Book Description

Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge; 23 March 1731 - 22 June 1791), later Catharine Graham, was an English historian. Catharine Macaulay was a daughter of John Sawbridge (1699-1762) and his wife Elizabeth Wanley (died 1733) of Olantigh. John was a landed proprietor from Wye, Kent, whose ancestors were Warwickshire yeomanry. Macaulay was educated privately at home by a governess. In the first volume of her History of England, Macaulay claimed that from an early age she was a prolific reader, in particular of "those histories which exhibit liberty in its most exalted state in the annals of the Roman and Greek Republics...[from childhood] liberty became the object of a secondary worship." However this account is at odds with what she told her friend Benjamin Rush, to whom she described herself as "a thoughtless girl till she was twenty, at which time she contracted a taste for books and knowledge by reading an odd volume of some history, which she picked up in a window of her father's house." She also told Caleb Fleming that she knew neither Latin nor Greek. Little is known about her early life. In 1757 a Latin and Greek scholar, Elizabeth Ca rter, visited a function at Canterbury where she met Macaulay, then 26 years old. In a letter to a friend, Carter described Macaulay as a "very sensible and agreeable woman, and much more deeply learned than becomes a fine lady; but between the Spartan laws, the Roman politics, the philosophy of Epicurus, and the wit of St. Evremond, she seems to have formed a most extraordinary system." On 20 June 1760 she married a Scottish physician, Dr. George Macaulay (1716-1766), and they lived at St James's Place, London. They remained married for six years until his death in 1766. They had one child together, Catharine Sophia. Between 1763 and 1783 Macaulay wrote, in eight volumes, The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line. However, when completing the last three volumes she realised she would not reach 1714 and so changed the title to The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution. Being practically unknown before the publication of the first volume, overnight she became "the Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay." She was the first Englishwoman to become an historian and no other contemporary women were historians.