Daughter and Mother; some new light on Catharine Macaulay and her family

BRIDGET HILL

Catharine Macaulay, the republican historian and author of an eight-volume history of England in the seventeenth century, was born in I 73 I. She died sixty years later. In I 760 she married Dr George Macaulay, physician and treasurer of the Brownlow Lying-in Hospital. Their only child, Catherine Sophia, was born in I 76 5. A year later George Macaulay died. Twelve years of widowhood came to an end when, in December 1778 at the age of 47, Catharine Macaulay remarried. Her second husband was William Graham, aged 21, described as a ‘surgeon’s mate’. Despite all the prognostications of her critics, she continued her History and in I 78 3 published the final volume. In May I 784 she travelled to the United States of America with her husband. She was to stay there for over a year. When finally she left in October 1785, she went straight to the South of France. Only in the spring of 1786 did she finally return to England. She was then 5 5 and her daughter, Catherine Sophia, 21.

Richard Baron in the 1760s described Catharine Macaulay as ‘a woman without passions’.1 When he first met her she was a young woman recently married and just embarking on her History. It is difficult not to sympathise with Baron’s view, as material on the basis of which it would be possible to see her as something more than a distinguished scholar and historian whose fame developed overnight and as rapidly faded, around whom a great deal of gossip circulated, has until recently been scant indeed. We know next to nothing of her as a wife or mother. The various depictions of Catharine Macaulay in paintings, engravings and statuary do little to modify Baron’s views. In general she appears as a severe Roman matron - noble, learned, but not warm.2 There is little to contradict Baron’s description of her face as ‘abstract as the print of Mr. Loclte’. 3 Much later, Alicia Lefanu, daughter of Mrs Frances Sheridan, whiIe full of admiration for Catharine Macaulay, was to find her ‘cold’.4 There is very little information available about the six years of her first marriage, and none about the childhood of her daughter, Catherine Sophia. Richard Baron, a close friend of Dr Macaulay, Catharine’s first husband, provides us with the only

I. The Diury of Sylus Neville 1768-1788, ed. Basil Cozens-Hardy (London 1950). p.20. 2. See, for example, the oil-painting of her attributed to Robert Edge Pine c. 1774, in Bridget Hill,

3. The Diury of Sylus Neville. p.20. 4. Alicia Lefanu. Memoirs of the lije arid writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan (London 1824). p.232-

The Republican Virugo (Oxford 199.2). Plate 4.

3 3 .

British journal for eighteenth-century studies 22 (1999). p.35-49 0 BSECS 0141-867X

36 BRIDGET HILL

information we have of this period of her life. Her husband was apparently devoted to her, and told Baron. ‘you may think that Catharine from her application to study is not an attentive wife, but there never was a more affectionate wife, a more tender mother’.j Baron’s views were echoed later in I 769 by a letter in the Town and country magazine. It was written by ‘a Gentleman in Town to his Friends in the Country’. They had been reading Catharine Macaulay’s History and begged their friend in town to tell them ‘what kind of a woman’ she was. ‘You have often heard the notables of both sexes say when speaking of a learned lady, God pity the husband’, the author wrote, ‘[but] I assure you [...I that Dr. Macaulay was, in a married state an object of envy: nor do I know any man more happy than he was in a wife, not only as to her person, sense, and prudence, but her family economy’. ‘I am informed’, the letter continued, ‘that Mrs Macaulay is as remarkable for her discharge of the parental [...I as of the conjugal duties’.6 We know all too little of her first husband, but perhaps even less of her second, William Graham. Her brother, John Sawbridge, was a radical political figure of some importance, and there is no absence of information about his political activities, and occasionally reports of visits his sister paid to him at his country house, Olantigh, near Canterbury, but we hear little of his personality, his relations with his sister, and very little of relations between members of the Sawbridge family.

Recently, the coming to light of a series of unpublished letters froin her daughter, Sophia, to Catharine Macaulay immediately preceding (four of the letters are undated but were almost certainly written before May 1784) and during her visit to the United States in 178411785, in the period of her subsequent stay in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France in I 78511 786, and, finally, a group of letters written after Sophia’s marriage in 1787 up to her mother’s death in I 79 I , do something to amend our view of both mother and daughter.7 The letters were not known to exist until, in June 1992, they suddenly appeared for sale at a London auction. For Sophia, the period in which the letters were written were vital years covering her emergence from childhood, her life as a young woman, her marriage and growing maturity. In that time, daughterlmother relations were to change from one of a devoted dependence to one of almost motherly concern for Catharine Macaulay’s health, together with an independence and assurance that enabled her to gently chide her mother for her weaknesses. In a sense there is almost a reversal of their roles.

To modern ears the letters seem formal. Although in the earlier letters her mother is addressed as ‘Dear Mama’, suddenly, in January 1786, she becomes ‘My Dearest Madam’, as though Sophia had decided she was no longer a child and must now adopt more adult forms of address. Sophia often ends her letter with ‘your Sincerely Dutiful & Affectionate Daughter’. Most of her uncles and

j. The Diary ofSylas Neville. p.13-14. 6. Town und country magazine I (1769). p.91-92. 7. Catharine Macaulay material. Gilder Lehrman Collection on deposit at the Pierpont Morgan

Library, New York. The reference is GLC 1795, series I , 2, 3 and 4.

