Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie

“ He succeeded to the property in 1603, and in 1617 was knighted by James VI. in Edinburgh. As he was left an orphan at an early age, he was brought up under the care of his grand-uncle, John Urquhart of Craigfintray, who has been commonly called from this circumstance "the Tutor of Cromartie." [5] His great-grandnephew, our Sir Thomas, has celebrated his praise in very high terms. "He was," he says, "over all Britain renowned for his deep reach of natural wit, and great dexterity in acquiring of many lands and great possessions, with all men's applause." ”

“ Pococke, in his Tour through Scotland (1761) , says of the castle of Cromartie: "It has fallen into the hands of one Mr Urquhart, who had commanded a Spanish Gally, and died a Convert to Popery; which slip his son, now eighteen years old, has in some degree recovered, by conforming to the Church of England" (p. 176; Scottish History Society) .
[137] In the old Statistical Account of Cromartie, and in the preface to the Maitland Club edition of Urquhart's Works, the estate is said to have passed into the hands of Sir William Pulteney. ”

“ It can only be felt by those who have perused the Tract itself." It is to be feared that Dr Kippis was mentally akin to the Irish bishop who remarked of Gulliver's Travels when it appeared, that "all was not gospel that was in that book."
Some one has said that the names of Urquhart's ancestors, at any rate on the male side, are very likely those of the giants and heathen in the Amadis of Gaul; and certainly Famongomadan, Cartadaque, Madanfabul, Arcalaus, and Basagante remind one of chiefs and heroes of the Cromartie line. In the female line the resemblance is much closer ”

“ To the west of the parish of Cromartie were situated the joint parishes of Kirkmichael and Cullicudden, on the southern shore of the Cromartie Firth. In Sir Thomas Urquhart's time these were separate parishes, but they were united in 1662, and a new church was built at Resolis, in Kirkmichael, near the border of Cullicudden. ”

“ Francis Rabelais, in the French Tongue, and now faithfully translated into English. ευνοει εὑλογε καἱ εὑπραττε. London, Printed for Richard Baddeley, within the Middle Templegate. 1653." On the title-page of the second book are the translator's initials, S, T. V. C. (Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie) . While on that of the third book we have his name in full: "Now faithfully translated into English by the unimitable pen of Sir Thomas Urwhart, Kt. and Bar. ”

“ But the word is evidently αυρον—the Lat. aurum, "gold." In the "Postilla" to the Pedigree of the Urquharts, our author says that "the shire of Cromartie ... hath the names of its towns, villages, hamlets, dwellings, promontories, hillocks, temples, dens, groves, fountains, rivers, pools, lakes, stone heaps, akers, and so forth, of pure and perfect Greek." We need not be surprised that Sir Thomas's Greek has more affinity with the vernacular form of the language current in the Cromartie of his time than with the Attic of the age of Pericles,
"For Greke of Athenes was to him unknowé." ”

“ The party to which our author belonged was for a time excluded from all share in public life; and even the army, which was to defend the sovereign against the English sectaries, was carefully sifted, to remove those whose presence might bring a curse upon it. So that, though the land resounded with war and the rumour of war, Sir Thomas remained in an enforced quietude in his castle at Cromartie. ”

“ It was also decided that Sir Thomas's house at Cromartie should be put in a state of defence, and that the work should be [Pg 71] carried out by the tenants of Sir James Fraser, a bitter Parliamentarian, and opponent of the Stuarts in the north, and by those of our knight's old enemy, Lesley of Findrassie. [99] It is easy for unregenerate human nature to understand the pleasure with which the members of the Committee of War would give this last order. ”

“ Unsuccessful Rising in the North—Sir Thomas makes his Peace with the Church—Return of Charles II. to Scotland—Invasion of England—Battle of Worcester—Sir Thomas a Prisoner in the Tower—Makes Friends—Is liberated on Parole—Great Literary Activity—Revisits Scotland—Dies—Later History of the Urquharts of Cromartie—Characteristics of our Author—Glover's Portraits of him. ”

