Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster General between 1846 and 1848. Macaulay's The History of England, which expressed his contention of the superiority of the Western European culture and of the inevitability of its sociopolitical progress, is a seminal example of Whig history that remains commended for its prose style. Early life Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire on 25 October 1800, the son of Zachary Macaulay, a Scottish Highlander, who became a colonial governor and abolitionist, and Selina Mills of Bristol, a former pupil of Hannah More. They named their first child after his uncle Thomas Babington, a Leicestershire landowner and politician, who had married Zachary's sister Jean. The young Macaulay was noted as a child prodigy; as a toddler, gazing out of the window from his cot at the chimneys of a local factory, he is reputed to have asked his father whether the smoke came from the fires of hell. He was educated at a private school in Hertfordshire, and, subsequently, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won several prizes, including the Chancellor's Gold Medal in June 1821, and where he in 1825 published a prominent essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review. Macaulay did not while at Cambridge study classical literature, which he subsequently read in India. He in his letters describes his reading of the Aeneid whilst he was in Malvern in 1851, when he says he was moved to tears by Virgil's poetry. He taught himself German, Dutch and Spanish, and was fluent in French. He studied law and he was in 1826 called to the bar, before he took more interest in a political career. Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review in 1827, and in a series of anonymous letters to The Morning Chronicle, censured the analysis of indentured labour by the British Colonial Office expert Colonel Thomas Moody, Kt. Macaulay's evangelical Whig father Zachary Macaulay, who desired a 'free black peasantry' rather than equality for Africans, also censured, in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, Moody's contentions.