William Herrick Macaulay, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather were ministers of religion, came of the famous family of John Macaulay, who, having a cure of souls at Inveraray, was visited by Johnson and Boswell on their tour. Zachary Macaulay was his great-uncle; Thomas Babington Macaulay and Lady Trevelyan, the mother of George and Robert Trevelyan, were his father's first cousins; and Rose Macaulay is his niece. Through his grandmother he was also connected, as his name recalls, with Robert Herrick. Almost the whole of his life was spent in the service of King's, of which he was successively Bursar, Tutor and Vice-Provost. He must be reckoned the last and amongst the greatest builders of the College from what it was under the Founder's Statutes into what it now is; the best Home Bursar and the best Tutor that recent generations have known. Macaulay was a man of remarkable character and powers, of a nearly infallible judgment both of intellect and of right feeling on all matters falling within the strict range of his attention, never untrue in the least degree to his own standards, and dealing with all according to his own honour and dignity.

He was a Wykehamist, in the first generation of the non-Etonian members of King's. Between school and Cambridge he spent a short period at the University of Durham, of which he was a Fellow. At King's he was one of the circle, there and at Trinity, of which Sidgwick and Henry Jackson were the leaders, and was an intimate of its outstanding members.