The English essayist, historian, and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron of Rothley (1800-1859), was the most popular and dazzling English historian of the 19th century. He was an eloquent spokesman for the liberal English middle classes.

The views of the Tory ascendancy, which had dominated England in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, also gave color to David Hume's History of England, the leading text on the subject after its publication between 1754 and 1761. The growing power of the Whigs, as the party of the middle-class industrialists and businessmen, created the need for a reinterpretation of English history that emphasized the role of the civil war of the 17th century, the Glorious Revolution, and the Hanoverian Settlement as the cornerstones of English freedom, prosperity, and social progress. More than any other writer, Macaulay promulgated this "Whig view of history" and trusted to the maintenance of this tradition...