
Despite almost a decade and a half on Macintosh’s archival trail, new discoveries continue to take me by surprise. I have spent some time recently working through material at the National Archives relating to Macintosh’s time as a counterrevolutionary spy in Bern in the 1790s. Although it will be some time before I am able to write about this period (in the chronology of the book, I am still in 1780!), I have been keen to gather as many sources as I can for this phase of his life, so that I have a better sense of what I will be dealing with when the time comes. What took me by surprise in this material, most particularly, was a letter sent by Macintosh to his Foreign Office contact, George Canning, in February 1799. The previous year, Macintosh had fled from Bern when Switzerland was invaded by France, and had taken up residence in Stuttgart.

Perhaps conscious that his value to the counterrevolutionary movement was waning, and (as ever) complaining of ill health and insufficient funds, Macintosh proposed yet another reinvention in his personal and professional life. His letter to Canning was, in effect, a request for a favour. Could Canning pull some strings, Macintosh wondered, to have him assigned to Lord Elgin‘s (he of the Parthenon sculptures infamy) new embassy to Constantinople? Macintosh imagined that his particular combination of knowledge and experience would be valuable to Elgin: “It is possible, & even very probable,” he told Canning, “that my knowledge of the British concerns, relation, & future views with Asia, Africa, and the Levant in general, might prove occasionally useful to his Lordship”.
In anticipation of an affirmative response, Macintosh planned to leave Stuttgart for Erlangen or Nuremberg, which were “upon the ordinary high road to Vienna”, so that, presumably, he would be better-placed to make an onward journey. I know from other sources that Macintosh did make it to Nuremberg, but his hopes of joining Elgin’s embassy clearly came to nothing; he was still in Germany, in Offenbach, in November 1801.
In some respects, this episode is entirely in keeping with Macintosh’s modus operandi, yet it still took me by surprise; his appetite for reinvention still present, even in his early 60s. Given how minutely some periods of Macintosh’s life are detailed in surviving sources, I find the obscurity of his final dozen-or-so years tricky to analyse and narrate. Each newly encountered source for this period is, therefore, particularly valuable in providing some sense of his trajectory from counterrevolutionary spy to purportedly penurious exile in Eisenach.