Colin Macaulay

Colin Macaulay (13 April 1760 – 20 February 1836),[1] was a Scottish general, biblical scholar and key activist in the campaign to abolish slavery.

However, his education must have been formative as he became in later life a distinguished linguist with extensive knowledge of classical and modern languages, history and literature, and he wrote with a polished style.

Firstly, during the Second Mysore War, he was captured and held prisoner at Seringapatam for almost 3 and a half years (1780-1784) along with Sir David Baird and several other British officers.

Incidentally this did not stop his promotion to Lieutenant on 10 March 1782 or his appointment on the same date as aide-de-camp to Major-General William Medows, Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army - a position he retained for at least ten years.

He regulated and arranged the supplies for the army, and with a fellow officer identified a secure southern route for one of the forces (led by General George Harris) in their final approach.

For this service he was subsequently recognized in a special General Orders issued by the Governor-General, and awarded the Seringapatam Gold Medal.

Here he became a successful administrator at a time of great political unrest but at one point was the victim of an assassination attempt, organised by the Prime Ministers of those states, Velu Thampi Dalawa and the Paliyath Govindan Achan, when his house in Cochin was attacked.

These possibly date from the 9th century and bear inscriptions in Tamil and other ancient scripts, setting out old privileges granted to the Syriac Church.

How Macaulay rescued these plates remains a mystery, but he presented them to the Syriac Church and also had replicas made, one set of which is now in the Cambridge University Library.

Claudius Buchanan to secure agreement from the Rajah of Travancore, as well as senior local clerics, to create the first translation of the Bible into Malayalam.

Fourteen years later he was sufficiently recovered from a recent ‘severe illness’ to sit in Parliament for one Session (from 1826 to 1830) as Member for Saltash[1] as a Whig.

He became a member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and worked closely with William Wilberforce, his brother Zachary, and (until the quarrel in 1820), his brother-in-law Thomas Babington.

He accompanied the Duke of Wellington to the Congress of Verona in 1822, where Britain submitted proposals for the entire Abolition of the Slave Trade.

They valued his fluency in French and Italian and his personal friendship with Wellington, developed over twenty years earlier during their military campaigning in India.

Unfortunately whilst Wellington agreed with Macaulay and Allen's aims, his view was that securing agreement would be impossible as the French were completed uninterest in abolition.

Sir George Otto Trevelyan, who was born too late to know him personally, but was certainly acquainted with many who did wrote that Colin 'was generous in a high degree, and the young people owed to him in books which they otherwise could never have obtained, and treats and excursions which formed the only recreations that broke the uniform current of their lives.