Man-Midwife, Male Feminist: The Life and Times of George Macaulay, M.D., Ph.D. (1716-1766)

Second Marriage; Jermyn Street, St. James. Catharine and her History: 1759-65

While children survived from his first marriage, George Macaulay continued to live as a widower for almost nine years. A more typical pattern for well-to-do young widowers involved early remarriage, but as we have seen, Macaulay was busy. In addition to his professional, literary, and philanthropic activities he had first two and then, tragically—after June 1753—one daughter to rear. But the last child of his first marriage, Catharine, also died in November 1758. What caused the deaths of his first wife and his daughters is anyone's guess. Despite the earlier introduction from Turkey of vaccination against smallpox by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, epidemics of that disease still ravaged the country. Pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis also took their toll. After or during the traditional period of a year's mourning following the death of his youngest child, however, Macaulay addressed his attentions to Miss Catharine Sawbridge of Olantigh, Wye, in Kent, a brilliant and charming woman fifteen years his junior. [See Plate 14: Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay.]

It seems likely that Catharine and George met as the result of George's connection with Charles Townshend. Townshend, we recall, had been among the subscribers who joined the board of governors of the lying-in hospital on 4 July 1752, and undoubtedly voted for Macaulay. Thereafter, Townshend continued to take an active role in the affairs of the hospital, for his name frequently appears among the governors present at the board's weekly and quarterly meetings. He had been elected to parliament as the member for Great Yarmouth in 1747, was attached to George Montegu Dunk, the second Earl of Halifax, and when, in 1748, Halifax became the head of the board of trade, Townshend took a post in that office. Thereafter, in 1755, he Page  204rose to become Lord of the Admiralty. His career continued to flourish. In 1756 Prime Minister Pitt had the Duke of Devonshire, then serving as the head of Treasury, appoint Townshend Treasurer of the Chamber. Though many perceived this appointment as too junior for a person of Townshend's manifest abilities, in 1757 he became a Privy Councilor. The year 1761 saw his appointment as Secretary at War, and in 1763 he became President of the Board of Trade. In 1765 he became Paymaster General, and on 2 August 1766, a month before his friend George Macaulay's death, he rose to the highest fiscal office of the kingdom, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer.[1]

Among Townshend's political allies was John Sawbridge, Catharine Sawbridge's brother. These two men, and perhaps George Macaulay as well as others, were members of a group who subsequently—if ironically in view of Townshend's almost single-handedly provoking the American Revolution—became known as the "Supporters of the Bill of Rights."[2] There were also Scottish connections between Macaulay and Townshend. In 1758, five years after Archibald Macaulay's third term as Lord Provost, Townshend had been granted the Freedom of the City, causa honoris, and the prestigious Select Club of Edinburgh, of which Archibald Macaulay was surely a member, suspended its own rules and elected him a member so that they that they might hear him speak.

We also recall that Caroline Campbell, coheir and eldest daughter of John Campbell, the second Duke of Argyll (Macaulay's first patron), and then wife of Francis Scott, the first Earl of Dalkeith, joined the board of governors of the lying-in hospital on 4 July 1752. After the earl's death, Lady Caroline married Townshend in 1755. An attractive scenario posits Macaulay, or at least a common interest in the lying-in hospital, as the link between the two. But given the tangle of the threads running through the skein of power, influence, and patronage exercised by the aristocracy and meritocracy of the era, it is more likely that these two already knew each other in other settings. It is, however, Page  205very probable—particularly in view of the intimate and personal nature of Macaulay's correspondence with Charles Townshend on the subject of his marriage to Catharine (see below)—that the Townshends in fact provided the initial link between Macaulay and his second wife.

Catharine Sawbridge (b. 1731) had received a private education, apparently acquiring much of her erudition as an autodidact particularly attracted to reading history. As she reports in the introduction to the first volume of her History of England, liberty was the theme that gripped her as she found it developed in histories of the Greek and Roman Republics.[3] Bridget Hill speculates that Catharine Sawbridge, who had lost her mother in 1733 and who had perhaps been neglected by a reclusive father, found a father figure in George Macaulay—a man 15 years her senior, and that may well be the case (105). Given Catherine's intelligence, good family, and good looks, it seems inconceivable to imagine that George Macaulay was her first suitor. When she married him, moreover, she was twenty-eight.