Some new light or1 Catlwririe Macaiilay arid herfamily 37

aunts are referred to by their surnames - John Sawbridge becomes ‘Uncle Sawbridge’ and Stephen Beckingham ‘Uncle Beckingham’ - but there is one exception - he seems to have been a very favourite Uncle - Wanley Sawbridge. brother to Catharine, is consistently called ‘Uncle Wanley’. William Graham is always ‘Mr. Graham’. But beneath this formality of language there is genuine feeling. The letters are at roughly two-month intervals. There may, of course, have been others that have not survived but the general sense of the letters seems continuous. There are two major exceptions: between I I April I 786 and 2 1 July 1787, and, more importantly, between 13 August 1787 and April I 790. The first marks Catharine Macaulay’s return to England after an absence of nearly two years, and Sophia’s subsequent marriage to Captain Gregory. The marriage took place in June I 78 7 and the letters are resumed in July of the same year when the Gregorys take their honeymoon in France. At this time it would seem that her mother and William Graham, after living in London close to the Gregorys, were staying with the Arnolds in Leicester. Mrs Arnold was William’s sister and her husband was Dr Thomas Arnold, a distinguished physician and writer on the subject of insanity. The second interval of more than two and a half years is more difficult to explain. It seems likely that both Catharine Macaulay and her daughter in this period were living in London. Only when the Grahams move out of London to Brucknal [sic] in Berkshire in April I 790 does the correspondence resume.

Catherine Sophia was born on 25 February 1765, but of her childhood we know nothing. In the sources available we first meet Sophia in the period spent in Bath when she and her mother lived in the house of the elderly cleric and Wilkesite, Dr Wilson. She seems to have already known Dr Wilson, who described her in a letter to Wilkes of 1775 as a ‘pretty miss’.x She would have been about ten years old. Apparently, Wilson was devoted to her. There is a portrait of Thomas Wilson and Sophia by Joseph Wright (probably the only one extant of Catharine Macaulay’s daughter).g They sit at a table with a volume of Catharine Macaulay’s History open before them. Sophia is a plain, but not unintelligent, looking little girl. According to David Hume, Wilson adopted her ‘by all the Rites of Roman Jurisprudence’. The adoption took place in April I 77 5 ‘in the presence of five or six witnesses’. It was Wilson’s intention, Hume added, ‘to leave her all his fortune, which is considerable’. ‘(’

Much was written of William Graham at the time of the second marriage in I 778 but, beyond the ‘scandal’ of her marrying a man - a nonentity - 26 years her junior, it is difficult to give William Graham a face or to endow him with any character. In Sophia’s early letters, apart from ‘pray remember me kindly to Mr. Graham’ and ‘I hope you never omit to remember me to Mr. Graham’, we remain in ignorance of him.” He only becomes a human being on the

8. The Correspondenre qf the late John Wilkrs with his tricnd. ed. John Almon. 5 vols (London 1805).

y. See Hill, The Republican Virugo, Plate 10, 10. The Lerters ofHunre. ed. J. Y. T . Crcig. z vols (Oxford 1932). ii.321. 11. From two undated letters written before May 1784, in the Catharine Macaulay material.

iv.176.

38 BRIDGET HILL

voyage to America when, with Catharine Macaulay unwell, it was he who wrote to reassure Sophia. Sophia was not ungrateful, and wrote to her mother, ‘I beg you will return my best thanks to Mr. Graham for his attention in seizing the only opportunity to let me hear of you, & assure him he could not possibly confer a greater obligation upon me than in doing so’.12 On hearing of the safe arrival of her mother and Mr Graham, Sophia wrote back that she was ‘much obliged to Mr. Graham for those little scraps which are prettily scattered through- out your letter.’ In the same letter, she asks her mother to tell Mr Graham, ‘I am not so absolutely determined to add to that class of women [spinsters] whom he esteems unwise’, but that sometimes she occupies herself with ‘those qualifications which are necessary to make an old maid respectable’. She had decided to relinquish ‘the Miss when I attain the age of forty’. And in order that Mr Graham should be a witness against her if she wanted ‘to break so good a resolution’. she reminds him that on the coming 24 February I 78 5 she will be twenty.’3 On one occasion, after admonishing her mother for the health fads with which she experimented, Sophia acknowledges William Graham’s care of his wife: ‘I am well acquainted with Mr. Graham’s kind & constant attention to your ease and satisfaction and I most heartily thank him for it & if it will afford him any pleasure he may be assured that the whole of his behaviour has long engaged my sincere regard and esteem’.I4

