Identifying John Adams’s Mystery Correspondent

Sometime in 1778, John Adams, on his first diplomatic mission for the U.S. of A., passed on a bunch of reading material to Edmé Jacques Genet, director of the French Foreign Ministry’s bureau for translation.

Genet was assembling items for Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique (Affairs of England and America), a surreptitious propaganda effort by the French government. (This Genet was the father of Edmond-Charles Genet, the French diplomat whose activities in America irked George Washington while Adams was Vice President.)

Among the material that Adams turned over was the 1775 volume of The Remembrancer, a round-up of the year’s news published in London by John Almon. And in that book Adams discovered a couple of letters he had written himself:

Looking over the Remembrancer, for the Year 1775, found to my Surprize, having never seen this Remembrancer before, two Letters from a Gentleman in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, to his Friend in London, one dated Feb. 10 1775 and the other Jany 21. 1775. They are found in Pages 10.11 and 12 of the Remembrancer for that Year.

Genet never had those letters translated, but many American authors have reprinted the two letters from The Remembrancer, not knowing who wrote them.

Accepting Adams’s claim, the editors of the John Adams Papers included those two letters from early 1775 in their 1977 volume of his correspondence. At the time they lamented, “he failed to mention the intended recipient.”

One clue might be that the letters were published as sent “to his Friend in London” as opposed to “to a Gentleman in London.”

The answer started to become clear when scholars spotted the second of those letters in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. Adams’s correspondent was the British historian Catharine Macaulay. His exchange with her went on longer than previously recognized.

There appear to be some unanswered questions still. The letter published with the date of 10 Feb 1775 (250 years ago today) was actually dated 28 Dec 1774. Did Almon assign the February date from when that text was published in a British newspaper?

That full letter was published in 2020 in The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay. The part that appeared in The Remembrancer was just part of the complete text.

Finally, the letter that Almon dated to 21 Jan 1775 isn’t part of the Macaulay Papers, at the Gilder Lehrman Institute or published. It’s possible that Adams sent it to someone else in London. But he knew hardly anyone there, and there’s no hint in The Remembrancer or Adams’s letter to Genet that the two letters went to different people. So probably the missing letter went to Macaulay but just hasn’t been found.

Judging by the 10 February/28 December letter, that 21 January letter probably:

• contained more material than Almon printed.
• wasn’t dated 21 January.

”No other than the notorious Richardson”

As I quoted back here, on 24 May 1773 Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette closed an item about Ebenezer Richardson with the line: “Balf, McQuirk & Kennedys are not the only Instances of the unexampled Goodness of George the Third.”

By invoking those London legal controversies from a couple of years before, this newspaper linked Richardson’s pardon after killing Christopher Seider in a riot to two cases that London radicals had held up as examples of government corruption.

In the same way, they treated the Boston Massacre of 1770 as the local equivalent of the Massacre of St. George’s Fields in 1768. American Whigs viewed and presented their efforts as part of reforming the whole British Empire.

John Wilkes, Catharine Macaulay, and a few other radicals wrote back to the Bostonians, but they didn’t win over many other people in Britain.

The Boston Whigs had more success building solidarity in other mainland British colonies. Case in point: They were able to convince Philadelphians to dislike Ebenezer Richardson.

That invocation of the Kennedy brothers, McQuirk, and Balfe came a paragraph below a report that the Customs service was seeking a new berth for Richardson in Philadelphia.

About six weeks later, on 5 July, the Boston Gazette shared this anecdote:

A correspondent has sent the following, viz.

“Notwithstanding the art made use of to conceal the appointment of that pardoned murderer, the infamous and ever to be detested Ebenezer Richardson, this may certify, that said Richardson lately employed a friend to bespeak a passage for him in a vessel bound from Salem to Philadelphia.

The master enquiring who the intended passenger was, and being told it was one belonging to the customs and no other than the notorious Richardson, he refused carrying him on any consideration.[”]

That item was reprinted in the Pennsylvania Journal on 14 July.

Richardson did eventually make it to Philadelphia, but the city was ready for him.

TOMORROW: In the city of brotherly love.

“Complying with her constitution’s earnest call”

Sarah Robinson (1720–1795, shown here) was the younger sister of Elizabeth (Robinson) Montagu.

In 1748 Robinson started sharing a house in Bath with Lady Barbara Montague (c. 1722–1765). This lady’s Montague family was different from the Montagu family that Sarah’s sister married into.

Two years later, Robinson penned her first novel, The History of Cornelia—published, like all her work, anonymously or pseudonymously, and for money.

In 1751 Sarah Robinson married George Lewis Scott (1708–1780), one of George III’s instructors—a job she had helped to secure for him, apparently.

However, that marriage broke up within a year, with the Robinson family stating it was never consummated. The unhappy couple grumbled about each other for the rest of their lives. (George Lewis Scott would later introduce Thomas Paine to Benjamin Franklin, but that’s another story.)

The woman now called Sarah Scott went back to “Lady Bab” in Bath and back to earning money with her pen. By the end of that decade she was also translating from the French, creating educational materials, writing history books about Protestants on the continent. Scott’s most successful novel appeared in 1762: A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent. Almost everything she wrote had a moralizing element.

By 1778 Lady Bab had died, but Sarah Scott had gained a comfortable income through family gifts and inheritance. She stopped publishing, but she kept up her lively literary correspondence with her sister.

In October of that year, Catharine Macaulay left Bath for Leicester, and the next month word got back that the celebrated historian had married William Graham. But that wasn’t all people heard.

On 27 November, Sarah Scott sent this news to Elizabeth Montagu, as transcribed in The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, edited by Karen Green:

Mrs Macaulay’s marriage was reported in good time to change conversation, of which the Duel between the two gaming counts had been the sole topic, and it was entirely worn out.

A Gamester appears to me so far from being a loss to the world that I consider the marriage as the more melancholy event of the two, because it is a dishonor to the sex. If I had not more pride than revengefulness in my temper I might derive much consolation from the moral certainty that her punishment will equal her offence.

The man she has married is in age about 22, in rank 2nd Mate to the Surgeon of an India man. He is brother to a Dr [James] Graham, who etherized and electrified her, till he has made her electric per se.

She wrote a letter to Dr Wilson acquainting him with her marriage, and her reasons for it, which she tells him in the plainest terms are constitutional; that she had been for some years struggling with nature but found that her life absolutely depends on her complying with her constitution’s earnest call (perhaps she calls it nature’s, but I shall not, for it is not the nature of woman, and woman cannot find her excuse in the nature of a beast) and she would have chosen him, if his age, as he must be sensible, did not disqualify him for answering a call so urgent.

