Today marks this blog’s 14th birthday. A great deal has happened since my first post in 2012, when I was just beginning to figure out who William Macintosh was and how interesting (and challenging) it might be to piece together the story of his life. Thanks to the largess of the British Academy, I have been working full time on my book since the beginning of September and have managed to make the kind of progress that I know would almost certainly be impossible under other circumstances. As ever, however, there is still a long way to go, but I am beginning to sense a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel (or at least the tunnel that leads to a first complete draft of my book; there will doubtless be another long tunnel that leads to a revised and shortened version suitable to submit to the press!).

I have recently begun work on the book’s tenth chapter, which follows a decade in Macintosh’s life from financial failure in London in 1783, through personal reinvention as a gentleman farmer in the rural hinterland of Avignon and the tragic suicide of his son, to the advent of the French Revolution and the eventual seizure of his property as a bien national. I am looking forward (albeit trepidatiously) to tackling this chapter, since it concerns the period of Macintosh’s life that is currently the most obscure to me. Part of the mystery derives from the fact that most of the archival sources are (understandably) written in French and therefore take me much longer to process and make sense of than English-language sources.

One episode of Macintosh’s time in France that I am particularly looking forward to unravelling is his friendship with Leonor de Almeida Portugal, the poet and painter whom Macintosh knew as the Countess Oeynhausen. Leonor, Marquesa de Alorna, led a fascinating life that rivals Macintosh for interest and intrigue. Indeed, so compelling is her story that it will be coming to Netflix later this year as a six-part Portuguese-language biographical series made by Ukbar Filmes and RTP, with Sara Matos in the lead role.

Looking ahead to next year and this blog’s fifteenth birthday, I should by then have submitted the book manuscript and will be waiting (again with trepidation) for the arrival of the reviewers’ reports. Perhaps then I can start writing the script for the six-part Netflix series!

Today is International Women’s Day and a good time to discuss the forgotten work that went into making the French translation of Macintosh’s Travels, published in Paris as Voyages en Europe, Asie et en Afrique (1786). Although the translation was (and is) typically attributed to Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the reality is rather more complicated and interesting. It has long been known that Brissot’s wife, Félicité, was responsible (either alone or in collaboration with her husband) for a number of translations ordinarily attributed to him. The question of whether Félicité had undertaken, or assisted with, the translation of Macintosh’s book is one that I have only recently been able to answer, thanks to the digitised records of the archive of the Paris book guild, the Chambre syndicale de la librairie et imprimerie de Paris.

In April 1785, Voyages was registered with the guild and subsequently issued with a permission tacite (tacit permission), allowing it to be published and distributed. As part of the registration process, the book’s translator was named. Here, the register took me by surprise: not only was the translation not Brissot’s, it was not Félicité’s either. The real translator was, in fact, Félicité’s teenage sister, Marie-Anne, known in the family as Nancy.

At the time the translation was undertaken (somewhere between the autumn of 1783 and the spring of 1784), Nancy was living in London with her sister and brother-in-law, who had relocated there from France in order to pursue Brissot’s dream of establishing a new literary and philosophical society, the Lycée de Londres. At this time, Brissot was busily engaged in various publishing ventures, including the six-part periodical Tableau de la situation actuelle des Anglois dans les Indes Orientales. Brissot had encountered Macintosh’s book as part of the wider research that supported the composition of the Tableau, and decided at some point in 1783 that a full-scale French translation was required as a supplement of sorts to the Tableau. Félicité, who might ordinarily have performed the literary labour of translation was occupied with a different task: translating and adapting Oliver Goldsmith’s An History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son (1764), subsequently published in Paris in 1786 as Lettres philosophiques et politiques sur l’histoire de l’Angleterre. The task of translating Travels was, therefore, taken on by Nancy, in the year she turned sixteen.

