Mark Napier (historian)

Mark Napier (24 July 1798 – 23 November 1879) was a Scottish lawyer, biographer and historical author.

His father was Francis Napier, a writer to the signet in Edinburgh, and his mother was Mary Elizabeth Jane Douglas, eldest daughter of Colonel Archibald Hamilton of Innerwick, Haddingtonshire.

[2] In the 1830s Mark Napier is listed as an advocate living at 11 Stafford Street in Edinburgh's west end.

[3] In 1844 he was appointed sheriff-depute of Dumfriesshire, to which Galloway was subsequently added (in 1874), an office he held for the rest his life.

He died at his residence at 6 Ainslie Place[4] on the Moray Estate in west Edinburgh, on 23 November 1879, as the oldest member of the Faculty of Advocates then discharging legal duties.

1854, and Letters to the Commissioners of Supply of the County of Dumfries, in Reply to a Report of a Committee of their Number on the Subject of Sheriff Courts, 1852, 2nd edit.

The publication raised acrimonious controversy related to the execution by drowning of the two Covenanter women, Margaret Maclachlan and Margaret Wilson, who are still known as the "Wigtown Martyrs", because Napier raised doubts as to whether the two women's execution ever took place at all; and he replied to his objectors in the Case for the Crown in re the Wigtown Martyrs proved to be Myths versus Wodrow and Lord Macaulay, Patrick the Pedlar and Principal Tulloch, 1863; and in History Rescued, in Reply to History Vindicated (by the Rev.

[2] Napier married his cousin Charlotte Ogilvy (1806-1883), daughter of Alexander Ogilvy, and widow of William Dick Macfarlane, and by her had a son and a daughter: Francis John Hamilton Scott, commander in the Royal Navy, and Frances Anne, married to Lieutenant-colonel Cecil Rice.