In other words, Macaulay had discovered that all those medical symptoms that had crippled her for years—fatigue, weakness, “pains in my ears and throat,” “irritations of my nerves,” and above all “a Billious intermitting Autumnal fever”—would go away when she had sex. Really good sex. Sex with a man less than half her age just returned from the sea. Sex that her doting seventy-five-year-old patron, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson, simply wouldn’t have been able to supply.

Which of course ticked Wilson off, as Scott’s letter went on to describe:

The Doctor shews the letter, but I have not seen it, and the Gentlemen declare it cannot be shown to a woman. Old Wilson is rewarded for his folly; he is in the highest rage, and having some years ago by Deed given her the furniture of the house they lived in and 300 peran[num] for her life, he intends to apply to the law to be released from this engagement; on pretence of its having been given without value received. It will make a curious cause, . . .

If there is any zeal still remaining in the world for virtue’s cause the pure Virgins and virtuous Matrons who reside in this place, will unite and drown her in the Avon, and try if she can be purified by water, for Dr Graham’s experiments have shown that fire has a very contrary effect on her, being a Salamander it is the element truly congenial to her. Were she flesh and blood one could not forgive her, but being only skin and bone she deserves no mercy.

Given Sarah Scott’s own unorthodox domestic history, perhaps she shouldn’t have looked down on Catharine Macaulay’s choice of a second husband. But, as the two poems that Christopher Anstey shared a week later demonstrate, all the fashionable people in Bath were gossiping about the Grahams.

COMING UP: The lawsuit.

“Did you see Mr. Anstey’s verses at Bath-Easton?”

What happened in Batheaston didn’t stay in Batheaston.

Within three weeks after Christopher Anstey read his ode “Winter Amusements” and its pointed follow-up at the Riggs-Millers’ salon on 3 Dec 1778, those poems were circulating in manuscript. Along with knowledge of what recently remarried lady he had written about.

On 29 December, the Blue Stockings Society hostess Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her sister-in-law Mary Robinson:

I have sent you some Verse of Mr Ansteys on ye subject [of Catharine Macaulay]. The first copy he put into ye Urn at Mrs Millers at Bath Easton & being desired when he drew them to read them a second time, instead of so doing he read ye other copy.

The previous year, the artist Richard Samuel had depicted both Montagu and Macaulay, along with seven other female British authors, as the Muses.

In January 1779 Anstey’s ode appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Westminster Magazine, the Scots Magazine, and other periodicals, usually linked to the Batheaston salon.

I haven’t found any hint of Anstey’s second poem being printed until the Riggs-Millers published the fourth volume of their Poetical Amusements in 1781. But people continued to hear about it.

On 14 January, Horace Walpole (shown above) wrote to the Countess of Ossory:

Did you see Mr. Anstey’s verses at Bath-Easton? They were truly more a production of this century; and not at all too good for a schoolboy. In the printed copy they have omitted an indecent stanza or two on Mrs. Macaulay. In truth Dame Thucydides has made but an uncouth match; but Anstey has tumbled from a greater height than she. Sense may be led astray by the senses; but how could a man write the ‘Bath Guide,’ and then nothing but doggerel and stupidity?

I suspect that when Walpole wrote, “they have omitted an indecent stanza or two,” he was referring to Anstey’s follow-up rather than lines suppressed from the original ode.

Now one rule about spreading unabashed gossip in eighteenth-century Britain was that when Horace-freakin’-Walpole said you’ve gone too far, you were deep into rudeness.

But what people wrote about Macaulay’s new marriage in poems and magazines was nothing compared to what they wrote in letters.

TOMORROW: Passion’s wild career indeed.

“A sweet pretty nostrum, quite pleasant and new”

After Christopher Anstey won Lady Anna Miller’s biweekly poetry contest at Batheaston on 3 Dec 1778, as described yesterday, he waved aside calls to read his ode “Winter’s Amusement” again.

Instead, he pulled out what he later called an “Epode.” That word signals that it was part of the ode, though written with a different metre and tone.

When both poems were published in The New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1786), Anstey’s lines were simply headed: “LINES Repeated by the Author, on Being Asked to Read the Preceding Stanzas a Second Time.”

That’s the version I’m following rather than the one in the collection of Anstey’s work published by his son in 1808, on the assumption that it’s closer to the original:

Must I read it again, Sir?—So—here do I stand,
Like the priest that holds forth with a skull in his hand—
Repeat such a dreadful memento as this is,
To spleen the young fellows, and frighten the misses?
When beauties assemble to laugh and be gay,
How cruel to preach upon beauty’s decay!
How hard, that the fairest of all the creation,
Should suffer one wrinkle by anticipation!
What delicate nymph but must shrink when she hears
Her charms will all fade in the winter of years?
What languishing widow would e’er wish to know
Her charms were all faded a long while ago?
Unless one could bring some receipt to supply
Fresh Cupids to bask in the beam of her eye.
Recall the lost rose, or the lily replace,
That have shed their dead leaves o’er her ever green face!
And this (thank the gods) I can promise to do,
By a sweet pretty nostrum, quite pleasant and new,
Which learned historians and doctors, I find,
Have lately reveal’d for the good of mankind.
A nostrum like which, no elixir yet known,
E’er brac’d a lax fibre, and strengthen’d its tone.
Nore’er was so grand a restorative seen,
For bringing back sixty—to lovely sixteen!
To you then, ye fair, if old Time should appear,
And whisper a few little hints in your ear,
That Cupid his triumphs begins to resign,
Your nerves are unstrung, and your spirits decline,
You have no other physical course to pursue,
Than to take—a young husband your springs to renew;
You may take him—I think—at—about twenty-two!
For when both the spirits and nerves are in fault,
Platonic affection is not worth a groat.
The conjugal blessing alone is decreed
The truest specific for widows indeed;
And I trust they will find it, as long as they live,
The best of amusements that winter can give!

The opening line shows that Anstey wasn’t surprised to win the poetry competition that day. He’d already prepared this encore.

While people might have wondered about the relevance of Anstey’s ode to people they knew, they couldn’t miss his allusion to “learned historians and doctors”—the famous historian Catharine Macaulay had recently left nearby Bath and married Dr. William Graham.

Macaulay had indeed been a “languishing widow,” complaining about her “nerves,” albeit more than a decade from “sixty.”

Graham was indeed “about twenty-two!” In fact, he was twenty-one, but that didn’t rhyme.

Even the phrase “Platonic affection” was a jab. The previous year, a London publisher had issued this print of Macaulay with her then-housemate, the Rev. Thomas Wilson, calling them “The Political Platonic Lovers.”

TOMORROW: Audience response.

