Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:08:34.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2013

Philip Hicks
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Woolf, D. R., “A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (1997): 645–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Hutchinson's memoirs of her regicide husband were written in 1664–71 but not printed until 1806, despite Macaulay's efforts to get them published earlier. Space does not permit a detailed account of this work, except to say that while Hutchinson shared Macaulay's regicide politics, the Memoirs espoused very traditional views about women's proper place, belied only by Hutchinson's own activity as a political writer and a courageous political agent for her husband. Hutchinson, Lucy, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson with a Fragment of Autobiography, ed. Keeble, N. H. (London, 1995), pp. 26, 51–52, 67, 70, 136, 233–35, 271, 279–84, 289–90, 293, 308–9, 317Google Scholar; Keeble, N. H., “Obedient Subjects? The Loyal Self in Some Later Seventeenth-Century Royalist Women's Memoirs,” in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. MacLean, Gerald (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 201–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, Bridget, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992), pp. 48–49Google Scholar.

3 Woolf, , “A Feminine Past?” pp. 677Google Scholar, 650–55.

4 Phillips, Mark Salber, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, N.J., 2000), pp. 103–14Google Scholar; Hicks, Philip, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (London, 1996), chaps. 1–2, pp. 173–74, 204, 215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woolf, , “A Feminine Past?” pp. 659–68Google Scholar. For a literary perspective, see Looser , Devoney, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore, 2000)Google Scholar.

5 Macaulay, Catharine, The History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols. (London, 1763–1783) 5:79–80, 94–95, 148, 188, 213–14, 384–86, 390Google Scholar (mispaginated as 382), 8:308, 330–31, 333–34, henceforth cited as History, The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time (Bath, 1778), pp. 4–5, 33–34Google Scholar, henceforth cited as History (1778), and Observations on a Pamphlet Entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 3d ed. (London, 1770), pp. 7, 13–17, 20–27Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Smith, Hilda L. (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 245, 255–57Google Scholar; Hill, Bridget, “Reinterpreting the ‘Glorious Revolution’: Catharine Macaulay and Radical Response,” in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. MacLean, Gerald (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 267–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schnorrenberg, Barbara Brandon, “An Opportunity Missed: Catharine Macaulay on the Revolution of 1688,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 231–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Burke, Edmund to Shackleton, Richard, c. 15 August 1770, in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Copeland, Thomas W., 10 vols. (Cambridge and Chicago, 1958–1978), 2:149–50Google Scholar.

7 Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. Womersley, David (Harmondsworth, 1998), pp. 141, 145–46, 185Google Scholar.

8 Burke, , A Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 144, 150Google Scholar.

9 Macaulay, Catharine, Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London, 1790), pp. 46–50, 201–2Google Scholar.

10 Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, ed. Brody, Miriam (Harmondsworth, 1992), pp. 174, 210, 252Google Scholar; Boos, Florence S., “Catherine Macaulay's Letters on Education (1790): An Early Feminist Polemic,” University of Michigan Papers in Women's Studies 2 (1976): 64–78Google Scholar; Kelly, Gary, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York, 1992), p. 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, Bridget, “The Links between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay: New Evidence,” Women's History Review 4, no. 2 (1995): 177–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See, e.g., Hill, , The Republican Virago, pp. 140–42, 146–47Google Scholar; Pocock, , “Catharine Macaulay,” pp. 251–52Google Scholar; Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Labalme, Patricia H. (New York, 1980), pp. 153–82Google Scholar, at p. 182; Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), p. 258Google Scholar.

12 Pocock, , “Catharine Macaulay,” pp. 249, 251–52Google Scholar.

13 Barker-Benfield, G. J., “Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 1 (1989): 95–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sapiro, Virginia, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago, 1992), p. 281Google Scholar; Johnson, Claudia L., Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago, 1995), pp. 24–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Kerber, Linda K., “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—an American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 187–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Women of the Republic, pp. 11–12, 28–31, 283–85; Rendall, Jane, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Landes, Joan B., Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), p. 148Google Scholar.

15 Pocock, , “Catharine Macaulay,” p. 251Google Scholar.

16 Chalus, Elaine, “Elite Women, Social Politics, and the Political World of Late Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 43, no. 3 (2000): 669–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “My Minerva at my Elbow': The Political Roles of Women in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, ed. Taylor, Stephen, Connors, Richard, and Jones, Clyve (Rochester, N.Y., 1998), pp. 210–28Google Scholar, and “‘That Epidemical Madness’: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Chalus, Elaine and Barker, Hannah (London, 1997), pp. 151–78Google Scholar; Andrew, Donna T., “Popular Culture and Public Debate: London 1780,” Historical Journal 39, no. 2 (1996): 405–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 49–51Google Scholar; Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), pp. 94, 260–61Google Scholar.

