 Catharine Macaulay’s most substantial work was the eight-volume A History of England from the Accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick Line, the first volume of which was published in 1763, but the last not until twenty years later. This history, which began with the accession of James 1, and told the history of the English Civil War as the outcome of the struggle of the Commons to retain their liberties against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts, affirmed the right of the people to depose their monarch. She wrote a further history, in letters, covering the period after 1688, as well as political pamphlets, refuting the monarchism of Hobbes, and the political conservatism of Burke. She criticized the policy of the British Government in the lead up to the American War of Independence, and was welcomed by the Americans, after Independence, as an important advocate of the principles on which the United States was founded. In her pamphlets she defended the right to petition and argued for copyright. Her most philosophical work, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), developed the doctrine of the will that she called “moral necessity”; this work was partly reproduced in her Letters on Education (1790), which was, in turn, reviewed by, and profoundly influenced, Mary Wollstonecraft.