(The photograph above by Ian is here via Flickr shows a statue in the form of a large ornamental vase standing in the Royal Victoria Park in Bath. Many sources say this is the vase the Riggs-Millers brought back from Rome and used at their literary salons, or a replica of that vase. It’s neither of those things. It doesn’t look like the engraving the couple published in 1775, and it’s not even hollow. Like Anstey’s second poem, it’s a heavy-handed follow-on to an original.)

“Oft where the crouded stage invites, The laughing Muses join”

Christopher Anstey (1724–1805, shown here by William Hoare ignoring his daughter and her dolly) was the son of a Cambridgeshire minister who showed a great talent for Latin poetry at school and university.

The market for Latin poetry being small, Anstey was lucky enough to inherit considerable estates. He married and had a large family. In the 1760s he started to spend time in Bath, at first for his mood and then because he liked it.

In 1766, Anstey published The New Bath Guide: or Memoirs of the B–n–r–d Family in a Series of Poetical Epistles, a long satirical poem that became hugely popular.

Ten years later, having moved to Bath, Anstey wrote An Election Ball, in Poetical Letters from Mr. Inkle at Bath to his Wife at Gloucester. He dedicated that satire to John Riggs-Miller, host of a literary salon at Batheaston.

Anstey was a regular at the Riggs-Millers’ every-other-Thursday parties, including one on 3 Dec 1778. That was a little more than two weeks after Catharine Macaulay married Dr. William Graham in Leicester, a development that people in greater Bath were already gossiping about.

The poem that Christopher Anstey threw into the Riggs-Millers’ Roman vase for judgment that day was an ode titled “Winter’s Amusement.” That might have seemed a mere comment on the season. But as the lines were read aloud, the audience detected a more serious message: people should avoid passion and folly in love, especially as they grow older.

Ye beauteous nymphs, and jovial swains,
Who, deck’d with youthful bloom,
To gay assemblage meet to grace
Philander’s cheerful dome,

Mark how the wintry clouds hang o’er
Yon frowning mountain’s brow;
Mark how the rude winds warp the stream,
And rock the leafless bough.

The painted meads, and flow’ry lawns,
Their wonted pride give o’er;
The feather’d flocks in silence mourn;
Their notes are heard no more.

Save where beneath the lonely shed,
Or desolated thorn,
The red-breast heaves his ruffled plumes,
And tunes his pipe forlorn.

Yet shall the sun’s reviving ray
Recall the genial spring;
The painted meads resume their pride;
The feather’d flocks shall sing.

But not to you shall e’er return
The pride of gaudy years;
When pining Age with icy hand,
His hoary mantle rears.

When once, alas! his churlish blast
Shall your bright spring subdue,
I know not what reviving sun
Can e’er that spring renew.

Then seize the glorious golden days
That fill your cups with joy!
Bid every gay and social scene
Your blissful hours employ.

Oft where the crouded stage invites,
The laughing Muses join;
Or woo them while they sport around
Eugenia’s laurel’d shrine.

Oft seek the haunts where health and joy
To sportive numbers move;
Or plaintive strains breathe soft desire,
And wake the soul to love.

Yet ah! where-e’er you bend your way,
Let fair Discretion steer:
From Folly’s vain delusive charms,
And Passion’s wild career.

So when the wintry hours shall come,
When youth and pleasure fly,
Safe shall you ward th’ impending storm,
And Time’s rude blast defy.

Perpetual charms, unfading spring,
In sweet reflection find;
While innocence and virtue bring
A sun-shine to the mind!

(I’m following the title and text printed in The Scots Magazine in January 1779 rather than in the 1808 collection of Anstey’s work.)

The judges at the salon chose Anstey’s ode as that day’s best offering. Lady Miller asked him to read it again. Instead, he pulled another poem out of his pocket.

TOMORROW: The epode.

“They hold a Parnassus-fair every Thursday”

Anna Riggs (1741–1781) was the daughter of a London Customs official, granddaughter of a wealthy Irish Privy Councilor.

Riggs’s mother was, according to the novelist Frances Burney, “a most prodigious fat old lady,…very merry and facetious.” Horace Walpole said she was “an old rough humorist who passed for a wit.”

In 1765 Riggs married John Miller (c. 1744–1798), from a genteel but poor Irish family. He served as a junior officer in a light-horse regiment during the last three years of the Seven Years’ War and then tried studying the law.

Miller was “full of good-natured officiousness,” Walpole said, but that didn’t promise financial success. Fortunately, Anna inherited a fortune from her grandfather.

The Riggs-Millers (John took on Anna’s surname in honor of her money) bought an estate in the village of Batheaston, near Bath. They spent a lot of the Riggs family money fixing up the manor and laying out ornamental gardens.

By 1770 this lifestyle had become too expensive or, in Walpole’s words, “the whole caravan were forced to go abroad”—the Riggs-Millers, their infant girl, and Anna’s mother, plus select servants. The family spent a couple of years in France and Italy, expanding with the birth of a boy in Paris. Anna Riggs-Miller bought an antique vase dug up “by a labouring man in 1769 at Frescati, near the spot where is supposed to have stood the Tusculanum of Cicero.”

The couple came back to Batheaston full of continental sophistication. Well, a version of it, per Walpole:

Alas! Mrs. Miller is returned a beauty, a genius, a Sappho, a tenth Muse, as romantic as Mademoiselle [Madeleine de] Scuderi, and as sophisticated as Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vesey. The Captain’s fingers are loaded with cameos, his tongue runs over with virtù…

Anna published her Letters from Italy in three volumes in 1776.

By 1775 the Riggs-Millers were hosting literary salons at Batheaston. The main ritual of these gatherings was a poetry contest staged around that antique vase. Once again, here’s Walpole, from a 15 Jan 1775 letter in which he also remarked on news from Massachusetts about something “called minute-men”:

They hold a Parnassus-fair every Thursday, give out rhymes and themes, and all the flux of quality at Bath contend for the prizes. A Roman vase, dressed with pink ribbons and myrtles, receives the poetry, which is drawn out every festival; six judges of these Olympic games retire and select the brightest compositions, which the respective successful acknowledge, kneel to Mrs. Calliope Miller, kiss her fair hand, and are crowned by it with myrtle, with—I don't know what.

You may think this is fiction or exaggeration. Be dumb, unbelievers! The collection is printed, published. Yes, on my faith, there are bouts-rimés on a buttered muffin, made by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland; receipts to make them, by Corydon the venerable, alias George Pitt; others, very pretty, by Lord Palmerston; some by Lord Carmarthen; many by Mrs. Miller herself, that have no fault but wanting metre; and immortality promised to her without end or measure.

