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Catharine Macaulay's Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2013

Philip Hicks
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Extract

The eighteenth century marked a watershed in the relationship between women and historical writing in Britain. Previous to this period, D. R. Woolf has demonstrated, women had certainly purchased, read, and discussed works of history, contributing to “the ‘social circulation’ of historical knowledge.” A few, perhaps most notably Lucy Hutchinson, had composed Civil War memoirs. Some women had written genealogical, antiquarian, and biographical works, as well as local and family history, a “feminine past,” according to Woolf, that men often judged unworthy of real history. Only in the eighteenth century, however, did women and men significantly modify a neoclassical paradigm that conceived of history as a strictly male enterprise, the record of political and military deeds written by men and for men. In this century prescriptive literature increasingly urged history upon women as reading matter intellectually and morally superior to novels and romances. The great triumvirate of British historians, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and William Robertson, wrote expressly for female readers. Their “philosophical” history, with its shift of emphasis from political to social and cultural subjects, appealed to women, as did their experiments with the narrative techniques of sentimental fiction. The century also witnessed the appearance of the first female historian in Britain to write in the grand manner, Catharine Macaulay (1731–91). Mrs. Macaulay's success in the traditional genre of history won her the respect of male peers as well as the applause of a wide readership.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2002 , pp. 170 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2002

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104 For this historiographical tradition, see Salmon, J. H. M., “Precept, Example, and Truth: Degory Wheare and the Ars Historica,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Kelley, Donald R. and Sacks, David Harris (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 11–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levine, Joseph M., The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991)Google Scholar, chap. 9; Hicks, , Neoclassical History and English Culture, pp. 9, 24–27, 122–23, 178–79Google Scholar; Macaulay, , History, 1:vii–ix; 3:71; 6:xii; 7:495Google Scholar; Hume, , History of England, 5:545–46Google Scholar.

105 Pocock, , “Catharine Macaulay,” pp. 247–48Google Scholar.

106 Macaulay, , History, 7:445Google Scholar.

107 For a modern account of Arria, see Pomeroy, Sarah B., Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York, 1975), p. 161Google Scholar; for Russell, Rachel, see Schwoerer, Lois G., Lady Rachel Russell: “One of the Best of Women” (Baltimore, 1988)Google Scholar.

108 Macaulay, , History, 7:446Google Scholar.

109 Ibid., 2:293.

110 Livy, Ab urbe condita (The history of Rome from its foundation), 2.40, in The Early History of Rome, trans. de Sélincourt, Aubrey (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 150Google Scholar. Of the four sources Macaulay used for this portion of her narrative, she relied most heavily on Guthry, Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs, p. 29Google Scholar. Also see [Henry, ], The Memoirs of Henry Guthry, Late Bishop of Dunkeld, 2d ed. (Glasgow, 1748), pp. 56–57Google Scholar; Burnet, Gilbert, The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald (London, 1677), p. 132Google Scholar; Rushworth, John, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Weighty Matters in Law, Remarkable Proceedings in Five Parliaments, 6 vols. (London, 1680–1701), 2:935Google Scholar.

111 Macaulay, , History, 2:356Google Scholar. Livy, 5.50, pp. 396–97.

112 Macaulay, , History, 2:282Google Scholar.

113 “Women too, of rank and condition, forgetting the delicacy of their sex, and the decorum of their character, were intermingled with the lowest rabble; and carried on their shoulders the rubbish, requisite for completing the fortifications” (Hume, , History of England, 5:263Google Scholar). Both Hume and Macaulay made more of the women's role in this episode than their source had. Compare Guthry, , Memoirs, p. 54Google Scholar.

114 Macaulay, , History, 1:x; 3:140, 160, 356–57; 5:304; 6:339Google Scholar; 7:260; 8:281. Also see Wilson, , The Sense of the People, pp. 234–36Google Scholar; Pocock, , “Catharine Macaulay,” pp. 248–49Google Scholar.

115 Macaulay, Catharine, An Address to the People of England, Ireland, and Scotland, on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs, 3d ed. (New York, 1775), p. 10Google Scholar.

