In the same February he was named a member of the newly established ecclesiastical court of high commission for the province of Glasgow (ib. viii. 417). On 19 Aug. he was constituted `sole and full intromitter of his Majestie's revenues and casualties, &c., and regulator of the entire revenues of Scotland, in order to avoid the abuses occasioned by a multiplicity of offices’ (Cal. State Papers, Dom. Ser. 1603-10, p. 629). He was nominated a commissioner of the general assembly summoned by the king `out of grace and in the interests of peace and concord,' and appointed to meet at Glasgow on 8 June 1610. Through his dexterous management, aided by the expenditure of a considerable sum of money in bribes, the alteration of the forms and method of church government practically amounted to the entire superseding of presbyterianism by episcopacy. At the conclusion of these deliberations he returned in September to London. He died at Whitehall on 30 Jan. 1611, according to Calderwood, ‘not withour suspicion of poison.' He was just ‘about to solemnize magnificently his daughter's marriage with the Lord Walden.’ He purposed to celebrate St. George’s day following in Berwick, where he had almost finished a sumptuous and glorious palace (History, vi. 153). His funeral was solemnly performed at Westminster in April following, but his body was embalmed, and, after being place in a coffin of lead, was sent to Scotland to be buried in the collegiate church of Dunbar. Here an ornate and elaborate monument has been erected to his memory, with his figure as a knight in armour in the attitude of prayer.
Archbishop Spotiswood, who was naturally inclined to take a favourable view of Dunbar’s policy in Scotland, describes him as `a man of deep wit, few works, and in his majesty’s service no less faithful than fortunate.'
By his wife Catherine, daughter of Sir Alexander Gordon of Geicht, and granddaughter of Cardinal Beaton, Dunbar had two daughters: Anne, married to Sir James Home of Coldingknows, Berwickshire, by whom she had a son Sir James, third earl of Home [q. v.]; and Elizabeth, married to Theophilus Howard, lord Walden, afterwards second Earl of Suffolk [q. v.]
[Reg. P. C. Scotl. vols. iii-viii.; Cal. State Papers, Scott. Ser.; Cal. State Papers, Dom. Ser.; Sir James Melville's Memoirs (Bannatyne Club); Moysie’s Memoirs (Bannatyne Club); Balfour's Annals; Histories of Calderwood and Spotiswood; Gardiner's Hist. of England; Crawford's Officers of State, pp. 397-8; Douglas's Scottish Peerage (Wood), i. 453-4.]
HOME, HENRY, Lord Kames (1696–1782), Scottish judge, son of George Home of Kames, Berwickshire, a country gentleman of small fortune, was born at Kames in 1696. His mother was a daughter of Mr. Walkinshaw of Barrowfield, and granddaughter of Robert Baillie (1599–1662) [q. v.], principal of the university of Glasgow. He was educated at home under a private tutor named Wingate, who taught him little, and about 1712 was bound by indenture to a writer of the signet at Edinburgh. After an interview with Sir Hew Dalrymple, then president of the court of session, to whose house he had been sent one evening on business, Home determined to become an advocate. He thereupon set to work to repair the defects of his early education, and having applied himself to the study of mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, as well as law, was called to the Scottish bar on 19 Jan. 1724. At first he was not very successful. In 1728, however, he published his ‘Remarkable Decisions of the Court of Session from 1716 to 1728,’ a carefully executed work, which drew attention to Home's abilities. From this time his progress was assured. On the death of Patrick Campbell of Monzie, Home was appointed an ordinary lord of session, and took his seat on the bench on 6 Feb. 1752 with the title of Lord Kames. In 1755 he became a member of the board of trustees for the encouragement of fisheries, arts, and manufactures of Scotland, and was shortly afterwards chosen one of the commissioners for the annexed estates. On 15 April 1763 he also became one of the lords of the justiciary court in the place of Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto, promoted to the post of lord justice clerk. Home sat on the bench for over thirty years, exercising his judicial functions, in spite of his increasing infirmities, until within a few days of his death. On the day the court rose for the Christmas vacation, 1782, he took an affectionate farewell of each of his brethren, and on leaving the court-room cried in his usual familiar tone, ‘Fare ye a'weel, ye bitches!’ He died on 27 Dec. 1782, aged 86, and was buried in the churchyard of the parish of Kincardine, Perthshire, where an immense white marble monument was erected to his memory.
Kames was an ingenious and voluminous writer, with a considerable knowledge of law and a great taste for metaphysics. His style, however, is crabbed and wanting in variety, while his learning is frequently superficial and inaccurate. Dr. Johnson formed a poor opinion of him. When Boswell, boasting of the advancement of literature in Scotland,