17 Deutsch, Phyllis, “Moral Trespass in Georgian London: Gaming, Gender, and Electoral Politics in the Age of George III,” Historical Journal 39, no. 3 (1996): 637–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), pp. 411–13Google Scholar; Jones, Vivien, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London, 1990), pp. 120, 131–38Google Scholar; Andrew, , “Popular Culture and Public Debate,” pp. 419–21Google Scholar; Rendall, , The Origins of Modern Feminism, pp. 70–72Google Scholar.

18 Hill, , The Republican Virago, pp. 12–19, 52–71Google Scholar; Schnorrenberg , Barbara Brandon, “The Brood Hen of Faction: Mrs. Macaulay and Radical Politics, 1765–1775,” Albion 11, no. 1 (1979): 33–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greig, J. Y. T., ed., The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932), 2:199Google Scholar.

19 Macaulay, Catharine, 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, 2d ed. (London, 1769), pp. 23–28Google Scholar, History, 3:190; 5:7–9, 103–4, 111, 140–41, 288Google Scholar; 6:32, 172, and History (1778), pp. 22–23, 77–78, 359, 370Google Scholar.

20 See Hill, , The Republican Virago, pp. 125–27, 185–86, 216–23Google Scholar.

21 [Macaulay, Catharine], Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, In a Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl Stanhope (London, 1790), pp. 53–55, 23–28, 86–87Google Scholar; Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Indianapolis, 1987), pp. 66–67Google Scholar. Also see Schnorrenberg, Barbara Brandon, “Observations on the Reflections: Macaulay Graham vs. Burke Round Three,” in The Consortium of Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850: Proceedings 1987, ed. Spencer, Warren and Evans, Ellen (Athens, Ga., 1987), pp. 215–25Google Scholar.

22 Wilson, , The Sense of the People, pp. 51–53Google Scholar, chaps. 3–4. Clark, Anna, “The Chevalier d'Eon and Wilkes: Masculinity and Politics in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 1 (1998): 19–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), chap. 6, pp. 234–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), chap. 3, pp. 247–50Google Scholar.

25 Macaulay, , Observations on the Reflections, pp. 6, 7, 42, 53Google Scholar. Gunther-Canada , Wendy, “The Politics of Sense and Sensibility: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay Graham on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Smith, H. L., pp. 126–47Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., “Introduction,” in Burke, , Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. xxxii–xxxiii, 66–70Google Scholar. Burke's Enquiry had itself helped to create the cult of sensibility. See Barker-Benfield, , The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 17, 19, 264Google Scholar.

26 See Macaulay, , History, 3:70–73; 6:376; 7:355,490; 8:174–75Google Scholar. For other examples, as well as an alternate interpretation, see Kucich, Greg, “‘This Horrid Theatre of Human Sufferings’: Gendering the Stages of History in Catharine Macaulay and Percy Bysshe Shelley,” in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Pfau, Thomas and Gleckner, Robert F. (Durham, N.C., 1998), pp. 448–65Google Scholar.

27 Barker-Benfield, , The Culture of Sensibility, p. 145Google Scholar. Clark, , “The Chevalier d'Eon and Wilkes,” pp. 26–38Google Scholar. For her judgment on rakes generally, see Macaulay, , Letters on Education, p. 222Google Scholar, and History, 8:62–63Google Scholar.

28 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), pp. 381–422Google Scholar, and Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 103, 114–18, 215–34, 257. Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (New York, 1968), pp. 3–5, 22, 358–60Google Scholar; Worden, Blair, “Part I,” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776, ed. Wootton, David (Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 70–71, 85–86, 104, 107–8Google Scholar, and “Milton and Marchamont Nedham,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. Armitage, David, Himy, Armand, and Skinner, Quentin (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 170–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pitkin, Hanna F., Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 5, 25, 48–51, 109–10, 305Google Scholar.

