Charles Kenneth MACKENZIE

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Charles Kenneth Mackenzie was born in 1788, probably in Scotland, the eldest son of Kenneth Francis Mackenzie (1748-1831) and his wife Anne Townsend Mackenzie (1764-1846). The Mackenzies were an ancient Scottish famiy, "allied to the best blood of Scotland"; Charles was born into a junior branch, the Mackenzies of Redcastle. His was a large family, with eleven surviving children--four younger sons and six daughters. Charles was considerably older than his brothers. The youngest, J. F. Townsend Mackenzie, born about 1813, entered the army and somewhat unromantically caught cold in Fife, developed pneumonia, and died in 1833. The next youngest son, Colin, was almost twenty years younger than Charles but close in age to James and Kenneth. Colin (1806-1881) joined the East India Company as a cadet in 1825 and spent most of his life in military service in the East--in the first Afghan War, in the 1856-57 India mutiny; a prisoner at times, a witness to the murder of his friend Sir William Hay Macnaghten. James was a civilian doing business in China and India. Of Kenneth we know least, and the name of only one daughter appears--Mary, the next oldest child to Colin. Colin's first wife, Adeline Pattle, was the older sister of the photographer Julia Margaret (Pattle) Cameron and of Maria Pattle Jackson, Virginia Woolf's grandmother.

Charles must have had a lonely, difficult childhood. In the late 1780s or early 1790s his father, a Scottish barrister, purchased Lusignan, a "very large" plantation in Demerara which generally "gave a very good income," supporting the family for almost fifty years. Kenneth Francis Mackenzie's ties to the Caribbean area were strengthened when about 1793 he was appointed attorney general in Grenada, serving also as President of the Council. At the start of Julien Fedon's rebellion of 1795-96, when Ninian Home, the governor, and over forty of his associates were taken hostage (and later murdered), Kenneth Mackenzie became de facto governor, "the chief authority left in George Town," dealing with a rebellion fueled by racial, national, and religious animosities. He led British troops in their efforts to control the rebellion, with its continuing massacres of English planters and their families; later he was accused variously of acting too slowly or too quickly. After a few months, English help began to trickle in; large reinforcements arrived early in 1796 at the same time as a new governor arrived, and President Mackenzie, by now ill, returned to Britain. He had, he said, exhausted his private fortune in providing for his troops and seeing to public needs, but he was never reimbursed the £20,000 he claimed. (See [Helen Douglas Mackenzie], Storms and sunshine of a soldier's life. Lt.-General Colin Mackenzie C.B. [Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1884], 1:3-6, 11, which repeats the family account as told much later by Charles's younger brother Colin--who was not born until ten years after the Grenada rebellion. Also see Raymund P. Devas, The Island of Grenada (1650-1950) [St. George's, Grenada: U. of the West Indies, 1964], 103-155, for a detailed history of the rebellion; pp. 122-135, 140, 147, and 151 discuss Kenneth Mackenzie's role, quoting both his defenders and detractors.)

Was Charles in Grenada during this dreadful time, or had he been sent to school or left with relatives in Britain? If the history of his younger brothers gives any clue, Charles's early years were difficult wherever he was. Their father was rigid, stern. Decades later Helen Mackenzie wrote that Colin's "was not a happy childhood. Every offence was visited with severity; flogging ad libitum was the rule, so that when the boys caught sight of their father they preferred escaping to meeting him." Anne Mackenzie brought no softening touch: the discipline "was not mollified by any interference on the part of their mother, though she was most tender to her children as long as they were babies" (Storms and sunshine 1:7). For Charles's younger brothers, boarding school did not improve matters: "Colin often regretted the desultory manner in which he had been educated, and the inferior schools to which he had been sent. When about twelve he was placed wth his elder brothers, James and Kenneth, at a school in Cumberland, of which he used to speak with horror, from the "brutal severity of the punishment" (1:9).

There is a gap in our knowledge of the family after the parents' return to Britain in 1796. Kenneth senior continued his fruitless efforts to have the government acknowledge his services in Grenada and recompense him for his out-of-pocket expenses. For more than a decade his claims kept them in London, where Colin was born in 1806. By then Charles, whatever his preparatory education, had begun medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. In 1808 he was chosen president of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, a society of medical students and post-graduates; he received a medical degree in 1809, with a dissertation on asphyxia. Among his fellow medical students, the future ethnologist James Cowles Prichard (1786 -1848) became a life-long friend. Mackenzie, who seems never to have practiced as a doctor, also extended his studies beyond medicine; soon after taking his degree he published essays on Scottish mineralogy that led to an 1812 book, Outlines of the Mineralogy of the Ochil Hills. (Several sources also credit him with a degree of doctor of law; it was not an Edinburgh degree, and I have found no record of his receiving a degree anywhere else.)