These letters also tell us something of how far Catharine’s daughter shared her mother’s interests, ideas and politics. The very first of these letters from daughter to mother tells of Sophia’s reading. Like her mother, she had read and admired Madame Genlis’s work on education. She is delighted to find her mother agrees with her in her opinion, for she writes, ‘it always raises me in my own opinion when my judgement is confirmed by your approbation’. But Sophia has one interesting criticism of Madame de Genlis. She believed that no kind of deceit should be used towards children, and where Madame Genlis’s Adelaide is concerned, among all the ‘numerous artifices which are practised on [her]’ she felt some would certainly have been detected.Is Later, in October 1784. when Mrs Gregory senior’s younger son is coming home for the holidays and Sophia is staying with her, she reflects that, ‘if it is written in the book of my fate ever to be called by the name of mother, I hope to make some advantage of her example, for she seems to understand the business of education both in theory and practice as well as Mme Genlis’. In the same letter, she postpones giving any opinion of Cicero, whom she has just started to read, pending her finishing his life, but is confident her mother will find many of her former prejudices against him to have been dispelled.16 In another undated letter, she writes that

Gilder Lehrman Collection. Henceforth all letters mentioned are from the same Collection. unless otherwise stated. 12, Letter of 2 July 1784. 13. Letter of 4 October 1784. 14. Letter of 15 November 1785, 15. Undated letter written before May 1784. 16. Letter of 4 October 1784.

Some new light on Catliurine Mucaulay and herfamily 39

she has read Thomson’s Seasons for the first time and ‘never was so much delighted with any poet’. She was contemplating reading either Middleton’s Life of Cicero, Raynal’s Histoire des Indes or Plutarch’s Lives but was ‘undetermined which to take first’.I7 When staying with the Heron family, she is at pains to assure her mother that her reading is not being neglected: ‘Sometimes of an evening when we are all together one of us reads the history of France to the rest, & and at times I take up the spectator’. She was ‘extremely entertained with reading the French history’. But, at the same time, she admits ‘poor Rollin does not go on very well’ and she must wait until her return to town to finish him.IR In March 1785, in response to her mother’s asking after her progress in reading, she wrote back that during the previous summer she had ‘slightly perused Cook’s last voyage to the South Seas, Coxe’s Northern Tour, some travels through South America, and read many of Plutarch’s Lives and some of Plato’s Dialogues’. As Catharine Macaulay was later to express her opinion that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was ‘totally unfit for the perusal of youth’ and that the reading of Sir Charles Grandison should be delayed ‘to an age when the judgement is sufficiently ripe to separate the wheat from the chaff‘, a somewhat apprehensive Sophia continued ‘to which list you must excuse me when I add Sir Charles Grandison’. She was ‘now pursuing the study of Ancient History and the best poets’, and, on the advice of both her mother and her uncle, was about to embark on ‘a series of Theological reading which I know you will approve, Stackhouse’s History of the Bible, Leeland’s View of the Deistical Writers and Prideaux’s Connexions’.’9 Sophia was clearly her mother’s daughter and by no means unread.

John Willtes loved a scandal and. following Catharine Macaulay’s second marriage, indulged in a great deal of gossip of at least questionable veracity. Shortly after Catharine Macaulay’s marriage to William Graham, he wrote to his daughter. Polly, thai Dr Wilson was now ‘thoroughly convinced froin facts of the lady’s former intimacy with Dr. -. and he thinks her a monster’.20 The doctor referred to was Dr James Graham, the quack doctor, brother to William Graham, now her husband. When Wilkes wrote again, he claimed that Catharine Macaulay’s brother, John Sawbridge, was disgusted by his sister’s behaviour and thought her ‘so abandoned a woman’ that Sophia should not stay with her but come to live with himz1

The first of the letters from Sophia to her mother are undated but belong to the period before Catharine Macaulay’s departure for the United States in May 1784. At the time these early letters were written, Sophia was not apparently living with her mother, but this may only mean that she was visiting friends or

17. IJndated letter written before May I 784. 18. Another undated letter written before May 1784. Charles Rollin (1661-1741). a French

19. Letter of I March 1785; Catharine Macaulay. Letters on educntion (London I 790), p.r45, 147. 20. Letters f r o m the yenr 1774 to the yenr 1796 uf John Wilkes. esq., ed. Sir W. Rough. 4 vok

21. lbid., p.127.

historian, wrote a Histoire nncienne nnd n Histoire rotiininr.

(London 1804). ii.115.

40 BRIDGET HILL

relations. The first suggests she was staying with Mrs Heron. Catharine Macau- lay’s cousin, Catherine, had married Thomas Heron, who lived at Chilham in Kent. They had two daughters of whom Sophia was very fond. The second letter confirms her whereabouts as that of Chilham Castle. Whether or not Sophia lived apart from her mother and step-father is difficult to establish. Before her mother left for America, the letters she wrote were those written during visits to her friends and relations. Directly her mother left for America until her return from France, she seems to have lived with her Uncle, John Sawbridge. Soon after her mother returned to England, she was married. These are the letters of a young woman not long removed from childhood. The tone, if formal, is warm. They are addressed to ‘My dear Mama’.