In short since folly, which never ripens to madness but in this hot climate, ran distracted, there never was anything so entertaining or so dull—for you cannot read so long as I have been telling.

Between 1775 and 1781 the Riggs-Millers published four volumes of Poetical Amusements at a Villa Near Bath, along with the smaller collections On Novelty and Hobby Horses, giving the proceeds to charity. The frontispiece of the first volume showed the “Roman vase,” above.

Literary reviewers and poets who weren’t invited to the salons tended to disdain the whole enterprise. Nonetheless, notable writers like William Mason and David Garrick contributed work. The poet Anna Seward credited that biweekly salon for discovering her. In 1778 John Riggs-Miller was made a baronet (on the Irish establishment).

In October 1778, as I described back here, the celebrated historian Catharine Macaulay left Bath after sharing the Rev. Thomas Wilson’s house for years. The next month, in the town of Leicester, she married William Graham, a doctor less than half her age. By the end of the year, the posh people of Bath were gossiping about the newlyweds. And in that same period Sir John and Lady Miller hosted one of their regular salons.

TOMORROW: “Winter’s Amusement.”

“The accomplishments of her mind”

On Friday, 18 August, the American Revolution Institute will host one of its “Lunch Bite” seminars, looking at a copy of Catharine Macaulay’s 1776 pamphlet An Address to the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland: on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs.

As the event description says, “Using events such as Parliament’s passing of the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre, Macaulay’s pamphlet was written as an appeal to Great Britain to change its policies towards the colonies.”

Research Services Librarian Rachel Nellis will also discuss Macaulay’s life, including her connections to John and Abigail Adams and Mercy Warren.

Macaulay was well known as a Whig historian of Britain by the late 1760s. As a measure of her stature across the British Empire, she was the one woman designated to receive a copy of the town of Boston’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre report.

In the summer of 1770, the merchant Moses Gill told John Adams that Macaulay would be interested in a letter from him as the author of essays recently reprinted in London as A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law.

Adams got worked up about that prospect. He wrote a draft letter into his diary and “heavily corrected” it in many little ways before sending it off.

And then he didn’t hear anything back for months. In February 1771 a cousin of Abigail Adams named Isaac Smith, Jr., was visiting London. Smith wrote:

I have had the pleasure of meeting with Mrs. McAulay, at their house; who enquired of me with regard to you, and informed me, sir, that she should write to you, as soon as she had published a fifth Vol. which she has now in her hands.

She is not so much distinguished in company by the beauties of her person, as the accomplishments of her mind.

Macaulay didn’t get to her reply until 19 July, so she started with an apology: “A very laborious attention to the finishing the fifth vol of my history of England with a severe fever of five months duration the consequence of that attention has hitherto deprived me of the opportunity of answering your very polite letter…”

Macaulay praised Adams’s book (while getting the title wrong). She stated: “A correspondence with so worthy and ingenious a person as your self Sr will ever be prised by me as part of the happiness of my life.” And they did exchange a few letters before the outbreak of war.

Then, as I related back in January, the forty-seven-year-old widow Macaulay married William Graham, the twenty-one-year-old brother of her physician. How did that affect the Adamses’ impression of her? This seems like a good time to return to that storyline.

Meanwhile, the seminar about Macaulay’s 1776 pamphlet will take place online and at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., on Friday at 12:30 P.M. Register to attend either way through this page.

TOMORROW: The talk of Bath.

“Bawdy Bodies” Online from Yale

In 2015–16, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale hosted an exhibition of eighteenth-century British prints called “Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women,” co-curated by Dr. Hope Saska and Dr. Cynthia Roman.

That display has now been turned into an online exhibit, available here.

The introductory page says:

The works on display focus in particular on images that ridicule the highly accomplished and creative women who dared to transgress or test the boundaries of propriety that circumscribed their gender.

While late eighteenth-century commentators often celebrated the florescence of graphic caricature and satire that openly lampooned political figures—including the royal family—many of the satires exhibited here expressed trenchantly conservative views concerning social roles and manners. Loath to celebrate new-found intellectual, social, and political freedoms and empowerment for women, graphic satirists instead harshly ridiculed female liberties and accomplishments to the delight of largely male audiences.

Among the examples is Thomas Rowlandson’s satire “Breaking up of the Blue Stocking Club,” shown above. Though that phrase initially meant all the people who came to Lady Elizabeth Montagu’s salons, male or female, by the late 1700s it was gendered and pejorative.

I didn’t see material on Catharine Macaulay, but this exhibit provides context for the prints satirizing her intellectual output, personal life, and distinct appearance.

John Sawbridge, M.P.

John Sawbridge (1732–1795) was of the radical Whigs who joined the Rev. John Horne in supporting John Wilkes during the 1760s, forming the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights, and then leaving that group to form the Constitutional Society instead, as discussed yesterday.

Sawbridge first tried to run for Parliament in 1763, but bowed out when a more prominent Kentish gentleman wanted the seat. Reportedly, Tories tried to keep him in the race in hopes he’d split the Whig vote—the first time he had to deal with the rough and tumble of genteel Georgian politics.

Five years later, Sawbridge entered Parliament as a member for the town of Hythe, succeeding Lord George Sackville (Germain). At first he appeared to be one of the Duke of Grafton’s men, but he started to push Wilkes’s cause. As a result, Lord Grafton dropped Sawbridge, but the city of London adopted him, making him a sheriff and an alderman.

Then came the split with Wilkes. In 1771 Sawbridge was up for the post of Lord Mayor of London, but Wilkes threw his weight behind the incumbent instead. That year, the ministry’s preferred candidate won the office—Wilkes and Sawbridge had split the Whig vote.

Wilkes became increasingly vituperative, saying that “in politics [Sawbridge], poor man,…[could] see no farther than his nose.” Sawbridge had a big nose, but the cross-eyed Wilkes was hardly the one to criticize someone else’s vision. When that didn’t work, Wilkes complained that Sawbridge was a “proud Colossus of pretended public virtue.”

In response, Sawbridge kept talking about the importance of remaining politically independent of parties and, more radically, serving the people by voting the way they wanted. Most politicians preferred the approach Edmund Burke argued for, voting the way that you knew was best for them.

In the spring of 1774 Sawbridge and Wilkes reconciled. Sawbridge bowed out of the race for Lord Mayor in favor of Wilkes, who promised support in the fall’s parliamentary election. Sawbridge lost his seat in Hythe but won one in London. The next year, he also succeeded Wilkes as Lord Mayor.

