This reflection argues that America functioned for Macaulay not merely as a site of imperial crisis, but as a space in which republican principles could be enacted and a mirror through which she could critique Britain’s political decay.
Introduction: Macaulay, Republicanism, and the Atlantic World
Catharine Macaulay emerged in the 1760s and early 1770s as one of the most prominent republican voices in the English-speaking Atlantic world. Hosting salons and writing to correspondents that spanned a broad spectrum of British, American, and French persons, Macaulay created a truly transatlantic community to promote her work and discuss her ideas. [1] Because of her effort to create these connections, the reception of the early volumes of her History in both Britain and America was unprecedented. [2] It was during these decades that Macaulay spoke of herself with extraordinary self-confidence as the physical embodiment of republicanism, and thus so was regarded and promoted as such by her contemporaries. Her Loose Thoughts on Hobbes was highly sought after, and her dismissal of Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents was widely read. Her interventions in contemporary political debate were commended for their seriousness and rational, masculine qualities.
Macaulay’s republicanism, sympathy for popular resistance to government, and her literary reputation all made her an attractive ally for American colonists. The first link of her network of American allies was forged by 1769. Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush initiated a regular correspondence with Macaulay after attending her salon in London. In a letter to his brother Jacob, he wrote that “Mrs. Macaulay, the celebrated female historian … is employed in publishing a 5th volume of her History of England, in which she purposes to treat largely of the settlement of the colonies. You may depend upon it, she will do ample justice to the rights of America.” [3] So too did Macaulay join in the colonists’ criticism of British policy and encouraged their resistance. She wrote to John Adams that the “unjust system of policy which has too long prevailed in your government and filled the hearts of your Patriots with melancholy apprehensions for the future state of America.” [4]
American Readership and the Limits of Agreement
Prior to the American Revolution, Macaulay’s History of England was met with an enthusiastic reception from Americans (which she encouraged by sending copies to influential individuals such as James Otis, John Dickinson, and Ezra Stiles). [5] So too did Mercy Warren (the American activist poet, playwright, and pamphleteer who, during and leading up to the American Revolution, published poems and plays that attacked royal authority and urged colonists to resist British infringements on their rights and liberties) read Macaulay’s History, as well. Of course, the fact that so many Americans read or admired Macaulay’s history does not establish that they shared her same metaphysical or religious beliefs in the universal rights of man, nor that they all were in harmonious agreement as to what forms of constitution were the best vehicles for effecting political progress.
When he first wrote to Macaulay, John Adams revealed that although he had read “not only with Pleasure and Instruction, but with great admiration, Mrs. Macaulay’s History of England,” he did not completely agree with her political principles. [6] Later, in a letter to Richard Prince, he explained that he wrote on principles of government because his countrymen were running wild and had been propagated by their ill-informed favorites, including pamphlets like Common Sense, but also Macaulay’s History. [7] While her brand of republicanism and enlightenment was by no means the only impetus behind American revolutionary zeal, it was certainly influential. That influence, however, was not confined to pamphlet debates or private correspondence: it was embedded in the way Macaulay herself conceptualized America within her historical narrative.
The American Issue in the History of England
This conceptualization of America became most visible in the fifth volume of her History, published in 1771. While Macaulay celebrated the excellence of the English commonwealth she described there, she sharply disagreed with her contemporary British government’s policies toward the American colonies in the years preceding the American Revolution. Writing her fifth volume of History from Bath, she picked up after the death of Charles, when the Commons, “according to the example of the Romans after the expulsion of their regal tyrants, passed an act prohibiting the proclaiming any individual to be King of the English Empire.” [8] She transitioned to record the settlements of America, which, she claimed, all but New-England adhered to Stewart interest. [9]
Never during the annals of time, according to Macaulay, was there a government, so newly established, so formidable to foreign states as was the English commonwealth. Truly, in only the space of twelve years, the tyranny of more than 500 years had subdued and “in the form of government built on its ruins, they [the English] had recalled the wisdom and glory of ancient times.” [10] The appetite for Liberty in Englishmen was at an all time high. The government of the country was “in the hands of illustrious patriots, and wise legislators’ the glory, the welfare, the true interest of the empire was their only care; the public money was no longer lavished on the worthless dependants of a court; no taxes were levied on the people but what were necessary to effect the purposes of the greatest national good.” [11] This government prioritized Macaulay’s values – it truly sought out liberty and was composed of men who had a true interest in helping their fellow citizens.