Travels was a long book (around 150,000 words) and full of references to places and people with whom Nancy was probably unfamiliar. This was not, then, an insignificant undertaking, but it would have been done with the support of Félicité and in close consultation with Brissot, who took on a more editorial role in the production of Voyages—supplementing the book with a preface and footnote commentary, as well as emending the text in some places, expanding it in others, and clarifying it elsewhere. Even with support, Nancy’s task was substantial and challenging, but she clearly possessed the skill and capacity to do it. Brissot would later tell his Swiss publishers, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, that he was très content with they way the translation had turned out.

Nancy’s subsequent life was eventful, but obscure in the historiography. She went on to marry Edme-Pierre Aublay, lived for a time in Philadelphia, ran a small boarding school (first on Cherry Street in Birmingham and then on Russel Square in London), endured the tragic death of her son, Francis (or François), an undergraduate student at the University of Oxford, corresponded with Joseph Banks, dedicated a book of religious instruction to her grand nephews, Felix and Eugene, invoking their learned grandfather, Jacques-Pierre, found herself one day captivated by the religious writing of Sir Matthew Hale, and died on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris in December 1839, aged seventy-three. She was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery.

Nancy’s labour on Voyages would have remained entirely invisible were it not for one line in the registers of the Paris book guild. I’m just glad I found it!

1784 was a particularly unfortunate year in the life of Jacques-Pierre Brissot. It would see him imprisoned twice: once in London (over unpaid printer’s bills) and once Paris (over his alleged involvement in the production of libellous pamphlets). It was also the year that he, possibly in collaboration with his wife, Félicité, completed the French translation of Macintosh’s Travels. In attempting to understand the events of that year, I was curious to know where it was in London that Brissot had been incarcerated. Most secondary sources identify it simply as a “debtors’ prison”, of which there were several in London at the time. Brissot, in his Mémoires, does not specify the name or location of the prison, but notes that, apart from the bars on the window, his surroundings were almost domestic: “I could have believed I was still at home [j’aurais pu me croire encore chez moi].”

The closest to a contemporary source I have been able to find—a brief biography of Brissot, written by Joel Barlow to accompany his 1794 English translation of one of Brissot’s works—is a little more specific, describing the prison as “a lock-up house in Gray’s Inn Lane.”

Although Barlow’s sketch of Brissot’s life has been described as “fanciful” by Robert Darnton in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), the specificity of the information with respect to Brissot’s incarceration perhaps lends it some credibility. Rather than a debtors’ prison per se, the lock-up on Gray’s Inn Lane (now Gray’s Inn Road) was a so-called sponging-house (sometimes spunging), where debtors were held temporarily in the expectation that a quick agreement could be reached with their creditors—see Margot Finn,The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (2003), 116–17. This was the case for Brissot, who, thanks to the financial assistance of friends and his mother-in-law, was able to extricate himself after a few days.

If we consider Barlow to be accurate, the lock-up in question was a public house, the Pied Bull (or Py’d or Pyed). In 1786, not long after Brissot’s incarceration, the pub was insured by its then landlord, John Smith. We can, perhaps, suppose that Smith was also in charge at the time of Brissot’s arrest in May 1784. Obviously none of this really matters, and certainly has no particular bearing on Brissot’s translation of Travels, but I am always curious about how we know what we know about the past, and that it seems that, in the context of the first of Brissot’s 1784 imprisonments, what we know (or, at least, what appears in the secondary literature) is a little imprecise. Rather than disappear down that rabbit hole myself (I am sure there are archival records that could definitively identify the site of Brissot’s incarceration), I hope this post might encourage others better placed that me to throw some light on that question.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have been trying for some time to understand the journey of one of Macintosh’s letters from George Washington, originally received by him in Avignon in 1788. When, twenty-two years later, Aaron Burr met Macintosh in Eisenach, Burr recorded in his journal that the letter from Washington was “now in the museum at Weimar.”

In late 2024, with the kind assistance of Dominik Hünniger, I traced the letter to the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar. Subsequent investigation revealed that the letter had previously been part of Goethe’s large collection of autographs and, more recently, had been on display a number of times at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv as one of its archival treasures.

Two questions remained: 1) How did the letter come into Goethe’s possession? and 2) In which museum had it been displayed when Macintosh and Burr discussed it in 1810?

