all the dangers and inconveniences” of each of them. [10] For Rollins, and later Macaulay, both the Spartans and Romans reached this balance. Despite this, in 1790, Macaulay would recall in a letter to a friend that she was “no classical scholar… [her] education in that respect has been more deficient than most of the finest writers in this country.” [11]

Early Volumes of History

Macaulay had the opportunity to reflect on all her learning as she became interested in writing history and set herself the task of completing an eight-volume history of England. The following section will consider Macaulay’s political orientation, her relationship to David Hume and his history, and finally considerations of the role of gender and the classics in her first volume. In parsing Macaulay’s relationship to Hume, we can begin to see how Macaulay claimed authority for herself as not only a female historian but a British one, distinct from other dominant forms of history telling at the time. [12]

According to her biographer, Macaulay was first inspired to write history because of the Romans and the Greeks, “their laws and manners interested her understanding, the spirit of patriotism seized her, and she became an enthusiast in the cause of freedom.” [13] While perhaps a romantic account, it does echo Macaulay’s own assertion, in the introduction to her first volume of the History of England that, “from my early youth I have read with delight those histories which exhibit Liberty in its most exalted state, the annals of the Roman and the Greek republics. Studies like these excite that natural love of Freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being.” [14] Thus, from a young age, Macaulay found some mantle of authority from the classics. Figuratively, she put on the Grecian garb over her persona as she later would literally for the portraits in which she posed. 

The publication of Volume One of her History of England — covering the history of the early seventeenth century – catapulted Macaulay onto the public scene in 1763. In its entirety, Macaulay’s eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to That of Brunswick Line (1763-84), together with its companion, The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time (1778), covered the years 1603-1742 and made use of manuscripts, letters, and sermons over the more than 20 years she researched and wrote it. [15] Macaulay achieved not only fame but also notoriety for her republican interpretations of the Civil War. Her History attempted to revive the political liberty she believed George III’s government threatened. She wrote as an “Old Whig,” looking to demonstrate how the present-day Whig aristocracy shifted from its original principles, allying themselves with the crown to destroy parliamentary independence in a system of corruption more terrible than Stuart despotism. From her perspective, the Glorious Revolution did not represent a deliverance from arbitrary government so much as the new enslavement of English people. [16]

Macaulay’s political orientation is evident from the start. The preface to her first volume was followed by an “Address to Liberty” by the Scottish poet and playwright James Thomson (1700-48). Macaulay worked to show that even though the triumph of liberty in the seventeenth century was short lived, its achievements were vast and worthy of emulation. Although Macaulay at times spoke of the ancient constitution and the Anglo-Saxon one having been corrupted by the Normans, she consistently argued for the equal rights of men (ones that were abstract rather than historical). She held that Charles I’s reign had been justified by Lockean natural law (the king was punished as a tyrant in the name of natural justice, rather than on constitutional grounds). 

Moreover, in her commitment to the moral and political certainties of history, Macaulay retained a sense of transhistoricalism, in which the values which she claimed historical transcendence – liberty, natural rights, the right of resistance to tyranny – had been present at many moments throughout history, from antiquity to the present. Yet the rediscovery of the idea of liberty was part of some ongoing historical process, far from complete in Macaulay’s era. [17] So too did an emphasis on individual morality lay at the heart of Macaulay’s method of writing history, creating an almost ahistorical quality to her writing. This may seem counterintuitive to her calls for values of historical transcendence. Yet their application in history was not unilinear: better times had existed in the past; her account of seventeenth-century England was one of great strides amidst a time of much backsliding. Progress came through increases in collective morality. While this collective knowledge and morality in which Macaulay was interested was key to her writing, she saw some key individuals as playing especially important roles at turning points in the long process of historical development (like Charles I, Cromwell, and William III). [18]