29 [Burgh, James], The Dignity of Human Nature, or, a Brief Account of the Certain and Established Means for Attaining the True End of Our Existence (London, 1754), pp. 276Google Scholar, 54, 66, 75, 76, 125, 153, 162. For a more positive view of women, see [Burgh, James], Thoughts on Education: Tending Chiefly to Recommend to the Attention of the Public, Some Particulars Relating to that Subject (Boston, 1749), pp. 53–57Google Scholar; Hay, Carla H., James Burgh, Spokesman for Reform in Hanoverian England (Washington, D.C., 1979), p. 65Google Scholar. For Milton's objections to women in politics, see, e.g., Eikonoklastes (1649), in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Wolfe, Don M., 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1953–1982), 3:421, 370, 455Google Scholar. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (pp. 100, 101, 143, 152), Wollstonecraft took offense at various passages in Paradise Lost (4.295–99, 634–38; 8.551–54, 576–78; 10.956).

30 [Brown, John], An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 2 vols. (London, 1757–1758), 1:125Google Scholar; Wilson, , The Sense of the People, pp. 185–203, 219–27Google Scholar; Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York, 1987), pp. 59–60, 70–84Google Scholar; Cohen, Michele, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), pp. 4–9Google Scholar; Colley, Linda, “Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Samuel, Raphael, 3 vols. (London, 1988), 1: 169–87Google Scholar.

31 Macaulay, , History, 5:22Google Scholar; 3:356; 2:449, 81, 82.

32 Ibid., 7:433, 431, 418, 403–4; 6:22, 23, and History (1778), p. 162Google Scholar.

33 For examples of these contrasting manly and effeminate traits, see Macaulay, , History, 1:276–77; 3:124; 4:44, 423; 5:6, 196; 7:334; 8:85, 246Google Scholar, and History (1778), p. 2Google Scholar.

34 Macaulay, , History, 1:80, 87, 39; 2:154–55Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., 1:3, 8, 10, 21–24. Brewer, John, “The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case Study in Eighteenth-Century Political Argument and Public Opinion,” Historical Journal 16, no. 1 (1973): 3–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, , The Sense of the People, pp. 213–15Google Scholar.

36 Macaulay, , History, 2:224Google Scholar, 220.

37 See MacGillivray, Royce, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974), pp. 237–42Google Scholar; Hyde, Edward, first earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. Macray, W. Dunn, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1888), 1: 2, 4, 55Google Scholar.

38 For general links between luxury and effeminacy, see Macaulay, , History, 2:224Google Scholar; 8:61. Macaulay argued that the luxury and superstition of Charles I's court attracted supporters to the royalist cause (History, 3:267–68, 332Google Scholar).

39 Ibid., 2:57, 58; 3:122, 124.

40 Ibid., 3:140.

41 Ibid., 4:137–39; 3:149–50; 2:463–65, 212. Also see 2:317–18, 371, 379, 383, 404; 3:180, 282–83; 6:159.

42 Ibid., 3:300.

43 Hutchinson, , Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, pp. 67, 70Google Scholar. Milton, , Eikonoklastes (1649)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in Complete Prose Works, 3:419–23, 450, 452, 459, 525–26, 538–39, 541Google Scholar.

44 Hume, David, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1754–1762), 6 vols. (Indianapolis, 1983), 5:221–22, 264, 364–65, 373, 384, 407, 451–56Google Scholar.

45 Clarendon had to tone down his criticisms to make them acceptable to his original readers, the queen's husband and son (Charles I and the Prince of Wales), suggests Brownley, Martine Watson in “The Women in Clarendon's Life and Works,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 22, no. 2 (1981): 153–74Google Scholar. For policy differences between Clarendon and the queen, see Wormald, B. H. G., Clarendon: Politics, History, and Religion, 1640–1660 (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 70, 146, 231–33Google Scholar.

46 For contemporary uses of “amazon,” see Wahrman, Dror, “Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 159 (May 1998): 113–60Google Scholar, at 132–36. For the petition, see Higgins, Macaulay, History, 4: 31–33Google Scholar; Patricia, , “The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners,” in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Manning, Brian (New York, 1973), pp. 189–99Google Scholar.

47 Macaulay, , History, 5:56, 354Google Scholar.

48 Ibid., 8:315–19.

49 Hume, , History of England, 4:351–53Google Scholar.

50 Macaulay, , History, 1:2, 1, 212–74, 276Google Scholar. Macaulay generally followed Hume in characterizing Elizabeth as despotic (Hume, , History of England, 4:354–70Google Scholar), though in a letter to her dated 29 March 1764, Hume insisted that Elizabeth's form of government had been “lawful”; see New Letters of David Hume, ed. Klibansky, Raymond and Mossner, Ernest C. (Oxford, 1954), p. 81Google Scholar. Macaulay also indicted a male despot, Charles II, for lacking “every manly sentiment” (History, 8:64Google Scholar).

