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Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Lynne E. Withey
Lynne E. Withey*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Extract

Late eighteenth-century London was a center of political debate, expressed variously in countless pamphlets, in coffee house discussions, and in extra-parliamentary political organizations. Intellectuals and political activists who argued about the problems of ministerial corruption and relations with the colonies had great faith in the power of reasoned discourse and the development of knowledge to improve the human condition. Most of them were interested in science and religion as well as politics. They were part of that broad intellectual ferment that we call the Enlightenment; yet for all the originality of some of their ideas and the radicalism of their political thinking, they owed a great deal to longstanding English political and religious traditions. They were rationalists who believed in God, and radicals who believed in history.

Catharine Macaulay was one of these intellectuals; she was surely not a particularly original thinker, but was unique in using history as her primary medium of political debate, and in being a woman tolerated in male intellectual circles. Macaulay and her associates owed a great intellectual debt to earlier radical thinkers, the “commonwealthmen” of the seventeenth century. What is perhaps less well understood is the extent to which their ideas were informed by religious beliefs as well as political ideology. Beliefs in both the ancient rights of Englishmen and in millennial perfectionism provided the basis for the particular brand of political radicalism espoused by Macaulay and her associates. History was an important part of their political thinking, both because the rights of Englishmen were rooted in historical experience and because the process of history was part of the ultimate achievement of perfection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Fall 1976 , pp. 59 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1976

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References

1. Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11. Price was also a post-millennialist; Priestley's views on this subject are less clear.

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19. Macaulay's views on monarchy are clearest in her discussion of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. She had no qualms about the deposing and executing of Charles I, because he had clearly overstepped the limits of his power. The brief republican period, between Charles's execution and the establishment of Cromwell's Protectorate, was the most glorious period in English history, she thought. Similarly, she felt that deposing James II was legitimate for the same reasons; furthermore, she argued, the people had the right to choose their kings — if they were to have kings at all. The notion of hereditary kingship was not part of the English constitution, but merely a custom that had developed in British society. History, I, 82Google Scholar; IV, 350-57, 428-35; V, 19, 249; VI, 72; History II, 4. See also Observations on Burke's Reflections, pp. 9-10, 14-15, 76-77, 81-82; Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr. Hobbes' Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society. With a Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government, in a Letter to Signior Paoli (London, 1767), pp. 29–30Google Scholar.

20. This point is especially apparent in her pamphlet on Hobbes, addressed to the Corsican Paoli, in which she argued that any “absolute” form of government — monarchy or aristocracy — is evil, and stressed the importance of democracy in a republican form of government. Remarks on … Mr. Hobbes, pp. 12-16, 29-30.

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22. Price went beyond linking good institutions to the improvement of reason to give this argument a moral dimension. A government that promoted freedom and equality was necessary not only because it would help increase understanding, but even more because it would be the only form of government under which the true nature of man could be realized. Men who were secure in their liberty and conscious of their power to rule themselves possessed a dignity of character and a desire to improve their minds. As proof of this assertion, he argued that intellectual achievements had been greatest in countries enjoying a high degree of liberty. Conversely, extreme servility to men in power debased man's character. Obedience to lawful rulers was necessary, but when carried to the extreme of submission to power for its own sake, both ruler and ruled were corrupted. He further argued that unnecessary subjection to rulers was a “blasphemy” against God, who created man free and capable of making his own moral judgments. Nature of Civil Liberty, pp. 8-9; Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (London, 1777), p. 11Google Scholar; A Discourse on the Love of Our Country … Delivered … to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain (Boston, 1790Google Scholar; originally published London, 1790), pp. 21-22, 31.

23. The notion that “power corrupts” was a constantly recurring theme in Macaulay's writing, both as an explanation of the abuses of power by kings and ministers and also as an argument against all aristocratic privileges. See, for example, her comments on Strafford, Laud, Essex, and the two Charles: History, II, 481–84Google Scholar; IV, 148-52, 297-98; VIII, 64. See also Observations on Burke's Reflections, pp. 44-46; Remarks on Mr. Hobbes, p. 23; and Price, Nature of Civil Liberty, pp. 21-23; Additional Observations on Civil Liberty, pp. 15-16.