The first dated letter from Sophia to her mother is that of 31 May 1784. It anticipates her mother’s arrival in Boston. One of the two radical publisher brothers, Edward and Charles Dilly, close friends of her mother, had told her that ‘a packet sailed for America at the begining of every month’. She was trying to come to terms with the interval that must elapse before she received a letter from her mother. Jacques Brissot had met Catharine Macaulay in the early I 780s and became a great admirer of her work. We know that a friendship was already established between him and Catharine, but it comes as something of a surprise that the friendship extended to Sophia. Later that same summer she called on Brissot’s wife, only to find her indisposed and unable to see her. The servant had told her Monsieur Brissot had left for France and was intending to carry out his promise of going on to Germany. He was to visit the States in 1788, but when he heard of the departure of Catharine Macaulay for Boston in I 784, his new journal Patriote fraiicais carried a glowing recommendation of her. Of how Sophia obtained a copy of the account we remain ignorant, but when she read it she thought it important to communicate the contents to her mother. ‘Among the emigrating multitude that France carries off from England’, it opened, ‘one must distinguish a celebrated historian’. Brissot called on her to do for recent American history what she had done for the seventeenth century in England, and write the history of ‘l’etonnante revolution de l’Amerique’.Zz It was essential that the Americans understood how republicanism in England had been destroyed, so that they did not make the same mistakes.

From the first letter, Sophia expresses her regret that her mother has decided to go to the United States. It was ‘far from being a desirable piece of intelligence to me’.23 But. she was to add, she is glad to know of her mother’s plans. Sophia has no time for the Americans but concedes that if they do receive her mother ‘as she deserves’, she ‘will throw aside all’ her ‘former prejudices & become one of their most zealous advocate~’.~4 Very little of her mother’s travels is reflected in Sophia’s letters. But what Sophia’s letters do make clear is how gratified her mother had been at her ‘agreeable reception in Ameri~a’.~S By May I 785 Sophia

2 2 . Letter of I 5 November 1785. 2 3 . Undaled letter. 24. Letter of 29 July I 784. 25. Letter of 4 October I 784.

Some new light t i i i Catheririe Maraulriy and hei-family 4 I

anticipates her mother’s return. She writes that she rejoices ‘in the hopes of seeing’ her soon ‘as I flatter myself you must long before this have renounced your scheme of visiting France before you return to England’.zh She was to be proved wrong. In the early summer of I 78 5 Sophia must have been told of the Grahams’ plans for going straight to the south of France on leaving the States and postponing returning to England. By October 1785 she is begging her mother: ‘for God’s sake write often, nothing else can make me patiently acquiesce with your remaining longer on the continent’.lT In December of the same year Sophia is begging her mother to continue to write long letters. In return she will ‘endeavour not to trouble you with my complaints at your prolonging an absence which I had flattered myself was nearly at an end’.LR A month later she admits that every letter from her mother renews her ‘regret at your long absence’.L9 Sophia, much later in November 1790, describes her mother as ‘a punctual correspondent tho’ not very fond of letter-~riting’.3O It was to be a bitter disappointment for her to learn that her mother intended calling in at Dunkirk before finally returning home. Finally, on I I April I 786, she writes of receiving ‘the agreeable news of your speedy return to England’. The news makes her ‘so happy [...I I am almost afraid of receiving another letter lest you should have altered your plan’.3’ There is little doubt that Sophia was not only devoted to her mother but found the enforced separation very hard to bear.

All the letters give the impression of a close-knit family circle. Sophia often gives her mother news of them. Her uncle Sawbridge, Catharine Macaulay’s brother, had married Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir William Stephenson, a London Alderman and one of John Sawbridge’s political colleagues. They had four children, three sons and a daughter. The earliest of Sophia’s letters informs us that her Uncle Sawbridge had ‘let his house in New Burlington Street and has taken one in Harley Street till their own is ready’.3l In her following letter she writes of her Uncle’s house in Portman Square being ready by the following summer. By July I 784 Sophia appears to be living there, but whether this was because her mother was away or a regular arrangement since her mother’s second marriage, it is impossible to say. She wrote that she had visited her Uncle N. [Nicholas] Sawbridge at Canterbury. He had ‘grown very faf.33 Both before and after her marriage to Captain Gregory, Uncle Wanley (the younger brother of Catharine Macaulay who became a cleric, remained unmarried and shared the radical politics of his sister and brother) is frequently mentioned and is a regular visitor both to Uncle Sawbridge’s household and, after Sophia’s marriage, to the Gregory family. He was to baptise Sophia’s first-born. Uncle Beckingham,

26. Letter of 3 May 1785. 27. Letter of 27 October 1785. 28. Letter of 5 December 1785. 29. Letter of I January 1786. 30. Letter of 10 November 1790 31. Letter of I I April I 786. 32. Undated letter. 33. Another undated letter.

42 BRIDGET HILL

‘a gentleman of fortune’, the husband of Catharine Macaulay’s elder sister, Mary, is another who joins in sending love to Catharine Macaulay.34 As we have seen, Sophia was a frequent visitor to the Heron family.