Colin C. Bendall's data with respect to first marriages in Gloucestershire suggest that between 1700 and 1750 the mean age for first marriages there was 25.01 years for females, with the preponderance of marriages occurring before age 28.[4] If the situation in Kent was similar, though Catharine Sawbridge's era would not yet have definitively tagged her with the label of spinster, she was hovering on the cusp of that designation. It may be that potential suitors were cowed by her intellect and her boredom with the usual "avocations of women" (Hays 2, 289, cited in Hill 9). Certainly a woman of her clearly formed and strongly held opinions would not gladly suffer fools or endure lickspittles, and her views on the outcomes of the usual education afforded her male contemporaries did not flatter those who had enjoyed its benefits. She observed that the general education of the English youth,

In this vitriolic vein she continues, describing the typical process and product of an English gentleman's education:

Though George Macaulay's education had in some respects paralleled the schema Catharine describes, his own unusual endowments and the happy circumstance of his having studied with the professors who trained him in Edinburgh and Padua had exempted him from fitting the profile Catharine sketches here. It is unthinkable that she would have married a man who did. She knew her own mind, and she knew her own value. She waited to marry until she found in George Macaulay a man she deemed worthy of her in intellect, character, and attitudes toward women—a partner, not a parent. Oona Chaplin when asked why she had married Charlie Chaplin—a man thirty years her senior—replied that she had done so principally because his character was already formed. She would not have to wait while he grew up nor worry about the shape of the outcome nor the crises of the process. Not improbably, Catharine Sawbridge found in Macaulay the same sort of mature reliability. His skirmishes with the Royal College of Physicians, moreover, provided ample evidence of the "independency" of his spirit.

Another factor in her decision may have been his financial security. Though we certainly do not intend to suggest that Catharine married George for his money—such an action would have been immeasurably beneath her—it would at the same time be naive to suppose that a concern for her financial well being played no role in their arrangements. Not only were such financial understandings customary, George Macaulay was all too familiar with the fatal vagaries of human existence, and he surely wanted to do what was in his power to protect her from them. Moreover, what we know of him suggests that he valued her independence—just as he had Leonora's. Accordingly, he saw to it that she would be financially independent of him, even before, if matters followed their natural course, he predeceased her. He settled on her £5000 at the time of their wedding at the Parish Church of Wye, 18 June 1760.[6] This is roughly the present equivalent of £300,000 or, as of 1 January Page  2082004, over $510,000.[7] From the time of her marriage, Catharine had the disposal of the annual interest on this sum for life.

Principally, we feel sure, Catharine Macaulay married George because she had fallen in love with—or at least had firmly committed to—a man whom she found worthy of her. We do not think a woman of her character would have done otherwise. Moreover, Catharine had found in George a committed devotee of women's causes. Beyond that, if Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay's second marriage (which her contemporaries predictably thought scandalous) to the much younger William Graham can be used as an index to her first, she followed her heart and chose exactly as she wished.

In allying himself with Catharine, George Macaulay had chosen for the second time an independent-minded woman of intelligence and breeding who had, like his first wife, been bereft of a mother in early childhood and privately educated and reared—perhaps in Catharine's case negligently—by a reclusive male relative. This pattern may reveal something about the qualities George Macaulay consciously or unconsciously sought in a mate: someone he could both partner and nurture. Whatever combination of conscious and subconscious intellectual and psychological considerations urged Catharine to marry George, his emotional motives in marrying her emerge clearly from the record. She fired his imagination, and his reason persuaded him that extraordinary happiness awaited him in their union. In a letter replying to his friend and patron, then privy counselor Charles Townshend, dated at Jermyn Street, June 17, 1760—the day before his wedding to Catharine—he writes:

"Turned of forty" George certainly was; in fact he was forty-four. But he looked forward to his new life with Catharine as eagerly as a youth in his twenties. An arresting detail appears in the comparative degree of happiness he anticipates in his second marriage. Perhaps he perceived in Catharine an even closer match of temperament, intellect, and interest than he had shared with Leonora. In any case, in his high expectations for life with Catharine, he was not disappointed. The foundation for this happiness rested partly on Catharine's character and on the care she took to do her part to make her marriage work. She seems to have been the mid-eighteenth century's prototype for the late twentieth-century professional woman. She was—or, encouraged by George's material and moral support, she became—perhaps the first of those laudable women, so admired in our own era, who successfully pursue a distinguished career, care for a husband, supervise a home and family, conduct an enviable social life within a brilliant circle of friends and acquaintances, and seem to manage superlatively all aspects of their demanding lives.

