Legacy of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay

Macaulay’s History of England brought him a secure, if diminished, place among English historians as the founder, with his contemporary Henry Hallam, of what is now known as the Whig interpretation of history. Fostered in the traditions of sturdy evangelical piety and liberal reform, he saw the origin and triumph of these values in the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), which firmly established the supremacy of Parliament and restricted the monarchy to a constitutional status. He planned to write the history of England from 1688 to 1820 (the death of George III) but died before he had completed it. Macaulay’s work is thus an account of that revolution, with a narration of the years preceding and following it. In stressing the unique importance for England of the revolution and, by implication, the superior virtues of those who brought it about, traditionally the Whig Party (though the Tories were also involved), Macaulay popularized a view of English history that was notably followed by his nephew Sir George Otto Trevelyan and his great-nephew George Macaulay Trevelyan and that affected the teaching of history as late as World War II.

Macaulay’s essays helped to mold the outlook of a generation of Englishmen and to give to many their first vivid glimpse of the past, together with a conviction that their own institutions would serve the best interests of developing countries under their care. His style, clear, emphatic, and insensitive, with short sentences forming a self-contained paragraph, came to be for half a century the characteristic English style in higher journalism and exposition of all kinds. Macaulay’s reputation, immense during the last decade of his life, fell steadily in the 50 years that followed. His undisguised political partisanship, his arrogant assumption that English bourgeois standards of culture and progress were to be forever the norm for less favoured nations, and the materialism of his judgments of value and taste all came under heavy fire from such near-contemporary critics as Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and John Ruskin. Moreover, a revolution in the realm of historical studies, already accomplished in Germany during Macaulay’s lifetime but never appreciated by him, soon affected English historiography. Wide as was Macaulay’s reading, his approach was largely uncritical, as his enthusiasm often carried him away. By taste and training an orator, his writing was special pleading rather than impartial presentation. Yet, despite these severe limitations, his greatness is incontrovertible, and, regarded solely as a work of art, the status of his History remains unassailed. In the grasp and range of his knowledge, in his powers of vivid and sustained narrative, and in his marshalling of topics to serve a great design, his History is unsurpassed among the work of English historians, save, perhaps, by The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of Edward Gibbon.