One topic that recurs in all Sophia’s letters is her anxiety and concern for the state of her mother’s health. If there remain any doubts about Catharine Macaulay’s persistent ill health from some time in the early I 770s, these letters are enough to dispel them. Her mother, she writes on one occasion, ‘does not give so good an account of herself as [she] could wish & I shall be impatient to have a better one’.35 Another time she hopes ‘my dear Mama will be very careful of herself. She had got through the severe winter so well, ‘it would be a thousand pities to get ill’ just as the better weather was coming.j6 When her mother tells her of a visit to the theatre, she is cautioned by Sophia against such ‘evening expeditions’. She wished her mother ‘to be careful at all times’.37 In May I 784, after her mother’s departure for the States, she writes that she hopes ‘you are now sailing in good health’.3* By July there is some anxiety about how her mother has survived the passage. The last letter from Boston, significantly written by her husband, William Graham. had told of her continuing ‘sickness & fatigue’.39 When, in February 1785, Sophia has heard nothing from her mother for over two months, she is immediately apprehensive that the cause may be ill health. A letter reassures her. But Catharine Macaulay was anything but well. In explaining to Mercy Otis Warren why she had second thoughts about the proposed American edition of her History oiEnglandfrom the Revolution to the present time in a series of letters to a friend and decided not to pursue the idea, she wrote that, in part, her decision was the result of her poor state of health, which ‘inclined me to take advantage of two or three years’ residence in the mild and steady climate of the South of France’.4* In fact, she stayed in the South of France less than a year. Whether or not inspired by Brissot’s earlier suggestion, there is evidence that Catharine Macaulay did contemplate writing a history of the American Revolution but that ‘the infirm state of her health’ forced her to give up the project.4’ In October I 784 Sophia had apparently had no letter since May of that year. She wrote to her mother that she and her aunt ‘were convinced it could only be occasioned by illness and an illness sufficiently serious to prevent you writing to me’. Her mother’s letter from Aix-en-Provence had suggested she was ‘not strong enough to write a longer letter’.42 Sophia begins to chide her for her faith in health fads: the taking of warm baths - the attraction of Aix - was fine in moderation but they were also weakening and should not

34. Mary Hays, Femule biography, 6 vols (London 1803). v.288. 35. Undated letter. 36. Another undated letter. 3 7. Ibid. 38. Letter of 31 May 1784. 39. Letter of 2 July I 784. 40. Wnrren-Adurns letters. 2 vols (Boston 192 5). Massachusetts Historical Society Collections.

41. Hays, Female biography. v.303. 42.Letter of 27 October 1785.

ii.257.

Some new light O I I Catherine Macaulay and her family 43

be used to excess. In the following letter she is critical of her mother’s plan of ‘Oeconomy which you suppose it commendable to pursue’. She knew her mother was ‘sometimes apt to carry a favourite pursuit too far’. ‘Such an excess of frugality’ was not wise. Whatever the cause of her illness - Sophia describes it as ‘a course of fatigues which no one could have supposed your delicate frame capable of supporting’ - she recovers, and her daughter begs her to ‘take care’ of herself.43 By the end of 1785 Sophia is still worrying that before her mother returns to England ‘some damp bed some accident which you have hitherto almost miraculously escaped may lead to the most fatal consequences & perhaps for ever deprive me of a blessing I so ardently long for’. ‘Very early in the summer’, she confesses, ‘I had hoped to have the happiness of seeing a parent whose delightful society & peculiar tenderness to me continually occur to my remembrance & encrease my desire of again enjoying that society & that tenderness to a very painful degree of impatience’.44 So why, given her daughter’s plea to her to return home, did Catharine Macaulay choose to postpone returning to England and go straight to the south of France? I think there can be little doubt that her mother was anything but well and had hoped to regain her health before returning to England. Sophia’s letters to Aix-en-Provence seem to confirm such an explanation.

Many of these letters from Sophia to her mother are concerned with financial matters. It must have been difficult to arrange for money to be readily available when travelling abroad, particularly when income was coming in sporadically and unpredictably. A Mr Rudd appears to have been in charge. There is a reference to ‘a mortgage in Scotland’ from which Mr Rudd reported receiving ‘a draught [...I of five hundred & fifty pounds‘. This may have been a legacy from her first husband, George Macaulay.45 In May 1784 Sophia had received the Mortgage Deed from Mr Rudd.46 There is also rent sent in ‘very punctually’ by a Mr Dick from a ‘Scotch farm’,47 There is much talk of Dr Wilson’s ‘payment of the annuity’.@ According to the Gentleman’s magazine, in a will of 5 May I770 Dr Wilson ’revoked all gifts, etc., to “Catharine Graham, formerly Macaulay”, but he left €500 and accruing interest to Catharine Sophia’.49 In December 1784 Sophia tells her mother that, according to Mr Rudd, ‘Dr. Wilson’s executors made not the smallest hesitation about the payment of the annuity & had promised he should have it at Christmas which is the time when the rents of the estates are paid in, & they should consider his waiting till then as a favour‘.io Unlike many of Dr Wilson’s promised legacies which failed to materialise - Wilkes had been promised €20,000 and actually received €50 -this does appear

43. Ibid. 44. Letter of I 5 November I 78 5. 45. Letter of 5 December 1785. 46. Letter of I December 1784. 47. Letter of 31 May 1784. 48. Letter of 31 August 1784. 49. Robert Pierpoint, Catharine Macnuliiy’s ’History’: the marble statue in the eritrance hall of

50. Letter of I December 1784. Warrington Town Hall. quoted as from Gerltlmcin’s magazine 54 (1784). p.317.

44 BRIDGET HILL

to have been paid. In a letter of 10 January 1786, Mr Rudd was to send Sophia ‘another [...I fifty pounds [...I when he receives Dr. Wilson’s annuity’.jr ‘I know you will be glad to hear’, she was to write the following April, ’that my legacy is perfectly safe tho it may be some time before it is paid as the Executors have put the management of the late Doctor’s affairs into the care of chancery’.sz

