The writing of THE ALCHYMIST, a novel awaiting a publisher, came about in this wise: In 1979 Lewis Vaughan, a distant cousin, wrote and published Vaughan Pioneers, a history of our family in America. While his research was extensive, he was unable to identify our original Welsh émigré ancestor, although it was well-known to many of us that we were descended from a clan of Vaughans who had resided for centuries at Tretower in southern Wales. I subsequently took up the chase where cousin Lewis had left off. My rather wide-ranging effort resulted in the publication of Vaughans in Wales and America, but I was unable to find any definitive clues predating our William Vaughan (1750-1840), who had married a Cherokee Indian lady named Fereby Benton. There were literally hundreds of Vaughans in coastal and western Virginia in the 1600s, but none of them proved to be ours. William had been in a company of men conscripted to fight in Lord Dunmore's War in 1774. His brother John fought in the American Revolution, but I could find nothing of William's whereabouts during that war. Folk tales concerning William as "the Welshman who bartered trade goods to the Indians" were widely accepted by older family members, but his origins were never revealed.

The more I searched, the more convinced I became that our Welsh William Vaughan not only married a woman who was part Indian, but he too was most likely descended from someone with Indian blood. Despite two trips to Wales and England and extensive research in America, I was unable to solve that mystery. I then turned to books that I had acquired on my visits abroad, and one of them opened up an entirely new set of possibilities.

While brousing Robert Vaughan's Antiquarian bookshop in Stratford in May of 1989, I chanced upon and subsequently purchased copies of THE POEMS OF HENRY VAUGHAN, Silurist, edited by E. K. Chambers, (London: Lawrence & Bullen Ltd., and New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896), and HENRY VAUGHAN, A LIFE AND INTERPRETATION by F. E. Hutchinson, (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1947). When I delved into the second volume of Chambers' books I was astonished by what I found there. This book contained extensive biographical notes on both Henry and Thomas Vaughan, including a strange story purportedly told by someone styling herself (or himself) as Diana Vaughan, then living in Paris. Thomas Vaughan, the girl claimed, was her original Welsh-American ancestor. The year following my acquisition of the Chambers and Hutchinson books, I visited the British Museum and Library in London, and found a list of publications written by Diana Vaughan or by others under various pseudonyms, concerning the matters discussed in Chambers' notes. These writers spun tales of adventure in which it was claimed that Diana's Thomas Vaughan had once visited America where he mated with a Lenni-Lenape Indian maiden, fathered a child, returned to England, became associated with Elias Ashmole and Sir Robert Moray in alchymical research in the king's laboratory at Whitehall, searched for the fabled philosopher's stone, associated with a group of occultists, and ultimately died in a small village outside London "from inhalation of mercurie." These stories and F. E. Hutchinson's Life and Interpretation of Henry Vaughan provided the initial impetus for the writing of The Alchymist. The possibility that Henry Vaughan's twin brother, Thomas, was my missing Welsh ancestor now loomed large in my mind. Whether this proved to be the case or not, the life story of Thomas Vaughan needed to be told. Helen Ashton had written about Henry in her historical novel, The Swan of Usk, which was published by MacMillan in 1940. No one had written the life of Thomas. It is my hope that The Alchymist, when published, will fill that void.

The Alchymist evolved, as a historical novel in two parts, the first set in 17th-century Wales, England, and America, the second in 19th-century Paris. The first part is essentially an extrapolation of facts known - but not widely known - concerning the lives and times of twin brothers Thomas and Henry Vaughan of seventeenth-century Wales and England. Sons of a junior son of the family of Tretower Vaughans, who lived for centuries near the small town of Crickhowell in Breconshire, Wales, they were distant kinsmen on my father's side of our family. This much was known. The identity of our Tretower progenitor remained a mystery. Both Henry and Thomas actually did many of the things depicted in the novel, with Henry achieving some lasting fame and repute as The Silurist, a writer of mystical poetry. In addition to the works of Chambers and Hutchinson, other materials relied on for historical accuracy included Theophilus Jones' History of Brecknockshire; Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses; The Dictionary of (Welsh) National Biography, Volume XX; The Making of the Tudor Dynasty by Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas; and Glanmor Williams' Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c1415-1642, among others, these being the most noteworthy.

