Any consideration of the history of the National Library of Scotland must begin with the body from which the National Library was born, the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. Inaugurated in 1689 and given the privilege of legal deposit by the Copyright Act of 1709, the Advocates' Library was long regarded as Scotland's national library in all but name. Although a modest degree of financial support had been forthcoming from the Treasury to extend the storage areas of the Advocates' Library in the first half of the nineteenth century, the burden on a private body of maintaining a library with legal deposit status and a national role became increasingly difficult to bear.

The 1850s saw a growing feeling in Scotland that the country's cultural institutions were suffering undue neglect in comparison with the support offered by the government to bodies such as the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Royal Dublin Society. Such neglect was rectified in part with the opening of the National Gallery of Scotland in 1859 and of the Industrial Museum of Scotland, precursor of the Royal Museum of Scotland, in 1861. However, state assistance for the Advocates' Library remained elusive. The Faculty's appeal for an annual grant for the Library was met with the skepticism of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone, who doubted the practicality of funding from the public purse a private body which already benefited from ‘a tax upon authors’. Nevertheless, Gladstone did raise the possibility that ‘it might be right to negotiate with the Advocates for taking over the whole property in the Library for public uses - under covenants securing to the Faculty any special privileges which might be useful to them and which without injuring the community might form an appropriate record of their former ownership’.