Mackenzie then returned to London, in the same year becoming a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. He may soon have discontinued his medical studies: he is said to have joined the Duke of Wellington's Peninsular army not long after taking his medical degree--as either an "amateur" or an aide de camp and secretary to the Duke. Several relatives were officers, particularly in India, and when the Allied forces commanded by Sir Arthur Wellesley (not yet Wellington) defeated the French on 27-28 July 1809 at Talavera, in western Spain, the 3rd Division was led by a Lieutenant General Mackenzie. Perhaps Charles was a hanger-on in a relative's camp rather than an insider at Wellington's elbow.

According to a New York newspaper quoted by Redding (Yesterday and to-day, 2:175), Mackenzie remained with Wellington's army "until the battle of Toulouse," 10 April 1814. However, he was in England for a year or more during that time, seeing to the publication of his book and further securing his position in the scientific world. In January 1812 he was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society and admitted in November of that year; in December he indicated that he was "desirous of admission into the Geological Society," to which he was elected in January 1813. To the Linnean Society he first gave his address as "Portugal"; other addresses at this time were all in London. If he then returned to the Peninsula, perhaps it was about the time that General J. Mackenzie commanded a division during the botched siege of Tarrazona, 3 - 11 June 1813.

After leaving the Peninsular Army, Mackenzie travelled on the Continent for several months. Once back in England, he continued to cultivate London scientific, political, and literary / journalistic circles. On 6 Jan. 1815 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; his sponsors were mainly members of the Linnean and Geographical Societies. He contributed to newspapers and magazines; an obituary notice in the Edinburgh Evening Courant, which others copied, said that these included the Edinburgh and Quarterly, but nothing has been identified as his in either. He received, and renewed, a ticket of admission to the British Museum Reading Room. He acquired the support of George Canning, who was appointed to the Foreign Office in September 1822. With that backing, Mackenzie moved towards a diplomatic career. He accompanied a British commission to Mexico in 1823; on 10 October he was named consul at Vera Cruz. Before that, however, he seems to have returned to Scotland, or at least to have had interests there; we hear that "he turned himself to mercantile affairs, and a cleverer young man wasna in-a' Embro'" (Blackwood's 27 (Apr. 1830), 679).

His fortunes were rising as those of his family fell. In the early 1820s the senior Mackenzies were in financial straits because of a drop in the Demerara plantation's productivity. They moved to Fife, then a few years later to Wales, where the two youngest boys became day scholars with a Rev. Dr. Donne in Oswestry. Though brother Colin would have liked a university education, the best their father could manage for him was an appointment to an East India Company cadetship in 1825. Charles came to his aid, payting an estimated £500 for Colin's outfit and passage. At the end of 1825 Charles was appointed consul-general to Haiti, "with particular instructions [from Canning] to obtain and to transmit to him accurate accounts regarding the population, the industry, and the produce of Hayti," a task he "fulfilled in a very clear and satisfactory manner." The patronage that had brought him this far, however, became a mixed blessing. Canning died in early August 1827, less than a year after becoming prime minister. A few months later Mackenzie returned to England (bringing "a few Specimens of plants that I collected in Haiti" for Dr. W. J. Hooker, an old friend who was now Regius professor of botany at Glasgow University) and was left dangling, technically with a position but with nothing to do, the report he had written for Canning kept under wraps by the government. (This charge, like the description of Mackenzie's Haiti mission, is made in "The British Colonies. Letter Third. To his Grace the Duke of Wellington, &c. &c. From James M'Queen, Esq.," Blackwood's Magazine 27 [Feb. 1830], 24. James Macqueen [1778-1870] had managed a sugar plantation in Grenada in the 1790s, when Mackenzie's father was attorney general / Council President; later Macqueen was a journalist and entrepreneur in Glasgow and London. In 1824 he published The West India Colonies: the calumnies and misrepresentations circulated against them examined and refuted.)

Mackenzie's consulship was officially terminated on 10 October 1828; he had simultaneously held the title of Hanoverian consul-general to Haiti and retained that title until February 1830. While seeking new government employment, at the end of 1828 he turned to his pen for support, writing articles that appeared in the January and April 1829 issues of the Foreign Quarterly Review and successfully applying to another old friend, Macvey Napier, for work on the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Though he was unhappy cooling his heels in London, he explained to Dr. Hooker that "I can't stir from town, until I know my future destination" and to Macvey Napier that he stayed only because his claims in Downing Street had not yet been settled. Whatever those claims were, they, like his father's earlier claims on the government, did not seem likely ever to be settled. He had as little hope of present government employment, "for I find that valuable as Mr Canning's approbation is, that it is not at the present day a passport to Ministerial patronage."

