 Although Macaulay did not write explicitly about the nature of freedom until quite late in life, her histories should be read as a contribution to the theory of republican liberty, though not quite as that idea has been outlined by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit (Skinner 1998, 2008; Pettit 1997). Skinner argues that, as a result of his intention of refuting the political doctrines which lay behind the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes made innovations in the concept of freedom of the will, and introduced the idea that one acts freely whenever one’s act is caused by one’s own deliberations, and is not impeded by some external constraint. Thus Hobbes simultaneously supported the metaphysical view, according to which freedom and causal determinism are compatible, and introduced the political concept of negative liberty, thought of as freedom from external constraint. He overthrew the then dominant metaphysical concept of human freedom—which had descended from Plato via the later Stoics, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius—according to which we are unfree when our acts are caused by the passions, and free only when we act according to reason, as well as the view that political freedom involves freedom from arbitrary domination.