Catharine Macaulay's History of England, her other writings on political subjects, and her association with persons of enduring reputation in England included her among the luminaries of her era. She was an intimate friend of Elizabeth Montagu and her circle of "Blue Stockings" (women who invited men to serious literary coteries). Dr. Samuel Johnson was a guest at her table. Her eventual friendships with the heroes of the American and French Revolutions like George Washington and Jacques Brissot de Warville speak to the distinction of her career and acquaintance. Her successful conduct of domestic life so impressed some of her contemporaries that they point to her attention to the roles of wife and mother as a matter worthy of seemingly astonished note in their diaries and memoirs, and George Macaulay Page  210himself paid tribute to her domesticity. "You may think," Silas Nevill reports George Macaulay as having said to Richard Barron, "that Catherine from her application to study is not an attentive wife, but there never was a more affectionate wife, or more tender mother."[9]

After George's death an observer, signing himself "P.M." in "A Letter from a Gentleman in Town to his Friend in the Country concerning a celebrated fair Historian," and responding to the sort of stereotyping remarks that suggest women cannot be both feminine and accomplished reports:

Beyond Catharine's remarkable attention to ensuring domestic amity, part of the couple's happiness is also traceable to the careful forethought that George Macaulay gave to cultivating a condition that would result in a fulfilling life for both of them. Again writing to Townshend two weeks following his and Catharine's nuptials, he observes with evident pleasure: "I have been pretty much engaged lately or I would sooner have acknowledged the honour of your last. While you are anxious about the affairs of the State, I have been laying a foundation for domestic happiness, which I hope will last as long as my life."[11] Apparently it did.

Other documents attest to third-party views of the Macaulays' characters and domestic bliss. Of George, a few years after his death, an observer wrote Page  211that, "if he was not the first-born son of Apollo, [he] was the twin-brother of Benevolence...." Commenting on the relationship between George and Catharine, the same observer continues: "friendship must have shone fair in such hearts as theirs; sensibility, and what used to be understood by that sweet old-fashioned expression, good-nature, forming the ground-work, can we have too high an idea of the superstructure?"[12]

Several portraits exist that depict Catharine and several eyewitnesses reported their impressions of her (Hill 14-15). All agreed that she was tall. The childhood recollection of Alicia Lefanu calls her "plain...pale...and formal." Hill thinks that her sister-in-law Elizabeth Arnold's description of her in the Town and Country Magazine is the one most complete by the person who perhaps had the greatest opportunity to observe her (vol. 1.,1769, 92). We follow Hill's abridgement of Mrs. Arnold's description. Catharine Macaulay was "elegant in her manners, delicate in her person, and with features, if not perfectly beautiful, so fascinating in their expression, as deservedly to rank her face among the higher order of human countenances." Her shape was "slender and elegant; the contour of her face, neck, and shoulders, graceful. The form of her face was oval, her complexion delicate, and her skin fine; her hair of a mild brown, long and profuse; her nose between the Roman and the Grecian; her mouth small, her chin round...[and her eyes as] beautiful as imagination can conceive, full of penetration and fire, but their fire softened by the mildest beams of benevolence; their colour was a fine dark hazel, and their expression the indication of a superior soul." Doubtless, George Macaulay found his wife's appearance pleasing and her capacities impressive, but it surely did not occur to him that his new spouse was to become, in the words of Mary Wollstonecraft, "the woman of the greatest abilities that her country has ever produced."[13]

Though no portrait is known to exist of George, perhaps we can nevertheless gain some sense of his appearance from Sir George Chalmers' (1720-91) fine portrait of his father Archibald. This picture remained in the hands of the descendants of Archibald's daughter, Anne Macaulay Frazer, from its Page  212completion in 1760 until 1946. [See Plate 15: Archibald Macaulay in Lord Provost regalia.] At that time Major J. F. Fraser-Tytler, Archibald's thrice great-grandson and George's twice great-nephew, presented the painting to the Corporation of Edinburgh.[14] Judging from the reservation quoted above concerning George's not being "the first-born son of Apollo," perhaps his personal appearance was somewhat less striking than Archibald's. If the son took after his father, George may have carried more flesh than an Apollonian comparison could have borne. But, as we have already seen, the qualities of his character overshadowed any possible defect in his person.

