 Macaulay has been called a “patriot historian” and her history is certainly intended to praise the English “patriots” who stood up for their fundamental rights against the absolutist tendencies of James I and Charles I (Pocock 1998). Her account of the years leading up to the Civil War constitutes a litany of acts of illegal taxation, abuses of power, arbitrary arrest and inhumane punishments. She praises in particular Sir John Elliot, “as the first martyr to the pre-eminent cause of liberty,” mentioning in particular a manuscript by him in which he argues that kings are subject to laws (Macaulay 1763–83, 2.81). But she is not simply a blind defender of the ancient constitution, or committed to English liberty for its own sake. She believes in the possibility of moral progress, and, as is already clear from her letter to Paoli, she sees the maintenance of a just political constitution, and the development of individual virtue, as inseparably intertwined. Thus she asserts in her response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France that English liberties are not simply grounded in customs associated with the English monarchy.