The answer to the first question comes (at least in part) from a letter to Goethe from his secretary-librarian Friedrich Theodor David Kräuter. Dated 28 August 1818, Goethe’s sixty-ninth birthday, Kräuter’s letter enclosed a much-wished-for addition to Goethe’s autograph collection: “the authentic signature of the great liberator of the New World [die beygelegte ächte Unterschrift des großen Befreyers der neuen Welt].” Although Kräuter does not mention Washington by name, it is highly likely that this is who he was referring to. Kräuter goes on to explain that he stumbled upon the letter containing Washington’s signature simply by chance.

Detail of Kräuter’s letter to Goethe. Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, 28/79, Bl 533-534.

In attempting to answer the second unresolved question, I received some very helpful advice from Sabine Schäfer at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv. She was able to point me towards a source—Goethes “Bildergalerie”: Die Anfänge der Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar (2002)—that details a short-lived museum that was established in 1809 in the Fürstenhaus on Fürstenplatz (now Platz der Demokratie) where the family of Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach lived. The four-room museum displayed a variety of artworks and, so it would seem, Macintosh’s letter from Washington.

The museum closed in January 1811 and the paintings (and the letter) were moved to the ducal library. The following year, one of Goethe’s friends and colleagues, Christian Gottlob von Voigt, who, with Goethe, was responsible for overseeing the library, wrote to him to explain that he had long intended to give the Washington letter to Goethe, but had been unable to find it among the chaos of his papers. Months later, Voigt was still unable to locate it.

So, now we know (or can be reasonably confident) that Macintosh’s letter from Washington was on display in the museum in the Fürstenhaus in 1810, that it was subsequently transferred to the ducal library, thereafter was lost or mislaid, then found its way to Kräuter, before becoming a memorable gift for Goethe’s sixty-nineth birthday.

As is often the case with this project, answering one question inevitably raises others. How did the letter come to be in the museum in the first place? Did Macintosh donate it to von Voigt directly? Did he hope that the letter might secure him some social capital? As ever, there is more digging to do!

For more than a dozen years, I have been compiling evidence of the ownership and readership of Macintosh’s book. It is only now, in turning to write about the book’s reception in ernest, and to think in connected ways about who encountered Travels and what they made of it, that the underrepresentation (or what I presume to be the underrepresentation) of women readers becomes particularly obvious. While I have previously identified women who owned the book (like Gustava Eleonora Lindahl [née Gjörwell]) or who sold it (like Catherine Finn), it was only yesterday that—for the first time—I encountered definitive evidence of a woman who actually read it. This was Luise von Göchhausen, chief lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia, patron of Weimar Classicism.

von Göchhausen read Travels (in English) in 1784, having borrowed a copy of the book from Johann Gottfried Herder in the late summer. Others in Herder’s circle were also queuing up to borrow it, most notably Karl Ludwig von Knebel, to whom Herder promised the book just as soon as it was returned. Although we do not know what von Göchhausen made of the book, her reading is important evidence of the book’s reach and circulation, particularly beyond Germanophone scholars of human difference, who were the principal readers of the 1782 London edition in the German-speaking states. As ever, there is more digging to do, and more stories to be uncovered.

2026 will, with a bit of luck, be the year I finish the book (or, at least, the year I submit the completed manuscript to the Press). I am working towards a Christmas submission deadline, and January therefore marks the beginning of the end of a period of research that has kept me fascinated, compelled, and a little frazzled for at least the last fifteen years. Although I still have some archival and library research to do this year, my main focus is on completing the book’s remaining chapters, of which I have two-and-a-bit long empirical chapters to write, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Since starting a period of research leave in September (praise be to the British Academy for the award of the Donald Winch Fund Fellowship), I have finished the chapter dealing with Macintosh’s experiences in India, and have written two thirds of the chapter dealing with the authorship, reading, reception, and translation of his book. This has been a virtually all-consuming task and I have unfortunately found little time to share work in progress on the blog.

