48 Facts About Catharine Macaulay

Catharine Macaulay was a famed English Whig historian.

Catharine Macaulay was the first Englishwoman to become an historian and during her lifetime the world's only published female historian.

Catharine Macaulay was a daughter of John Sawbridge and his wife Elizabeth Wanley of Olantigh.

Catharine Macaulay told Caleb Fleming that she knew neither Latin nor Greek.

Catharine Macaulay wrote to the American writer Mercy Otis Warren in 1787: "Tho' the History of your late glorious revolution is what I should certainly undertake were I again young, yet as things are I must for many reasons decline such a task".

Between 1763 and 1783 Catharine Macaulay wrote, in eight volumes, The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line.

Catharine Macaulay was the first Englishwoman to become an historian and during her lifetime the world's only published female historian.

Catharine Macaulay lamented that her contemporaries had forgotten that the privileges they enjoyed had been fought for by "men that, with the hazard and even the loss of their lives, attacked the formidable pretensions of the Stewart family, and set up the banners of liberty against a tyranny which had been established for a series of more than one hundred and fifty years".

Catharine Macaulay believed that the Anglo-Saxons had possessed freedom and equality with representative institutions but that these were lost at the Norman Conquest.

The history of England, in Catharine Macaulay's view, was the story of the struggle of the English to win back their rights that were crushed by the "Norman yoke".

Catharine Macaulay justified the execution of King Charles I by claiming that "Kings, the servants of the State, when they degenerated into tyrants, forfeited their right to government".

Catharine Macaulay was heavily critical of Oliver Cromwell, who she denounced as "the vain-glorious usurper" and as an "individual, no ways exalted above his brethren in any of those private endowments which constitute the true greatness of character, or excelling in any quality, but in the measure of a vain and wicked ambition".

Catharine Macaulay acknowledged that the Revolution Settlement limited the power of the crown and had rejected "hereditary indefeasible right" in favour of "a contract with the people" as the basis of the monarchy's power.

Catharine Macaulay shared her fellow radicals' anti-Catholicism, writing in the chapter covering the Irish Rebellion of 1641 of the Papists' "never-ceasing attempts by every kind of means, to bring all things again to subjection to the Church of Rome; their avowed maxim that faith is not to be kept with heretics; their religious principles calculated for the support of despotic power, and inconsistent with the genius of a free constitution".

Catharine Macaulay criticised "their apparent devotion to politics for personal gain rather than for the advancement of liberty".

Catharine Macaulay's approach was a moralising one as she believed that only a virtuous people could create a republic.

Volume four of the history was published; this dealt with the trial and execution of Charles I Macaulay expressed the view that Charles's execution was justified, praised the Commonwealth of England and revealed republican sympathies.

Early in 1769, Horace Walpole recorded dining with "the famous Mrs Catharine Macaulay": "She is one of the sights that all foreigners are carried to see".

Around 1770, Lord Lyttelton wrote that Catharine Macaulay was "a very prodigy", with portraits of her "on every print-seller's counter".

James Burgh wrote in 1774 that Catharine Macaulay wrote "for the purpose of inculcating on the people of Britain the love of liberty and their country".

Catharine Macaulay's fame came to an end in 1778 when she remarried, with many of her friends and supporters dropping her.

Catharine Macaulay henceforth disappeared into obscurity, only occasionally re-emerging into the public eye.

Catharine Macaulay wished to write a History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, however only the first volume was completed.

Catharine Macaulay was associated with two political groups in the 1760s and 1770s: the Real Whigs and the Wilkites.

Catharine Macaulay was sympathetic with the cause of the American Colonists.

Catharine Macaulay was a supporter of John Wilkes during the Wilkesite controversy of the 1760s and closely associated with the radical Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights.

In 1790, Catharine Macaulay claimed she was only talking about political inequality, she insisted she was not "arguing against that inequality of property which must more or less take place in all societies".

Catharine Macaulay opposed Catholic emancipation, criticising in 1768 those "who pretend to be friends of Liberty and would tolerate Papists".

Catharine Macaulay regarded the people of Corsica as being "under Popish Superstition" and recommended the works of Milton to enlighten them.

Catharine Macaulay claimed that there needed to be "an unrestrained power lodged in some person, capable of the arduous task of settling such a government" and claimed that this should be Paoli.

Catharine Macaulay attacked Edmund Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.

Catharine Macaulay advocated a system of rotation for MPs and "a more extended and equal power of election".

Catharine Macaulay was heavily influenced by the works of James Harrington, especially his belief that property was the foundation of political power.

Catharine Macaulay replied that "I have no desire to see the residence of the tyrants, I haven't yet seen that of the Georges".

Catharine Macaulay's last work was a pamphlet reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Catharine Macaulay wrote that it was right that the French had not replaced Louis XVI as this would have complicated their task to ensure liberty.

Catharine Macaulay replied to Burke's lament that the age of chivalry was gone by claiming that society should be freed from "false notions of honour" which were nothing more than "methodized sentimental barbarism".

Whereas Burke supported the inherited rights of Englishmen rather than the abstract rights of man, Catharine Macaulay claimed that Burke's theory of rights as gifts of monarchs meant that monarchs could just as easily take away the rights they had granted.

Catharine Macaulay is a central figure in the history of women's political thought.

Catharine Macaulay outlined her elements of her own form of popular or republican government.

Catharine Macaulay's work challenged the political and legal world of her time.

Catharine Macaulay was a lifelong member of the Church of England, although her apparent free expression of heterodox religious opinions shocked some of her contemporariness and led to accusations of infidelity.

Catharine Macaulay claimed that reason, without faith, was insufficient and wrote of the need for the Church to concentrate "on the practical doctrines of the Christian religion", such as man's God-given powers of bettering his own condition and reducing evil.

Catharine Macaulay rejected the idea of an inherent human nature: "There is not a virtue or a vice that belongs to humanity, which we do not make ourselves".

Catharine Macaulay wrote in 1790 in her Letters on Education, as Mary Wollstonecraft did two years later in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that the apparent weakness of women was due to their mis-education.

Catharine Macaulay wrote pamphlets criticizing the policy of the British Government in the lead up to the Revolution and she was personally associated with many leading figures among the American Revolutionaries.

Mercy wrote afterwards that Catharine Macaulay was "a lady whose Resources of knowledge seem to be almost inexhaustible" and wrote to John Adams that she was "a Lady of most Extraordinary talent, a Commanding Genius and Brilliance of thought".

Catharine Macaulay then visited New York and met Richard Henry Lee, who afterwards thanked Samuel Adams for introducing him to "this excellent Lady".