William Cuninghame of Lainshaw

[1] He was the son of William Cunninghame (died 1804), a prosperous tobacco merchant of Glasgow, who in 1779 bought the Lainshaw estate, Stewarton, Ayrshire.

[2][3] Educated at the University of Utrecht, he joined the Bengal civil service of the East India Company.

[2] Cuninghame was one of a group of British biblical interpreters of the early 19th century, including also Edward Bickersteth, Thomas Rawson Birks, Joshua William Brooks, and Edward Bishop Elliott, who combined premillennialism with a more traditional historicist reading of prophecy.

[4] In this, he followed the earlier influence of Johann Heinrich Alsted in Diatribe mille annis apocalypticis (Frankfurt, 1627), and Joseph Mede in Clavis Apocalypticae.

Departing from that traditional historicist hermeneutic, the premillennialism movement came to include futurist and dispensational contributors such as Hugh M'Neile, Edward Irving and John Nelson Darby.