As ever, the process of writing is a combination of analysis and discovery. As much as I refine my understanding of Macintosh’s world in the process of writing, so that world becomes richer and more complex as a result of the connections, realisations, and surprises that inevitably come or are revealed through the process of writing up research. The net effect of this is that the end point of each chapter only ever seems to recede, like the phenomenon of false summits in mountaineering. That is, for me, part of the excitement that comes from research, but it is also a source of anxiety as the thought that I am likely already beyond the contracted word length for the book makes me dread the unpleasant task of cutting that will need to take place in the future.

I began writing in earnest more than five years ago, in November 2020, in a small gap between lockdowns and homeschooling. In many ways, the book has been something of a refuge from a turbulent and upsetting world in that time and while I am very eager to be finished, I suspect I will miss my safe space when the work is finally done. Right, 342 days till Christmas. Let’s crack on.

This week I have had the privilege of working in three archives in Vatican City and Rome: the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, the Archivio Storico della Segreteria di Stato, and the Archivio di Stato di Roma. This has been a trip long in the planning, primarily due to the somewhat involved admissions processes for the two archives in the Vatican, but has been very worthwhile. I have learned a great deal about Macintosh’s time in Italy in 1790 and 1791, I have a better understanding of his relationship with Francesco Saverio de Zelada, the Cardinal Secretary of State, and I have confirmed that Macintosh did, indeed, meet with Pope Pius VI.

In addition to what I’ve learned about Macintosh, I have also gained some insight into the practicalities involved in using these three archives that are not necessarily obvious or well advertised. I thought it might be helpful, therefore, to note some of these down. These are reflections and observations based only on my very limited experience and from working with quite a narrow range of material, but I hope they will be helpful to those interested in working in the same archives.

Archivio Apostolico Vaticano

This is the largest and most famous of the archival collections contained in the Vatican and holds something in the region of 85 linear kilometres of material, much of which is stored in the “bunker” built beneath the Cortile della Pigna. As a first-time user, it can be difficult to comprehend the scope of the collection and how to identify relevant material. The archive does have a good overview document, Indice dei Fondi e relativi mezzi di descrizione e di ricerca, which showcases the overall structure of the archive and indicates which indexes describe the content of individual sections. This document is also important for subsequently ordering material, since it lists the abbreviated titles of collections that are used in the online ordering system.

For Anglophone researchers, an indispensable guide is the 1998 book Vatican archives: an inventory and guide to documents of the Holy See, edited by Francis X. Blouin, Jr. The value of this work is that it explains what is actually contained in each section of the collection and provides additional references to scholarly work on those collections. By triangulating these various sources and guides, it is possible to get a sense of whether or not a particular section contains relevant information. In addition to these two titles, which can be consulted prior to arrival in the archive, the archive itself contains a room, the Sala Indici (Leone XIII), that holds the various indexes, both printed and manuscript. This room also contains the computers through which you submit orders. One thing that I discovered is that some (perhaps all) of the indexes have been digitised and can be viewed on the computers in the Sala Indici. Via these computers it is also possible to access the intranet page of the archive, which contains additional useful information. Sadly, I don’t think any of the indexes are available for remote consultation.

It is possible to order three items per day, which are delivered to the adjoining Sala Consultazione Documenti (Pio XI). I found the delivery times quite rapid, but it is necessary to check to see whether the documents have been delivered; they are not brought to you.

Practicalities

In order to use the archives, it is necessary to apply in advance, a procedure which is explained online here. When planning a visit to the archive, it is important to check the opening times and dates, noting that the archive closes for most of the summer. Assuming your application for access is approved, you will be issued with an email that will allow you to pass the security checks to enter Vatican City by way of the Porta Sant’Anna. From there, you walk west along Via Sant’Anna, and through the archway into the Cortile del Belvedere.

The archive is not signposted (at least as far as I could see), but is accessed from the door in the northwest corner of the courtyard (this is on the same side as the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana).