Yet as early as 1773, she predicted the British government would fail to address colonial grievances and that their independence was unavoidable. As the Anglo-American conflict became increasingly unavoidable, colonial affairs and interests were at the heart of both London and Whig groups that Macaulay found herself to be a part of, and America was of particular fascination. [12] Macaulay saw the thirteen colonies as the last British place where some of the Commonwealth spirit might be revived. It was against this backdrop of escalating crisis and diminishing hope that Macaulay moved beyond historical interpretation to direct political intervention.
An Address to the People of England, Ireland, and Scotland (1775)
In her Address to the People of England, Ireland, and Scotland (1775), Macaulay sought to defend the American liberties about which she had so frequently written. She praised parliamentary candidates who supported reform and the taxation rights of Americans in 1774; furthermore, she charged that despotic government policies threatened the liberties of British citizens everywhere, cautioning that if the ministry’s actions had raised a “spirit beyond the Atlantic” that the British might never be able to quell, warning an alternative could lead to war with France and/or Spain, a loss of American revenues, and the colonies themselves. [13] The Address promoted the redress of colonial and constitutional grievances she had spent her political career opposing. Such intentions were not unusual or particularly controversial, but such a radically anti-British, anti-imperial undercurrent to the pamphlet from an English writer in 1775 was certainly uncommon. [14]
The Address was published in Bath, in two London editions, and in New York. The pamphlet begins in the aftermath of the general election in the autumn of 1774. Before the election, Macaulay’s brother John Sawbridge had re-entered into a partnership with John Wilkes (1725-97, an English radical, journalist, politician, magistrate, essayist, and soldier first elected a Member of Parliament in 1757), as the Society of the Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights launched an ambitious campaign, the pillar of which was a question of instructions for constituency to members of parliament. [15] The campaign was successful in metropolitan areas, with candidates elected on Wilkeite platforms in Middlesex, the City of London (Sawbridge was one of them), and Southwark. However, the campaign floundered in provinces, illustrating the limitations of the movement for political reform outside of cities (Edmund Burke had also condemned the doctrine of constituency in his Speech to the Electors of Bristol).
It was in the wake of these events that Macaulay voiced her frustration in this pamphlet. According to her, the provinces “reject[ed] the wise example set them by the city of London, and the county of Middlesex, in requiring a test from those they elected into the representative office,” a test which could have “given a renewed strength, vigour, and purity, to the British constitution.” [16] In her private correspondence, she described her aspiration for the Address as showing a zeal for the liberties of the British empire and that it might be well accepted by the friends of Liberty, the political reformers on either side of the Atlantic. [17]
Taxation, Representation, and the Drift toward Despotism
Macaulay believed that war between Britain and its North American colonies was inevitable, in part thanks to British taxation policy. Although the Stamp Act had been repealed in 1765, the Townshend Duties introduced in 1767–68 imposed indirect taxes on glass, lead, paints, paper, and tea imported into America. It should come as “no secret,” Macaulay wrote, that the “steady progress of despotism have attempted to wrest from our American Colonists every privilege necessary to freemen,” and she found the Stamp Act particularly shameful as an early sign of this trajectory. [18]
These policies confirmed a broader conviction Macaulay had long held about imperial power. She regarded the conquest and governance of foreign peoples as a dangerous triumph, especially within limited monarchies. When laws were imposed on the conquered, she warned, it “never fails of subjecting the conquerors to the same measure of slavery which they have imposed on the conquered.” [19] Continued oppression, she believed, would inevitably drive the American colonies to break free from British rule.
By the early 1770s, recent imperial policy appeared to Macaulay to confirm this logic in practice rather than theory. In 1770, Lord North repealed most of the Townshend Duties but fatally retained the tax on tea. The destruction of East India Company tea in Boston Harbour in 1773 was followed by the Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts, which ended local self-government in Massachusetts and effectively closed Boston’s trade. [20] For Macaulay, these measures marked a decisive escalation, elevating the intra-imperial conflict to a point of no return. While she lamented the impending loss of the colonies, she nonetheless anticipated – indeed, welcomed with excitement – the rise of an independent American republic.
