Catherine Macaulay [née Sawbridge, later Graham] 

Catherine Macaulay [née Sawbridge] [later Graham] (1731-91) was a celebrated historian, poet, and political writer, best known by the time of Scott’s composition of The Female Advocate for her multi-volume History of England from the Accession of James I, to that of the Brunswick Line. The first volume appeared in 1763 and the final one in 1783, an achievement that challenged the conventional opinion among the literati that history was not a proper subject for women writers. Macaulay’s praise of the Commonwealth’s republican ideals, her sympathies toward the American colonists, and her calls for parliamentary reform in her own day caused even the Rockingham Whigs to distance themselves from her radical voice. Her political position in the mid-1770s, however, was shared by Mary Steele, Mary Scott, Jane Attwater, and their friend in Bristol, the Baptist minister Caleb Evans, whose political sermons at that time reflect Macaulay’s opinions. As dissenters, they welcomed Macaulay’s bold criticisms of the established powers, both in church and state, such as this statement from her History of England: ‘That the people might learn to kiss the rod of power with devotion and, becoming slaves by principle, reverence the yoke, priests were instructed to teach speculative despotism, and graft on religious affections systems of civil tyranny’ (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1769), vol. 1, p. 348.  See Mary Steele’s poem, ‘Liberty, an Ode,’ and Jane Attwater's letter to Mary Steele on 18 July 1774, in Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 3.45-46; 3.245-49; also Bridget Hill, Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).