On your first visit to the archive, it is necessary to collect an admissions card (tessera di ammissione), which can be obtained from the admissions office (Segreteria Accettazioni) on the ground floor. Once you have your card, you present it at the reception desk to receive a locker key so that you can leave your possessions in the locker room (guardaroba). The index and consultation rooms are located on the third floor of the building (accessible via a dinky lift or via the stairs). There is no assigned seating, so you can sit wherever you prefer.

The main consultation room overlooks Cortile della Biblioteca, where there is an inexpensive café (il Bar B.A.V.), where you can get drinks, snacks, and sandwiches throughout the day. It is used by staff and visitors, but is not accessible to tourists, so does not get too crowded (at least in my experience). The Cortile is a nice place to pass time while waiting for documents to arrive.

Some things to note

It is not possible to take photographs in the archive, although you can order reproductions of material (albeit at quite a steep price). The limit on the number of items that can be ordered per day means that it is important to prioritise and be selective. The archive is open for the whole day only on Mondays and Tuesdays (it is a half day for the rest of the week). In addition to the index and consultation rooms, there are two additional rooms on the level below that contain printed reference works and are where digitised materials can be viewed. In addition to the café in the Cortile, there are vending machines selling drinks and snacks near the toilets. There is no wi-fi.

Archivio Storico della Segreteria di Stato

This archive is located almost directly opposite the Archivio Apostolico, at the southern end of the Cortile del Belvedere. Like the apostolic archive, it does have a strict policy governing admission and is a little more involved with respect to the documentation you need to provide. The process is explained on the archive’s website. The archive operates an online booking system, meaning it is necessary to reserve a seat (or workstation) in the reading room. These are done in timed blocks: 9 till 11 and 11 till 1. There is a notional limit of 100 bookings per year, at which point additional permissions are required. If you miss a certain number of bookings in a year, your access can be rescinded.

Assuming your request for access has been granted, it is necessary to collect your admissions card from a rather more imposing location: the Ufficio Permessi del Corpo della Gendarmeria. To access the permissions office, it is necessary to present yourself at the Portone di Bronzo (bronze door) in the Apostolic Palace. As a first-time visitor, it is not necessarily obvious how to get there, since it is not signposted. The easiest thing to do is to enter the colonnade of St Peter’s Square, by way of Via di Porta Angelica, and pass through the security checkpoint for visitors going on to see the basilica. You then follow the colonnade to the west, and you will eventually find the Portone di Bronzo. Once you pick up your card, you retrace your steps and head back to the Porta Sant’Anna to enter Vatican City, following the same route as for the apostolic archives.

The archive is, continuing a theme, not obviously signposted and is accessed via this door. There is an key card reader and, on presenting your admissions card, the door will open, leading you into the locker room, where you can leave your possessions.

The archival reading room is a bit like a wooden spaceship and is nicely set out. You take a seat at your pre-booked workstation, where it is possible to interrogate the archival indexes and to view certain materials that have been digitised. Unlike the apostolic archive, the externally available description of the archival collection is very minimal (described on the website here), but using the workstations it is possible to get a much better sense of what is in the collection. I am not sure how much of the material is available digitally, but the items I needed to consult were available in hardcopy only and it took only about 25 minutes for the material to be delivered.

Some things to note

Like the apostolic archive, it is not possible to take photographs (although reproductions can be ordered). It is possible to order up to five items per day, but it is important to note that the opening hours are limited to 9 till 1 every day. The archive is also closed during most of the summer and also follows the standard pattern of closing on certain feast days. There is no wi-fi.

Archivio di Stato di Roma

The state archives are located in the Biblioteca Alessandrina, part of the Palazzo della Sapienza, adjoining the church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. It is a beautiful building, but it also lacks signage (which is a recurring theme with archives in Rome!).

The archives have a comprehensive catalogue which can be consulted online, which eliminates some of the guesswork involved in determining whether or not it holds material relevant to one’s research interests. Material can also be ordered online in advance, even without a reader’s card. You need to register with the online system (which I believe is now common to all state archives in Italy) and place your order. Items will be held for seven days from the date of delivery.

The archive itself is located on the first floor of the palace, on the northern side. Again, there is no obvious signage, but is accessed through a glass sliding door (indicated as door XXII).