“ Sir Thomas does not let us off easily. After subjecting our credulity to a severe strain by one kind of statement, he unexpectedly increases the tension by another. Thus he says that an ancestor in the fifteenth century, Thomas Urquhart, had by his wife Helen Abernethie, daughter of Lord Salton, five-and-twenty sons, who grew up to manhood, and eleven daughters, all of whom found husbands. It would only have been kind of him to have reduced these numbers a little. But on one point he has spared us: we are not asked to believe that there were others who died in infancy. ”

“ It would seem from this that Urquhart was originally a place-name, probably Gaelic. There were two parishes of Urquhart in the old province of Moray—one with a priory near Elgin, and the other with a castle in what is now Inverness-shire.
[5] "Tutor" here simply means "legal guardian"—for boys until fourteen years of age, and for girls until twelve. After these ages and before that of twenty-one such wards are in the charge of "Curators." Owing to our author's having the same Christian name as his father, the mistake is often made of asserting that John Urquhart was his tutor. ”

“ There can be little doubt that Sir Thomas had the best of the argument. But he was not satisfied with this: for nothing less would content him than vanquishing his opponent on his own ground, as well as with the weapons of logic. With the same lordliness of temper which had led him to re-capitulate the dignified subjects which had occupied his studious mind—the squaring of the circle being but one of them—he chose the breaking-in of a horse as a set-off against his friend's achievements of the day before. ”

“ It is to be noticed [Pg 63] that Sir Thomas writes of himself in the third person. "I think," says the supposed anonymous writer of him, "there be hardly any in Scotland that proportionably hath suffered more prejudice by the Kirk then [than] himself; his own ministers (to wit, those that preach in the churches whereof himself is patron, Master Gilbert Anderson, Master Robert Williamson, and Master Charles Pape by name, serving the cures of Cromartie, Kirkmichel, and Cullicudden) , having done what lay in them for the furtherance of their owne covetous ends, to his utter undoing ”

“ On a table beside him are his hat and embroidered cloak. In the vacant spaces on each side of the upper part of the figure are his name and titles: "S^r Thomas Urchard, Knight, of Bray and Udol, etc., Baron of Ficherie and Clohorby, etc., Laird Baron of Cromartie and Heritable Sheriff thereof, etc." The portrait is described as taken from the life, and engraved in 1641; [149] and beneath it is a couplet by W. S., as follows:
"Of him whose shape this Picture hath design'd,
Vertue and learning represent the Mind." ”

“ Afterwards, raising the siege from about the mote-hill of Cromartie by the assistance of his namesake the other William, the shire of Cromarty was totally purged of the enemy." [190]
Tradition, according to Hugh Miller, is silent respecting the siege, but relates many details of the battle. The Scottish forces lay in ambuscade in the ravine or hollow which is still, or was until recently, called by Wallace's name, and attacked a large body of English troops on their way to join some of their countrymen, who were encamped on the peninsula of Easter Ross. ”

“ Sir Thomas was only eleven years old when, in 1622, he entered the University of Aberdeen, [13] but there is no reason to believe that the average age of the "men" of his year would be in excess of his own. Donne was the same age as Urquhart when he entered Oxford. The famous Crichton went up to St Andrews at the age of ten, though up to that time he had not given evidence of any extraordinary precocity. ”

“ In telling the story of Sir Thomas Urquhart's life, some of his most striking peculiarities have been displayed and illustrated, so that no one who has read the foregoing pages is altogether dependent upon what may now be said for forming an estimate of his character. His vanity is perhaps the most striking trait in it; but only a very hard-hearted moralist would call it a vice in his case, for it is as artless as it is boundless, and is combined with so much kindness of heart and generosity of feeling, that we are more entertained by it than indignant at it. ”

“ Summoning Shrewsbury, with the usual negative response, they quitted the London road; bent southward towards Worcester, a City of slight Garrison and loyal Mayor; there to entrench themselves, and repose a little." [114] Yet but slight opportunity for this was given them. The course taken by Cromwell was through York, Nottingham, Coventry, and Stratford-on-Avon, and when he arrived at Worcester with his army from Scotland, and with the county militias, who had risen at his summons, his forces numbered over thirty thousand men as against the enemy's sixteen thousand. ”

