SOURCE: “Catherine Macaulay and the Seventeenth Century,” in The Welsh History Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, December, 1967, pp. 381-402.

In the following essay, Bridget and Chrisopher Hill discuss Macaulay's History of England, which they praise for its detailed and perceptive interpretation of seventeenth-century English politics.

‘One hand a roll of ancient records grac'd, The other arm sweet Liberty embrac'd; And on her bosom Alfred hung—the Great, Who plung'd Corruption headlong from her seat’. 

Anon., Six Odes Presented to that justly-celebrated Historian Mrs. Catherine Macaulay on her Birthday (n.d., 1777?), pp. 42-43.

I

Catherine Macaulay, famous in her own day as the authoress of an eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover, and as a political radical, is, one suspects, never read these days. Yet, quite apart from her interest to historians of feminism, there is much in her...