Although I have never found myself getting emotionally attached to my main research subjects—referring to them by their surname (Speirs Bruce, Semple, Macintosh) seems to create the necessary distance—I have found myself endless fascinated by Macintosh’s family: his wife, Anna (known as Ann); his daughters Elizabeth (known as Betsey) and Mary (known as Polly); and his son, William. These were people Macintosh variously loved, argued with, became distanced from, and was reunited with, and they are there, in various ways, throughout the book I’m writing.

William disappears from the archive after 1779 and I have no idea what became of him. Betsey, once the apple of her father’s eye, largely disappears after 1781, returning briefly years later as a married woman in her mother’s will, but evidently estranged from Macintosh. Polly is the only one I have been able to follow through to her eventual death. In many ways, Polly was a remarkable woman—ambitious, self assured, and resilient. Born in Grenada, she started school in London just shy of her third birthday. Later, under her own initiative, she enrolled herself into a convent school in Belgium and converted to Catholicism. She married a minor French noble, became an émigré during the French Revolution, raised four children, was deserted by her husband, and eventually died in Paris in her mid eighties.

At the end of Macintosh’s life, Polly was almost the only family he had left: Ann (from whom he was long since separated) had predeceased him, as had his brother, George. Betsey and William, if they were still alive, were no longer part of Macintosh’s life. Polly and her four daughters were, therefore, the people to whom Macintosh left what little he had at the time of his death.

Much of Polly’s adult life was overshadowed by the uncertainties of the French Revolution. She and her husband were already émigrés by the time of the marriage in 1791. Their wedding took place at the English church in Ostend in September. By the time their first daughter was born the following year, in July 1792, they were living in Broomfield in Essex. A second daughter followed in January 1795, when the family were living in Bury St Edmunds. By the time the couple’s third daughter was born in July 1798, they were back on the Continent, living in The Hague. They eventually returned to France in 1802, taking advantage of Napoleon’s amnesty for émigrés.

Somewhat unusually (at least as far as I have been able to tell), Polly and her husband remarried in a civil ceremony in Caen in January 1803, keen to ensure that their daughters had a clear legal right to inheritance. A fourth daughter followed in the wake of the marriage, but the relationship was not to last. Around 1810, Polly’s husband had—as Macintosh would later note in a codicil to his will—”abandoned his wife and family and Country in a manner highly disreputable and offensive without having had the least provocation”.

Polly persevered, and life became easier after 1825 when she and her daughters began to receive compensation from the French state for property seized during the Revolution. When Polly died in 1853, and was interred at the Cimetière Notre-Dame in Versailles, her life would have been celebrated by her surviving children and grandchildren, one of whom, George-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou, when on to achieve fame as the founder of the Bureau des Constatations Médicales at Lourdes—a medical body established to investigate the curative powers of the shrine.