Many European men of letters in the nineteenth century, and in earlier times, were also men of political action. While Edward Gibbon’s parliamentary career was lackluster at best, Macaulay’s was eventful and consequential. He was one of his era’s most eloquent parliamentary speakers, twice served as a government minister, and participated in many important debates and divisions – on the abolition of slavery, the Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and many other campaigns, including unsuccessful ones, such as the early effort to repeal Jewish disabilities. To his contemporaries he was above all the famous author, but also a prominent parliamentarian, in addition to his significant public career in India. Moreover, Macaulay’s view of historical progress buttressed his Whig politics, just as his political and practical experience informed his scholarly outlook. He praised Charles James Fox’s and James Mackintosh’s historical works on James II because they wrote from practical experience, and not just as antiquaries. Similarly, he praised Gibbon, whose success as a historian was at least partially based on his observations as a militia officer and as a member of the House of Commons. No doubt he considered himself in similar fashion.

In a well-known study, Joseph Hamburger described Macaulay as a trimmer: in other words, as a politician who sought compromises which would help find the balance between continuity and change, and who attempted to manage and moderate crises. Macaulay, according to Hamburger, feared the tendency to oscillate between despotism, represented by the Tories, and anarchy, represented by the radicals. As far as this approach was Whig, he was a Whig. William Thomas, however, disagrees with Hamburger’s thesis, claiming Macaulay was not committed enough as a politician to take such a position actively and intentionally. In fact, claims Thomas, he was relatively diffident regarding political action, and turned to moderate Whiggism as the political creed which best answered his outlook. Furthermore, he was not particularly interested in daily practical politics. Macaulay is often viewed as a typical Victorian Whig, but as we have already noted, there was no such thing, and there were many varieties of Whiggism. To a certain extent he might be seen as belonging to the tradition of the Foxite Whigs. These were not democrats, but rather viewed themselves as aristocratic parliamentary trustees of the popular interest.