The Use of Lockhart’s Memoirs (1714) in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century Whig Historians of the Anglo-Scottish Union (1707)

Abstract

Eighteenth-century whig historians of the Union (1707) reacted to Lockhart’s tory-jacobite Memoirs in different ways. While John Oldmixon (1672-1742) incorporated passages from them into his account of the Union for the sake of confuting them, Abel Boyer (1667-1729) and Nicholas Tindal (1687-1774) endorsed them to a large degree, borrowing from them extensively. Then, several historians writing in the mid- to late eighteenth century such as Thomas Somerville (1740-1830) or Malcolm Laing (1762-1818) approached them with an open mind, but also some critical distance, revealing an evolution in British historiography towards a more scholarly approach to historical sources.

Except for Oldmixon’s accounts, all those historians’s expositions of the Union were to some extent impacted by Lockhart’s Memoirs. Far from using the latter only as a storehouse of information on the Union, they were all in some mesure influenced by Lockhart’s vision of that event and, as a result, ideologically hybrid.