Both men opposed Lord North’s policy toward the American colonies, but they were part of a small minority in Parliament. Over the next few years, Sawbridge allied with the Marquess of Rockingham and the Earls of Shelburne and Chatham rather than the more radical opposition. As Charles James Fox rose to lead the Whigs in the House of Commons, Sawbridge deferred to him.

In 1780, Sawbridge supported the Roman Catholic Relief Act. That proved to be wildly unpopular; the Gordon Riots paralyzed the city. Sawbridge lost support among Londoners, apologized humbly for taking a position that they didn’t like, and still came in fifth in a race for four seats.

However, one of the four frontrunners, John Kirkman, died on the day the polls closed. There was a special by-election, and this time Sawbridge won with no contest.

Four years later, the new prime minister, William Pitt, spent £2,000 supporting his own candidate in London. His party called Sawbridge a “republican” and “an avowed enemy to the constitution, to monarchy.” It didn’t help that Sawbridge’s older sister was the celebrated republican historian (and now married widow) Catharine Macaulay Graham.

Sawbridge insisted he wanted only reform in the Commons and protection for “the Rights of the People.” He pulled out a win in 1784 by only nine votes. He promptly resumed pushing for parliamentary reforms, which still went nowhere.

In 1790, Sawbridge sought reelection mainly for old times’ sake, even asking for the privilege to die in political service to the city of London. Voters chose him overwhelmingly. But then he suffered a stroke, so while he remained an M.P. until his death he was at least partially paralyzed.

Though contemporaries and historians agree that John Sawbridge was an ambitious man, he also stuck to his principles, which were ahead of his time.

“Poor Mrs. Macaulay! She is irrecoverably fallen.”

In October 1778, the historian Catharine Macaulay left Bath and the home she shared with the Rev. Thomas Wilson.

One possible reason for Macaulay’s move was that Wilson kept pressing her to marry him. Everyone knew the minister was besotted with the widowed author. He’d already signed over a lease to his house, erected a statue in London, and published a book of fawning poetry. But she declined to make him her second husband.

As Bob Ruppert described in this Journal of the American Revolution article, Macaulay moved across England to Leicester in the East Midlands. That was the city where her friend Elizabeth Arnold lived.

Arnold was the sister of Macaulay’s physician, Dr. James Graham, and wife of another physician who managed an asylum for the mentally ill. The two women had visited France together in late 1777.

On 14 November, a minister in Leicester married Macaulay to Dr. Graham. Not James Graham, who was with his wife and children in Scotland. That would have provided plenty of scandal and confirmed a rumor that John Wilkes had recorded earlier in the year.

Rather, the historian married William Graham, younger brother of Dr. James Graham and Elizabeth Arnold.

Much younger brother, in fact. William Graham was only twenty-one years old. He was barely a doctor, having studied in Edinburgh and trained as a surgeon’s mate for the East India Company. 

Even by the modern standard of “half your age plus seven,” William Graham seemed “too young” for Macaulay, who was forty-seven. And of course Macaulay was a woman. A woman who had put herself into the public eye by writing about history and politics.

The reaction was swift and negative. One acquaintance at Bath, Edmund Rack, wrote to Richard Polwhele, an eighteen-year-old admirer of the historian, on 29 December:

Poor Mrs. Macaulay! She is irrecoverably fallen. “Frailty, thy name is Woman!” Her passions, even at 52 [sic], were too strong for her reason; and she has taken to bed a stout brawny Scotchman of 21. For shame! Her enemies’ triumph is now complete. Her friends can say nothing in her favour. O, poor Catharine!—never canst thou emerge from the abyss into which thou art fallen!

And that was one of the more sympathetic responses.

COMING UP: More reactions.

[The portrait of “Mrs. Catherine M’Caulay” above is a woodcut printed in Nathaniel Ames’s Astronomical Diary; or Almanack for 1772. Paul Revere supplied versions of this cut to both Ezekiel Russell and Edes and Gill for their competing editions. Printing this illustration of Macaulay shows the admiration, or at least curiosity, that she inspired in New England at that time. (The almanac’s other images featured John Dickinson and the dwarf Emma Leach.) This image comes courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.]

“The highest dispenser of human fame, Mr. Johnson’s pocket book”

In late 1777, around the time the British historian Catharine Macaulay was visiting France for her health, she appeared in an engraving.

Macaulay was a celebrity, so she had been depicted in many engravings—some admiring, some satirical. But this picture was unusual.

It was a group portrait titled The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, drawn by Richard Samuel and engraved by someone named Walker. It appeared as a foldout in The Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book, for the Year of Our Lord 1778, published in London by Joseph Johnson.

The print showed nine women in vaguely classical costume engaged in different arts: music, painting, and so on. The caption below identified those women as:

Miss Carter, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Angelica Kauffman, on the Right hand; Mrs. Sheridan, in the Middle; Mrs. Lenox, Mrs. Macaulay, Miss More, Mrs. Montague, and Mrs. Griffith, on the Left hand.

These were all British women who had gained fame for some kind of writing, painting, or musical performances.

Samuel completed a painting based on the same composition and exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1779. As shown above, it now belongs to Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.

As portraiture, however, those pictures aren’t very good. Without the engraving’s caption, it would be impossible to connect the nine figures in the painting to the actual writers and artists. On 23 November, one of those women, poet and translator Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), wrote to another, Blue Stockings Society hostess Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800):

O Dear, O dear, how pretty we look, and what brave things has Mr. Johnson said of us! Indeed, my dear friend, I am just as sensible to present fame as you can be. Your Virgils and your Horaces may talk what they will of posterity, but I think it is much better to be celebrated by the men, women, and children, among whom one is actually living and looking.

One thing is very particularly agreeable to my vanity, to say nothing about my heart, that it seems to be a decided point, that you and I are always to figure in the literary world together, and that from the classical poet, the water drinking rhymes, to the highest dispenser of human fame, Mr. Johnson’s pocket book, it is perfectly well understood, that we are to make our appearance in the same piece. I am mortified, however, that we do not in this last display of our persons and talents stand in the same corner.

As I am told we do not, for to say truth, by the mere testimony of my own eyes, I cannot very exactly tell which is you, and which is I, and which is any body else. But this must arise from the deficiency of my sight, for some of the good people of Deal, I am told, affirm my picture to be excessively like.

As for Catharine Macaulay, she had an unusual face, already captured in those many engravings and at least one statue. By this date she was in her late forties, a widow, not in good health. But the figure of Clio, Muse of History, holding a scroll toward the center of the pictures doesn’t exhibit any of those personal features.

Still, this image reflects Macaulay’s place in British culture at the start of 1778. She was not only a celebrated historian, but she was being held up as the nation’s answer to the Muse of History herself.

And then it all came crashing down.

