Qualla: Catharine Macaulay

Catharine Macaulay: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. In June 1785, after a year touring the new United States, an English historian stayed for ten days at Mount Vernon as the personal guest of George and Martha Washington. Catharine Macaulay was the most famous female intellectual in the English-speaking world. She had written six volumes of a still-unfinished History of England, argued in print that the people had the right to overthrow tyrannical monarchs, corresponded with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and been welcomed in revolutionary Paris by Mirabeau and Condorcet. Washington wrote afterward that her principles were so much and so justly admired by the friends of liberty and mankind. Six years later, she died in obscurity in the Berkshire village of Binfield. Her name was being deliberately forgotten.

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Catharine Macaulay: Olantigh and the Reader

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Samuel, Public domain. Catharine Sawbridge was born on 23 March 1731 at Olantigh in Wye, Kent, the daughter of a landed proprietor whose ancestors had been Warwickshire yeomanry. Her mother died when Catharine was two. A governess provided some of her education; the rest she gave herself, with a stubbo...

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Image: Richard Samuel | Public domain

Catharine Macaulay: Against David Hume

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Samuel, Public domain. The History was conceived as the Whig reply to David Hume's enormously successful Tory History of England. Where Hume saw Parliament's seventeenth-century revolutionaries as troublesome enthusiasts, Macaulay saw them as the patriots who had attacked, at the hazard and even the lo...

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Image: Richard Samuel | Public domain

Catharine Macaulay: The Scandal of 1778

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brigade Piron, CC BY-SA 4.0. Catharine Macaulay had been widowed in 1766. She raised her daughter Catharine Sophia and continued her writing. In 1774 she moved to Bath, where the radical Reverend Thomas Wilson installed her in a house and erected a statue of her as the goddess of history in his church. The a...

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Image: Brigade Piron | CC BY-SA 4.0

Catharine Macaulay: America, and Wollstonecraft

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), Public domain. Macaulay's American journey was an act of intellectual pilgrimage. She stayed with John and Mercy Otis Warren and influenced Mercy's own work as a historian of the Revolution. She met Richard Henry Lee in New York. She corresponded with John and Abigail Adams. At Mount Vernon she...

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Image: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) | Public domain

Catharine Macaulay: The Reply to Burke

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Samuel, Public domain. In 1790 Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, the great conservative answer to the French upheaval. Macaulay replied immediately with her Observations on the Reflections of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke. Where Burke mourned the passing of the age of chivalry...

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Image: Richard Samuel | Public domain

Catharine Macaulay: Recovered

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Samuel, Public domain. For most of the nineteenth century she was forgotten. Her remarriage embarrassed the male historians who controlled the literary canon. Her radicalism embarrassed everyone. By the time Thomas Babington Macaulay, no relation, produced his own Whig History of England in the 1840s a...

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Image: Richard Samuel | Public domain