51 Clark, , “The Chevalier d'Eon and Wilkes,” p. 33Google Scholar. Hill, , The Republican Virago, pp. 138–39Google Scholar. London Chronicle (30 June–3 July 1770). Monthly Review 58 (February 1778): 111Google Scholar.

52 Macaulay, , Letters on Education, pp. 201–3, 274, 276, 295Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., pp. 47–50, 204–6, 216.

54 Ibid., pp. 206, 204.

55 Ibid., pp. 205–6, 212–13. Macaulay commends many of Rousseau's educational theories but warns that his influential novel Émile (1762) should not be read uncritically (ibid., p. 46).

56 Ibid., p. 203.

57 Ibid., p. 201.

58 Ibid., p. 206.

59 Ibid., p. 207.

60 Ibid., p. 221.

61 Ibid., p. 202.

62 Macaulay, , History, 8:62Google Scholar, 59.

63 Ibid., 3:450–51; 4:143, 424–25; 8:276.

64 Ibid., 1:ix–xvi; 2:83.

65 Macaulay, , Letters on Education, pp. 10–12Google Scholar.

66 Macaulay, , History, 1:viiGoogle Scholar. For links between education and patriotism generally, see History, 1:vii, 274–76; 4:431Google Scholar; 6:358–59.

67 Ibid., 6:vii.

68 Ibid., 3:160, 345–46; 5:19; 8:65–66.

69 Ibid., 1:272–76; 5:380. Key elements of this analysis appear indebted to Hobbes, Thomas, Behemoth or the Long Parliament (1679), ed. Tönnies, Ferdinand, 2d ed. (London, 1969), pp. 23, 43, 155, 158Google Scholar, and to Hume, , History of England, 3:80–82; 4:384–85; 5:80Google Scholar.

70 Macaulay, , History, 1:274–76Google Scholar.

71 Wilson, , The Sense of the People, p. 53Google Scholar. Also see Wahrman, Dror, “Gender in Translation: How the English Wrote Their Juvenal, 1644–1815,” Representations 65 (Winter 1999): 19–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Barker-Benfield, , “Mary Wollstonecraft,” pp. 106–10Google Scholar.

73 Macaulay, , History, 1:276–77, 270–71Google Scholar.

74 For positive depictions of chastity and modesty as worthy of men and women alike, see Macaulay, , Letters on Education, pp. 216, 222Google Scholar; Wollstonecraft, , A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 86, 256Google Scholar.

75 See, e.g., the borrowing identified above, nn. 50, 69. Macaulay's text is shot through with citations from both historians.

76 Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture, chaps. 3, 7; O'Brien, Karen, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 3; Phillipson, Nicholas, Hume (London, 1989)Google Scholar; Smith, David L., Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brownley, Martine Watson, Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form (Philadelphia, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Macaulay, , History, 4:426–36Google Scholar. Also see Siebert, Donald T., “Catherine Macaulay's History of England: Antidote to Hume's History?” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 303 (1992), pp. 393–96Google Scholar.

78 Hume, Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, 4:488Google Scholar. David, , “My Own Life,” in his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis, 1987), p. xxxviiGoogle Scholar.

79 Brownley, , “The Women in Clarendon's Life and Works,” pp. 153–54, 173Google Scholar.

80 Hume, , History of England, 4:352Google Scholar, 251; 5:342, 344.

81 “Nature has given man the superiority above woman, by endowing him with greater strength both of mind and body” (Hume, , “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Essays, p. 133Google Scholar).

82 Hume, , “Of the Study of History,” in Essays, pp. 563–68Google Scholar.

83 Pocock, Hume, History of England, 2:408–10Google Scholar, 235, 236; J. G. A., , Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), p. 249Google Scholar.

84 Hume, , History of England, 4:351–53Google Scholar; Pocock, , Barbarism and Religion, 2:234Google Scholar; Barker-Benfield, , The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 136–37Google Scholar.

85 Tomaselli, Sylvana, “The Enlightenment Debate on Women,” History Workshop 20 (Autumn 1985): 101–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zagarri, Rosemarie, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1992): 192–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rendall, , The Origins of Modern Feminism, pp. 21–32Google Scholar.

