As May draws to a close, and as the flood of exam and coursework marking begins to subside, my thoughts are turning back to writing. Despite my best efforts to keep the book moving along this term, I have—as always seems to be the case—been overtaken by short-term deadlines and time-sensitive tasks. This week I did, however, manage to carve out a morning for work at the London Metropolitan Archives, where I consulted, among other things, the register of Mary (Polly) Macintosh’s marriage.

As I have noted before, Polly’s 1791 marriage to her French patrician husband, Alexander, took place under rather unusual circumstances. The pair were émigrés, having escaped France during the Revolution, and were married in the Protestant Chapel in Ostend. I was keen to consult the register to check who had witnessed the ceremony, and was able to confirm that Polly’s mother, Ann, was in attendance, but not, seemingly, Macintosh himself. The ceremony was presided over by the Chapel’s minister, the Reverend John Trevor. Although both Polly and Alexander were Catholic, this was not an obstacle to them being married in a Protestant church; indeed the stipulations of the 1753 Marriage Act meant that doing so was necessary to ensure the legal validity of the marriage. Banns having been read to the Chapel’s congregation in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, the couple were married on 19 September 1791. More than a decade later, the pair would be married again—this time in a civil ceremony in post-Revolutionary France, and with Macintosh in attendance.

Despite the uncertainty that the Revolution precipitated for Polly and Alexander, they wasted no time in starting a family. Within a month, Polly was pregnant with the couple’s first daughter, Augusta-Elisabeth-Mathilde.