Sophia often comments in her letters to her mother on current politics. In one of the earliest (undated) letters, probably written in 1783. she writes that ‘the state of politics’ is ‘full as critical at present as when I saw you last’. She makes her own political sympathies abundantly clear. ‘There is a kind of plausibility about Lord North’s late conduct’, she writes shrewdly, ‘which makes him appear rather more respectable than he did formerly, & I cannot help siding with that party’. She thought that

if Pit [sic] were to get the better, it would be a terrible blow to the authority of the commons, as hitherto every minister however corrupt has always respected their resolutions whenever they had honesty or spirit to oppose their measures. rYr have thought their approbation Ci support absolutely necessary to their remaining in power

‘Fox’s moderation during the whole contest’, she went on to add, ‘had been highly commendable’.s3 After her mother’s departure for America when she had clearly been asked to keep her mother informed of the political situation, she wrote that she was ‘sorry not to have any thing agreeable on that subject to communicate’. Fox’s victory at the election of 1784 had been celebrated by his friends but care had been taken ‘to prevent any disturbances’.j4 In July and August I 784 she comments on Pitt’s new taxes. ‘People were grumbling’ about them. She thinks that ‘considering the quantity of money to be raised’, they were ‘as judiciously laid on as possible’. She goes on to add that while ‘his majorities are large’, she thinks ‘his popularity is already greatly diminished’.jj On 3 May 1785 she writes excitedly to her mother that she has been ‘lately seized with as violent a political fit as I experienced at the general election’. The cause was Pitt’s motion in favour of ‘our grand object’ - parliamentary reform. Pitt had ‘made an excellent speech on the occasion’. In Sophia’s opinion, ‘his plan seemed calculated to obviate every objection’. Sadly, she writes, it had been defeated by 74 votes because ‘it was not seconded by ministerial influence & consequently proved ineffectual’.jh In fact, it was the last effort by Pitt in the struggle for parliamentary reform. In July I 790 Sophia had been to Canterbury and there saw her Uncle Wanley in high spirits ‘at the success of his friend Honywood’ in the Kentish poll. She tells her mother, ‘they were to ride in procession on a day appointed in great state with blue saddle Cloths & God knows how many knots of blue Ribbon’. Uncle Wanley had been much delighted

51. Letter of 10 January 1786. 5 2 . Letter of 11 April 1786. 53. Undated letter. 54. Letter of 31 May I 784. 55. Letters of 29 July and 30 August 1784. 56. Letter of 3 May 1785.

Some new light 011 Catlierine Miicniilay and her farriily 4 5

‘with a cutting Paragraph’ he had written ‘for the Canterbury papers against the enemies of the Old Whig interest’.ji Wanley Sawbridge’s ‘friendship for Mr. Honywood is well known’, wrote the Gentleinan’s magazine, ‘his pen, his purse, and his time having been for some month devoted to [him]’. But. from the moment of Honywood’s election as high-Sheriff of Kent, Wanley’s health started to decline. He died in I 796.5*

In an undated letter, probably of I 783, Sophia reports to her mother that she has seen no reviews but was ‘delighted & not a little surprised to hear that the monthly has acted so well in the review of your publication’.5’J This was a reference to a review of the final volume of her History published in I 783. ‘It is but justice’, wrote the Monthly review, ‘to remark that she has paid becoming attention to the dignity of her subject‘. Events were traced by her ‘to their original source’. The warmth with which she sometimes expresses herself, the Review judged, ‘is for the most part, justified by the Occasion’. If, in ‘the delineation of character, Mrs. Macaulay may be thought to fall short of some who have preceded her’, it was because of her concern ‘to give a faithful representation, not a flattering picturesque likene~s’.~” Catharine Macaulay was understandably pleased with the review. Not all were so favourable. Clearly Sophia had been instructed to look out for any reviews of her mother’s works. One thing that emerges from these letters is Sophia’s awareness of her mother’s sensitivity to hostile reviews. When, in July I 790, she hears her mother is once again about to publish, she writes anxiously to her: ‘I saw so much of the mortification you felt at the uncandid account the Reviewers gave of your Immutability that I am really concerned when I hear you are publishing lest it should again occasion an interruption to the usual calmness and serenity of your feelings’. It was this anxiety about the reception her mother’s new work might receive that made her postpone responding immediately to the news. Her mother was hurt by this omission and issued ‘so sharp a reproof for my negligence’, writes Sophia, ‘that I am really at a loss what apology to make’. There follows a candid admission of some criticism of her mother’s works. ‘Excellent as are your writings’, she writes, ‘they are not volatile enough to suit the taste of the times’.61 In December I 790 she chastises her mother for becoming a bad correspondent, adding ‘the world says you are employed in writing to Mr. Burke - if so - I must for a time relinquish my claims in favour of the National Assembly’. She thought. she goes on, that the National Assembly ‘shows itself a little Despotic in this as well as other Instances’.6z When, a few months later, she received her mother’s Observations on the reflections of the Rt. Hon. Edrnund Burke, on the Revolution in France, she was enthusiastic. They were ‘much pleased with’ it. Her husband, she wrote, was ‘at this moment reading it for the second

57. Letter of 24 July 1790. 58. Gentlernan’s rnagazine 67 (1788). p.459 59. Undated letter. 60. Monthlg review hg (1783). p.471-78. h I . Letter of 24 July I 790. 62. Letter of I I December I 790.