It was in this context that Macaulay issued her most direct intervention in the American debate. The Address represents Macaulay’s only direct intervention in the debate over the American colonies, whose constitutional right to no taxation without representation she believed had been violated by the British government. In fact, she argued that Americans cannot be taxed because they are “neither adequately or inadequately represented.” [21]
She seized the moment to remind her fellow citizens in England, Scotland, and Ireland of the need for political reform at home. If Americans had been subjected to arbitrary taxation and governance, she warned, Britons might soon follow. Chastising her countrymen for their indifference to government abuses in North America, Macaulay cautioned that they risked becoming the next victims of tyrannical rule, and that the time to act on reform was now.
The Quebec Act and Religious Politics
Significantly, Macaulay not only reacted to the Stamp and Intolerable Acts, but also to the Quebec Act, which Parliament had enacted in 1774. Canada had been ceded to Britain at the conclusion of the French and Indian War (1754-63), an act designed to facilitate better administration of the colony. In an attempt to neutralize resistance among the large French Catholic majority to the Crown, Parliament took a pragmatic approach to recognize the rights of Catholics, while still allowing French civil laws to continue. Catholics in Canada were now allowed to hold elected office at a local level (still, the colony was denied a legislature – its governor was appointed by the British King). Furthermore, the act extended the boundaries of Canada to the south and west, and, in doing so, ignored the western land claims of the New England and mid-Atlantic colonies.
Macaulay was particularly incensed by the Quebec Act. As a republican, she objected to the lack of legislature and absolute power vested in an appointed governor, writing that “Canadians are deprived of the right to an assembly, and of trial by jury.” She saw that “English laws in civil cases [have been] abolished, the French laws established, and the crown empowered to erect arbitrary courts of judicature,” and in extending the borders of the colony, Britain allowed “despotism to have its full sway.” [22]
Macaulay’s opposition to the Quebec Act was not only political but also religious. A committed Protestant who abhorred the Catholic Church, she wrote within a long tradition of British anti-Catholicism that had followed the schism with Rome in the sixteenth century. Catholics in Britain and its empire faced persistent civil disabilities, including exclusion from elected office well into the nineteenth century. The Quebec Act’s recognition of Catholic political rights therefore marked a sharp departure from long-standing British policy.
Although Macaulay adamantly supported the extension of voting rights to all men, she remained opposed to extending elected office to Catholics. In her view, the Church was ruled by an absolute monarch, the Pope, a culture that cultivated obedient monarchists who would block her vision of republican progress. In her words, the establishment of a Popery, which was quite different from the toleration of it, was “altogether incompatible with the fundamental principles of our constitution.” [23]
For Macaulay, the most troubling aspect of the Quebec Act was its timing. Protestant Dissenters in Britain still laboured under civil disabilities, and between 1771 and 1774, the Feathers Tavern petitioners unsuccessfully sought relief from the obligation to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, which were required upon nomination to an ecclesiastical office, or enrollment or graduation from Oxbridge. With this in mind, prioritizing the rights of Catholics in Canada amidst a time when Protestant Dissenters were still treated as second-class citizens at home was a betrayal of Protestantism at its core. [24]
Reform at Home and the Warning to Britain
The bulk of the Address is a reprimand of British indifference to the plight of their American countrymen, coupled with a defense of the parliamentary reforms republicans advocated for. Macaulay is blunt with her criticism; in her view, these subjects have allowed free rein for tyranny in distant corners of the empire. Blinded by the perceived benefits of colonial trade, generations have overlooked the failed promises of the Glorious Revolution and accepted parliamentary actions uncritically. As a result, Macaulay argues these subjects, “dazzled with the sun shine of a court, and fattening on the spoils of the people,” have become willfully ignorant of the plight of Americans, issues that are “particularly [their] business to be acquainted with.” [25]
This political complacency, she suggests, had been sustained in part by economic prosperity, but only temporarily. Yet Macaulay suggests that while periods of economic growth might have led to a general indifference to politics, leading to an inability to limit monarchy and build representative assemblies, the economy has starkly shifted. Following the end of the French and Indian War, “commerce has been declining with hasty steps for these last ten years.” [26] Targeting her audience’s sense of economic vulnerability, she notes that no one was immune to the negative effects of economic crisis: not the “once-opulent trader,” or the “starving mechanic,” the “numerous half-famished poor” nor the “needy gentry.” [27]
From this shared vulnerability, Macaulay derived her sharpest warning. The loss of American colonies would bring a new focus to England, Scotland, and Ireland as an alternative source of tax revenue. In a warning tone, she predicted that after officials “pick the pockets of your American brethren,” they might come after the British people. [28] In other words, while the people of the British Isles might not, in their current moment, feel the economic pressures Americans did, she predicted the Crown would have no hesitancy to apply those same economic policies toward their subjects at home. By connecting the political to the economic, Macaulay made clear that only a proactive approach to parliamentary reform could prevent such an outcome.
