Married Life—Captive to Duty

Throughout their 32 years of marriage Zachary Macaulay spent a great deal of time separated from Selina. It was mainly anti-slavery business that kept him in London when the family were at Rothley, Bristol, or the south coast, where the Macaulays habitually took a house in the summer months. He travelled a number of times to France and it was on one of these occasions that Selina's alarm showed when they were out of contact with each other. ‘I hope it will please God’, she wrote in May 1814, ‘that you never again will be called away from me in this manner, so distanced that there can be no communication by post. It is now Saturday and I have not heard a word and you in another kingdom’. He was in fact on a delegation to Paris negotiating the French abolition of the slave trade as part of the peace treaty between Britain and France and therefore hardly cast adrift from diplomatic protection. Nonetheless Selina would have been all too familiar with current perceptions of a country which had passed through revolution and had been at war with Britain for much of the last two decades. She had some justification for her nervousness—the following year would see the return, albeit briefly, of Napoleon. Macaulay's full description of Paris in a letter several days later somewhat modified Selina's opinion of the city and despite the anxiety she felt, she told him ‘]I[could not but rejoice at any prospect of success in your mission’.