86 Hume, , “Of Refinement in the Arts,” “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Essays, pp. 269–72, 275–77Google Scholar, 132–34; Barker-Benfield, , The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 132–37Google Scholar.

87 Macaulay, , Letters on Education, p. 268Google Scholar.

88 Ibid., p. 206.

89 See Pocock, , Barbarism and Religion, 2:256–57Google Scholar.

90 For example, the female petitioners of 1642, discussed below. In another instance, Hume trivialized as farce the Dutch girl's saving of Muyden from the French in 1672 (Hume, , History of England, 6:263Google Scholar), while Macaulay contrasted her “sagacity and resolution” with the town's “cowardly” magistrates (Macaulay, , History, 6:345Google Scholar).

91 The following passages praising women appear neither in Clarendon nor Hume: Macaulay, , History, 2:226, 282, 293, 356; 3:124, 335, 375Google Scholar. Clarendon's History of the Rebellion breaks off before two other episodes (Macaulay, , History, 6:325–26; 8:13–14Google Scholar). Hume's History of England, admittedly a less detailed narrative than Macaulay's, omits these two as well.

92 As discussed elsewhere in this article, Macaulay takes offense at Hume's praise of Elizabeth I's manly character, Mary II's docility, and Henrietta Maria's relationship with Charles I. Macaulay also rejects Clarendon's approbation of the female peace petitioners of 1643 (History of the Rebellion, 3:139–40Google Scholar).

93 Clarendon treats the episode of Hamilton's mother neutrally (History of the Rebellion, 1:159; 3:318Google Scholar), while Macaulay draws out her heroism (History, 2:293Google Scholar). Hume is neutral regarding the fortifying of Leith (History of England, 5:263Google Scholar), which Macaulay underscores (History, 2:282Google Scholar), and the executions of Mrs. Gaunt and Lady Lisle (History of England, 6:464–65Google Scholar), whom Macaulay praises for their “magnanimity” and “fortitude” (History, 8:106–8, 111Google Scholar). Macaulay, (History, 7:444–46Google Scholar) magnifies the virtues of Lady Russell identified by Hume, (History of England, 6:433–34Google Scholar).

94 See, e.g., Clarendon's portrayal of Falkland's mother, who, though possessing “a most masculine understanding,” also had “the passion and infirmities of her own sex” (History of the Rebellion, 3:180Google Scholar).

95 Macaulay, , History, 2:226Google Scholar.

96 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, Memorials of the English Affairs, or an Historical Account of what Passed from the Beginning of the Reign of King Charles the First, to King Charles the Second his Happy Restauration (London, 1682), p. 24Google Scholar.

97 Macaulay, , History, 8:319Google Scholar. Hume had defended Charles I from the charge of uxoriousness and praised Queen Mary for being “a most obsequious wife” to William III (Hume, , History of England, 6:529–30Google Scholar; 5:473–74). Clarendon called Charles “the best husband,” a “great … example of conjugal affection” (History of the Rebellion, 4:489, 492Google Scholar). Macaulay condemned the submissiveness of both Charles, and Mary, (History, 2: 13, 100, 212, 404; 3:150; 4:197, 422; 8:315, 319)Google Scholar. For passive obedience, see History, 1:274; 2:380Google Scholar; 3:345; 8:67.

98 On Henrietta Maria's influence over Charles II, see Macaulay, , History, 6:386Google Scholar.

99 Catharine Macaulay, History of England, original manuscript, New York Historical Society, BV, vol. 2, fol. 459.

100 Macaulay, , History, 2:226–27Google Scholar.

101 The phrase “pit of shame” is a pun on Pitt's name. For Pitt, see Peters, Macaulay, History, 8:335–36Google Scholar; Marie, , Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years War (Oxford, 1980), pp. 203–6Google Scholar; Brewer, John, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 96–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 Macaulay, , History, 1:286; 2:23, 26, 323, 482; 7:494Google Scholar; 8:50; History (1778), pp. 288–89, 421–22Google Scholar.

103 “It Would indeed be a happiness to society, if women, who give such a biass to the morals and manners of men, were early taught to set a just value on solid and virtuous qualities, instead of admiring frivolous and delusive accomplishments. But according to the present modes of female education, it is difficult for a man of sense and worth to make any impression on a woman's mind, without first debasing his own.” See review of History, Monthly Review 32 (April 1765): 270–71Google Scholar.

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.