“ In one respect, at any rate, we have legitimate ground of triumph over our ancestors—we spell better than they did. Charles Lamb once lent a volume of the old dramatists to a friend, and asked him his opinion of it. The reply was that it contained a considerable amount of bad spelling! The name Urquhart, as thus written, occurs here in Sir Thomas's "Pedigree," and is, doubtless, the correct form of the name. In the Latinised shape of Urquhardus it occurs on the register of the University of Aberdeen, at which our author studied. ”

“ A century later, we find that Propetes Urquhart married Hypermnestra, "the choicest of Danaus' fifty daughters." This must have been some time after the little affair happened for which forty-nine of her sisters were condemned to draw water in [Pg 134] sieves; for, as every schoolboy knows, the fifty daughters of Danaus were married to their cousins, the fifty sons of Ægyptus, and all of them, but one, at the bidding of their father, murdered their husbands on the evening of the marriage-day. Hypermnestra, however, had pity upon her cousin and husband, Lynceus, and spared him. ”

“ If we can trust the two engraved portraits of Sir Thomas Urquhart which have come down to us, he was a man of handsome presence, and accustomed to deck himself in all the splendour of costume to which so many of his brother-cavaliers were addicted. George Glover, the famous engraver, drew both the portraits of him which are extant. One of these appears as a frontispiece to the Epigrams and to the Trissotetras. It is a small whole-length, and represents Sir Thomas in rich dress, [147] holding out his hand to receive from some [Pg 108] allegorical personage a laurel wreath "for Armes and Artes." ”

“ The story may be either the misapplication to Urquhart of some vague tradition of one of the feats of his hero, the Admirable Crichton, or of what he himself has actually recorded of the poet, Arthur Johnston. [154]
A modern critic, who has given Urquhart a full measure of praise, finds himself unable to say a word in favour of his poems. "This slender volume," he remarks, "gives not the slightest promise of talent. ”

“ The main contents of the work are lists of the ancestors, male and female, of the Urquhart family from the beginning down to the year 1652, taken from the Pedigree; a narrative of the sad fate that overtook the author's manuscripts after the battle of Worcester; some pages of one of them which contained a scheme for a Universal Language; a denunciation of the "unjust usurpation of the Presbyterian Clergy, and the judaical practices of some merchants" by which discredit had been cast upon the Scottish name ”

“ Indeed, he goes so far as to say [Pg 66] that, as a rule, the preachers of his time seldom gave such exhortations, as they were "enjoyned by their ecclesiastical authority [authorities?] to preach to the times, [91] that is, to rail against malignants and sectaries, or those whom they suppose to be their enemies." [92] Preaching "to the times" Sir Thomas found meant in his neighbourhood preaching against him; and one may be allowed, it is to be hoped, without unduly wounding the feelings of those who admire the Covenanters, to think sympathetically of his sufferings. ”

“ Sir Theodore Martin considers that there is a strong presumption against the truth of the above account of Sir Thomas's death, in his entire silence during the long period which elapsed between the publication of his last work and 1660, the date of the Restoration of Charles II. "Men," he says, "so deeply smitten with the cacoëthes scribendi as Urquhart was, do not thus readily cast the pen [Pg 98] aside ”

“ From Venice he proceeded to Padua, and from thence to the Court of Mantua, where the adventure occurred with which Sir Thomas Urquhart begins the narrative of his celebrated fellow-countryman's exploits, namely, the defeat and death of the travelling bravo, whose challenge he had accepted. Sir Thomas is the only authority for this incident in Crichton's history. ”

“ I will not say, κακου κόρακοϛ κακὸν ὠόν [an evil egg of an evil crow] , but may safely think that a well-sanctified mother will not have a so ill-instructed brat, and that injuria humana cannot be the lawfull daughter of a jure divino parent." [90]
Sir Thomas Urquhart is not to be taken as infallible in the opinions which he formed and expressed concerning the quality of the sermons which were delivered from the Presbyterian pulpits of his time. ”