Catharine Macaulay began the second volume of her History of England with an “Advertisement” to acknowledge the public’s favorable reception of her work. The best return she could offer her “friends of Liberty and the constitution,” she wrote, was her “perseverance according to the plan laid down in the introduction,” the continuation of her history. [1]
Her second volume, picking up on the reign of Charles I, did not simply narrate events but rather sought to fully expose the shallowness of the ministry and the oppressive grievances under which England labored. As Macaulay declared, under Charles, “Life, freedom of person, and possession of property, were held by a precarious tenure.” [2] Yet despite this precarious state of freedom, the English people, as she insisted, were never ignorant of their rights and privileges. They could, through “their own vigor and resolute opposition to the malice and power of their governors,” [3] defend those liberties. The second volume truly exposes 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. According to Macaulay, despite their freedom on the line, the long history of England’s virtuous populace could inspire future generations to continue to fight against oppression.
Volume II: The Reign of Charles I and the People’s Resistance
In this section, as well as in the next, I will attempt to outline the period(s) of history that Macaulay wrote about while also analyzing her own historical writing.
Charles I (1600–1649), whose authoritarian rule provoked civil war and ultimately led to his execution, provided Macaulay with the archetype of despotism. From the start of his reign, tensions between Charles and Parliament were constant. In 1625, his first year as king, Parliament refused to grant him the right to levy customs duties (except on conditions that increased its powers, though this right was granted to previous monarchs for life). When the Commons attempted in 1626 to impeach George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, James I’s favorite and a powerful figure who retained influence during the early years of Charles’s rule, the king responded by dissolving Parliament altogether. [4] Largely due to Buckingham’s incompetence, England had become embroiled in wars with both France (the Huguenot Wars) and Spain. Desperate for funds, Charles resorted to imposing a forced loan, which his judges declared illegal. He then dismissed the chief justice and ordered the arrest of more than seventy knights and gentlemen who refused to pay, deepening the nation’s resentment toward the crown.
In March of 1628, facing his third Parliament, Charles’ failed military expedition to aid the French Protestants at La Rochelle discredited his government. The House of Commons responded by passing resolutions that condemned the arbitrary taxation and imprisonment Charles had practiced just a few years ago, and then set out its complaints in the Petition of Right, demanding the recognition of four fundamental principles: no taxes without the consent of Parliament; no imprisonment without cause; no quartering soldiers on subjects; no martial law in peacetime. The king was compelled to give formal consent, and by the time the fourth Parliament met in 1629, Buckingham had been assassinated.
Macaulay’s judgement on these years is unsparing. “He had not only usurped the power of raising money without the consent of the people,” she wrote, “but his proclamations were considered by the ministry as so many new ones; the breach of which was severely punished as was the breach of the established laws of the realm.” [5] Her language intensifies as she lamented that “The laws, disarmed of their wonted power to protect, lay prostrate at the foot of the throne, to be trampled upon with impunity.” [6] For Macaulay, Charles’ tyranny was not merely political mismanagement but moral corruption – a betrayal of the constitutional order that once defined England’s greatness in her eyes.
The latter half of Volume II turns to Charles’s conflicts with Scotland. Believing he had secured absolute power over Great Britain, Charles neglected Scotland, alienating the nobility by revoking lands claimed by the crown and, in 1637, by imposing a new liturgy based on the English Book of Common Prayer. The Scots’ resistance, culminating in the National Covenant, led to the Bishops’ Wars, where Charles was decisively outmaneuvered. [7] Forced to summon the “Short Parliament” in 1640 and then the “Long Parliament” later that year to address the expenses of fighting the Bishops Wars, Charles faced a Commons determined to restrain royal authority. Parliament impeached his advisor, the Earl of Strafford, declared his fiscal measures illegal, and passed a bill preventing its own dissolution without consent. [8]
For Macaulay, these actions stood testament to the long history of the people in England’s commitment to their rights and privileges. Indeed, Parliament’s actions had “convinced the public that the redress of their sufferings depended entirely on their own vigor and resolute opposition to the malice and power of their governors.” [9] Likewise, the Scots showed an example of breaking out from a chain of passive obedience: “The spirit of the English constitution, which had been restrained by the Tudors, and totally suppressed by the Stewards,” now broke forth “like a mighty torrent.” [10] This, for Macaulay, was a moment of political education: the people’s rediscovery of their own constitutional power. The English example, she argued, could inspire others abroad to claim their liberty, an idea she would later echo in her correspondence with American revolutionaries. The endurance of English liberty, however imperiled, remained for her both historical fact and moral imperative.