History was not only an illustration of human moral character. More importantly, it was a means of supporting political views. Macaulay’s scheme of history could act as a justification of republicanism and liberty which had strong moral overtones. Indeed, the overall framework within which she placed historical events, and which governed her explanation of those events was determined by her fundamental moral positionality. For example, Macaulay treated the hypothetical existence of an ancient, free constitution as moral reinforcement for her reformulation of what should be the ideological underpinnings of English politics. The constitution was not her solution to the political issues of governance her country faced at its present moment. Instead, the constitution was constantly developing, with the possibility of eventually reaching a more perfect form. While ancient rights would not change in substance, modern knowledge might make improvements in the institutional expression of those rights. History could serve as the story of the improvement and gradual recovery of those rights. [19] At some point in the future, those goals could be reached. Indeed, her history combined her belief in the ancient constitution with a theory of natural rights, a theory of natural rights which was legitimized because it could be shown to have existed in the past and were not merely the creature of the modern man’s mind.

Macaulay was also interested in presenting her authorial self as an embodiment of autonomy. Her writing style, deliberately colloquial, could handle the language of political theory and yet undermine an opposing viewpoint in just one succinct sentence. She was daring, dismissive of whole sets of ideas and swaths of history. So too did her moral outlook, one that combined the Aristotelian idea of happiness (eudaimonia) as the highest good with some Christian inflection on when we function so as to reach a final telos (or ending point), resonate with masses of readers. [20]

No one who wrote a history of England in the later eighteenth-century did so without knowledge of the leading work in this field: David Hume’s History of England (1754-62). Macaulay covered the same chronology as Hume did, but where he explored England’s descent into and eventually emergence from religious zealotry, she told the story of how the English institutionalized (in the Commonwealth from 1649-53) then lost their liberty. [21] Put another way, Macaulay wrote against the religious skepticism and political detachment characteristic of Hume’s account. Yet at the core of their writing, both histories are Enlightenment histories of liberty as acquired by the English and then progressively understood and implemented. Both sought to broaden traditional political history by looking to the economic and social origins of political ideas and movements. [22]

The two historians also had different metaphysical and meta-ethical commitments. Hume was an advocate for the empirical methods, the limits of reason, and skeptical of empirically grounded doctrines, including the existence of God and the immutable moral truth. [23] Macaulay was less critical of such religious attitudes and believed in the existence of immutable moral truths grounded in the knowable through reason. Because she retained an understanding of reason’s power, and its capacity to grasp universal moral truths, implicit in the nature of things, Macaulay had a conception of individual freedom similar to that of the Stoics, a self-government in accord with reason. [24] Freedom of will was a moral necessity. Moral necessity obliged God to do what was best. Her perfectionism and theism underpinned her optimistic belief that society could progress toward a more perfect state in which individuals could exercise a rationally grounded virtue. This belief would become key to her understanding of transhistoricalism, a belief that united all her work, in which she believed the values of liberty could be found and would continue to be found through the longer history of antiquity to her present. 

While Macaulay adhered to the traditional protocols of male historical writing, like Hume’s, she realigned republican understandings of gender; she was acutely aware of her sex. [25] After speaking about fulfilling her “duties” as a historian,” she commented that, “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 and Virtue.” [26] Her private interest as a woman would not stand in the way of her public duty to liberty. Macaulay could argue that her loyalty to ancient principles of liberty could underwrite her gender transgression. Liberty could lift her across a gendered divide between private and public, as a rhetoric that could resonate across gendered lines. 

While liberty could help bridge the gender divide, Macaulay worked to preserve classical republican definitions of masculinity while also arguing women should be able to adopt some of that manliness for themselves. [27] She clung to ancient, stoical conceptions of manhood embedded in the Commonwealth era, borrowing Ciceronian and Machiavellian notions of political virtue that assumed only men could be intellectually rigorous or take on the warrior-statesman ideal. [28]

