SOURCE: “Catherine Macaulay's History of England: Antidote to Hume's History?,” in Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment, edited by H. T. Mason, The Voltaire Foundation, 1992, pp. 393-96.

In the following essay, Siebert analyzes the differences between Macaulay's and David Hume's historical accounts of the execution of Charles I, and argues that each retelling shows how these writers used history as a tool to advance their own political convictions.

Without question Catherine Macaulay's History of England was intended partly as an Old Whig, republican answer to David Hume's version of seventeenth-century England, which, though it cannot fairly be termed ‘Tory’, as it sometimes has been, is at the very least highly sympathetic to the Royalist cause and similarly quite antipathetic to its enemies. Some partisans of Macaulay, including one recent scholar, tend to suggest that by more meticulous research she set the record straight, as it...