The growing split in the party between Wellington and the Canningites worked against Mackenzie. His Haiti report, like his career, remained stalled until 1830, when finally "the results of his labours have been, after much delay, and to the dismay of the British anti-colonists, drawn forth from the archives of the Foreign-office, by order of the House of Commons, and printed for the information of the members of that House and of the public." This would be Notes on Haiti , two volumes published in London early in 1830. They did not include the totality of Mackenzie's reports: "Much, however, as had been disclosed by the papers, darker and more conclusive information still remains behind, in the Report which Mr MacKenzie was commanded and commissioned to make, and which he did make, but which has been suppressed somewhere and even a review of the whole transmitted for the Quarterly Review, withheld by, it is believed, the official influence which controls that publication" (Macqueen, op.cit.).

Finally Mackenzie received new employment. On 20 Feb. 1830 he was named Commissioner of Arbitration to the Mixed British and Spanish Commission at Havana, Cuba. A few months later George IV died, Parliament was dissolved, and by year's end the Whigs were in power. If Mackenzie had already gone out to Cuba, he was soon back in London, where we find him from late 1830 into 1832. In November 1830 he became for a short while the first editor of The Albion, a conservative evening daily, writing its leaders. He contributed to the first number of The Metropolitan, published 1 May 1831, and continued to contribute through 1832, on Polish affairs and other subjects; his friends Thomas Campbell and Cyrus Redding were respectively nominal editor and actual sub-editor (Redding, Campbell, 2:284). In 1832 he was a member of the Council of the newly formed Literary Association of the Friends of Poland, of which Campbell was president (Redding, Campbell, 2:290-291; his sister-in-law claimed that "One of [Colin Mackenzie's] brothers became Secretary of the Polish Association' and even persuaded Colin to join the Polish army; see Storms and sunshine 1:26-27).

More personal matters also kept Mackenzie in London into 1832. His father, who was again living there, died in the course of the year; Colin was home from India on sick leave. The five brothers tried unsuccessfully to agree on "the best way of disposing" of the Demerara estate, which Colin referred to as "our paltry inheritance" and which created problems for years. Finally, his appointment re-affirmed, Charles returned to Cuba in 1832, but in 1834 Palmerston, at the Foreign Office, dismissed him from Government service. It proved to be a permanent dismissal.

All in all, the 1830s were not kind to the family. The youngest brother, Townsend, died on 29 January 1833. The remaining brothers still could not agree about the Demerara estate. By August 1835 Colin was declaring himself entirely out of patience; then in 1836 he lost his young wife, only 24 and already the mother of three daughters. In 1838, again back in England on sick leave, Colin was involved in a "disagreeable lawsuit." Charles's life seems similarly unsettled, as reflected less dramaticaly in his history with the Royal Society. He lost membership early in the decade, was re-admitted in June 1832 only to have his membership cancelled in 1835, "from the non-payment of his annual contribution"; the next year he was "re-admitted by ballot into the Society."

From this point on, Mackenzie's activities are particularly difficult to trace. The Edinburgh Evening Courant obituary notice described him as "a ripe scholar and an excellent linguist, with great versatile literary attainments." According to Redding, after 1834 Mackenzie "turned his attention not only to literature [i.e., journalism] and the politics of the day, but to divers commercial operations" (Yesterday and today, 2:175). The nature of these remains obscure. About 1846 business took him to the United States for a few years; in 1850-1851 he was back in London. There he fell in with Robert Pearse Gillies, whom he would have known as the first editor of the Foreign Quarterly Review. Gillies enlisted Mackenzie's help in a plan to bring out the first number of a "New Foreign Quarterly Review," but Mackenzie "was called away to America" before anything could appear (Gillies to Brougham, 18 March 1852; ms. UCL). Thereafter Mackenzie lived in the U.S., "chiefly in Boston and New York, in both of which cities he counted numerous friends, not the least known of whom was Prescott the historian" (Redding 2:175). During this time he sent reports on American events to at least one English newspaper. Some accounts of his death suggest that he was in straitened circumstances in his last years.

Charles Mackenzie died 6 August 1862, aged 75, of "accidental burning" in an extensive fire that started at the Rainbow Hotel, "a sort of English chop and lodging house" in New York City. The Rainbow Hotel occupied the first three floors of a six-story building at 31-33 Beekman Street, in a block that was mainly commercial and manufacturing; Mackenzie shared a third-floor room with a William Simmons, who also died, and whose age was given variously as 35 and 26. (Boase mistakenly dates the death as 6 July. Joseph Irving, The Book of Scotsmen [Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1881], 306, gives age at death as 74; while the first newspaper accounts of the fire were vague or confused about his age, the death certificate and Redding give it as 75.) His body was returned to Liverpool, England. I have found no evidence that he ever married.

Charles married Rebecca MOLYNEUX on 12 Jan 1828 in Christ Church, Southwark, London, England.