Mark Napier (historian)
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Mark Napier (24 July 1798 – 23 November 1879) was a Scottish lawyer, biographer and historical author. He was called to the Bar, practised as an advocate, and was made Sheriff of Dumfries and Galloway. Napier wrote from a strongly Cavalier and Jacobite standpoint. He published Memoirs of the Napiers, of Montrose, and of Graham of Claverhouse, the last of which gave rise to controversy.
Napier was a member of the Edinburgh Calotype Club and the Photographic Society of Scotland. Founded in 1843 the club is one of the world's first photographic clubs.[1]
Born on 24 July 1798, he was descended from the Napiers of Merchiston. His great-grandfather Francis Napier, 6th Lord Napier had five sons, of whom the youngest, Mark, a major-general in the army, was the grandfather of the biographer. 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. He was educated at Edinburgh High School and the university of Edinburgh, and passed advocate at the Scottish bar in 1820.[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.[2] He is buried in St Cuthberts churchyard in Edinburgh.[5]