TOMORROW: A step too far.

“As rotten as an old Catherine pear”

In April 1778, John Wilkes was back at Bath (if he had ever left). On the 28th he wrote to his daughter Polly about the well known author Catharine Macaulay:

Yesterday we went to Kitty Macaulay, as she is still called. She looked as rotten as an old Catherine pear. Lord I[rnham]. was disgusted with her manner, &c.

Darley has just published a new caricature of her and the Doctor, which she owns has vexed her to the heart. It is worth your buying.

Back in May 1777, the artist Mattina Darly had published a cartoon of Macaulay writing while the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson looked on, titled “The Historians.” Behind them was a bust of Alfred the Great, reflecting both Whiggish admiration for that early king and how the minister had named his mansion Alfred House. The image above comes courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library.

The “new caricature” from Darly was evidently the one at the bottom of this post, showing Macaulay stalked by death while she applied makeup. That picture also included Wilson’s profile.

Wilkes knew that Macaulay didn’t like that portrayal. Nevertheless, he recommended that his daughter buy the picture.

And then a few lines later Wilkes wrote: “To-day I dine with Mrs. Macaulay and the Doctor.”

What a delightful man.

TOMORROW: A more flattering, less recognizable picture.

John Wilkes’s Gossip about “Kitty Macaulay”

Catharine Macaulay was a celebrity in Britain, so her return from France at the start of 1778 attracted notice.

John Wilkes was in Bath when Macaulay arrived home. He wrote to his 28-year-old daughter Mary (called Polly, and shown here with dad) on 4 January:

Mrs. Macaulay returned to Dr. [Thomas] Wilson on Friday. I saw her yesterday very ill indeed, and raving against France and everything in that country. She even says their soups are detestable, as bad as Lacedemonian black broth, and their game insipid, all their meat bad, and their poultry execrable. Yet she says, that she dined at some of the best tables and was infinitely caressed.

She saw Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, but refused his invitation to dinner, for fear of being confined on her return in consequence of the Habeas Corpus Act.

“Lord J——s C——t, Mr. Wilkes, you know, I am very fond of partridges. I saw them often served up, but could not eat them, I found them so hard and ill-flavoured.[”]

I stayed with her nearly an hour, in which time, I believe, she exclaimed twenty times, [“]Lord J——s C——t.” She was painted up to the eyes, and looks quite ghastly and ghostly. She has sent away her English woman, and has only a French valet-de-chambre and friseur, at which the reverend Doctor is indignant, and with whom the English servants already quarrel.

Three days later Wilkes told his daughter that his health had improved and he was thinking about returning to London. He added:

The rage of politics is, I think, more violent at Bath than even at London, and nothing is talked of but America, except Kitty Macaulay, who grows worse daily. The doctor [Wilson] looks stupid and sulky.

And the day after that Wilkes suggested Macaulay was having an affair:

It is not only my opinion, but that of the generality of Mrs. Macaulay’s friends, that her head is affected, and some indiscretions with Dr. G—— are the common topic of conversation.

Dr. James Graham had treated Macaulay’s headaches and other neurological symptoms, using her endorsement to build his career. Wilkes evidently thought their relationship went beyond doctor and patient. And of course he would know.

TOMORROW: Wilkes gives unabashed gossip a bad name.

Catharine Macaulay “just returned from a Journey to Paris”

Today, after a gap of more than four months, I’m picking up the story of the British author Catharine Macaulay.

To catch us up, I’ll quote Macaulay’s own letter to the Earl of Buchan dated 23 Feb 1778:

The favor of your Lordship’s letter found me just returned from a Journey to Paris where I resided a few weeks for the recovery of my health after a long and dangerous illness.

Macaulay had gained the strength to undertake that journey only after Dr. James Graham had provided her with “a judicious mixture of the Bark” to treat her “Billious intermitting Autumnal fever,” as I quoted here. The doctor’s sister Elizabeth Arnold was Macaulay’s traveling companion.

Both Macaulay and Lord Buchan supported the American cause. France had just become a formal ally of the U.S. of A., and Macaulay wrote:

I have the pleasure to inform your Lordship that sentiments of liberty which are as you observe lost in these united Kingdoms never flourished in a larger extent or with more vigorous animating force than they do at present in France.

That reflected the Enlightenment circles that Macaulay visited since France was, after all, still a less democratic regime than Britain.

The author also told the earl: “I have this month published a vol of the history of England from the revolution to the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole.” That was the first volume of a never-completed set titled The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend. It was less formal than Macaulay’s earlier histories.

The “Friend” was the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson—Macaulay’s patron, host, and unrequited suitor in Bath. A portrait of Wilson with Macaulay’s daughter set me off on the author’s story last May. That daughter, Catherine Sophia, was “at a Boarding School at Chelsea” when her mother wrote to Lord Buchan; she would turn thirteen the next day. 

TOMORROW: The Wilkesite view.

“Nathaniel Barber, Esq; Captain of the North-Battery”

Nathaniel Barber (1728–1787) was an insurance broker with an office in the North End of Boston.

He became one of the more gung-ho Whigs in Boston, though he didn’t hold significant political offices or (to our knowledge) publish political essays.

Barber married Elizabeth Maxwell in 1750, and the couple started having children the next year with Nathaniel, Jr. Barber probably worked as an ordinary merchant before opening his insurance office by 1762.

On 24 Sept 1766, Barber was in the crowd watching the Customs officials try unsuccessfully to search the warehouse of Daniel Malcom for smuggled goods. Not coincidentally, Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson reported that “Malcolm is a principal underwriter” of Barber’s insurance firm.

In two depositions after that event, Barber insisted that he had no idea who told him “that Upon Mr Malcoms House being attacked the Old North Bell was to Ring” to assemble defenders, and denied having passed on that rumor to magistrate John Tudor.

Barber also claimed that “from the appearance and behavior of the People assembled who were worthy Gentlemen and good sort of People, there was not the least appearance of disorder, much less Opposition to any legal Authority.” (The Customs officials didn’t see things the same way.)

Here are three notable mentions of Barber in the newspapers, starting with the Boston Gazette for 8 Aug 1768:

We hear that the Week before last was finished, by Order and for the Use of the Gentlemen belonging to the Insurance Office kept by Mr. Nathaniel Barber, at the North-End, an elegant Silver BOWL, weighing forty-five Ounces, and holding forty-five Gills.

On one Side is engraved within a handsome Border—To the Memory of the glorious NINETY-TWO Members of the Honorable House of REPRESENTATIVES of the MASSACHUSETTS-BAY, who undaunted by the Insolent Menaces of Villains in Power, and out of strict Regard to Conscience, and the LIBERTIES of their Constituents, on the 30th of June 1768, VOTED NOT TO RESCIND.—Over which is the Cap of Liberty in an Oaken Crown.

