CASTLE URQUHART, (LOCH NESS)
GRANTED BY CHARTER 1509 TO THE FAMILY OF GRANT OF GRANT NOW EARLS OF SEAFIELD.
A. Fullerton & Co London & Edinburgh.

Sir Thomas, the family genealogist, is chiefly known as the translator of Rabelais. He appears to have at one period travelled much on the continent. He afterwards became a cavalier officer, and was knighted by Charles I. at Whitehall. After that monarch’s decapitation, he accompanied Charles II. in his march into England, and was taken prisoner at the battle of Worcester in 1651, when his estates were forfeited by Cromwell. He wrote several elaborate works, but the most creditable is his translation of Rabelais. Such, notwithstanding, was the universality of his attainments, that he deemed himself capable of enlightening the world on many things never “dreamed of in the philosophy” of ordinary mortals. “Had I not,” he says, “been pluck’d away by the importunity of my creditors, I would have emitted to public view above five hundred several treatises on inventions, never hitherto thought upon by any.” The time and place of his death are unknown. There is a tradition that he died of an inordinate fit of laughter, on hearing of the restoration of Charles II. The male line ended in Colonel James Urquhart, an officer of much distinction, who died in 1741. The representation of the family devolved on the Urquharts of Braelangwell, which was sold (with the exception of a small portion, which is strictly entailed) by Charles Gordon Urquhart, Esq., an officer in the Scots Greys. The Urquharts of Meldrum, Aberdeenshire, obtained that estate through the marriage, in 1610, of their ancestor, John Urquhart of Craigfintry, tutor of Cromarty, with Elizabeth Seton, heiress of Meldrum. The Urquharts of Craigston, and a few more families of the name, still possess estates in the north of Scotland; and persons of this surname are still numerous in the counties of Ross and Cromarty. In Ross-shire, Inverness-shire, and Morayshire, there are parishes of the name of Urquhart.

FOOTNOTES:

[228] Highlands of Scotland, p. 288.

[229] For portrait of General Hugh Mackay, vide vol. i. p. 361.

[230] Skene’s Highlanders, vol ii. p. 301.

[231] See p. 61, vol. i.

[232] See p. 60, vol. i.