Thomas Babington Macaulay Biography

Dromo's Den

MACAULAY, Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800–59). An eminent English historian and statesman. He was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, Oct. 25, 1800, being the eldest son of Zachary Macaulay. As a child, he was most precocious, reading voluminously from the age of three, writing a universal history at seven, and composing treatises, poems, ballads, and hymns at 10. At 12, after a childhood influenced beneficially by the judicious counsel of Hannah More, he was sent in 1812 to the private school of a Mr. Preston. During the years spent there he advanced with the rapidity of which his earliest days had given such ample promise, and in 1818 entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he acquired a brilliant reputation both as a scholar and a debater. Twice he won first honors in the English prize-poem contest—in 1819 by a poem on "Pompeii" and in 1820 by another on "Evening"—but was debarred by his distaste for mathematics from securing the much-coveted chancellor’s medal. In 1821 he obtained the second Craven scholarship, in 1822 took the bachelor’s degree, and in 1824, after two unsuccessful trials, was elected a fellow of Trinity and began to devote himself zealously to literature. The first medium of his writings was Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, circulating chiefly among the students at Eton and Cambridge. For this he wrote several of his earliest ballads—e.g., The Spanish Armada, Moncontour, The Battle of Ivry—and numerous essays and critiques. In 1825 he took the master’s degree and in the same year made his appearance in the columns of the Edinburgh Review with his famous essay on Milton. The learning, eloquence, brilliancy, and generous enthusiasm of this attracted the instant attention of the educated public and opened to the young author the highest social privileges. Into the enjoyment of these new-found honors he was just beginning to enter when the culmination of family financial misfortunes brought him temporarily to almost abject poverty. In 1826 he was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn; but two years’ pretense at practice left him unadvanced in the profession, for he had a greater penchant (encouraged by the circumstances of his early home training) for politics than for the courts. In 1830 the friendship of Lord Lansdowne, holder of the "pocket borough" of Calne, opportunely opened the way for his entrance into the political world at one of its most critical moments. Once in Parliament, he threw himself with characteristic earnestness into the reform movement, becoming one of the leading members of the rising Whig party through his splendid eloquence and effective argument. On the victory of his party in 1832 he was made one of the Board of Control of Indian Affairs. In 1834 reappearing financial necessity compelled him somewhat reluctantly to leave England and enter the active India service as a member of the Supreme Council. During the four years thus spent his ability found expression in the creation of a new and humane penal code and in continued literary labors. Returning to England in 1838, he resumed his political career, being in 1839 elected a member of Parliament for the city of Edinburgh. Accepting later in the same year an appointment to the post of Secretary of State for War in Melbourne’s ministry, he shared its fall in 1841. In 1842 appeared his magnificent martial ballads, Lays of Ancient Rome, and in 1843 three volumes of Essays. Having devoted five years to combined literary work and powerful aid to the Whig opposition, he was, on the return of his party to power in 1846, restored to office, this time as Paymaster-General. The loss of his seat in Parliament, however, incurred in 1847 through his too zealous advocacy of religious toleration at an unpopular moment, offered him at length an opportunity for devoting himself seriously to the work for which he had been planning during several years—his great History of England from the Accession of James II. The first two volumes of the work appeared in 1848 and achieved at once such an extensive and enduring success as had hitherto been the lot of the most popular novelists alone. The year following their appearance he was elected lord rector of the University of Glasgow, and was offered a position again in the cabinet under Lord Russell, which latter honor, however, he declined. In 1855 Edinburgh made such reparation for its slight of 1847 as it could, by returning him unsolicited to his former seat in Parliament. Declining an offer of the professorship of modern history at Cambridge, he devoted himself more assiduously to the writing of his History. The appearance of the third and fourth volumes in 1855 created a furor of excitement among publishers and readers. In the United States their sale exceeded that of almost every other book except the Bible. In 1857 the French Academy of Moral and Political Science made him a foreign associate, and in the course of the same year he was raised to the peerage of Great Britain under the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothley. But ill health, interrupting his work as early as 1852, had by 1857 made serious inroads upon his physical strength. He died rather suddenly on Dec. 28, 1859, at Holly Lodge, a quiet retreat to which he had retired in 1857. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poets' Corner. His premature death left uncompleted his great History, which extended only through the period of William III when its author's work ended.

Macaulay was indisputably a man of splendid talent. His scholarship—in the strictly classical sense of the term—was admirable; his miscellaneous literary acquisitions were something prodigious; his knowledge of modern European, and especially of English, history from the age of Henry VIII down to his own, was unsurpassed. His History will always be read on account of its wonderful style, and although it suffers from the author's passion for epigram at the expense of truth, and from his partiality and frequent exaggeration, yet the loss from these defects has been habitually exaggerated by the dry-as-dust scientific historians.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920)