G. M. Trevelyan on Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Macaulay's permanent reputation rests chiefly on his History of England in the reigns of James II and William III, the causes and the course of the English Revolution and the Revolution Settlement as worked out under William. Lord Acton once told me that he considered Macaulay, with all his faults, as the greatest historian.”

“Economic and social history are now so large a part of historical study and writing that it is difficult to remember how new a thing it was in 1848 for Macaulay to introduce social history woven in with the political narrative that could not really be understood without it. His famous Third Chapter on the State of England in 1685 has faults... Nevertheless the Third Chapter was a great new thing in English historiography... After the Third Chapter the narrative gets fairly into swing, and the wonderful story is told how James II in three years turned even Tories into rebels, and the series of events and chances which enabled the Revolution to take place without a civil war. I think this is the greatest piece of historical narrative in our literature.”

“His worst fault was imputing motives, which is always a dangerous game played in the dark. For instance, though he gives the facts of Churchill's part in the Revolution correctly he seems to blame him for turning against James, while everyone else is applauded for doing so. Macaulay was, I think, very much affected by Swift's Tory attacks on Marlborough. Indeed it is not true, as is often said, that he always think the Whigs right and the Tories wrong. He detested the Shaftesbury Whigs at the time of the Popish Plot and the adoption of Monmouth as candidate for the crown. He thinks the Tories were right about the Indemnity Bill of 1689, about the attainder of Fenwick and about making peace "without Spain" at the end of the Marlborough wars. He is perfectly fair to Tory leaders like Danby and Nottingham and gets his prejudice against Marlborough from Tory sources. The path Macaulay trod was no doubt narrow, but it was well in the middle. Although he was a Whig of the Nineteenth Century, for the period in the past about which he wrote he was not a Whig but a Williamite.”