The first (and only) female historian in Georgian England

Georgian England is usually more associated with powdered wigs and aristocratic scandals than radical or revolutionary ideals. However, there were thinkers back then who supported the latter most ardently – and one of them was Catherine Macauley.

Little is known about her early life, apart from the fact that she grew up with her brother in the family of a minor Kentish landowner. In 1757, one Elizabeth Carter, herself a scholarly woman known for her translations from Latin and Greek, had met the 26-year-old Catherine, and wrote later that the latter “is 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”.

Catherine herself later admitted that, in her early youth, she had been a rather empty-headed girl. Nothing in her education could have challenged that – she received conventional lessons from a governess at home, and never went to school. However, from about twenty years old, she developed a passionate interest in history, and started teaching herself this discipline via whatever books on the subject she could obtain.

Her brief marriage to a Scottish doctor, George Macaulay, lasted only six years and ended in her widowhood. Her first ever work on history was finished several years later. It was a revolutionary book for more reasons than one: first of all, its publication made Catherine the only published female historian of her era. Second, it displayed startling (from the conventional perspective) opinions on the English Civil War. Charles I was no martyr, Catherine argued – this king had deserved his execution. In fact, she said, the failure of the regime that was established after the war was not that it gave too much power to common people, but that it did not give them enough, and thus ended up with Oliver Cromwell as a dictator.

This stance earned Catherine no friends among even the Whigs, who were traditionally opposed to the power of the crown. Catherine agreed with them on some questions – like them, she definitely resented George III. However, otherwise she lambasted them for using the rhetoric of liberty to enshrine the power of their own party, which by her time, she claimed, had turned into an aristocratic clique no better than the courtiers on the king’s side.

In 1778, the scholarly widow astonished the public once more – this time in a very different way. She had remarried – which, in itself, was not scandalous. However, her second husband, Will Graham, was a young and handsome surgeon – twenty-one years old, and twenty-six years her junior. At best, she was joked about as a cradle-snatcher; at worst, derided as immoral. Mind you, none of the people who accused her of lustfulness and broke ties with her would have batted an eye at the sight of a middle-aged nobleman having a much-younger mistress…

As the American War of Independence broke out, Catherine openly supported the cause of the rebels against her own country (or, at least, her own country’s government). What did the ministers expect, she argued, after making the colonies bear such a heavy yoke? She was not alone in England to have such an opinion. However, she went further, criticizing imperialism (though, of course, the term did not exist yet) as a concept, and arguing that corruption and tyranny are an inevitable consequence of keeping colonies at all.

Among other things, Catherine Macauley advocated for frequent elections (every three years instead of seven), a frequent rotation of people in political offices, and laws that would have limited the amount of land one person could own.

Not all of her opinions, of course, were so pleasingly progressive to our modern ear. Like most people of her time, Catherine was rather religious, and had a common prejudice against Catholics – she considered Catholicism to be too naturally conductive to superstition and absolute monarchy. For example, she greatly admired Corsican freedom fighters and even corresponded with their leader Pasquale Paoli (who later became young Napoleon’s great hero). However, at the same time, she sighed that it was a shame that the Corsicans still laboured under the “Popish superstition”.

For obvious reasons, the American founding fathers were very fond of Catherine – after the war was over, George Washington invited her to stay with him as a guest, and spoke of her with great admiration. In France, Mirabeau translated most of her works into French just to make his countrymen acquainted with her ideas. Indeed, some years later, Catherine became a bestselling author in revolutionary France.

She did not live either to enjoy this startling fame abroad or to see her dreams of a new republic realize – death came for her in 1791.

We know, however, that she would have welcomed the new world. During a visit to France back in 1774, her friend once enquired whether she wanted to see the Palace of Versailles.

Catherine replied to him the following:”I have no desire to see the residence of the tyrants.”

Ann Hawthorne is a passionate student of the Regency era, and sets all her historical romances there. Her books do not follow the leading couples into their bedchambers, preferring to let the sparks fly in the ballroom instead. She and her friend and colleague also do developmental and copy editing for fellow historical authors.