SOURCE: “An Opportunity Missed: Catherine Macaulay on the Revolution of 1688,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 20, 1990, pp. 231-40.

In the following essay, Schnorrenberg details how Macaulay's History of England and political pamphlets were conscious corrections to the historical writings of David Hume and Edmund Burke and why, in particular, Macaulay believed that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had proved insufficient in producing real liberty in England.

Those of us who learned our history first in the Whig tradition were taught early that the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 was a good thing. It freed England, Scotland, Wales, and even an unwilling Ireland from the menace of a Roman Catholic king and untramelled royal prerogative. That this was accomplished without bloodshed made the Revolution doubly glorious. Although the Whig interpretation of history is generally associated with the nineteenth century, most writers of the decades between the Revolution and Thomas Babington Macaulay...