The Lord Macaulay | |
|---|---|
 Photogravure of Macaulay byAntoine Claudet | |
| Secretary at War | |
| In office 27 September 1839 – 30 August 1841 | |
| Monarch | Victoria |
| Prime Minister | The Viscount Melbourne |
| Preceded by | Viscount Howick |
| Succeeded by | Sir Henry Hardinge |
| Paymaster General | |
| In office 7 July 1846 – 8 May 1848 | |
| Monarch | Victoria |
| Prime Minister | Lord John Russell |
| Preceded by | Hon. Bingham Baring |
| Succeeded by | The Earl Granville |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1800-10-25)25 October 1800 Rothley Temple,Leicestershire, England |
| Died | 28 December 1859(1859-12-28) (aged 59) London, England |
| Political party | Whig |
| Parent(s) | Zachary Macaulay Selina Mills |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Politician |
| Profession | Historian, poet |
| Signature | .svg) |
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay,PC, FRS, FRSE (/ˈbæbɪŋtənməˈkɔːli/; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian, poet andWhig politician who served as theSecretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as thePaymaster General between 1846 and 1848. He is best known for hisThe History of England, a seminal example ofWhig history which expressed Macaulay's belief in theinevitability of sociopolitical progress and has been widely commended for its prose style.[1] Macaulay also played a substantial role in determiningIndia's education policy. He was one of the reason of India's Current Education System.
Macaulay was born atRothley Temple[2] inLeicestershire on 25 October 1800, the son ofZachary Macaulay, a ScottishHighlander, who became acolonial governor andabolitionist, andSelina Mills ofBristol, a former pupil ofHannah More.[3] They named their first child after his uncleThomas Babington, aLeicestershire landowner and politician,[4][5] who had married Zachary's sister Jean.[6] The young Macaulay was noted as a child prodigy; as a toddler, gazing out of the window from his cot at the chimneys of a local factory, he is reputed to have asked his father whether the smoke came from the fires of hell.[7]
He was educated at a private school inHertfordshire, and, subsequently, atTrinity College, Cambridge,[8] where he won several prizes, including theChancellor's Gold Medal in June 1821,[9] and where he in 1825 published a prominent essay onMilton in theEdinburgh Review. Macaulay did not study classical literature while at Cambridge, though he subsequently did when he was in India. In his letters he describes his reading of theAeneid whilst he was in Malvern in 1851, and says he was moved to tears byVirgil's poetry.[10] He taught himself German, Dutch and Spanish, and was fluent in French.[11] He studied law and in 1826 he wascalled to the bar, before he took more interest in a political career.[12] Macaulay in theEdinburgh Review in 1827, and in a series of anonymous letters toThe Morning Chronicle,[13] censured the analysis of indentured labour by the British Colonial Office expertColonel Thomas Moody, Kt.[13][14] Macaulay's evangelical Whig fatherZachary Macaulay, who desired a 'free black peasantry' rather than equality for Africans,[15] also censured, in theAnti-Slavery Reporter, Moody's contentions.[13]
Macaulay, who did not marry nor have children, was rumoured to have fallen in love withMaria Kinnaird, who was the wealthy ward ofRichard 'Conversation' Sharp.[16] Macaulay's strongest emotional relationships were with his youngest sisters: Margaret, who died while he was in India, and Hannah, to whose daughter Margaret, whom he called 'Baba', he was also attached.[17]
Macaulay in 1830 accepted the invitation ofthe Marquess of Lansdowne that he become Member of Parliament for thepocket borough ofCalne. Macaulay's maiden speech in Parliament advocated abolition of thecivil disabilities of the Jews in the UK. Macaulay's subsequent speeches in favour of parliamentary reform were commended.[9] He became MP forLeeds[9] subsequent to the 1833 enactment of theReform Act 1832, by which Calne's representation was reduced from two MPs to one, and by which Leeds, which had not been represented before, had two MPs. Macaulay remained grateful to his former patron, Lansdowne, who remained his friend.
