Macaulay was the son of the Scottish-born Rev. Aulay Macaulay, Vicar of Rothley, Leics.,, who had been appointed to the living by his brother-in-law, Thomas Babington MP. Colin Macaulay also had close links to Leicester through his mother, Ann Heyrick, daughter of John Heyrick, a long-serving own Clerk of Leicester. Though the exact details of his birth seem to be unrecorded, Macaulay was baptised at Rothley in 1800, and was educated at Rugby School. In 1831 he became partner in a firm of solicitors at Leicester. Under his two year presidency of the Leicester Lit. and Phil. he oversaw the completion of the Society’s transfer of its museum collections to the Leicester Corporation in 1847, the Society’s first meeting in what he described as the Society’s “own meeting room” within the new Town Museum on New Walk in January 1849, and the official opening of the Museum in June 1849 No Presidential Address is recorded but he read papers on aspects of English history to ordinary meetings of the Society. He died in 1853 at Knighton Lodge, Leicester, and was buried at Rothley.
Biography: G. Le G. Norgate, (rev. Emma Major): Oxford Dictionary of Biography entry for his father, Rev. Aulay Macaulay; F.B. Lott: Centenary Book of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society (Leicester, 1935)