While great attention has been given to accuracy of historical fact and detail throughout the writing of the novel, the reader should understand that many of the characters who appear throughout the first part of the book were actual human beings personally known to the twins, but not necessarily known to them in the precise manner in which the relationships are described. There remains to this day a great deal of mystery and uncertainty with regard to the matter of Thomas Vaughan's life with the Lenni Lenape Indians in America, and, indeed, he may not have journeyed there at all. Evidence seemed to point to the existence of two Thomas Vaughans, both with remarkably similar life experiences. Poetic license was exercised in the composition of both parts of this novel in which the lives of persons of historical import are interwoven with fictional characters.

For those readers who wish to conduct their own investigation into these matters, a list of the volumes attributed to Diana Vaughan, most of which may be read in their original French at the British Museum and Library in London, will be appended to the novel as a postscript.

The serious student of the history of alchymical science will likely quarrel with my perhaps tenuous hypothesis that an emissary of George Starkey may have appropriated some of the writings of Thomas Vaughan for his own. It is my contention that when Thomas Vaughan became aware of George Starkey, he [Thomas] had already begun the writing of many of his tracts under the pseudonym Eugenious Philalethes; further, that Starkey, while engaged in his own parallel scientific inquiries, had not at that time begun writing under his soon-to-be-assumed pen-name, Eierenaeus Philalethes; and that he perhaps was moved to write under this similar name after his acquaintance with Vaughan's work. It should be noted that my novel was commenced in 1990, shortly after publication of my family history. Four years later, when Harvard University Press published Gehennical Fire, William Newman's well-researched and heavily-footnoted study of "The Lives of George Starkey," I reviewed my own findings, ultimately concluding that little if any of my earlier analyses required change. It was then, and remains now, my opinion that there is a great deal of confusion with regard to the authorship of a number of documents referred to here and in the postscript appended to this novel. The reader is reminded that this is a work of historical fiction, representing only one possible scenario of many that may be drawn from known historical fact and conjecture. Anyone who is tempted to treat The Alchymist as a genealogical resource is forewarned.

Brief Synopsis

Part One of THE ALCHYMIST deals with the lives and times of twin brothers Thomas and Henry Vaughan from their early days in 17th-century Wales to their schooling at Oxford, and their involvement in the great Civil War. After serving the Crown during the war, the brothers go their separate ways. Henry chooses the life of a country physician and mystical poet, while Thomas loses his living as rector of his small parish church, and elects thereafter to devote his life to a study of alchemy and the occult. Thomas Vaughan visits America in hopes of finding the herb Saturnia, which he believes to be a key to the Philosophers Stone, the Grand Recipe for turning base metals into gold. While there, he mates with a Lenni-Lenape Indian maiden. Upon his return to England, he becomes associated with Elias Ashmole and Sir Robert Moray in alchemical research in the king's laboratory at Whitehall. In his search for the fabled philosopher's stone he travels to Amsterdam and Warsaw, where he encounters a group of cabalistic adventurers. During the Great London Plague of 1666, he dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances "from inhalation of mercurie."

Part Two, which takes place some two hundred years after the death of Thomas Vaughan, is based on events involving the mysterious Diana Vaughan, who attempts to trace her heritage amongst occultists and rumor-mongers in 19th-century Paris. In the City of lights, Diana meets a newspaper columnist who writes under the name of Leo Taxil and becomes entrapped in Taxils plot to involve her in the morally suspect activities of an androgynous lodge. Taxil publishes an account of the adventures of an unidentified American girl in the lodge, and threatens to identify that girl as Diana unless she agrees to pay him a large sum of money. When angry mobs seek to do her bodily harm, a friendly Catholic priest comes to her rescue. Dianas father arrives from Boston and returns her to America. Leo Taxils true identity as Gabrielle Jogand-Pages is revealed, but his nefarious scheme to discredit Freemasonry continues unabated, and in fact gains an even wider audience with the publication of Memoires de un ex Pallidiste, whose authorship he attributes to Diana Vaughan.

This preface and synopsis have been published on the internet with the thought that someone will find it sufficiently interesting to call it to the attention of an agent and/or publisher.