Macaulay wasSecretary to the Board of Control underLord Grey from 1832 until he in 1833 required, as a consequence of the penury of his father, a more remunerative office, than that ofthe unremunerated office of an MP, from which he resigned after the passing of theGovernment of India Act 1833 to accept an appointment as first Law Member of theGovernor-General's Council. In 1834 Macaulay went to India, where he served on the Supreme Council between 1834 and 1838.[18]HisMinute on Indian Education of February 1835 was primarily responsible for the introduction of Western institutional education to India.[citation needed]
Macaulay recommended the introduction of the English language as theofficial language of secondary education instruction in all schools where there had been none before, and the training of English-speaking Indians as teachers.[1]In his minute, he urgedLord William Bentinck, the then-Governor-General to reform secondary education onutilitarian lines to deliver "useful learning", a phrase that to him was synonymous with Western culture. There was no tradition of secondary education in vernacular languages; the institutions supported by theEast India Company taught either inSanskrit orPersian.[citation needed] Hence, he argued, "We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language." Macaulay argued that Sanskrit and Persian were no more accessible than English to the speakers of the Indian vernacular languages and existing Sanskrit and Persian texts were of little use for "useful learning". In one of the less scathing passages of the Minute hewrote:
I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientaliststhemselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
He furtherargued:
It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanskrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.
Hence, from the sixth year of schooling onwards, instruction should be in European learning, with English as the medium of instruction. This would create a class of anglicised Indians who would serve as cultural intermediaries between the British and the Indians; the creation of such a class was necessary before any reform of vernacular education. Hestated:
I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
Macaulay's largely coincided with Bentinck's views[19] and Bentinck's English Education Act 1835 closely matched Macaulay's recommendations (in 1836, a school namedLa Martinière, founded by Major General Claude Martin, had one of its houses named after him), but subsequent Governors-General took a more conciliatory approach to existing Indian education.
His final years in India were devoted to the creation of a Penal Code, as the leading member of the Law Commission. In the aftermath of theIndian Mutiny of 1857, Macaulay's criminal law proposal was enacted.[citation needed] TheIndian Penal Code in 1860 was followed by the Criminal Procedure Code in 1872 and theCivil Procedure Code in 1908. TheIndian Penal Code inspired counterparts in most otherBritish colonies, and to date many of these laws are still in effect in places as far apart asPakistan,Malaysia,Myanmar,Bangladesh,Sri Lanka,Nigeria andZimbabwe, as well as inIndia itself until recently.[20][21] This includes Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which remains the basis forlaws which criminalize homosexuality in severalCommonwealth nations.[22]
In Indian culture, the term "Macaulay's Children" is sometimes used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or displayattitudes influenced by colonialism ("Macaulayism")[23] – expressions used disparagingly, and with the implication of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. In independent India, Macaulay's idea of thecivilising mission has been used by Dalitists, in particular byneo-liberalist[citation needed]Chandra Bhan Prasad, as a "creative appropriation for self-empowerment", based on the view that the Dalit community was empowered by Macaulay's deprecation of Hindu culture and support for Western-style education in India.[24]
Domenico Losurdo states that "Macaulay acknowledged that the English colonists in India behaved likeSpartans confrontinghelots: we are dealing with 'a race of sovereign' or a 'sovereign caste', wielding absolute power over its 'serfs'."[25] Losurdo noted that this did not prompt any doubts from Macaulay over the right of Britain to administer its colonies in an autocratic fashion; for example, while Macaulay described the administration ofgovernor-general of IndiaWarren Hastings as being so despotic that "all the injustice of former oppressors, Asiatic and European, appeared as a blessing", he (Hastings) deserved "high admiration" and a rank among "the most remarkable men in our history" for "having saved England and civilisation".[26]
Returning to Britain in 1838, he became MP again inEdinburgh in the following year. He was madeSecretary at War in 1839 byLord Melbourne and was sworn of thePrivy Council the same year.[27] In 1841 Macaulay addressed the issue ofcopyright law. Macaulay's position, slightly modified, became the basis ofcopyright law in the English-speaking world for many decades.[28] Macaulay argued that copyright is a monopoly and as such has generally negative effects on society.[28] After the fall of Melbourne's government in 1841 Macaulay devoted more time to literary work, and returned to office asPaymaster General in 1846 inLord John Russell's administration.
