Scholars customarily overvalue the influence of historical truth as against historical myth. Thomas Innes, by exact scholarship, revalued the sources of ancient Scottish and Irish history, providing a base in which all late scholars would build. Incidentally he removed centuries of false history, and thereby destroyed the historical foundations of whig theories and the historical justification of the Hanoverian succession to the throne of Scotland. But did the political cause of Jacobitism gain anything from his work? Probably not. We may doubt whether the Chevalier de St George [The Old Pretender] even read it. In fact very few people read it. Even the greatest historian of the eighteenth century [Gibbon] was not among them.
H.R. Trevor Roper, The invention of Scotland (2014), 71
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