The social and intellectual life of Dr Jacques Boyd, Scottish Huguenot

This article explores the life of Jacques Boyd ( b . c.1686), a South Carolina-born Huguenot from a family of Bordeaux merchants of Scottish descent, during the period that he spent in Holland (c.1708–1716). Earlier research has described the lives and connections of some of the Boyd family when in South Carolina and Ireland, but Jacques Boyd himself has received very little attention – mainly due to the lack of evidence concerning his life post-1708. However, recent discoveries in the archives of Leiden University Library have allowed a brief exploration of Boyd’s life in Holland and his eventual return to Carolina, and then Bordeaux. Mentions of Boyd in the Leiden correspondence reveal an intellectually curious figure, whose ability and resourcefulness had allowed him to forge close connections with many influential Rotterdam-based publishers and thinkers, and who would later form his own intellectual society and subsequently publish his own ideas. Boyd’s life in Rotterdam further highlights the contribution of Huguenot émigrés to Dutch intellectual and commercial culture, but his eventual return to France suggests that the religious idealism that had driven his father and uncles out of the kingdom in 1685 may not have been passed on to their descendants.