While scholars in the second half of the twentieth century generally recognize Catherine Macaulay as the first English woman historian, it was not her sex but her politics that made her an important figure in the eighteenth century. As one of the last Old Whigs, or Commonwealthmen, she presented in her writings views of liberty, constitutional government, and the nature of man inherited from seventeenth-century writers such as James Harrington and Sir Algernon Sidney. Her History of England replied to David Hume's history far more vigorously than did Tobias Smollett's. Her pamphlets most obviously argued the contemporary radical position, in many instances replying to Edmund Burke's much more conservative views.

Catherine Sawbridge was born at Olantigh, the family estate in Kent. Both her mother, Elizabeth Wanley Sawbridge, and father, John Sawbridge, came from prominent London Whig banking families. Her father lived the life of a country gentleman; after...