On the other Side, in a Circle adorned with Flowers, &c. is No. 45, WILKES AND LIBERTY, under which is General Warrants torn to Pieces. On the Top of the Cap of Liberty, and out of each Side, is a Standard, on one is MAGNA CHARTA, the other BILL OF RIGHTS.—

On Monday Evening last, the Gentlemen belonging to the Office made a genteel Entertainment, and invited a Number of Gentlemen of Distinction in the Town, when 45 Loyal Toasts were drank, and the whole concluded with a new Song, the Chorus of which is, In Freedom we’re born, and in Freedom we’ll live, &c.

The silversmith who made that bowl was Paul Revere, and today it’s a treasure of the Museum of Fine Arts. The song was “The Liberty Song,” printed the month before.

In the 30 Apr 1770 Boston Gazette:

Yesterday se’nnight a Daughter of Mr. Nathaniel Barber, at the North End, was Baptized at the Reverend Dr. [Andrew] Eliot’s Meeting-House, by the Name of Catharine Macaulay. The same Gentleman about 18 Months ago had a Child christened by the Name of Oliver Cromwell, and about 18 Months before that, another by the Name of Wilkes.

Edes and Gill’s newspaper had reported the christening of each boy, with a note that little Wilkes “had No. 45, in Bows, pinn’d on its Breast” at the ceremony.

On 1 Oct 1772, the Boston News-Letter reported:

His Excellency the Governor has been pleased to Commission Nathaniel Barber, Esq; Captain of the North-Battery in this Town, with the Rank of Major.

You might ask why Gov. Hutchinson granted a prestigious rank to someone so obviously in the political opposition. In that period he was trying to use his patronage powers as commander-in-chief of the militia to peel men away from the Whigs.

COMING UP: Did that work?

Mrs. Macaulay, Dr. Franklin, and Habeas Corpus

In late 1776 the Scottish artisan James Aitken, after receiving some encouragement of American diplomat Silas Deane, left incendiary bombs in the Royal Navy dockyards at Portsmouth and Bristol.

The British authorities tracked down Aitken, who had become known as “John the Painter.” He was tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged by 10 Mar 1777. (Read the whole story in Jessica Warner’s study The Incendiary.)

Lord George Germain led the national government in another response to Aitken’s attacks: a Treason Act. Like laws that Parliament enacted during previous wars, this allowed the government to hold anyone suspected of treason or piracy without bail or trial—i.e., to suspend the right of habeas corpus—for the rest of the calendar year.

Parliament renewed this law each year until the end of the American war. The Massachusetts General Court passed a similar law to deal with traitors, though it promised more protections for the accused. Eventually the U.S. Constitution would carve out a wartime exception to habeas corpus as well.

Britain’s Treason Act was on Catharine Macaulay’s mind when she visited Paris at the end of 1777. Though her country wasn’t yet at war with France, there were American rebels in the capital—Deane, Arthur Lee, and most famously Benjamin Franklin.

I assume Mrs. Macaulay and Dr. Franklin had met in London during the 1760s when they were both Whig celebrities, but I don’t know if they became more than acquaintances. In late 1777, the two figures were definitely at the same dinner parties. According to Elizabeth Arnold, “Mrs. Macaulay met him several times, among the literati of Paris, at dinners given on her account, but she never received him at her hotel.”

Macaulay made a point of not visiting Franklin or inviting him to visit her. She explained herself to him in a letter dated 8 December:

Sir

I have some affaires which demand my immediat return to England. You are very sensible that the suspenssion of the Habeas Corpus Act subjects me to an immediat imprisonment on any suspicion of my having held a correspondence with your Countrymen on this side the Water. This Sir is the only reason why I did not fix a day to have the honor of seeing you at my own Hotel and why I have not been more forward in availing myself of my present situation to hold converse with my American friends who reside in this Capital.

I am sure Sir that you and every generous American would be exceedingly concerned to hear that my feeble constitution was totaly destroyed by a long imprisonment and to see me fall a sacrifice to the resentment of administration unpitied and unlamented as an impertinent individual who would needs make a bustle where she could not be of the smallest service and especially Sir as I hope the whole tenor of my conduct must have convinced you that I would with pleasure sacrifice my life to be of any real use to the public cause of freedom and that I am now nursing my constitution to enable me to treat largely on our fatal civil wars in the History I am now about.

I am Sir with a profound respect for your great Qualities as a Statesman Patriot and Phylosopher Your Very Obedient Humble Servant.

By “our fatal civil wars,” Macaulay meant the war then taking place in America—the very war that made it dangerous for her to be seen as too close to Franklin. And once again, Macaulay made a point of her delicate health.

COMING UP: Back home in Bath.

Dining with the “agreable society” of Paris

In the fall of 1777, the historian Catharine Macaulay and her companion Elizabeth Arnold arrived in Paris.

They were supposed to proceed to Nice for Macaulay’s health, but she discovered a reason to stay in the capital, as she later told the Earl of Harcourt:

When I arrived at Paris the Physician to whom Mr. [Horace] Walpole recommended me said that I should certainly perish on the road if I attempted to go farther.

Happily for me the Bark which I had before repeatedly tried in vain about a week after I was at Paris began to have so good an effect as to abate my fever sufficiently for me to partake of that agreable society.

Arnold later reported that the “agreable society” included the authors Anne-Marie du Boccage (shown above) and Marmontel, Madame Helvetius, Count Sarsfield, the Duc de Liancourt, the Duc de Harcourt, Abbé Seignelay Colbert de Castlehill, the British ambassador Lord Stormont, and the recently ousted government minister Turgot. (Plus a lady named “Madame Grigson” whom I couldn’t identify.)

As a British Whig, Macaulay expected to find the French capital under the oppression of an absolute monarchy. Instead, she heard a lot of people agreeing with her own ideas about republicanism.

I must tell your Lordship that after the French had paid me compliments on my genius and on my literary powers, the quality which they regarded as the next highest compliment was that I was a hater of kings.

In regard to the part they take in our civil wars, they are all American mad; and I do assure you, my Lord, that even your Lordship would not be well received in France if you were not an American. All the enlightened French wish ardently to see a large empire established on a republican basis to keep the monarchies of the world in order; and all the vulgar have the same earnest desire, through hatred and jealousy of the English.

By “our civil wars,” Macaulay meant the British government’s conflict with the thirteen breakaway colonies in North America.

