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Prophet_051-100.indd 65 3/2/12 10:28 PM DEFENCE AND DEFIANCE She has been blamed as an historian whose partiality for republicanism is too marked. But how could she have avoided partiality while depicting the tyrannical excesses that signalled the ministries of the Buckinghams, the Lauds, and the Straffords? Her partiality in favour of that system speaks highly of both her spirit and her intellect . Partiality for characters alone dishonours the historian.... Respect for the sacred rights that nature has granted to mankind is what distinguishes this history and places it well above that ofHume, whose fawning courtier spirit often alters or effaces the colours of truth.... Madame Macaulay has had the courage to ... go off the beaten track that other historians have followed, to open up a new path, to censure the servile principles ofHume, to defY the body of public opinion he had managed to captivate.... And now I have but one wish: that her History be translated into French. 171 8 DEFENCE AND DEFIANCE The change in political climate which took place between the 176os and the 178os is well illustrated by earlier French reactions to republican interpretations of the English revolution. The journal Encyclopedique, not the least liberal of ancien-regime periodicals, refused in its highly laudatory review of Hume's Stuarts in 1760 to go into any detail concerning the most guilty activities of Cromwell and his hot-brained parliamentarians: "Our readers would shudder if the bounds of this journal allowed us to place before their eyes portraits depicting some of the features of these tyrants." 172 Nor is it easy to find at this time in France a very much more favourable opinion of the English Protector and his Puritan sup171 . Journal du Licee de Londres ou Tableau de l'etat present des sciences et des arts en Angleterre, Paris, No. 1,January 1784, pp. 33-34- A resident of London at this time, Brissot was personally acquainted with Catherine Macaulay. A letter of 30January 1784 sent by her to his Newman Street address indicates that discussions concerning the translation ofsome of her work into French were already taking place (Archives Nationales, 446 AP2). 172. June q6o, IV. 25. Prophet_051-100.indd 66 3/2/12 10:28 PM BEFORE 1789 porters. The hostility expressed by Bossuet in the seventeenth century toward these fiendish regicides is still very much alive a century later. Rousseau speaks of Cromwell as irredeemably vile and perhaps best sums up the general view: "What has never yet been seen," he wrote in 1751, "is a hypocrite turning into a good man: one might reasonably have attempted the conversion of Cartouche , but never would a wise man have undertaken that of Cromwell."173 Some further idea of the Protector's reputation in France as the most evil of men may be had from the fact that Crebillon found himself able to use parts of the first two acts of an abandoned tragedy on Cromwell in his Catilina.174 An unsuccessful tragedy, Cromwel, by Antoine Maillet-Duclairon, was in fact performed by the Comediens Franc;:ais inJune 1764, and depicts the prevailing view of the Protector as a murderer and usurper. The last two lines of the play, significantly, are spoken by the heroic General Monk: Et montrons aux Sujets que les premieres Loix Sont d'aimer la Patrie & de servir les Rois.175 [And let us show our subjects that thefirst ofall laws Is to love our country and to serve our kings.] The youthful poet Franc;:ois de Neufchateau in a work of 1766 also displays this classic reaction to the leading figures in Stuart history . Charles I is seen as an "unfortunate and innocent" prince.176 Cromwell, on the other hand, is looked upon as the supreme hypocrite: Personne mieux que lui sous l'air de la candeur N'a de ses grands desseins voile la profondeur I 73. Riponse de].-). Rousseau au Roi de Pologne, Due de Lorraine, in Oeuvres completes de].J. Rousseau, Paris, I852, I. 492. I74· See Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, XXIV. 359· 1 75. Cromwel, tragedie en cinq actes et en vers. Par M. Du Clairon. Representee pour Ia premiere fois par les Comediens Franc;:ais Ordinaires du Roi, Je 7juin I 764, Paris, I 764. The play closed after the fifth performance. I 76. Lettre de Charles f er, Roi d 'Angleterre, de la Maison de Stuart ason fils le prince de Galles retire en France, par M. Franc;:ois de...

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