46 BRIDGET HILL

time’. But, clearly, while admiring the work - ‘I feel the strength of your Arguments & the goodness of your language’ - she had reservations. Already she had made clear her doubts about the actions of the National Assembly. She now felt that she had ‘lost that spirit of Patriotism which I still admire & which you have uniformly retained through Life’. She goes on to query the justification for ‘the injuries which are done to individuals, & which are unavoidable in all revolutions’. Such injuries were ‘by them and their families bitterly and severely felt, whilst the Public Good arising from them is distant doubtful and precarious, & felt in a trifling degree by each member of the community’. She admitted that ‘these reformations’ were necessary or ‘all governments would degenerate into Despotism’, nevertheless she was glad her ‘private station in Life’ made it unnecessary for her ever to become a ref0rmer.~3 Sophia had little practical experience of politics. In the period of the Wilkes’ campaign, when her mother received much of her political education and was developing her republican ideas, Sophia was a child. Like her mother, she had visited France before the Revolution but solely as a tourist. If Sophia’s politics diverged from those of her mother at this time, it is possible that, had Catharine Macaulay lived to see the next phase of the Revolution, their ideas might well have converged.

In June I 78 7 Sophia married Charles Gregory, ‘captain of the Manship East Indiama11’.~4 Sophia described Mrs Gregory as ‘my uncle’s sister’, so Charles was Sophia‘s c0usin.~5 Catharine Macaulay, in a letter to Mercy Warren, said it was a ‘match very much to mine and the rest of her friends’ liking’.66 For the rest of that year she was living in Knightsbridge, at I 9 Queens Row. In July it was the turn of the Gregory family to be travelling. They were accompanied by Sophia’s Uncle, John Sawbridge, and Mrs Gregory. It seems likely that Sophia had delayed her marriage until her mother was back home. In October 1788 Catharine Macaulay, in a letter to Mercy Warren, reported that Sophia had ‘got a daughter and that the Mother and the Child are both ~ e l I ’ . ~ 7 In Spring 1790 her son, David William, was born, and she writes to her mother, ‘my little Boy, and my great Girl, & Myself are all remarkably In November 1790 Sophia tells her mother that she intends ‘to present you with another grandchild next April’.@ It was a boy, born on 15 April 1791. Not surprisingly, the letters to her mother of the next four years are very much concerned with childbirth and the mounting preoccupations of a growing family. ‘Your Grandson is as fat as a little Ortolan’, she writes in November I 790, and ‘Catherine talks from Morning till night to make up for lost time’.7O She had just heard from Dunkirk that a

63. Letter of 3 January 1791. 64. Gentleman’s magazine 57, part i (1787). p.547. 65. Letter of 29 July I 784. 66. Warren-Adams letters. ii.298. 67. lbid., p.304. 6 8 . Letter of 20 May 1790. 69. Letter of 10 November 1790. 70. lbid.

Some n e w light O H Catherine Macuulay and her family 47

third cousin was ‘expected in the Summer & one at Ostend in June or July’. There was, she wrote, ‘no fear that the Clan of Gregories will fail’.TT

Apart from news of her own family, Sophia gives news of the rest of the Sawbridges. In 1790 she tells her mother that Uncle John Sawbridge has been ill in Dunkirlc but has recovered: ‘They do not call his illness Paralytic -We only think from the Symptoms it was something like it as he complains of a lameness which affected one side 0nly’.7~ Five years earlier, in 1785, there had been a report in the newspapers that John Sawbridge ‘lay at the point of death’. The report was immediately denied. John Sawbridge was ‘perfectly well’.71 But the illness he suffered in Dunkirlc in November I 790 was the fist indication of the condition from which he was to die five years later. At the time of his death it was said that he had been ‘three years Paralytic’.74

On 20 May I 790 Sophia suddenly writes her mother a very different lund of letter in which she gossips freely about other members of the family. ‘The Beclinghams’, she tells her mother, ‘go on as at first’. This may be a reference to her cousin who, in the summer of I 785, ‘was married to a young lady whom he has been some time attached to & who’, Sophia had thought, promised ‘to make an excellent wife’.75 If so, the marriage may have been running into difficulties. ‘Mrs Sawbridge‘, Sophia continues, ‘has commenced again her former round of dissipation’. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that she was referring to her aunt, ML-s John Sawbridge. ‘Montagu has recovered his usual state of health or rather dis-health.’ Montagu was the eldest son of John Sawbridge who was educated at Caen in Normandy. He was to die in November of the same year. Sophia more than hints it was the result of his mother’s neglect. He had taken to his bed, ‘where I fear he meets with all the want of tenderness he has experienced from his birth‘.76 As to the Mr Dash whose ‘daughter has run away with an Irish fortune hunter from a Sunday Concert in the true spirit of adventure’, this would seem to be the Samuel Dash of Shepherd’s Hill, Sussex, who on his death in 1791 left the main part of his fortune ‘to his nephew Wanley Sawbridge and to Alderman John Sawbridge’.77 Dash, according to Sophia, had declared he would ‘not give her a sixpence’ and would

make a certain amiable niece of his Heir. You who know her can suppose how artfully she pretends to pacify & at the same time in reality to exasperate the weak Man against her Cousin - in short every day she airs out in the carriage with poor Uncle Dash to keep up his spirit €7 try to recowile him to his daughter

Dash clearly changed his kind, and Wanley and John Sawbridge were to benefit.

