Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1st Baron

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1st Baron (1800–59). Poet, historian, and politician. Of Scottish presbyterian ancestry, he was the son of Zachary Macaulay, the evangelical anti‐slaver and co‐founder of the Clapham sect. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he acquired an early reputation as a Whig orator and a later reputation as a formidable contributor to the Edinburgh Review. A Whig MP for Calne, Leeds, and Edinburgh, he became secretary at war, paymaster‐general, and was involved in drafting a new penal code for India. His Lays of Ancient Rome appeared in 1842, four years after he had projected the future History of England. Originally intended as a history of England since 1688, Macaulay had only reached 1702 by the time of his death. It set the terms of a new Whig historiography which survived until the middle of the 20th cent.