Macaulay made her strongest case for women’s access to virtue by pointing to various historical women in her History. For example, Macaulay honored the patriotic wife Lady Rachel Russell, who was implicated in the 1683 Rye House Plot to assassinate King Charles II. In sharing her husband’s political ideals, ones she agreed mattered more than life itself, Lady Russell had, according to Macaulay, “that nobleness of nature… as never to have desired him to do a base thing for the saving his life.” [29] Macaulay even likened Russell to the Roman matron Arria, who had given her husband the courage to die for his historical beliefs, leading them to commit a double suicide. As a widow, Russell was prepared to follow Roman custom join her husband in death, but “it was the sense of religion, the duties of a mother, and promise which she had made lord Russell in the our of parting, that she would preserve her life for the sake of his children, which alone prevented her from following the example of Roman Arria, in that act of conjugal heroism for which this illustrious woman is so justly celebrated.” [30] In this example, women had a civic duty to support and encourage men with a Roman stoicism, even instructing them on their duties to the state. 

Macaulay recognized the tactical importance of women to her project of history writing and her ideological model of republicanism: the women both served as a way for her to create an imagined community between herself and historical women as well as a way for Macaulay to create a genealogy of patriotic women like herself. In yet another example, Macaulay reflected on King Charles’ mother’s influence when, in 1639, he attempted to pacify Scottish covenanters. Macaulay wrote that, “the covenanters, after the example of the Romans in the same exigencies, sent Hamilton’s mother: … She was a pious woman, and a warm covenanter, and no doubt made use of those strong augments the subject would admit, to make him forbear from any hostile attempts on his country. Whatever might be his resolutions on entering the Frith, like Coriolanus he could not resist the united solicitations of two parents, nor break through that double tie of filial duty with which he was bound both to this country and the fair negotiator.” [31] Coriolanus’ mother Veturia and wife Volumnia persuaded him not to march against Rome in 491 BC just as Hamilton’s mother reminded her son of his own loyalties. 

Here, too, Macaulay molds her writing to highlight a moment of female patriotism. By making these analogies, Macaulay created a gallery of politically virtuous women, women who often influenced male family members. When she described the Scots raising money to gift Charles I, she wrote about “the Scoth-women, imitating the Roman matrons on a like memorable occasion, [who] gave up their jewels and ornaments to supply the necessity of their country.” [32] And when the Scots fortified Leith against Hamilton’s anticipated invasion, Macaulay wrote that “not only the inferior sort, and those who assisted for pay, performed the drudgery of manual labour, but nobles, gentry, women of all ranks, laid aside the effeminacy of their manners, and, emulating Grecian virtue, intermingled with the low herd, and carried on their shoulders the materials requisite for completing the fortifications.” [33] Whereas, to Hume, the women of Leith were unladylike, Macaulay thought they could offer proof that neoclassical virtue could be relevant to modern femininity.

Beyond some focus on gender, Macaulay turned to the classics not to blur antiquity with the 1640s or the 1760s, but to connect readers with the source of her political inspiration. To Macaulay, ancient history could reveal political virtue, showing itself to be not the antithesis of woman, but instead expose a number of politically virtuous women from the past. She assembled a model of patriotism by exploiting the possibilities of classical analogy and history. Republicanism, too, drew heavily on a classical political experience that Macaulay could guide readers to examine. While historically circumstances and education might have rendered women unfit for classical citizenship, women could still acquire desirable political traits from men. 

But why should a woman admire a Greco-Roman ideal of citizenship that was male-centered, warrior, and patriarchal? It assumed rigid separation between the public and private spheres (which at least in Athens would have left women confined to the household while men lead the assembly to practice their citizenship). By highlighting exemplary women who did just that, Macaulay could uncut the gender assumptions on which republicanism rested. [34] To work towards a more just and republican British future, Macaulay believed women would have to gird themselves with the personal qualities of the classical tradition. 

