 Macaulay moves on to criticize Hobbes’s strange doctrine in relation to contracts, according to which the people contract with each other to be governed by the sword of an absolute monarch. Implicitly relying on the moral conception of a just contract, Macaulay argues that a contract requires at least two parties. If one of those parties were to dissolve after the contract, as Hobbes suggests the sovereign people do, then the contract would be null and void (Macaulay 1767, 6–7). While this response may not satisfy defenders of Hobbes, it allows us to understand Macaulay’s conception of the social contract as an implicit or explicit contract between the people and some individual or assembly, according to which the people transfer a limited power for the sake of the common good, and retain the right to declare the contract null, in case the other party fails to keep up their end of the bargain. It is in this light that she represents the execution of Charles I.