Jermyn Street, St. James

Sometime after 1753 but no later than 1756 when his cousin Tobias Smollett wrote him at his new address, George Macaulay moved from Poland Street to more fashionable quarters he had purchased in Jermyn Street, and it was there that he and Catherine established their household. Correspondence dated at their residence sometimes named St. James and sometimes Jermyn Street; a look at the schematic map explains why. [See Plate 16: Location of George Macaulay's house on Jermyn Street.] After St. James Street was widened in the early eighteenth century, the Macaulay house was on the southeast corner of the intersection.

At this writing, a commercial block of buildings dating from 1904-05 stands on the site formerly occupied by number 39 Jermyn Street, and the neighboring house immediately to the south, number 64 St. James Street. In the 1750s and 60s, this neighborhood was a good deal more fashionable than Poland Street had been, and the location offered the Macaulays several advantages. The house stood near the popular coffee and chocolate houses in St. James Street. The famous White's Coffee House, owned by Robert Arthur, frequently played host to the discussions of what was arguably the most brilliant masculine conversational society ever to meet in Britain—gatherings that from time to time had included playwright John Gay, lexicographer Samuel Johnson, satirist and Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin Jonathan Swift, physician and wit George Arbuthnot and perhaps occasionally George Macaulay—though what we know of his Page  213and Catharine's social life suggests that he may have preferred to entertain at home. Nearby were the Ozindas Chocolate House, the Smyrna, the Hutched House Tavern, and St. James Coffee House.[15] The Macaulays' house was also an easy stroll from St. James Parish Church, Westminster as St. James, Piccadilly was then known. The church had been George's home parish every since his arrival in London, and he and Catharine regularly attended services there.

Also, and much less pleasantly, nearby stood the infamous St. James's Workhouse. Built on the site of Pawlett's burial ground where a medieval plague hospital had once been, the workhouse rejoiced in an address known alternately as Pest House Close or Little Gelding's Close. There all the poor of St. James parish who were over the age of six labored six days a week from sunrise until six P.M. in the summer and until sundown it the winter spinning with flax and wool (Sheppard 211). They were fed the pauper's diet of "porridge, boiled meat, bread, cheese, and beer" at three minutely regulated daily meals. Children under six were taught, at least in theory, to read, and on Sundays the poor, after attending divine services, were allowed out until half past eight. Woe betid any who were caught drunk or begging in the streets, however, for they were fined the lion's share of the pittance they earned. The parish of St. James contracted with a Mr. Mariot, Sheppard tells us, to [mis]manage the workhouse for £200 per year. By 1741, conditions in the workhouse had become utterly intolerable: no work was done, "the stench [was] hardly supportable" the inhabitants were "almost naked and the living going to bed with the dead" (211). The workhouse was closed, and it was seemingly not in operation when George Macaulay took up residence or when Catharine joined him.

By the summer of 1762, however, the numbers of the poor in St. James Parish had grown to 1100, and their relief was costing the parish between £6000-7000 per annum (212). An act of Parliament then allowed a new committee of the St. James Vestry, called the "governors of the poor" to assume responsibility for finding ways to relieve their poverty. This body reopened the workhouse and set the poor to tasks like silk weaving and making quilted petticoats. George Macaulay's charitable impulses and proximity Page  214surely disposed him to answer at least some of the inevitable calls on his talents and training that a reopened workhouse and subsequent charitable hospital must have entailed.

Doubtless Macaulay maintained his surgery in the house at the corner of Jermyn and St. James Street. It seems that following George Macaulay's death in 1766, Catharine soon moved out, and the house then was occupied by a society physician and baronet Sir George Baker, who practiced there until 1809 (547).

While the Macaulays continued in residence, however, a socially prominent, politically active, and intellectually brilliant company gathered frequently at their table. Diarists and commentators have provided us with accounts that give us glimpses into that private world. Dr. Samuel Johnson famously reported to James Boswell a conversation on the subject of "levelling"—of social equality—that took place at the Macaulay table. Dr. Johnson, doubting the practical sincerity of Catharine's libertarian sentiments, suggested that Mrs. Macaulay invite her footman to join the company at table. To Boswell, he scoffed that she, like other "levellers" always seemed to want to level up, but never down. "She has never liked me since," Boswell reports Johnson as saying.[16]

