In a letter to a friend, Carter described Macaulay as a "very sensible and agreeable woman, and much more deeply learned than beseems a fine lady; but between the Spartan laws, the Roman politics, the philosophy of Epicurus, and the wit of St. Evremond, she seems to have formed a most extraordinary system".

[9] The marriage coincided with the publication of the first volume of The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, in a Series of Letters to the Reverend Doctor Wilson (1778) in which she argued that the English Civil War had not gone far enough to eliminate the prerogatives of the crown.

According to Mary Hays, Macaulay "had been furnished by general Washington with many materials" for a history of the American Revolution but that "she was, by the infirm state of her health" stopped from doing so.

Macaulay wrote to the American writer Mercy Otis Warren in 1787: "Tho' the History of your late glorious revolution is what I should certainly undertake were I again young, yet as things are I must for many reasons decline such a task".

She lamented that her contemporaries had forgotten that the privileges they enjoyed had been fought for by "men that, with the hazard and even the loss of their lives, attacked the formidable pretensions of the Stewart family, and set up the banners of liberty against a tyranny which had been established for a series of more than one hundred and fifty years".

The history of England, in Macaulay's view, was the story of the struggle of the English to win back their rights that were crushed by the "Norman yoke".

The Parliamentarian army's fighting "was not a trade of blood, but an exertion of principle, and obedience to the call of conscience, and their conduct was not only void of insolence but benevolent and humane".

[17] She was heavily critical of Oliver Cromwell, who she denounced as "the vain-glorious usurper" and as an "individual, no ways exalted above his brethren in any of those private endowments which constitute the true greatness of character, or excelling in any quality, but in the measure of a vain and wicked ambition".

However, she also claimed that patriots had neglected "this fair opportunity to cut off all of the prerogatives of the crown", to which they had "justly imputed the calamities and injuries sustained by the nation".

The Revolution Settlement had failed to "admit of any of those refinements and improvements, which the experience of mankind had enabled them to make in the science of political security".

[18] Macaulay shared her fellow radicals' anti-Catholicism, writing in the chapter covering the Irish Rebellion of 1641 of the Papists' "never-ceasing attempts by every kind of means, to bring all things again to subjection to the Church of Rome; their avowed maxim that faith is not to be kept with heretics; their religious principles calculated for the support of despotic power, and inconsistent with the genius of a free constitution".

[11] Thomas Hollis recorded in his diary (30 November 1763) that "the history is honestly written, and with considerable ability and spirit; and is full of the freest, noblest, sentiments of Liberty".

[23] Horace Walpole wrote to William Mason, quoting with approval Thomas Gray's opinion that it was the "most sensible, unaffected and best history of England that we have had yet".

[25] However, Walpole later changed his opinion: "The female historian as partial to the cause of liberty as bigots to the Church and royalists to tyranny, exerted manly strength with the gravity of a philosopher.

Too prejudiced to dive into causes, she imputes everything to tyrannic views, nothing to passions, weakness, error, prejudice, and still less to what operates oftenest and her ignorance of which qualified her less for a historian—to accident and little motives".

[28] The French statesmen Mirabeau, Jacques Pierre Brissot and the Marquis de Condorcet admired the History as a corrective to Hume.

[citation needed] The Tory Samuel Johnson was a critic of her politics: Sir, there is one Mrs. Macaulay in this town, a great republican.

I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, Madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us."

[36] Macaulay opposed Catholic emancipation, criticising in 1768 those "who pretend to be friends of Liberty and (from an affectation of a liberal way of thinking) would tolerate Papists".

[39] However, Paoli distanced himself from Macaulay as his sole concern was sustaining English support for Corsica rather than intervening in domestic politics.

She wrote that it contained "a poison sufficient to destroy all the little virtue and understanding of sound policy which is left in the nation", motivated by "the corrupt principle of self-interest" of "Aristocratic faction and party" whose over-riding aim was a return to power.

[46] She replied to Burke's lament that the age of chivalry was gone by claiming that society should be freed from "false notions of honour" which were nothing more than "methodized sentimental barbarism".

[57] In addition, scholars have noted Macaulay's impact on early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

[58][59][60] Macaulay and Wollstonecraft both wrote on themes such as education, freedom as independence, equality, virtue, reputation, injustice, history, and false ideas.

[61] Wollstonecraft recognized the impact when she wrote to Macaulay: "You are the only female writer who I coincide in opinion with respecting the rank our sex ought to endeavour to attain in the world.

[63] She was a lifelong member of the Church of England, although her apparent free expression of heterodox religious opinions shocked some of her contemporariness and led to accusations of infidelity.

[65] She also claimed that reason, without faith, was insufficient and wrote of the need for the Church to concentrate "on the practical doctrines of the Christian religion", such as man's God-given powers of bettering his own condition and reducing evil.

[67] She wrote in 1790 in her Letters on Education, as Mary Wollstonecraft did two years later in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that the apparent weakness of women was due to their mis-education.

[68] In the Letters she wrote "the thoughts of a fatherless universe, and a set of beings let loose by chance or fate on one another, without other law than power dictates and opportunity gives a right to exact, chills the sensibility of the feeling mind into indifference and despair".

Afterwards, Washington wrote to Lee of his pleasure at meeting "a Lady ... whose principles are so much and so justly admired by the friends of liberty and mankind".