Volume III: The “Equal Rights of Man” and the Seeds of Revolution
In her third volume of The History of England (published 1767), Macaulay’s interpretation of past events became yet more divisive and overtly philosophical. Here, she introduced the phrase “the equal rights of man,” a phrase rarely found in the corpus of eighteenth-century political or philosophical writing. Critiquing Catholic political subservience, she argued that “a people who profess the blessings of Liberty, who know its value, and who are acquainted with the equal rights of men, and understand the rational principles of government and subjection” must reject tyranny. [11] She even claimed that “the doctrine of Christ … asserted the equal rights of men,” [12] tying republican liberty to both earlier understandings of natural law or Christian doctrine. [13]
Yet Macaulay also recognized that liberty, though “largely enjoyed,” was “not firmly established.” [14] Her narrative of the early 1640s shows a nation poised between freedom and relapse into servitude. The Grant Remonstrance against Charles’ abuses, the Irish Rebellion, and subsequent disputes over military command all exposed the fragility of constitutional order. [15] When Charles rejected Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions, in which Parliament sought a larger share in control over the share of government, declaring Nolumus Leges Angliae mutari (“We are unwilling to change the laws of England”), he effectively sealed the rupture between monarchy and people. [16]
For Macaulay, this moment marked the moral turning point of the English Civil War. “Charles began now severely to feel those distresses and difficulties into which his conduct had driven him,” she wrote. [17] The Parliamentarians, laboring under “the difficulties which ever attend designs of this nature, where the power of execution remains in the body of the people,” embodied the “illustrious legislators” who sought to preserve liberty against arbitrary rule. [18]
In August of 1642 the government would split into two factions: the Cavaliers (Royalists) and the Roundheads (Parliamentarians). Macaulay’s sympathies lay wholly with the latter, whose victory under Oliver Cromwell represented, for her, the triumph of civic virtue over corruption. Yet she acknowledged the difficulty of sustaining such virtue among the populace. Under despotic governments, she observed, “the common herd of men are incapable of judging of argument, and must be led to action by their passions, not by their understandings.” [19] Education, therefore, remained essential: only through knowledge of rights could citizens preserve liberty against manipulation and superstition. [20]
Conclusion
Thus, in the second two volumes of her History of England, Macaulay transformed seventeenth-century events into a moral-political allegory of liberty’s fragility and endurance. By introducing the “equal rights of man” and grounding that concept in both Christian and republican traditions, she helped articulate a philosophical foundation that would reverberate across the Atlantic world.
In the second part of this study, to be published later next week, I will turn to the artistic components of Macaulay’s History, specifically the portrait of her as Libertas that accompanied Volume III, and consider how visual culture extended and complicated her political philosophy. There, I will compare Macaulay’s self-representation to that of another eighteenth-century woman writer whose image also negotiated the politics of liberty: Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved poet of Boston whose Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) offered its own visual and textual assertion of freedom.
Notes
- Macaulay, The History of England, II.
- Ibid., II:255.
- Ibid., II:347.
- Parliament blamed the failure of a naval expedition against the Spanish port of Cadiz in the Fall of 1625 on Buckingham.
- Macaulay, The History of England, II: 133.
- Ibid., II: 255.
- The National Covenant was an agreement signed by many people of Scotland during 1638, opposing the proposed Laudian reforms of the Church of Scotland by King Charles I. The Bishops’ Wars were two separate conflicts fought in 1639 and 1640 between Charles I and his Covenanter opponents in Scotland. They were the first of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, which also include the First and Second English Civil Wars, the Irish Confederate Wars, and the 1650 to 1652 Anglo-Scottish War.
- The Long Parliament, summoned in November 1640, proved to be just as uncooperative to Charles as the last, condemning his actions and preparing to impeach Strafford for treason (he was beheaded in May 1641). So too was Charles forced to agree to a measure whereby the existing Parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent. He also accepted bills declaring his arbitrary fiscal measures illegal and generally condemning his methods of governing in the previous 11 years. Charles visited Scotland in August of 1640 where he agreed to the full establishment of Presbyterianism and allowed Scottish estates to nominate royal officials.
- Macaulay, The History of England, II: 347.
- Ibid., II: 380.
- Ibid., III:77-8.
- bid., III:345.
- Karen Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 72.
- “The body of the nobility had never acted on any extensive view of public utility; their opposition had been solely founded on private pique and personal jealousy; they had rather distasted the ministers of the late oppressive measures, than entertained any noble resentment at the oppression itself” (Macaulay, History of England), III: 44.
- Ibid, III:314.
- Charles’ full response, Propositions Made by Both Houses of Parliament … with His Majesties Answer Thereunto (1642), can be found here: https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1642-propositions-made-by-parliament-and-charles-i-s-answer.
- Macaulay, History of England, III: 159-60.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 161.
- So, the Parliamentarians did their best to endeavor by “every political art to keep u their disgust to the character of the King, and their apprehensions of his treachery,” while the factions of the Royalists did their best, using “every plausible quality in the King’s character [to exaggerate] to a high degree of moral virtue: every probable excuse was framed for his past conduct: every treachery with which he had been charged was denied; the attributes of piety, virtue, and honour were given to him” (III: 161). With the plot to bring the army against the Parliament, the rumor of an intended assassination in Scotland, the Irish massacre, and “the petulant indiscretion of several Papists and virulent royalists,” tensions continued to rise amongst Englishmen and all those living in the British Isles (Ibid). Thus, from this period, the rebellion, by a quick progression, spread itself throughout the whole Kingdom.