In the election of 1847 he lost his seat in Edinburgh.[29] He attributed the loss to the anger of religious zealots over his speech in favour of expanding the annual government grant toMaynooth College in Ireland, which trained young men for the Catholic priesthood; some observers also attributed his loss to his neglect of local issues. In 1849 he was electedRector of the University of Glasgow, a position with no administrative duties, often awarded by the students to men of political or literary fame.[30] He also received thefreedom of the city.[31]
In 1852, the voters of Edinburgh offered to re-elect him to Parliament. He accepted on the express condition that he need not campaign and would not pledge himself to a position on any political issue. Remarkably, he was elected on those terms.[citation needed] He seldom attended the House due to ill health. His weakness after suffering a heart attack caused him to postpone for several months making his speech of thanks to the Edinburgh voters. He resigned his seat in January 1856.[32] In 1857 he was raised to thepeerage asBaron Macaulay, ofRothley in theCounty of Leicester,[33] but seldom attended theHouse of Lords.[32]
Macaulay sat on the committee to decide on the historical subjects to be painted in the newPalace of Westminster.[34] The need to collect reliable portraits of notable figures from history for this project led to the foundation of theNational Portrait Gallery, which was formally established on 2 December 1856.[35] Macaulay was amongst its founding trustees and is honoured with one of only three busts above the main entrance.
During his later years his health made work increasingly difficult for him. He died of a heart attack on 28 December 1859, aged 59, leaving his major work,The History of England from the Accession of James the Second incomplete.[36] On 9 January 1860 he was buried inWestminster Abbey, inPoets' Corner,[37] near a statue ofAddison.[9] As he had no children, his peerage became extinct on his death.
Macaulay's nephew,Sir George Trevelyan, Bt, wrote the "Life and Letters" of his uncle. His great-nephew was the Cambridge historianG. M. Trevelyan.
As a young man he composed the balladsIvry andThe Armada,[38] which he later included as part ofLays of Ancient Rome, a series of very popular poems about heroic episodes in Roman history which he began composing in India and continued in Rome, finally publishing in 1842.[39] The most famous of them,Horatius, concerns the heroism ofHoratius Cocles. It contains the oft-quoted lines:[40]
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?"
His essays, originally published in theEdinburgh Review, were collected asCritical and Historical Essays in 1843.[41]
During the 1840s, Macaulay undertook his most famous work,The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, publishing the first two volumes in 1848. At first, he had planned to bring his history down to the reign ofGeorge III. After publication of his first two volumes, his hope was to complete his work with the death ofQueen Anne in 1714.[42]
The third and fourth volumes, bringing the history to thePeace of Ryswick, were published in 1855. At his death in 1859 he was working on the fifth volume. This, bringing theHistory down to the death ofWilliam III, was prepared for publication by his sister, Lady Trevelyan, after his death.[43]
Macaulay's political writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called theWhig interpretation of history. This philosophy appears most clearly in the essays Macaulay wrote for theEdinburgh Review and other publications, which were collected in book form and a steady best-seller throughout the 19th century. But it is also reflected inHistory; the most stirring passages in the work are those that describe the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688.
Macaulay's approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency.Karl Marx referred to him as a 'systematic falsifier of history'.[44] His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while characters he approved of were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his main heroWilliam III of any responsibility for theGlencoe massacre.Winston Churchill devoted afour-volume biography of theDuke of Marlborough to rebutting Macaulay's slights on his ancestor, expressing hope "to fasten the label 'Liar' to his genteel coat-tails".[45] Later historians have also highlighted his views on non-European cultures and philosophies as explicitly racist, citing, for example, his remark that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'.