71. Letter of 22 April 1790. 72. Letter of I 7 April I 790. 73. Letter of 27 October 1785. 74. C. S. Orwin and S. Williams, A history oj Wyr Church and Wye College, (Ashford 1913). p.67. 75. Letter of 3 December 1785. 76. Letter of I May 1790. 77. 7bid.: Gentleman’s rnagazirie 61, part ii (1791), p.781.

48 BRIDGET HILL

‘I intended to have written but a few lines’, Sophia writes in explanation of this fascinating letter, ‘but the spirit of scandal has got the better of me’.T8

Some time between August I 78 7 and March I 788 Catharine Macaulay and her husband left London for Bruclcnal [sic], Berkshire. In a letter to Mercy Warren, she describes her new home as ‘a small Villa in Berkshire’. It was here she intended ‘chiefly’ to reside. She had become, she writes ‘quite tired of the absurdities of the Capital’.?Y When, exactly, the final move to Binfield near Reading was made it is difficult to say. In January I 79 I Sophia writes to her mother that she had heard they ‘are going to leave Binfield & have some thoughts of coming to Sloane Street Knightsbridge’. She chastises William Graham, who ‘did not mention a word of it here’. ‘Tell him’, she adds, ‘he is very good for Nothing’.80 It was in a letter of 11 April, from Charles Gregory to William Graham, that the seriousness of Catharine Macaulay’s health becomes clear. Sophia is ‘indisposed’ waiting to give birth to her third child. They were ‘extremely concerned to find the description of Mrs Graham’s health so far from what we cou’d wish’. To reassure Sophia, her husband begs William Graham to ‘frequently favor us with a few lines’.81 On 15 April Sophia’s second son was born. Both, William Graham was told, were ‘doing as well as one can wish’.82 To celebrate the arrival of his second son, William Graham sends ‘half a dozen of my Oldest Madeira’ and ‘half a dozen of the very Old Sherry Mrs Graham was so fond of .8j Meanwhile, Mrs Macaulay’s health was deteriorating rapidly, and William Graham wrote to tell Charles Gregory of the situation. ‘Your last letter was so alarming’, responds Charles Gregory, ‘I thought it proper to communicate its contents to Mrs. Gregory and I am sorry to say it has affected her extremely and had I done it in the first instance God knows what wou’d have been the consequence’. Although, he added, ‘She recovers daily her strength [...I I cannot get up her ~pirits’.~4 On 22 June I 791 Catharine Macaulay died.

A year after her death, William Graham, who at the age of thirty had decided to go to university and study divinity, took his degree. He moved first to a living near his sister, Elizabeth Arnold, in Misterton, Leicestershire. In I 79 7 he remarried. A year earlier, in August I 796, Sophia started corresponding with him. The correspondence continued until 1820. If, in the early part of her correspondence with her mother, she had acknowledged her step-father out of a sense of duty and loyalty, it is clear that over the last seven years of her mother’s life she had developed a real attachment to him.

These letters undoubtedly have a humanising influence on the rather austere image that Catharine Macaulay left to posterity. They correct some of the rumours that circulated after her second marriage about her relations with her

78. Letter of I May I 790. 79. Warren-Adarns letters, ii.305 80. Letter of 3 January 1791. 81. Letter of 11 April 1791. 82. Letter of 15 April 1791. 83. Letter of 16 April 1791. 84. Letter of 13 May 1791.

Some new light on Cathcjrine Macaulay and her family 49

daughter and husband, that she was a bad wife and a neglectful mother. A daughter who formerly had been a mere shadow in Catharine Macaulay's life becomes a real person. Through these letters we get to know and like her. The existence of a devoted and loving daughter who found the trials of separation from her mother almost unbearable, who was profoundly concerned with her mother's health, who anguished at the effect bad reviews of her work had on her and was not afraid to criticise her work, is something, perhaps, we had not expected. Sophia was certainly very fond of her mother, profoundly admired her and her work, but she emerges as having a mind of her own. We also get to know William Graham better, and appreciate the role he played of solicitous supporter of his wife. It is the recognition of his many qualities that slowly forges a close and lasting relationship between daughter and step-father. While we know nothing of Catharine Macaulay's replies to her daughter's letters, we do learn something more about her. That she was a sick woman for much of her life, and especially from the time of her move from London to Bath, we had suspected. But the evidence of her vulnerability to hostile reviews, and her sensitivity to any criticism, that Sophia reveals so clearly, make her determination to continue to publish right up to a month or so before her death courageous if not foolhardy.

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