Innes, THOMAS, a Scottish historian, known better as 'Father Innes,' was born in 1662 at Drumgask, on Deeside, Aberdeenshire. At fifteen he was sent to Paris, where he studied at the College of Navarre and the Scots College, of which latter body his eldest brother Lewis (1651-1738) was principal from 1682. Thomas received priest's orders in 1692, and after three years of mission work at Inveraven, Banffshire (1698-1701), returned to Paris, and became prefect of studies in the Scots
College, where he died, 28th January 1744. To pursue his researches he had paid a visit or two to England and Scotland; and Wodrow, who saw him at Edinburgh in 1724, describes him as 'a monkish, bookish person, who meddles with nothing but literature.' Withal he was a staunch Jacobite, but no Ultramontane; not free, indeed, from suspicion of Janseism. He may justly be looked on as the precursor of Niebuhr and Niebuhr's successors; for his Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of Scotland (2 vols. 1729) is much the earliest of all scientific histories. It was meant for an introduction to a Civil and Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, one volume of which, coming down to Columba's death, he prepared for the press, whilst another, bringing down the narrative to 831, was left incomplete. Both were edited for the Spalding Club by Dr Grub in 1853. The aim of the whole work was 'to counteract the inventions of former historians [Hector Boece], and to go to the bottom of the dark contrivances of factious men [George Buchanan] against the sovereignty of our kings;,' and, though he thus wrote with a purpose, his honesty and acumen were such that the work retains a permanent value. See the Memoir by Dr Grub prefixed to the reprint of the Critical Essay ('Historians of Scotland' series, vol. viii. 1879).