Legendary kings of Scotland

As part of that debate, the list of legendary kings of Britain became involved, in the form of the "Brutus myth", promoted by Edward Hall over the doubts of Polydore Vergil.

Publicists on the English side of the argument, including John Elder, James Henrisoun, and William Lamb, had cast doubt on Scottish history.

The de Wet portrait collection later became a noted sight for tourists, for example as written about by John Macky, A Journey through Scotland.

Peter Hume Brown in his biography of Buchanan describes him as somewhat more sceptical than Boece in what he accepted as historical; but less so than John Mair, writing earlier.

[13] Writers who perpetuated the Boece tradition, as put into form by Buchanan, included: The antiquity of the line was attacked by William Lloyd, who argued that Scotland was not settled before the 6th century; George Mackenzie published the 1685 Defence of the Antiquity of the Royal Line of Scotland against Lloyd, and a sequel the next year against Edward Stillingfleet, who had given a sceptical account of Boece's history in Chapter V of his Origines Britannicae.

Reference works continued, however, to copy Buchanan's list, and the mythological history took many years to drop out of circulation, persisting in print as factual well into the 19th century (for example the fourth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1810), the Encyclopædia Perthensis (1816),[22] the London Encyclopedia (1829), and the individual kings in reference books by George Crabb[23] and John Platts[24]).

The kings in the list from about the 6th century (in the Fifth Book of Buchanan) onwards may have some relationship to historical figures in the Kingdom of Dalriada, extending in present-day terms from western Scotland to part of Ireland.

The critical Essay (1729) of Innes, while demolishing the king-list going back to Boece, substituted in part kings of the Picts, and is now regarded as questionable in its own way.