(Jewel, p. 224). He states (Logopan. p. 10), that he thrice entered the lists, like his favourite hero, the Admirable Crichton, against men of three several nations to vindicate his native country, and, having disarmed his opponents, magnanimously spared their lives, though not until they had ‘in some sort acknowledged their error.’
Shortly after his return from the continent Urquhart appeared in arms among the northern confederates who opposed the ‘vulgar covenant.’ The first skirmish of the Scottish war was occasioned by Urquhart's attempt to recover by force a store of arms deposited by him in Balquholly House (now Halton Castle), Turriff, which had been seized by the Barclays of Towie. Close upon this followed the Trott of Turriff (14 May 1639), in which Urquhart shared, and the short-lived royalist occupation of Aberdeen. Ten days later, upon the anti-covenanter force dispersing, he sailed from Aberdeen for England, and entered the service of Charles I, by whom he was knighted in the gallery at Whitehall on 7 April 1641. While in London he seems to have resided in Clare Street. Before returning to Scotland in the autumn of the ensuing year to take upon him the burden of the ‘crazed estate’ which he inherited upon the death of his father, Sir Thomas saw through the press and dedicated to his then political leader, James Hamilton, third marquis of Hamilton [q. v.], his three books of ‘Epigrams.’ Each book contains forty-four epigrams or rather aphorisms; in metrical form they are sextains, and are sententious and sedate, not witty (cf. Collier, Bibl. Cat. ii. 461). At the close of 1642, after setting apart the bulk of the rents due from his estate for the payment of creditors, he went abroad again for three years. But affairs seem to have been mismanaged in his absence, and he returned to find the creditors changed, not for the better, and the debt little, if at all, reduced. From the close of 1645 he took up his abode in the ancestral tower of Cromarty, a fortalice erected under a royal grant of James III to William Urquhart, dated 6 April 1470. In 1648 he was appointed officer of horse and foot in the royal interest for putting the kingdom into a state of defence.
It speaks well for his power of detachment and his cheerfulness amid ‘solicitudinary and luctiferous discouragements, fit to appall the most undaunted spirits,’ that he was able to prepare for press in the very year of his return his abstruse work on trigonometry, entitled ‘Trissotetras.’ This singular book was dedicated by Sir Thomas to his mother, who is addressed with every embellishment of adulatory extravagance as ‘Cynthia.’ He found, moreover, a source of keen pleasure in his books at Cromarty—‘not three among them,’ he says, ‘were not of mine owne purchase, and all of them together in the order wherein I had ranked them, compiled (like to a compleat nosegay) of flowers which in my travels I had gathered out of the gardens of above sixteen several kingdoms’ (Logopan.) Most of these treasures were soon unhappily sequestrated and sold by the creditors, ‘iron-handed,’ he complains, ‘in the use of hornings and apprizings.’ The worst of this gang, in the debtor's eyes, were ‘the caitiff’ Robert Lesley, descendant, as he avers, though wrongly, from Norman Lesley, the murderer of Cardinal Beaton, and Sir James Fraser of Darkhouse, ‘of whom no good can truly be spoken but that he is dead.’ Among his enemies he naturally includes the usurers, who ‘blasted all his schemes for the benefit of mankind;’ but with none of his foes did he quarrel more forcibly than with the neighbouring ministers of Kirkmichael, Cullicuden, and Cromarty, and to the ‘acconital bitterness’ of this last, one Gilbert Anderson, he frequently refers.
His struggle with his creditors and his attempts at squaring the circle were interrupted by the news of the execution of the king. Early in 1649 he joined Thomas Mackenzie of Pluscardine, Colonel Hugh Fraser, John Munro of Lumlair, and others, who rose in arms and planted the standard of Charles II at Inverness. The rising proved abortive, and on 2 March 1649 the estates of parliament at Edinburgh declared Urquhart a rebel and a traitor. No active steps seem to have been taken against him until 22 June 1650, when he was as a ‘malignant’ examined by a commission of the general assembly, and charged with having taken part in the northern insurrection, and with having vented dangerous opinions. His political attitude was probably regarded by the commission as innocuous, for his case was merely referred to the discretion of John Annand, minister of Inverness (cf. General Assembly Records, Scot. Hist. Soc. 1896).
On the coronation of Charles II at Scone Urquhart finally quitted the old castle of Cromarty and joined the Scottish army. The expeditionary force was very heterogeneously composed, and, according to Urquhart, who had abated none of his antipathies, it was spoiled by presbyterians, whom he accuses of deserting on the eve of the battle, ‘lest they should seem to trust to the arm of flesh.’ Prior to the battle of Worcester Sir
