had no wish to interfere with Macaulay’s freedom of voting. He
thus entered parliament at one of the most exciting moments of
English domestic history, when the compact phalanx of reactionary
administration which for nearly fifty years had commanded
a crushing majority in the Commons was on the point
of being broken by the growing strength of the party of reform.
Macaulay made his maiden speech on the 5th of April 1830, on
the second reading of the Bill for the Removal of Jewish Disabilities.
In July the king died and parliament was dissolved; the
revolution took place in Paris. Macaulay, who was again
returned for Calne, visited Paris, eagerly enjoying a first taste
of foreign travel. On the 1st of March 1831 the Reform Bill
was introduced, and on the second night of the debate Macaulay
made the first of his reform speeches. It was, like all his speeches,
a success. Sir Robert Peel said of it that “portions were as
beautiful as anything I have ever heard or read.”
Encouraged by this first success, Macaulay now threw himself with ardour into the life of the House of Commons, while at the same time he continued to enjoy to the full the social opportunities which his literary and political celebrity had placed within his reach. He dined out almost nightly, and spent many of his Sundays at the suburban villas of the Whig leaders, while he continued to supply the Edinburgh Review with articles. On the triumph of Earl Grey’s cabinet, and the passing of the Reform Act in June 1832, Macaulay, whose eloquence had signalized every stage of the conflict, became one of the commissioners of the board of control, and applied himself to the study of Indian affairs. Giving his days to India and his nights to the House of Commons, he could only devote a few hours to literary composition by rising at five when the business of the house had allowed of his getting to bed in time on the previous evening. Between September 1831 and December 1833 he furnished the Review with eight important articles, besides writing his ballad on the Armada.
In the first Reform Parliament, January 1833, Macaulay took his seat as one of the two members for Leeds, which up to that date had been unrepresented in the House of Commons. He replied to O’Connell in the debate on the address, meeting the great agitator face to face, with high, but not intemperate, defiance. In July he defended the Government of India Bill in a speech of great power, and he was instrumental in getting the bill through committee without unnecessary friction. When the abolition of slavery came before the house as a practical question, Macaulay had the prospect of having to surrender office or to vote for a modified abolition, viz. twelve years’ apprenticeship, which was proposed by the ministry, but condemned by the abolitionists. He was prepared to make the sacrifice of place rather than be unfaithful to the cause to which his father had devoted his life. He placed his resignation in Lord Althorp’s hands, and spoke against the ministerial proposal. But the sense of the house was so strongly expressed as unfavourable that, finding they would be beaten if they persisted, the ministry gave way, and reduced apprenticeship to seven years, a compromise which the abolition party accepted; and Macaulay remained at the board of control.
While he was thus growing in reputation, and advancing his public credit, the fortunes of the family were sinking, and it became evident that his sisters would have no provision except such as their brother might be enabled to make for them. Macaulay had but two sources of income, both of them precarious—office and his pen. As to office, the Whigs could not have expected at that time to retain power for a whole generation; and, even while they did so, Macaulay’s resolution that he would always give an independent vote made it possible that he might at any moment find himself in disagreement with his colleagues, and have to quit his place. As to literature, he wrote to Lord Lansdowne (1833), “it has been hitherto merely my relaxation; I have never considered it as the means of support. I have chosen my own topics, taken my own time, and dictated my own terms. The thought of becoming a bookseller’s hack, of spurring a jaded fancy to reluctant exertion, of filling sheets with trash merely that sheets may be filled, of bearing from publishers and editors what Dryden bore from Tonson and what Mackintosh bore from Lardner, is horrible to me.” Macaulay was thus prepared to accept the offer of a seat in the supreme council of India, created by the new India Act. The salary of the office was fixed at £10,000, out of which he calculated to be able to save £30,000 in five years. His sister Hannah accepted his proposal to accompany him, and in February 1834 the brother and sister sailed for Calcutta.
Macaulay’s appointment to India occurred at the critical moment when the government of the company was being superseded by government by the Crown. His knowledge of India was, when he landed, but superficial. But at this juncture there was more need of statesmanship directed by general liberal principles than of a practical knowledge of the details of Indian administration. Macaulay’s presence in the council was of great value; his minutes are models of good judgment and practical sagacity. The part he took in India has been described as “the application of sound liberal principles to a government which had till then been jealous, close and repressive.” He vindicated the liberty of the press; he maintained the equality of Europeans and natives before the law; and as president of the committee of public instruction he inaugurated the system of national education.
A clause in the India Act 1833 occasioned the appointment of a commission to inquire into the jurisprudence of the Eastern dependency. Macaulay was appointed president of that commission. The draft of a penal code which he submitted became, after a revision of many years, and by the labour of many experienced lawyers, the Indian criminal code. Of this code Sir James Stephen said that “it reproduces in a concise and even beautiful form the spirit of the law of England, in a compass which by comparison with the original may be regarded as almost absurdly small. The Indian penal code is to the English criminal law what a manufactured article ready for use is to the materials out of which it is made. It is to the French code pénal, and to the German code of 1871, what a finished picture is to a sketch. It is simpler and better expressed than Livingston’s code for Louisiana; and its practical success has been complete.”
Macaulay’s enlightened views and measures drew down on him, however, the abuse and ill-will of Anglo-Indian society. Fortunately for himself he was enabled to maintain a tranquil indifference to political detraction by withdrawing his thoughts into a sphere remote from the opposition and enmity by which he was surrounded. Even amid the excitement of his early parliamentary successes literature had balanced politics in his thoughts and interests. Now in his exile he began to feel more strongly each year the attraction of European letters and European history. He wrote to his friend Ellis: “I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion astonishing to myself. I have never felt anything like it. I was enraptured with Italian during the six months which I gave up to it; and I was little less pleased with Spanish. But when I went back to the Greek I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was.” In thirteen months he read through, some of them twice, a large part of the Greek and Latin classics. The fascination of these studies produced their inevitable effect upon his view of political life. He began to wonder what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better to squander their intellect, their health and energy, on such subjects as those which most statesmen are engaged in pursuing. He was already, he says, “more than half determined to abandon politics and give myself wholly to letters, to undertake some great historical work, which may be at once the business and the amusement of my life, and to leave the pleasures of pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, and diseased stomachs to Roebuck and to Praed.”
In 1838 Macaulay and his sister Hannah, who had married Charles Trevelyan in 1834, returned to England. He at once entered parliament as member for Edinburgh. In 1839 he became secretary at war, with a seat in the cabinet in Lord Melbourne’s ministry. His acceptance of office diverted him for a time from prosecuting the plan he had already formed of a great historical work. But in less than two years the Melbourne
