This week, in preparation for moving on to what will be the final empirical chapter of the book, I visited the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester to consult the correspondence of William Wickham in the vast Wickham family papers. I managed to locate two letters from Macintosh that were new to me and, in transcribing them, was faced with a familiar problem: trying to identify the individuals who were part of the constantly changing cast of characters that constituted his social and political milieux.

Although the group of people that forms the context to our lives necessarily changes across time, as new connections are formed and other fade away, Macintosh’s cosmopolitan mobility had meant that changes in the composition of his networks were often rapid and wholesale. Moving between the Caribbean, India, Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, Macintosh met and formed friendships with a vast and shifting cast of characters. It seems that just as I become familiar one group of individuals who populate his correspondence, he is on the move again.

I am currently dealing with Macintosh’s final days in Avignon before his flight to Switzerland (first to Estavayer and then to Bern) and preparing for yet another recomposition of his social circle. Often it is challenging simply to identify the individuals with whom he was interacting, either because of imprecise or shifting orthographies or because they are described on the basis of titles or roles shared by many others. One such that I encountered yesterday was “Young Count de Lentzbourg of Fribourg”. While a scholar of the counter-revolution in Switzerland might have been able to pinpoint this individual quite easily, the task of figuring out who’s who is more challenging when one follow an individual like Macintosh whose geographical mobility transcends specialist disciplinary knowledge.

I won’t recount the long effort and circuitious searching it took to establish that the individual to whom Macintosh was referring was Louis Stanislas Xavier de Lenzbourg (1778–1838). The two met in Bern in the year Xavier—who would go on to pursue a celebrated military career—turned seventeen and was on the lookout for a commission. Xavier is, of course, only one among scores of individuals who formed the backdrop to Macintosh’s new life as an émigré and counter-revolutionary, and I look forward (albeit with some trepidation) to meeting and getting to know this new cast of characters.