At the reception desk on the left-hand side, you can collect your admission card by presenting your identity card or passport (which will be held until you check out at the end of your visit). You will be issued with a locker key that also corresponds to your desk in the reading room. The reception desk can also provide you with the unique password needed to access the wi-fi. Items ordered in advance should be ready for immediate collection, which you can do from the issue desk next to reception.

The reading room itself is extremely atmospheric, particularly the impressive coffered ceiling. Perhaps the most welcome aspect, however, is the fact that photography is permitted!

Some things to note

The archive is open Monday to Friday, 9 till 6, but researchers are limited to consulting three items per day (with some exceptions based on the type of material).

The final fifteen years of Macintosh’s life were concerned, in one way or another, with the actions and sentiments of Napoleon Bonaparte. From 1797, Napoleon was a regular subject in Macintosh’s letters to his spy handler, William Wickham, and to government officials in London. For Macintosh, the “little general” was understood to be “equally deficient in…dignity, politeness, & civility, which are the constant concomitants of true Bravery, Education & good-breeding.” Despite this assessment, Macintosh engaged in some flattering diplomacy with Napoleon in early 1800, shortly after the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799), that had seen him take power as First Consul of the French First Republic. 

Writing from Nuremburg on 4 January 1800, Macintosh enclosed a gift, which he hoped Napoleon would find instructive and inspiring: “a small duodecimo volume printed at Rouen in 1672”. This volume was La vie du general Monk Duc d’Albemarle, an “account of the glorious achievements and of the life & actions of that extraordinary person.” George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, had been centrally involved in the 1660 restoration of the Stuart monarchy in Britain, and his actions were presented by counterrevolutionaries like Macintosh as an example that they hoped Napoleon would follow. In his letter, Macintosh extoled the various rewards, honours, plaudits, and “perpetual dignities” that would be bestowed on Napoleon if he were to follow Monck’s example and oversee the restoration of the monarchy in France.

What, if anything, Napoleon made of Macintosh’s letter is not clear. I had hoped that one of the two copies of La vie du general Monk that are held in Napoleon’s library at the Château de Fontainebleau might contain an inscription linking them to Macintosh, but unfortunately they do not (my thanks to the staff there for checking on my behalf).

One element of Macintosh’s letter that is particularly intriguing, however, is a reference he makes to a “talisman” that he had been provided with in 1798 with the intention that it be delivered “into your own hands” at Rastatt during the Second Congress of Rastatt. This “talisman”, presumably a letter, was never actually delivered, and its content can only be guessed at. That said, writing in 1847, Macintosh’s grandnephew, George Macintosh, believed this “talisman” was “reason to suppose, that in the course of the year 1798, Mr. W. Macintosh had…been employed by the exiled Bourbons to communicate with Buonaparte, respecting their return to France.”

Beyond Macintosh’s obscure reference to the “talisman”, it is certain that he was in contact during the late 1790s with a key supporter of the future Louis XVIII, the extravagantly named Joseph-Jean-Baptiste-Luc-Hippolyte come de Mareschal-Vezet (1743–1816). In de Vezet’s encoded correspondence—referred to in Henri Dugon’s book Au service du Roi en exil (1968)—Macintosh was given various noms de plume, including “Cerau” and “Come.” There remains, as ever, a great deal of digging still to do in order to establish Macintosh’s connection with the exiled Bourbons more firmly, but it seems probable that de Vezet was the most likely intermediary.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with Deirdre Grieve (née Chapman), a long-time supporter of this project and a direct descendant of William Macintosh’s sister, Mary.

At the end of September, the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh will be hosting a launch event for Dierdre’s new novel, Badlands, which will be published by Vagabond Voices in October. Tickets are free and can be booked online here.

The recording of my inaugural lecture, “The archive in the armoire: rediscovering the global lives of William Macintosh,” was recently posted online. Although the recording doesn’t include my personal highlight—which was the very generous vote of thanks offered by my colleague, Felix Driver—it is otherwise a good substitute for those who were unable to attend in person.