Author: Mercer, James
Biography:
MERCER, James (1734-1804: ODNB)
He was baptised at St. Nicholas’s, Aberdeen, Scotland (as James Francis Edward) on 16 Feb. 1834, the elder son of Margaret (Rickart) and Thomas Mercer. The family, though Protestant, were Jacobites; after fighting for the Stuarts at Culloden, Thomas Mercer went into voluntary exile in Paris, where he died in 1760. Their son was educated at the High School, Aberdeen, and the Marischal College (MA 1752) and became an excellent classicist. A contemporary at the Marischal was James Beattie (q.v.), who later became a close friend. A few years with his father in France made Mercer fluent in French. Against his parents’ wishes, however, he joined the British army at the start of the Seven Years War (1756) and saw action in France and Germany. On 13 Sept. 1763 he married Katherine Douglas, only daughter of John Douglas of Fechil, in Scotland; they had two daughters but Katherine spent much of her life as an invalid. Mercer’s mother, who had opposed the marriage as well as the choice of career, cut off his inheritance. Mercer was able to purchase a commission in the 49th Infantry and served in Ireland, rising to the rank of Major, from 1763 to 1772 or 1773, but sold his commission and left the army when disappointed of further promotion. He later accepted a commission as Major with a regiment of Fencibles (militia) stationed at Glasgow but retired when their number were reduced at the end of the US War of Independence in 1783. The deaths of his mother and brother restored him to his inheritance and in 1787 he was able to build “a pleasant little villa” (Douglas), Sunny Bank, near Aberdeen, where he died on 27 Nov. 1804. His last years were blighted by the death of his wife on 3 Jan. 1802. They are both buried, with a memorial tablet, at St. Nicholas’s. Mercer was shy about his literary work and would not have published but for the urging of his brother-in-law, Lord Glenbervie, who oversaw publication, persuaded Mercer to put his name to the 1804 edition, and in 1806 added the long memoir which became the main source of all subsequent biographical accounts. (ODNB 30 May 2023 [Mercer and Douglas]; findmypast.com 30 May 2023; ancestry.com 30 May 2023; Memoir prefixed to Lyric Poems [1806])