Much of what has passed for the truth about Scottish history, Trevor-Roper suggests, is actually the product of this same mythopoetic impulse. Consider the case of Hector Boece, a 15th-century scholar and humanist from Dundee who wrote a hugely influential "History of the Scots." Boece was not content with the truth about the Scots — that they were an Irish people who migrated to western Scotland in the fifth century C.E. ("Scotus," in Latin, originally meant "Irish.") Jealous of the alleged antiquity of the English, who traced their descent to Aeneas and the Trojan Wars, Boece elaborated a rival myth, according to which the Scots were descended from an ancient Greek hero, Gaythelos, and his wife Scota, an Egyptian princess who was the daughter of the biblical pharaoh.

Because Boece alleged that their descendants — who took the names Gael and Scot in their memory — arrived in Scotland in the fourth century B.C.E., he was faced with a 900-year gap in the historical record. He filled it by inventing 40 kings, whom he not only named but provided with what Trevor-Roper calls "elaborate and detailed biographies." Among them were many wicked monarchs, "a set of human monsters, vicious, violent, and frightening" — such as Lugtacus, who "repeatedly raped his aunts, his daughters, his sisters and their daughters." As befit a moralistic historian, Boece showed these evil kings receiving due punishment, as their suffering subjects deposed and executed them.