The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 3 — Reading Companion

Schomberg's Chair and the Weight of Precedent

In a passage that could serve as a thesis for Macaulay's entire project, the historian describes how the House of Commons, in July 1689, set a chair for the Duke of Schomberg within the bar. Schomberg rose, thanked the House for a grant of £100,000, and the Speaker replied with formal grace. Macaulay then notes that exactly 125 years later, in July 1814, the same procedure was followed for the Duke of Wellington. He marvels that a popular assembly adhered to ancient forms with the punctilious accuracy of a College of Heralds. The observation is not merely decorative; it is an argument about the character of English government. Macaulay uses the physical objects—the chair, the mace—as evidence of institutional continuity across revolutions. The reader is invited to see the Glorious Revolution not as a rupture but as a scene in a longer play, where the props and blocking remain unchanged even as the actors change.

Avaux's Proposal and the Limits of the Catalog

The catalog subjects list only the reigns of James II and William and Mary, but the excerpts reveal a darker current. Macaulay recounts that the French ambassador, the Count of Avaux, urged James to carry out a Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of the English in Ireland. Avaux's aim, Macaulay writes, was to make it impossible for the two nations ever to be united under one government. The proposal is described as one of almost incredible atrocity. This moment is not captured by the subject headings, which emphasize constitutional transition. Macaulay's narrative, however, insists on the violence that accompanied the settlement. The reader encounters a world where ethnic extermination is coolly discussed at Dublin Castle, where the king's mind is completely prostrated by defeat, and where the war in Ireland is as much a war of extirpation as of succession. The catalog's tidy categories obscure the messy, brutal realities Macaulay documents.

The Texture of Panic and Rout

Macaulay's prose is at its most vivid when describing disorder. The excerpts include a passage on the dismay at Dublin Castle after Londonderry was relieved and the Enniskilleners defeated one of James's armies. Disaster followed disaster so fast that the mind of James, never very firm, had been completely prostrated. Another army is described as retreating, or rather flying, from Ulster, reduced in numbers and broken in spirit. Sligo, the key of Connaught, had been abandoned to the Englishry. The language is concrete and kinetic: the reader sees the flight, hears the panic. Macaulay does not simply state that the Jacobites lost; he shows the psychological collapse. This attention to the texture of defeat—the prostration of a king, the rout of an army—gives the volume a dramatic momentum that the catalog's dry chronology cannot convey. The excerpts suggest that Macaulay's history is as much a study of fear and morale as of policy and legislation.

Readers approaching this volume should attend to Macaulay's use of physical detail—the chair, the mace, the horse in Hyde Park—as clues to his larger argument about English exceptionalism. The catalog subjects frame the work as a political history, but the excerpts reveal a narrative equally concerned with ceremony, atrocity, and the psychology of defeat. The comparison between Schomberg and Wellington is not incidental; it is a key to Macaulay's method of reading the present into the past. Let the set pieces guide you, but watch for the moments when the historian's voice breaks through the chronicle.

I keep thinking about Macaulay’s grim, deliberate parliamentarians slowly building something lasting, and it reminded me of a quieter world—one I knew from an old habit of browsing titles late at night. The weight of political struggle faded, leaving only the human softness underneath. That’s what I found again in The boys in white — Story, Setting & Ideas, though I never expected the connection.