The Liberal historianLord Acton read Macaulay'sHistory of England four times and later described himself as "a raw English schoolboy, primed to the brim with Whig politics" but "notWhiggism only, but Macaulay in particular that I was so full of." However, Acton would later find fault in Macaulay.[46] In 1880 Acton classed Macaulay (withBurke andGladstone) as one "of the three greatest Liberals".[47] In 1883, he advisedMary Gladstone:
[T]he Essays are really flashy and superficial. He was not above par in literary criticism; his Indian articles will not hold water; and his two most famous reviews, onBacon andRanke, show his incompetence. The essays are only pleasant reading, and a key to half the prejudices of our age. It is theHistory (with one or two speeches) that is wonderful. He knew nothing respectably before the seventeenth century, he knew nothing of foreign history, of religion, philosophy, science, or art. His account of debates has been thrown into the shade by Ranke, his account of diplomatic affairs, byKlopp. He is, I am persuaded, grossly, basely unfair. Read him therefore to find out how it comes that the most unsympathetic of critics can think him very nearly the greatest of English writers...[48]
In 1885, Acton asserted that:
We must never judge the quality of a teaching by the quality of the Teacher, or allow the spots to shut out the sun. It would be unjust, and it would deprive us of nearly all that is great and good in this world. Let me remind you of Macaulay. He remains to me one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious for certain reasons which you know.[49]
In 1888, Acton wrote that Macaulay "had done more than any writer in the literature of the world for the propagation of the Liberal faith, and he was not only the greatest, but the most representative, Englishman then living".[50]
W. S. Gilbert described Macaulay's wit, "who wrote ofQueen Anne" as part of Colonel Calverley's Act I patter song in the libretto of the 1881 operettaPatience. (This line may well have been a joke about the Colonel's pseudo-intellectual bragging, as most educated Victorians knew that Macaulay didnot write of Queen Anne; theHistory encompasses only as far as the death of William III in 1702, who was succeeded by Anne.)
Herbert Butterfield'sThe Whig Interpretation of History (1931) attacked Whig history. The Dutch historianPieter Geyl, writing in 1955, considered Macaulay'sEssays as "exclusively and intolerantly English".[51]
On 7 February 1954,Lord Moran, doctor to the Prime Minister, SirWinston Churchill, recorded in his diary:
Randolph, who is writing a life of the late Lord Derby forLongman's, brought to luncheon a young man of that name. His talk interested the P.M. ... Macaulay, Longman went on, was not read now; there was no demand for his books. The P.M. grunted that he was very sorry to hear this. Macaulay had been a great influence in his young days.[52]
George Richard Potter, Professor and Head of the Department of History at theUniversity of Sheffield from 1931 to 1965, stated "In an age of long letters ... Macaulay's hold their own with the best".[53] However Potter also stated:
For all his linguistic abilities he seems never to have tried to enter into sympathetic mental contact with the classical world or with the Europe of his day. It was an insularity that was impregnable ... If his outlook was insular, however, it was surely British rather than English.[54]
With regards to Macaulay's determination to inspect physically the places mentioned in hisHistory, Potter said:
Much of the success of the famous third chapter of theHistory which may be said to have introduced the study ofsocial history, and even ...local history, was due to the intense local knowledge acquired on the spot. As a result it is a superb, living picture of Great Britain in the latter half of the seventeenth century ... No description of therelief of Londonderry in a major history of England existed before 1850; after his visit there and the narrative written round it no other account has been needed ... Scotland came fully into its own and from then until now it has been a commonplace thatEnglish history is incomprehensible without Scotland.[55]
Potter noted that Macaulay has had many critics, some of whom put forward some salient points about the deficiency of Macaulay'sHistory but added: "The severity and the minuteness of the criticism to which theHistory of England has been subjected is a measure of its permanent value. It is worth every ounce of powder and shot that is fired against it." Potter concluded that "in the long roll of English historical writing fromClarendon toTrevelyan onlyGibbon has surpassed him in security of reputation and certainty of immortality".[56]
Piers Brendon wrote that Macaulay is "the only British rival to Gibbon."[57] In 1972, J.R. Western wrote that: "Despite its age and blemishes, Macaulay'sHistory of England has still to be superseded by a full-scale modern history of the period."[58] In 1974J. P. Kenyon stated that: "As is often the case, Macaulay had it exactly right."[59]
W. A. Speck wrote in 1980, that a reason Macaulay'sHistory of England "still commands respect is that it was based upon a prodigious amount of research".[60] Speck stated:
Macaulay's reputation as an historian has never fully recovered from the condemnation it implicitly received in Herbert Butterfield's devastating attack onThe Whig Interpretation of History. Though he was never cited by name, there can be no doubt that Macaulay answers to the charges brought against Whig historians, particularly that they study the past with reference to the present, class people in the past as those who furthered progress and those who hindered it, and judge them accordingly.[61]
According to Speck:
[Macaulay too often] denies the past has its own validity, treating it as being merely a prelude to his own age. This is especially noticeable in the third chapter of hisHistory of England, when again and again he contrasts the backwardness of 1685 with the advances achieved by 1848. Not only does this misuse the past, it also leads him to exaggerate the differences.[61]
On the other hand, Speck also wrote that Macaulay "took pains to present the virtues even of a rogue, and he painted the virtuous warts and all",[62] and that "he was never guilty of suppressing or distorting evidence to make it support a proposition which he knew to be untrue".[63] Speck concluded:
What is in fact striking is the extent to which hisHistory of England at least has survived subsequent research. Although it is often dismissed as inaccurate, it is hard to pinpoint a passage where he is categorically in error ... his account of events has stood up remarkably well ... His interpretation of theGlorious Revolution also remains the essential starting point for any discussion of that episode ... What has not survived, or has become subdued, is Macaulay's confident belief in progress. It was a dominant creed in the era of theGreat Exhibition. ButAuschwitz andHiroshima destroyed this century's claim to moral superiority over its predecessors, while the exhaustion of natural resources raises serious doubts about the continuation even of material progress into the next.[63]
In 1981,J. W. Burrow argued that Macaulay'sHistory of England:
... is not simply partisan; a judgement, like that ofFirth, that Macaulay was always the Whig politician could hardly be more inapposite. Of course Macaulay thought that the Whigs of the seventeenth century were correct in their fundamental ideas, but the hero of theHistory was William, who, as Macaulay says, was certainly no Whig ... If this wasWhiggism it was so only, by the mid-nineteenth century, in the most extended and inclusive sense, requiring only an acceptance of parliamentary government and a sense of gravity of precedent.Butterfield says, rightly, that in the nineteenth century the Whig view of history became the English view. The chief agent of that transformation was surely Macaulay, aided, of course, by the receding relevance of seventeenth-century conflicts to contemporary politics, as the power of the crown waned further, and thecivil disabilities of Catholics andDissenters were removed by legislation. TheHistory is much more than the vindication of a party; it is an attempt to insinuate a view of politics, pragmatic, reverent, essentiallyBurkean, informed by a high, even tumid sense of the worth of public life, yet fully conscious of its interrelations with the wider progress of society; it embodies whatHallam had merely asserted, a sense of the privileged possession by Englishmen of their history, as well as of the epic dignity of government by discussion. If this was sectarian it was hardly, in any useful contemporary sense, polemically Whig; it is more like the sectarianism of English respectability.[64]
In 1982,Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote:
[M]ost professional historians have long since given up reading Macaulay, as they have given up writing the kind of history he wrote and thinking about history as he did. Yet there was a time when anyone with any pretension to cultivation read Macaulay.[65]
Himmelfarb also laments that "the history of theHistory is a sad testimonial to the cultural regression of our times".[66]
In the novelMarathon Man and itsfilm adaptation, the protagonist was named 'Thomas Babington' after Macaulay.[67]
The Quarrel of Croker and Macaulay, by historianWilliam Thomas(published in 2000), studies the relationship between the Anglo-Irish politician and author John WilsonCroker and Macaulay.[68]
In 2008,Walter Olson argued for the pre-eminence of Macaulay as a Britishclassical liberal.[69]
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| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
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| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forCalne 1830–1832 With:Sir James Macdonald, Bt to 1831 Charles Richard Fox 1831–1832 | Succeeded by |
| New constituency | Member of Parliament forLeeds 1832–1834 With:John Marshall | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forEdinburgh 1839–1847 With:Sir John Campbell to 1841 William Gibson-Craig from 1841 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forEdinburgh 1852–1856 With:Charles Cowan | Succeeded by |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Secretary to the Board of Control 1832–1833 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Secretary at War 1839–1841 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Paymaster General 1846–1848 | Succeeded by |
| Academic offices | ||
| Preceded by | Rector of the University of Glasgow 1848–1850 | Succeeded by |
| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
| New creation | Baron Macaulay 1857–1859 | Extinct |
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