Even after more than a dozen years on the archival trail of William Macintosh, there are still moments where I find myself astonished by a new fact or revelation about his life and that of his immediate family. In recent days, I have returned to the task of tracing the life of Macintosh’s son, William, and his unexpected and tragic fate—one that I encountered for the first time yesterday—has caused me, once again, to see the narrative that I am writing in an entirely new light.

My prompt for returning to William (junior) was a long and rather regretful letter that Macintosh sent from Madras in July 1779. At more than 7,000 words in length, the letter was an attempt to atone for the damage that long separation—geographical and temporal—had done to their relationship and, more pragmatically, to communicate some important life lessons and maxims. William would have been 14 at the time he received Macintosh’s letter and was a pupil at a “virtuous seminary,” probably on the Continent. This was the third school William had attended since 1771; none of which had seemed to suit him. William had started formal education rather late. When he enrolled at a school in Abingdon in November 1771, his contemporaries were already starting to learn Latin grammar but poor William had not yet mastered the English alphabet.

By 1781, William had entered a new school—his fourth in ten years—and the invoice for his board and tuition (above) is the last reference to him that I can find in Macintosh’s archive. I had long suspected that William had predeceased his parents (he is not mentioned in either of their wills, for example), but my investigations over the years had come to naught. Yesterday, however, I finally found out the truth: that in December 1784 William committed suicide in his room at the New Hummums coffee house and hotel in Covent Garden.

Almost at once, a coroner’s inquest was arranged to investigate William’s death (above). Depositions were taken from the hotel’s owner, Thomas Harrison; George Hopwood, the hotel’s porter; and John Cosens, landlord to William’s mother and sisters. Testimony from the deponents tells a story of a young man in distress who, in the days leading up to his death, had been behaving in strange and erratic ways. The day before he died, William had presented himself at his mother’s lodgings, hoping to see his youngest sister, Polly, and to retrieve clothes and other items he said were worth £50. He had a pistol in his pocket and, according to Cosens, his behaviour “was very rude and extraordinary.” Denied the opportunity of speaking to his mother or sisters, he left.

The following day—in an evident state of distress—William told the hotel’s owner that “his mother had no Affection for him since he was four years old.” Later that evening, Hopwood found William sitting despondently in front of the fire in his room, his hair untied and hanging loose about his face, a pistol in his right hand. He spoke in a low voice only to tell Hopwood that he didn’t require anything. Minutes later Hopwood and Harrison heard a shot. When Hopwood arrived in the upstairs room it was to find William lying in a pool of blood, fragments of skull and brain matter across the walls.

While the inquest established the cause of death, it did little to inquire into the factors that had led to it, returning a verdict only of insanity. For want of explanation, the newspaper press was filled in the days after the event with lurid speculation. Some sources claimed that William had fallen victim to card sharps, who had left him penniless and hopeless. Others claimed that a lack of maternal affection had driven him to distraction. Still others claimed that William and his family, having been abandoned by Macintosh, were in such a state of penury that William found it intolerable and that he had intended to kill both himself and his younger sister, Polly, to relieve their suffering. What all sources agreed on, however, was that William had been a strapping and handsome young man, standing more than six feet tall. He was just 19 when he died.

Given the contradictions of the contemporary press reporting, it will be difficult to separate truth from fiction as I delve deeper into this sad story. Although almost 230 years separate me from the tragic end of William’s life, I cannot help but feel a sense of shock and sadness. Polly would doubtless have remembered this tragedy right up to her own death in old age in 1853, but after her, who would have remembered William?