Macaulay’s belief in the ancient constitution, which informed her historical writing, also traced itself to classical antiquity. Indeed, Macaulay established the importance that freedom had for her, aligning herself with Roman and republican histories that would portray the ideal of liberty as “the natural love of freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being until, that is, it is nipped by the frost of prejudice or blasted by the influence of vice.” [35] This statement is twofold. First, freedom is tied to reason and virtue, which Macaulay explains when she states that that “public liberty” is the “standard by which [she has] endeavoured to measure the virtue of the characters” that she will discuss. [36] Second, freedom was not only an individual ideal but also a collective one. Furthermore, the reason that virtue was a necessary constituent of freedom had a religious backing. Karen Green has argued that this was part of a “Christian Eudaimonism,” an idea combining the Aristotelian pursuit of the highest good with the Christian notion that the highest good is to follow God’s commands. Macaulay was committed to a belief in a God who gave humans the rational capacity to discern immutable principles that formed the basis of moral law. [37] 

Macaulay’s commitment to liberty, immutable moral truths, and a Christian eudaimonism are all present in the first volume of her History, which covers the reign of James I and the first years of Charles I. It is in this first volume that Macaulay begins to develop a theme that she will continue in her subsequent writing, the contemporary threat to English liberty posed by a corrupt parliament and the necessity to revive virtue necessary to preserve that liberty. Setting her “intention had hitherto been, and, I trust in God! Ever will be, my support, in the laborious talk of delineating the political history of this country,” [38] Macaulay set out to prove a “good citizen is a credit to his country, and merits the approbation of every virtuous man.” [39] Indeed, the principal motive to undertake English history was to do justice to “our illustrious ancestors” and have “an eye to public liberty.” [40]

On a more practical level, Macaulay begins her History by advocating the historical reading will “cultivate” in future English generations a “birthright” of liberty. [41] She implies that the seeds of liberty are planted deep in English minds, yet need cultivation through reading. She is sorry that “the study of history is little cultivated, and not at all those fundamental principles of the English constitution on which our ancestors founded a system of government, in which the liberty of the subject is as absolutely instituted as the dignity of the sovereign.” [42] Here, Macaulay understands public liberty as an inward principle and public project – one that needs to be instituted. In this way, Macaulay’s understanding of history and the body become interlocked – the interior becomes the seed of the national community. [43] Before she digressed from the subject she set out to write too far, Macaulay attached an “Address to Liberty.” 

“An Address to Liberty” in Catharine Macaulay’s first volume of her History. Image taken by Hilary Gallito and courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Not yet moving too far from her central theme of liberty, Macaulay began the narration of her History in the year 1609, “notable for the prevailing influence of liberty” when the republic of Holland was truly “animated with its virtue.” [44] So too did the English finally move to push back against the tyranny of Rome by creating statues to defend people against the “inordinate claims of this [Catholic] spiritual prince.” [45]

It would be in the second volume of her History that Macaulay would expose the extent to which England suffered under tyranny and gave readers a sense of the temper of the nation when it went under such duress. Despite their freedom on the line, the long history of England’s virtuous populace could inspire future generations to continue to fight against long histories of oppression. 

In future reflections, I will continue to reflect on Macaulay’s commitment to transhistoricalism and the philosophical commitments that undergird her writing. So too will I keep the focus on her understanding of the classics to help us understand how she saw the world around her. 