As the Address demonstrates, the looming American crisis gave republicans in Britain a relevant context in which to frame their radical campaign for reform. These efforts, however, were not to be limited to questions of taxation; to make Parliament truly representative, Macaulay advocated for a variety of measures to eliminate corruption and elevate concern for the public good. Among these efforts might be the Wilkeite policies her brother championed, the redistribution of seats in Parliament to better reflect population shifts, or, more controversially, the proposals advanced by radicals in and around London who called for new measures of accountability for elected officials.
In her Address, Macaulay dismisses those who had contempt toward her proposals to impose means to check that elected officials “[obey] the mandates of their constituents.” [29] While those men who opposed her view assert “unlimited obedience is stipulated in the acceptance of protection,” Macaulay argued that instead, their current government subjects constituents to a form of “unlimited slavery,” shown most clearly in the actions “your Governors have exerted [in] an arbitrary power over your brethren in America.” [30]
Macaulay ended her Address with an invitation for her countrymen to “Rouse! and unite in one general effort; till, by your unanimous and repeated addresses to the throne, and to both houses of parliament, you draw the attention of every part of the government to their own interests, and to the danger|ous state of the British empire.” [31] As a call to action, her Address not only pointed out the unfair treatment of the American colonies but also insisted on the necessity of safeguarding against such abuses lest they be employed on British subjects at home as well. Yet embedded within this warning was a recognition that reform might come too late to preserve imperial unity.
Conclusion: Hope and an American Republic
While a war with their mother country would be regrettable, Macaulay sees no other option for the American colonies. Having exhausted appeals to constitutional redress, and fighting for republican principles and parliamentary reforms at home, she understands that peaceful resolution between the two sides is most improbable. Her writings were well known in the colonies, and her celebrity gave her access to America’s leading republicans and rebels; regular letters she received from Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia informed her conviction that “an extensive empire of freemen” was already forming and that American tolerance for a corrupt Parliament—as for monarchy in general—had already passed. Though disappointed by the impending loss of the empire, Macaulay readily embraces the thought of American independence as a victory for republicanism. By their example, she hopes Americans will inspire their former countrymen to reform governance in what then remained of the British Empire.
To Macaulay, America represents something new. It is a laboratory in which republican principles, theories of natural rights, and guarantees of liberties can be put into action, tested, and refined. Less restrained by tradition, it is free of the shackles of monarchist history. Macaulay remains ultimately committed to reforming the British system at home, however. Challenging the indifference of the electorate on the “foggy islands” off the European continent was her priority, along with the cultivation of an active and informed citizenry.
Works Cited
- In fact, Macaulay’s acquaintance ranged from the conservatives, Samuel Johnson (1709–84), James Boswell (1740–95), David Hume (1711–76), and Tobias Smollett (1721–71), who opposed her ideas, to the notorious John Wilkes (1725–97), whom she and her brother supported for a time. She knew and entertained Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), Horace Walpole (1717–97), James Burgh (1714–75), Richard Price (1723–91), Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), Benjamin Rush (1747–1814), Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754–93), and many other less well-known writers and political activists of the period. She also was in contact with various famous literary women of her lifetime including Sarah Scott (née Robinson, 1720–95), Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson, 1718–1800), and various other members of the Bluestocking circle including Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), though her relationship with these women was not always a positive one.
- Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 41.
- Carla H. Hay, “Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution.” The Historian 56, no. 2 (1994): 305; Corner, Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, 60-61; L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 2:182; Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 29-32; Benjamin Rush to [Jacob Rush], 26 January [1769], in L. H. Butterfield, ed.,Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, 1951), 1:74.
- Macaulay to John Adams, August 1773,11 September 1774, Adams Papers, reel 344; Macaulay to Arthur Lee [1773] and Macaulay to Richard Henry Lee [1775], “Lee Family Papers,” reel 2; Macaulay to Warren, 11 September 1774, MWP in Hay, “Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution,” 309.
- Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 43. Green cites the following: ‘I received by Dr Jeffries the singular honor of your letter with an elegant edition of your excellent history,’ James Otis to Catharine Macaulay, July 27, 1769, GLC01796; ‘It was with singular pleasure I received the very acceptable present of your [justly] celebrated History of England,’ William Livingston to Catharine Macaulay, September 22, 1769, GLC01793; ‘ … it would be in vain for Me to think of sending you a Present, equal in Value to that with which you have honored Me,’ John Dickinson to Catharine Macaulay, December 17, 1770, GLC01790.03; ‘By Mr Marchant we see the elegant copy of your publications in five Volumes, which you did us the honor of presenting to the Redwood Library in this Town,’ Ezra Stiles to Catharine Macaulay, November 13, 1772, Newport, Rhode Island, Ezra Stiles Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
- John Adams to Catharine Macaulay, August 9, 1770; in The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, ed. Karen Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 115.
- John Adams to Richard Price, May 20, 1789; Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 9.558–9.
- Macaulay, The History of England, V:1.
- Macaulay made sure to note that the settlers of New-England had been planted by the friends of Liberty, who had fled from the tyranny of past times (History, V:78).
- Macaulay, The History of England, V:94.
- Ibid., V:377.
- Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 126. Macaulay’s networks of Atlantic connections included Benjamin Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, James Otis and Mercy Otis Warren, Samuel Adams, John Dickinson, Ezra Stiles, the Lee brothers, William Livingston, James Bowdoin, and, later, George Washington.
- Catharine Macaulay, An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland, on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs by Catharine Macaulay (England: Printed by R. Cruttwell … for E. and C. Dilly, …, 1775), 7.
- Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 136.
- Magnus Skjönsberg, ed., Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 145.
- Catharine Macaulay, An Address to the People of England, Ireland, and Scotland, on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs (London, 1775), 5, in Evans Early American Imprint Collection, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.
- Catharine Macaulay to Mr. and Mrs. Northcote, January 20, 1775, Correspondence, 196.
- Macaulay, An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6.
- Ibid., 11.
- On November 28, the Dartmouth, carrying 114 chests of tea, arrived at Boston Harbor. “The Body” (a group of Bostonians who met at Faneuil Hall and subsequently the Old South Meeting House about the matter) demanded the tea be returned. Yet by December 15, the Eleanor and the Beaver, both carrying tea, arrived at another Boston port (Griffin’s Wharf). If the duty on the Dartmouth tea was not paid, the customs officer was authorized to seize the ship and its cargo. (See Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) for more on the Tea Party and its legacy in the American imagination.) The governor, ships’ owners, and tea consignees all refused to return the tea to England, yet the Body resolved to prevent the East India tea from being landed, stored, sold, or consumed. Following the conclusion of the meeting, the crowd streamed onto the street to Griffin’s Wharf and created, in John Adam’s words, a “daring … intrepid … Epocha in History.” (John Adams, Diary 20, entry for 13 December 1773, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.) Although acknowledging it as an attack on private property, he nonetheless finds the destruction amazing. (Ibid).
- Macaulay, An Address to the People of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 9.
- Ibid., 7.
- Ibid., 10.
- Magnus Skjönsberg, Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings, 147.
- Macaulay, An Address to the People of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 7.
- Ibid., 9.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 14.
- Ibid., 9.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 15.