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.