Works Cited

1. Peter Moore, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream (1740-1776) (Penguin Books, 2023), 239.
2. Karen O’Brien, “Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England,” (2009), 155.
3. Karen Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment (Abingdon, Oxon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2020), 10.
4. Ibid., 11.
5. English translations of Homer and Marcus Aurelius that included translations of Dacier’s French Prefaces are, Ozell, Broom, and Oldisworth, The Iliad of Homer Translated from the Greek into Blank Verse to Which Are Added a Preface to the Life of Homer and Notes by Madame Dacier, 2nd ed., 5 vols (London: Bernard Lintott, 1714) and Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the Roman Emperor, Concerning Himself. Treating of a Natural Man’s Happiness: Wherein It Consisteth, and of the Means to Attain Unto. Translated out of the Original Greek; With Notes: By Meric Casaubon, D.D. To Which Is Added, The Life of Antoninus: With Some Select Remarks upon the Whole. By Monsieur and Madame Dacier. Never before in English , trans. Meric Casaubon (London: A. and John Churchill in Pater-​ noster-​ Row; and Sam Smith and Tho Bennet in St Paul’s Church-​ yard, 1692). Macaulay refers to André Dacier, The Works of Plato Abridged with an Account of His Life, Philosophy, Morals and Politics, 4th ed., 2 vols (London: R. Ware, et al., 1749), in her Letters on Education.
6. Elizabeth Carter, All the Works of Epictetus Which Are Now Extant; Consisting of His Discourses, Preserved by Arrian, In Four Books, The Enchiridion, and Fragments (London: S. Richardson, 1758).
7. A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from the Year 1741 to 1770. To Which Are Added Letters from Mrs. Carter to Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vesey between the Years 1767 and 1787 , 4 vols (London: F.C. & J. Rivington, 1808), 2.260–​1 cited in Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 13.
8. Hays, Mary. Female Biography, or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries : Alphabetically Arranged (London: Printed for R. Phillips …, 1803), 5:289.
9. Catharine Macaulay and Karen Green, The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, (Oxford University Press, 2019), 220, 224.
10. Charles Rollin, The Roman History from the Foundation of Rome to the Battle of Actium. Vol. 2 (England: Printed for J. and P. Knapton, 1739-50, 1750), 2.
11. Catharine Macaulay to Ralph Griffith, 24 Nov. 1790, GLC as cited in Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 105.
12. Married at the time to George Macaulay, an intelligent and generous widower, Macaulay’s intellectual aspirations were encouraged, some of his own biographers calling him a “feminist.” He showed no opposition to her publishing under her own name (Cook and Cook, Man-​Midwife; James Wyatt Cook, ‘Macaulay, George’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006]).
13. Hays, Female Biography, 5.289-90.
14. Catharine Macaulay, The History of England: From the Accession of James I, to That of the Brunswick Line (London: J. Nourse, 1763), I:7. 
15. Bridget Hill and Christopher Hill, “Catharine Macaulay’s History and her Catalogue of Tracts,” The Seventeenth Century, vol. 8, no. 2, (Fall 1993): 274.
16. Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain,” 12.
17. O’Brien, “Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England,” 158.
18. Lynne E. Withey, “Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda,” The Journal of British Studies 16, no. 1 [1976]: 72.
19. Ibid., 80.
20. Green, “Catharine Macaulay’s Enlightenment Faith and Radical Politics,” 39. According to Green, the term,‘Christian eudaimonism’ is intended to include both Platonist and Stoic versions, as well as more classically Aristotelian forms, as found in Locke, when he repeats Aristotle’s, ‘the special function of man is the active exercise of the mind’s faculties in accordance with rational principle. It is found in a sophisticated form in Descartes, who, discussing Seneca’s philosophy with Elizabeth of Bohemia, distinguishes within the highest good, what we aim at, virtue, and the pleasure which is the prize that the soul feels when it attains virtue.
21. O’Brien, “Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England,” 157.
22. Such general discussions, in Hume’s work, are usually fleshed out in appendices, and Macaulay follows suit by including a number of summary chapters.
23. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 47.
24. Ibid., 52.
25. Macaulay, The History of England, I:x,xvii.
26. Macaulay, The History of England, I:x.
27. Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War,” 175. Yet Macaulay did not always adopt this “manliness” for herself. On occasion she used emotional language in her History. 
28. Macaulay, The History of England, III:70-3, VI:376, VIII: 174-5; Hicks, “Catharine Maculay’s Civil War,” 177.
29. Macaulay, The History of England, VII:445.
30. Ibid., VII:446.
31. Ibid., II:293.
32. Macaulay, The History of England, 2:356. 
33. Macaulay, The History of England, 2:282. 
34. Ibid., 198.
35. Macaulay, The History of England, I:vii.
36. Ibid., I:ix.
37. Alan Coffee, “Catharine Macaulay” in The Wollstonecraftian Mind, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2019). 203.
38. Macaulay, The History of England, I:vii.
39. Ibid., I:viii.
40. Ibid., I:ix.
41. Ibid., I:xv.
42. Ibid.
43. Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity 1640-1940 (Duke University Press, 2008), 72.
44. Macaulay, The History of England, I:47.
45. Ibid., I:271.