Sir Thomas Hope, 1st Baronet

Sir Thomas Hope, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish lawyer, politician and lord advocate under James VI and I and Charles I. He became one of the leading legal figures of seventeenth-century Scotland and supported the Presbyterian Covenanters.

Hope helped frame legal arguments against royal religious policy and served in the parliaments of the Covenanting period. His diaries and professional papers are important sources for law, politics and family networks before the civil wars.

Nigel Tranter’s Hope Endures is a biographical novel centred on Thomas Hope’s rise from an Edinburgh merchant family to the office of Lord Advocate. The story follows his legal career under James VI and I and Charles I as disputes over royal authority, the kirk, church property and Parliament harden into the Covenanting crisis. Hope’s courtroom skill and political judgement are therefore the action of the novel: rather than placing a lawyer at the edge of civil conflict, Tranter shows how petitions, precedents and constitutional argument become weapons in the struggle that precedes open war.