Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a Whig politician, member of Parliament, legal member of the council in India, where he wrote the penal code and the minute on education, and the most popular historian of his age. The History of England, from the accession of James II, sold like a novel; the essays for the Edinburgh Review, of which Machiavelli of 1827 is the one the Harvard Classics print, made his name in his twenties. He wrote with a confidence and a clarity that made every question look settled, and his Whig interpretation, of history as the story of liberty’s progress, is what later historians spent a century unsettling.