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33. Ibid., IV, 140-48.

34. Ibid., I, 122-37; II, 220-25; and Appendix; VII, 108-32, 145-46. Quote from IV, 418.

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40. Ibid., IV, 417-21.

41. Ibid., IV, 292-93. See also 267-70, 435-36.

42. Ibid., IV, 350-57.

43. Ibid., V, 385-86.

44. Ibid., V, 112.

45. Ibid., V, 249.

46. Ibid., V, 163, 249, 154-55.

47. Ibid., VII, 261-65.

48. Ibid., VIII, 250-54, 260-62, 272.

49. Ibid., VIII, 329-31; quote from 329; History II, 4, 72, 333.

50. History II, 6, 13, 72-73, 78-83; quote from 13.

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54. Marie Peters and J. R. Pole argue that reference to the ancient constitution as the embodiment of English liberties (rather than dating the progress of liberty only from 1688) is an important distinction between radical and moderate reformers in the late eighteenth century. Peters especially stresses the merging of natural rights theory with the ancient constitution among the radicals of the 1760s and 1770s (the most important period in Macaulay's writing). Peters, , “The ‘Monitor’ on the Constitution, 1755-1765: New Light on the Ideological Origins of English Radicalism,” English Historical Review, LXXXVI (1971), 707–10Google Scholar; Pole, , Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London, 1966), pp. 427–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. J.G.A. Pocock dates the use of the ancient constitution by radicals to the “neo-Harringtonians” of the late seventeenth century. “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, XXII (1965), 572–74Google Scholar. He discusses the connection between the ancient constitution and natural rights theory in the eighteenth century in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (New York, 1967; orig. pub. 1957), pp. 238–51Google Scholar. For a general discussion of the evolution of the various theories of the ancient constitution, see Hill, Christopher, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution (New York, 1964), pp. 50–122Google Scholar.

55. For Burke's comments on the ancient constitution and natural rights, see Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. O'Brien, Conor Cruise (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 117-20, 150–53Google Scholar. J.G.A. Pocock discusses Burke's use of the ancient constitution, and finds his views on it similar to those widely held in the seventeenth century in “Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas,” Historical Journal, III (1960), 128-31, 137–41Google Scholar.

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57. Observations on Burke's Reflections, pp. 30-31. It is worth noting here that Paine rejected the theory of the ancient constitution altogether. He took the step that Macaulay and her friends were unable to take, in arguing that England in fact had no constitution and that natural rights could be determined simply by abstract reasoning. See Rights of Man, ed. Collins, Henry (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 93-95, 207-10, 124–27Google Scholar; Cone, , English Jacobins, pp. 69, 100-07, 133-34, 212–13Google Scholar; Black, , The Association, p. 208Google Scholar; Hill, , “Norman Yoke,” pp. 99–104Google Scholar.

58. For Macaulay's comments on the American Revolution, see An Address to the People of England, Scotland and Ireland, on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs, in The Magazine of History, No. 114 (Tarrytown, N.Y., 1925), 79–90Google Scholar (orig. pub. London, 1775), esp. 88-89. On the French Revolution, see Observations on Burke's Reflections, pp. 22-23, 86-89. Price and Priestley were more explicit in equating the Revolution with the millennium. See esp. Price, , Importance of the American Revolution, pp. 1–7Google Scholar; Priestley, , Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France, (3rd ed.; Birmingham, 1791), pp. 143–50Google Scholar.

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60. Robbins, , Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, p. 386Google Scholar. On English radical influence in America, see Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969)Google Scholar, Ch. 1. Many of the pamphlets of Macaulay, Price, Priestley, Burgh, and other radicals were reprinted in America.

61. J. R. Pole, “Introduction” to Letters of Joseph Priestley to Theophilus Lindsay and Thomas Belsham (MSS on microfilm, University of California Library, Berkeley).