 Macaulay’s brother John Sawbridge, a member of parliament, who was elected a London Alderman in 1769, became in the same year a founding member of the Society of the Gentleman Supporters of the Bill of Rights. This society was established with John Horne Tooke and others to support John Wilkes, who had been denied the parliamentary seat he had won for Middlesex, as a result of being outlawed for having published articles criticizing the ministry and the King (Hill 1992, 55–62). However, by 1771, Sawbridge and Tooke had left this society because of its too narrow focus on Wilkes’s interests. Macaulay’s early volumes of history constitute a thinly veiled critique of contemporary political events, and set out the broader principles of the Society of the Bill of Rights, by rehearsing the arguments for the rights of the parliament and the liberties of the people that fuelled the English Revolution.