 The argument developed in this history is that without appropriate constraints on the power of the crown, parliament had inevitably become a tool of court policy. In the second volume of her eight-volume history, she had given an extended account of Wentworth’s manipulation of the Irish parliament, during Charles I’s reign, commenting that it showed “that parliaments are noxious things when they become the dupes of ministers” (Macaulay 1763–83, 2.184–5). The relevance of this reflection for contemporary politics would not have been lost on her readers, and she had anticipated the argument developed in A History of England, from the Revolution to the present time in her first response to Burke.