Works
Napier's reputation was literary rather than legal: his only strictly legal works were The Law of Prescription in Scotland, 1839, 2nd edit. 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. 1852.
In 1834 Napier published Memoirs of John Napier of Merchiston; and in 1839 he edited Napier's unpublished manuscripts with an introduction. His other biographical works suffered from partisan exaggerations arising from his Jacobitism. On the Marquis of Montrose he published Montrose and the Covenanters, 1838, Life and Times of Montrose, 1840, Memorials of Montrose and his Times, a collection of original documents edited for the Maitland Club (vol. i. 1848, and vol. ii. 1850); and the summation in Memoirs of the Marquis of Montrose, two vols. 1856.
Napier's Memorials of Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, 1859–62, included letters of Claverhouse and other documents not previously in print. Its publication led to controversy about the drowning of the two women, Margaret Maclachlan and Margaret Wilson, known as the "Wigtown Martyrs". Napier raised doubts as to whether the execution took place; 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. Archibald Stewart), 1870.
Napier in 1835 published a History of the Partition of Lennox; the Napiers had an historical connection with the earldom of Lennox. He also edited vols. ii. and iii. of John Spotiswood's History of the Church of Scotland for the Bannatyne Club in 1847. The Lennox of Auld, an Epistolary Review of “The Lennox” by William Fraser was published posthumously in 1880, edited by his son Francis.
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“...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?”
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