OPERATIONS RESUME

The state moved swiftly to fill the vacancies caused by a death of a public servant, but the vultures had begun circling even more rapidly: on the very day that William died, Lieutenant General George Morrison, the Quartermaster General, wrote with haste to the Treasury, lobbying for his son to replace William as his Deputy. (He was to be disappointed.) William’s executors, David Dundas and James Livingstone, also set to very quickly: by 2 August they had arranged for James Christie to sell the house in Argyll Street, along with the majority of its contents. There is no indication of how much, if anything, William’s heir, Thomas Vincent Reynolds, had decided to retain, but he evidently had well-prepared plans to use the money now becoming available to him. In September he got married and soon began to acquire property around his wife’s home village in Essex.

The progress through the press of William’s paper on the Greenwich-Paris project had, of course, stalled. It was picked up by Charles Blagden who, by early August, had identified ‘several mistakes and blunders … principally in the numbers’. He had discussed some of these with William before his death and he had returned to it subsequently. Looking back to the earlier rows with Maskelyne and Ramsden, and conscious that the accuracy of a paper about Anglo-French cooperation was also a matter of national pride, he told Joseph Banks that there must be

Cavendish had suggested to Blagden that the paper should be worked over in detail and that any errors should be published in the same volume of the Philosophical Transactions. Isaac Dalby, who had worked with William on the mathematical aspects of the paper, was the obvious choice to take this forward. William’s paper had already been set up in type, so it could not be easily changed without considerable expense.