116 Macaulay, , History, 3:124Google Scholar.

117 Ibid., p. 335.

118 Ibid., p. 375.

119 Whitelocke, , Memorials of the English Affairs, p. 63Google Scholar.

120 Macaulay, , History, 3:196–98Google Scholar.

121 Clarendon, , History of the Rebellion, 3:139–40Google Scholar. Hume, , History of England, 5:371–72Google Scholar. Whitelocke mentioned “the City Dames” and their petition only in passing (Memorials of the English Affairs, p. 52).

122 Alexander, Macaulay, History, 3:198–99Google Scholar. For the rewards bestowed upon the Roman matrons,see William, , The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, 3d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1782), 1:206, 211–13Google Scholar.

123 Macaulay, , History, 3:198–99Google Scholar. Besides this Roman example, Macaulay applauded the “very civil” reception parliament accorded the counterrevolutionary peace petition of 1643. She indicated that this virtuous assembly respected women's right to participate in the political process, even though this petition, like that of 195 B.C., was in her view misguided (History, 4:31–33Google Scholar).

124 As Susan Staves has surmised, in an otherwise insightful essay, “ “The Liberty of a She-Subject of England': Rights Rhetoric and the Female Thucydides,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1, no. 1 (1989): 161–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

125 For the importance of ancient history as a source of republican thought, see Fink, Zera S., The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston, Ill., 1945)Google Scholar; Robbins, , The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 44, 105–8, 200–201Google Scholar.

126 Twice Clarendon damned politically intriguing women, Monck's wife and Mrs. Windham (the Prince of Wales's nurse), by likening them to Fulvia as she appeared in Paterculus's History (2.74): “Fulvia, the wife of Antony, who had nothing of the woman in her except her sex, was creating general confusion by armed violence.” Paterculus, Velleius, Compendium of Roman History, trans. Shipley, Frederick W. (London, 1924), pp. 207–9Google Scholar; Clarendon, , History of the Rebellion, 4:23Google Scholar; 6:154–55. Hume alluded to several classical women, both good and bad, including Fulvia, (Essays, pp. 130, 564–65, 589)Google Scholar.

127 These major themes are especially prominent on pp. iv–vii, 4–10, 268, 277–80, 360. Pages 315–507 are devoted to theological issues. Only 33 of the Letters' 515 printed pages touch on the issue of gender (i.e., pp. 24–25, 46–50, 61–62, 142, 179, 201–22).

128 Wollstonecraft was explicit in wanting women to participate as citizens hut did not follow up her own suggestions in any detail. Caine, Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 88, 264–65, 295, 306, 313–14Google Scholar; Barbara, , English Feminism, 1780–1980 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 36–37Google Scholar; Guralnick, Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, pp. 232, 259, 269Google Scholar; Elissa, S., “Radical Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Studies in Burke and His Time 18, no. 3 (1977): 155–66Google Scholar, at 165.

129 Macaulay, , Letters on Education, p. 210Google Scholar.

130 Wollstonecraft, , A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 263–65Google Scholar, 88.

131 For a literary analysis of the worthies, Macaulay, and the Roman matrons, see the important study by Guest, Harriet, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar, chaps. 2, 9.

132 Ballard, George, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752), ed. Perry, Ruth (Detroit, 1985)Google Scholar; [Walsh, William], A Dialogue Concerning Women, Being a Defence of the Sex. Written to Eugenia (London, 1691), pp. 127–28Google Scholar; [Tate, Nahum], A Present for the Ladies: Being a Historical Vindication of the Female Sex (London, 1692), pp. 39–42, 46–48, 53–54, 76, 88–96Google Scholar; Alexander, , History of Women, 1:204–5, 211–13, 389Google Scholar; “Sophia,” Woman Not Inferior to Man (London, 1739), pp. 54–55Google Scholar.

133 “Sophia,” Beauty's Triumph; or, the Superiority of the Fair Sex Invincibly Proved (London, 1751), p. 39Google Scholar; Walsh, , A Dialogue Concerning Women, pp. 128–34Google Scholar; Tate, , A Present for the Ladies, pp. 98–100Google Scholar; Ballard, , Memoirs, pp. 212, 230–31Google Scholar.

134 For Macaulay as a “worthy,” see Wollstonecraft, , A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 210Google Scholar, 174; Hill, , The Republican Virago, p. 20Google Scholar; Barker-Benfield, , The Culture of Sensibility, p. 380Google Scholar.

135 Macaulay, , An Address to the People, p. 6Google Scholar, and Observations on a Pamphlet, pp. 22–25.