To be sure, Macaulay wasn’t seeing a cross-section of French society. She met mainly with progressive intellectuals and aristocrats who knew of her as an anti-government author in Britain. And as she acknowledged, even Frenchmen who supported the traditional order (“the vulgar”) saw a reason to support the new U.S. of A.—in order to weaken Britain.

There was one thing Macaulay couldn’t stand about France, however, and after a few weeks it sent her back to Bath:

it was sad necessity which drove me away; as my stomach was always unfortunately delicate, I nauseated from the first, tho’ I was prejudiced in its favor, at all the food I met with in France; their meat is carrion, their poultry and even their game insipid, and their cookery most detestable. They have no good sources to season their meats with, and they use them too sparingly; their made dishes are a collection of gravy drawn from bad meat, fat, &c., without over flavour but what a little onion gives; thus the stomach is loaded with everything which is baneful to it without the assistance of warm spices to help digestion; and, in addition to these mortifications, as my stomach was very weak after my illness, all their wines turned sour upon it.

Thus all the juices of my body, vitiated by my long and important illness, was deprived of that nourishment which can alone restore the decayed strength and yield fresh balm to the oppressed constitution.

Macaulay thus found the French national constitution less oppressive than she expected, but her own constitution oppressed by French cuisine. Once again, her health was on a knife’s edge.

TOMORROW: A note to Dr. Franklin.

Catharine Macaulay on the Road

I once read the observation that a group of people traveling together moves as fast as the slowest member and has as much fun as the grumpiest member.

Catharine Macaulay’s health dictated the slow pace of her travel through France with Elizabeth Arnold. As to whether she was a happy companion, Arnold later wrote about her with great admiration, but it doesn’t sound like a fun time.

Here are some anecdotes from the road as eventually published in Mary Hays’s Female Biography.

Between Calais and Paris, she looked in vain for the healthy and well-fed peasant, the beautiful and luxuriant meadows, the cultivated farms, and comfortable farm-houses, of her native island. Despotism had palsied the hand of industry; an indigent and miserable people appeared thinly scattered over wild and dreary plains. . . .

The travellers stopped one day at Chantilly, where they met with two of their friends, and where they had an opportunity of observing a royal residence [shown above], and contrasting it with the wretchedness which they had so recently witnessed. Mrs. Macaulay was not in a state of health to bear the fatigue of inspecting the palace.

To Dr. [Treadway Russell?] Nash, one of the gentlemen whom she met at Chantilly, and who would, with apparent satisfaction, have described to her the curiosities and magnificence of the prince’s residence, she replied (after thanking him courteously for the trouble he was about to give himself,) that she would spare him the repetition, since she could receive no pleasure in hearing of the splendor of one mortal, while the misery of thousands pressed upon her recollection.

Actually, I have to admire Macaulay’s force in shutting down a bore there.

…at the first post-house at which they stopped to change horses, the feelings of the travellers were again excited by the objects which, crowding around their carriage, clamorously implored their charitable donations, while they exhibited in their persons and squalid appearance every variety of want and of human wretchedness. ‘My God! my God!’ exclaimed Mrs. Macaulay, with a benevolent enthusiasm, bursting into tears, ‘have mercy on the works of thine own hand!’ She made her servant distribute to them each three livres, and divided among them the provisions she had in the carriage.

Britons, and British Whigs in particular, believed France was a country of widely unequal wealth and oppressed, starving peasants, so these rural sights confirmed what Macaulay and Arnold expected to see.

During a stop in Abbeville, when Macaulay’s “health was in a languishing state,” Arnold expressed some worry about her dying, prompting this response:

After reproving her friend’s too great sensibility and solicitude on her account, “I thought and hoped,” said she, ”that you viewed my death but as a short separation between virtuous friends, and that your assurance of a re-union with me, in a more perfect state, would have preserved you from being thus severely affected by the idea of my dissolution.” She went on to console her companion and fellow-traveller in the same strain, “Consider our parting,” said she, “but as a short privation; for, be assured, the friendship of the good will not be dissolved by death: we shall again unite in another life.”

The feeble state of her frame, and consequent sufferings, she said, naturally led her to these reflections.

Again with the illness.

Macaulay was sincerely and conventionally religious, though her politics verged on the radical. That made an interesting contrast with her rival historian David Hume, who was religiously skeptical and quite traditional in his politics.

TOMORROW: Paris at last.

“Her fever seemed to have left her”

In late 1777, as I’ve been relating, doctors advised the historian Catharine Macaulay to leave her home in Bath and travel to Nice for her health.

Macaulay needed a companion on that trip, a genteel woman about her age. Her favored physician, Dr. James Graham, may have been the one who recommended Elizabeth Arnold (1743–1802).

This lady was the wife of Dr. Thomas Arnold of Edinburgh. More important, she was Dr. Graham’s older sister.

Years later, Arnold wrote about what she’d first heard of Mrs. Macaulay and the real person she met:

“She is deformed, (said her adversaries, wholly unacquainted with her person), she is unfortunately ugly, she despairs of distinction and admiration as a woman, she seeks, therefore, to encroach on the province of man.”

These were the notions…that I was led to entertain of Mrs Macaulay, previous to my introduction to her acquaintance. Judge then of my surprise, when I saw a woman elegant in her manners, delicate in her person, and with features, if not perfectly beautiful, so fascinating in their expression, as deservedly to rank her face among the higher order of human countenances. . . .

Infirm health, too often the attendant on an active and highly cultivated understanding, gave to her countenance an extreme delicacy, which was peculiarly interesting. To this delicacy of constitution was added a most amiable sensibility of temper, which rendered her feelingly alive to whatever concerned those with whom she was connected either by nature or by friendship.

Those impressions appeared in Mary Hays’s Female Biography, published in 1805.

The two women and their servants set off from Bath, but they didn’t get far. Although Dr. Graham’s preparation of “bark” (probably cinchona bark) did something to relieve Macaulay’s fever, it hadn’t fully kicked in yet. She later wrote, “I was so weak when I left Bath, that from Bath to London I was obliged to be six days on the road, and to remain one fortnight in London to recover strength sufficient to pursue my journey.”

Finally the ladies boarded a ship to cross the Channel. According to Hays, because Macaulay “was severely exhausted by sickness, she rested two days at Calais.” But suddenly she got better:

she soon experienced, from the change of air, or possibly from the sea sickness itself, a salutary effect. Her fever seemed to have left her, and she suffered in the remainder of her journey to Paris but little inconvenience.

In Paris, a stout British Whig like Macaulay expected to see the oppressive effects of French political and religious tyranny. To complicate matters, in late 1777 the French government was weighing whether to formally ally with Britain’s breakaway colonies and go to war.

TOMORROW: French food and French people.