Other guests at the Macaulay table during this period included Whigs like Thomas Hollis, Sylas Neville, and Richard Baron. Thomas Hollis frequently visited the Macaulays and in February 1764, reports Catharine "as conversing agreeably about her History, Politics & Virtu."[17] From Silas Neville's diary we gain an impression of Catharine Macaulay that Hollis' brother Timothy shared after she was widowed. Timothy Hollis found her "most agreeable," but, not surprisingly, he also found her mind occupied with the same sort of historical and political speculations that filled her writings. Though she would play card games and engage in small talk, the Page  215subjects that really interested her were never far from the forefront of her attention. This absorption Timothy Hollis found "odd" in her "but not unbecoming because uncommon."[18]

Her brother, John Sawbridge, who was to become one of George Macaulay's executors, undoubtedly visited the Macaulays frequently. Charles Townshend and Lady Dalkeith, both of whom remained friends and patrons of George Macaulay, surely called, as undoubtedly did the Bathursts who lived nearby and whose relatives had developed the neighborhood and probably had earlier owned the property that the Macaulays occupied.

From 1759 forward, Elizabeth Montagu, one of the leaders of the renowned "Blue Stockings," took Catharine Macaulay under her wing. Exercising her considerable influence on Catharine's behalf, Montagu wrote Lord Lyttleton that she "would wish Mr. Lyttleton to consider Mrs. Macaulay as a protégée of the Archbishop of Canterbury."[19]

Conversation and intellectual pursuits did not, however, consume the Macaulays' social calendar entirely. Evenings at the opera and the theater also certainly appeared on their social schedule. In May of 1760, Signor Vanneschi staged Baldassare Galluppi's opera Il Ciro Riconosciuto at Covent Garden for the benefit of the Lying-In Hospital. George was surely there, and it seems likely that he would have squired his prospective bride. Another theatrical benefit for the hospital, a performance of Every Man in his Humour at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on December 18, 1761, [cited above] probably found the Macaulays in attendance, as did a performance at the same theater of The Wonder on October 17, 1765 (LMB, WB, Oct. 4, 1765). The Macaulays' life together was devoted, full, and rewarding.

George's Role in Catharine's Development as Writer

Some time during the early years of her marriage, Catharine's amateur interest in history turned professional. While this might very well have happened whether or not she had married George, we have very good reason to believe that George Macaulay nurtured, perhaps even planted, in her mind the idea of becoming the first female historian in Britain.

As a highly educated member of the literati who had enjoyed the benefit of some of the finest instruction Europe had to offer, George Macaulay could hardly have avoided acquiring not only the erudition but also something of the pedagogical acumen to help Catharine develop and perhaps systematize her already remarkable talents as an autodidact. If he offered her advice concerning her practice of writing and perhaps served, in the early stages of her career, as editor, as we feel confident he did, such support must have strengthened both Catharine's resolve and her confidence in her own ability to in fact fulfill the daunting goal she set herself. Early scoffers imagined that George Macaulay had ghostwritten the first volume of Catharine's history.[20] Not only do the seven subsequent volumes, six of which were written after George died, and her many other publications give the lie to such nonsense, it is also absolutely unthinkable that either of the Macaulays would for a moment have countenanced such a fraud.

George was rightly proud of Catharine's accomplishments. He had married, as he thought, a prodigy, and he wanted the world to value her at his informed estimate of her worth, not to credit her with some specious and reflected glory. To confirm that estimate, he and Catharine were particularly interested in the reaction to Catharine's achievement of another of George's kinsmen, the celebrated historian David Hume, whose conservative political views differed fundamentally from Catharine's. Accordingly, at Hume's request, the Macaulays had dispatched to him a copy of the first volume of Catharine's History on its publication in 1763. After waiting expectantly for Hume's acknowledgement of the book's receipt and some indication of his opinion of its contents but receiving neither, at length George wrote his renowned cousin a delicate note of inquiry:

The tone of the letter suggests that Macaulay's relationship with his cousin, if not intimate, was at least close and cordial enough to express without patronage familial pride in Hume's renown abroad. Further, the note hints with George's characteristic tact that both the degree of the men's connection and their earlier discussion of Catharine's then forthcoming book mandated a reasonably prompt response from Hume. Hume soon answered as cordial kinship relations demanded, writing from Paris on March 29 to thank Catharine for the book, and "for the pleasure your performance has given me." He also praises the "obliging manner" in which Catharine speaks of him "even when opposing" his sentiments.[22] The differences between them were, however, fundamental and finally irresolvable, and after George Macaulay's death their professional exchanges became increasingly rancorous. Catharine was firmly republican and Hume unswervingly monarchist. Despite their disagreements, nonetheless, a later document suggests that Hume, though sharing some of the patriarchal and misogynistic biases of his age, was at least willing to admit Catharine into the fellowship of eminent historians. Writing to the Reverend Hugh Blair in 1776, Hume says:

Beyond George Macaulay's leading cheers, however, and aside from the self-evident encouragement and the assurances he must have offered about her capacity to become a historian, we can only speculate about the specific sorts of help that he may have given Catharine. There do, however, exist at least two modest clues to help inform that speculation. Writing in 1766 to William Williams, a young customs officer who seems to have benefited from George's friendship and patronage, Macaulay offers him this advice about practicing writing: "Habituate yourself to write letters, ev[en to?] imaginary persons on imaginary su[bjects?]. [It] is a very necessary accomplishment [and with] use, as in all arts, will tend to improvement."[23] The tone of this letter and of others to Williams that we shall discuss more fully below is at once paternal and magisterial. The advice suggests that Macaulay understood what many would-be authors don't, that writers regularly write and that, in writing, they build a repertoire of skills for addressing a variety of compositional problems.

While Catharine Macaulay was no Galatea and George no Pygmalion, his systematic education in languages, philosophy, and medicine, his background as a teacher of midwifery, and his own experience as a reader, editor, and reviewer qualified him ideally to offer Catharine suggestions for planning her studies, organizing her ideas, and writing about them. He may also have had something to do with her mastering the details of English grammar if Mary Delany's report concerning Catharine's command of grammatical principles is true. Bridget Hill cites Delany as saying that Catharine was Page  219"virtually ignorant" of those principles "until she was thirty years old, and now all her productions go to press uncorrected."[24] Of course, Catharine turned thirty just over a year after she married George.

The Death of Archibald

The foregoing portrait of Archibald Macaulay in his Lord Provost of Edinburgh's garb seems to represent a vigorous man in his prime. Yet the portrait was apparently begun in the year of Archibald's death, 1760, and, judging by the portrait's legend, "Archibald Macaulay Lord Provost of Edinburgh obit 1760," was finished posthumously. So even this year, otherwise auspicious in its promise of happiness for George, did not remain untinged by sorrow.

Archibald died November 4. His will, probated the following January 7, names George, his only surviving son, as executor and heir. Archibald's estate, at this period, however, proved to have a negative balance, and as appears in the text of the "testament dative and inventory" of Archibald's assets and liabilities, George's generosity had been keeping his father afloat financially—probably since Archibald's last term of office as Lord Provost had ended in 1758. George had loaned his father money against unsecured notes—no doubt understanding that the loans could not be repaid. George shrewdly guessed that he might not be the only person to whom Archibald was indebted, so when he agreed to serve as his father's executor, he did so only under a proviso that would clear him from responsibility for his father's debts beyond the value of Archibald's estate if his father owed money, and entitle him to receive the residue if there were in the estate a positive balance.

The "testament dative and inventory" gives the cash value of Archibald's estate, after the sale of his household goods, at £176.14, sterling or £2120.16 in Scottish money, including the value of monies owing him—largely unpaid salary as Lord Conservator—less his debts at £279.14.10 sterling or £3575.6.0 in Scottish money.[25] As the difference was relatively modest, we may suppose that George settled the debts to preserve his father's honor.

Archibald's deputy in Campvere, Charles Stewart, succeeded Archibald as Lord Conservator of the Scots Privileges. William P. Anderson reports that, "at his death Lord Provost Macaulay was interred in his own ground on the west side of the Covenanters' Prison, the next enclosure to Professor Black's Ground." This is accurate. Anderson continues, however, "No inscription exists to the Provost's memory, but a tablet records a daughter of his, and also a grandchild...."[26] Contrary to Anderson's report, the same tablet does memorialize the elder Macaulay as well, for we located and photographed it. The memorial, which is mounted on the back wall of the cemetery, bears an epitaph that reads: "Provost M'Aulay/ Mary M'Aulay His daughter died/ 23 June 1737/ John Buchanan of Leny/ Grandchild died 10 May 1739." It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that Mary, who was only sixteen at her death, was John Buchanan's mother. It seems more likely that he was the offspring of Carola Jr. We have not been able to discover when George's mother Carola died or where she was interred. [See Plate 17: Macaulay Monument, Edinburgh.]