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Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge, later Graham; 23 March 1731 – 22 June 1791), was an English Whig republican historian.
Queer Places:
All Saints Churchyard
Binfield, Bracknell Forest Borough, Berkshire, England
Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge, later Graham; 23 March 1731 – 22 June 1791), was an English Whig republican historian.
Catharine Macaulay was a daughter of John Sawbridge (1699–1762) and Elizabeth Wanley (died 1733) of Olantigh. Sawbridge was a landed proprietor from Wye, Kent, whose ancestors were Warwickshire yeomanry.[1] 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".[2] 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.[3] Little is known about her early life. In 1757, a Latin and Greek scholar, Elizabeth Carter, 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 beseems 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".[4] On 20 June 1760[5] 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.[6][7]
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.[8] 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 during her lifetime the world's only female historian.[9]
Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo
by Richard Samuel
oil on canvas, 1778
52 in. x 61 in. (1321 mm x 1549 mm)
Purchased, 1972
Primary Collection
NPG 4905. Included: Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin) (1743-1825), Poet and writer.
Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), Scholar and writer. Elizabeth Griffith (1727-1793), Playwright and novelist. Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), Painter. Charlotte Lennox (née Ramsay) (1720-1804), Writer. Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge) (1731-1791), Historian and political polemicist. Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson) (1718-1800), Writer and leader of society. Hannah More (1745-1833), Religious writer. Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (née Linley) (1754-1792), Singer and writer.
Thomas Hollis recorded in his diary (30 November 1763) that "the history is honestly written, and with considerable ability and spirit; and is full of the freest, noblest, sentiments of Liberty".[20] Horace Walpole wrote to William Mason, quoting with approval Thomas Gray's opinion that it was the "most sensible, unaffected and best history of England that we have had yet".[21] Early in 1769, Horace Walpole recorded dining with "the famous Mrs. Macaulay": "She is one of the sights that all foreigners are carried to see".[22] However, Walpole later changed his opinion: "The female historian as partial to the cause of liberty as bigots to the Church and royalists to tyranny, exerted manly strength with the gravity of a philosopher. Too prejudiced to dive into causes, she imputes everything to tyrannic views, nothing to passions, weakness, error, prejudice, and still less to what operates oftenest and her ignorance of which qualified her less for a historian—to accident and little motives".[23]
Her fame came to an end in 1778 when she remarried, with many of her friends and supporters dropping her. She henceforth disappeared into obscurity, only occasionally re-emerging into the public eye.[28] The increasingly radical nature of her work and her scandalous marriage on 14 November 1778[45] to William Graham (she was 47, he was 21) damaged her reputation in Britain,[46] where she lived in Bath, and, later, in Binfield, Berkshire. William was the younger brother of the sexologist James Graham, inventor of the Celestial Bed.
She died in Binfield in Berkshire on 22 June 1791[19] and was buried in All Saints' parish church there.
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