Catharine Macaulay

Works

• 1763The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line

  Eight volumes (1763–83) on England from 1603 to the Revolution of 1688, written from a republican standpoint: a defence of the parliamentarians of the Civil War and of the people’s right to resist, read as an answer to Hume’s History.

• 1790Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects

  Letters to a fictional Hortensia: girls and boys should be educated together and in the same subjects, because differences of character between the sexes come from education; against Rousseau’s education of Sophie, virtue is the same for both sexes.

• 1790Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France

  Reply to Burke in the form of a letter to the Earl of Stanhope: rights that rest on inherited custom are fragile and must rest on universal principles; Macaulay defends the French Revolution and calls for equal representation of the people.

Position

Macaulay is on the map as a republican political thinker and an early theorist of women’s education. Her “History of England” from James I to the Revolution of 1688 was read as a counterpart to Hume’s: where Hume, a sceptic about the grounds of morality, was taken to be sympathetic to the Stuarts, she defended the parliamentarians of the Civil War and held that moral truths are eternal and knowable by reason. After she sent him her first volume in 1764, they argued by letter over whether a division of power established by custom is legitimate. In “Loose Remarks” (1767) she rejected Hobbes’s purely political account of the state, his contract theory and his view of parental duties, and appended a democratic constitution for Corsica. Against Burke she argued in 1770 that political corruption had its roots in aristocratic factions, and in 1790 that rights resting on inherited custom are fragile and must rest on universal principles, together with equal representation of the whole people. Her “Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth” (1783) joined a rationalist ethics to a doctrine of moral necessity. The “Letters on Education” (1790) argued that differences of character between the sexes are produced by education, criticised Rousseau’s education of Sophie and proposed that girls and boys be taught together. Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed the book and in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792) called her the woman of the greatest abilities that England had produced.

Life & context

Catharine Sawbridge was born on 2 April 1731 at Olantigh near Wye in Kent into a wealthy landed family and educated at home, largely through her own reading of Roman and English history. In 1760 she married the Scottish physician George Macaulay, who died in 1766. The first volume of her “History of England” appeared in 1763, the eighth and last in 1783. Her London house became a meeting place of radical Whigs; her brother John Sawbridge was a leading radical in the City of London and its Lord Mayor in 1775. Her marriage in 1778 to William Graham, who was 21, brought public ridicule and cost her many supporters. In 1784–85 she travelled in the United States and stayed with George Washington at Mount Vernon. In 1790 she published the “Letters on Education” and her reply to Burke’s “Reflections”. She died at Binfield in Berkshire on 22 June 1791.

Further main works

• Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr. Hobbes’s Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society (1767)
• Observations on a Pamphlet, Entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)
• A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783)