The Stables, Cromarty, 15 – 16 April 2011

SIR Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty is generally remembered for two deeds – for translating Rabelais into English, and for dying of a fit of laughter on hearing of the Restoration of the Stuarts to the British throne – and one of these is probably apocryphal, writes Jim Miller.

Over two days in the middle of April, a considerable number of academics and Urquhart groupies, the two far from mutually exclusive, gathered in Cromarty to mark the 400^th anniversary of the birth of the town’s second most famous son.

Sir Thomas Urquhart, by George Glover, line engraving, 1641

Let us get a brief outline of the great man’s life out of the way first. Born in 1611, the son of the Urquhart laird of Cromarty, Thomas – or TU as I have come to call him – studied in Aberdeen, travelled on the continent, took up arms in the royalist cause in the civil wars, wrote a vast amount of diverse material, much of it while in prison after the battle of Worcester, and eventually died in exile in 1660, or thereabouts.

The works of Sir Thomas encompass a vast breadth of learning and invention, covering among other things epigrams, family history – of doubtful seriousness, mathematics, diatribes against the Scottish clergy, praise of Scotland, the translation of the first three books of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, and a proposal for a universal language.

The impressive line-up of scholars from home and abroad attracted to the conference, held in the Stables Gallery and organised by the Cromarty Arts Trust, suggests that a re-evaluation of and a new surge of interest in this 17^th-century writer may be in the offing.

Certainly the oeuvre of Sir Thomas offers some currently useful invective. Pursued relentlessly by creditors after he inherited his father’s debt-laden estate, he wrote of the knot of Scots bankers in London as “Quodomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets”.

The conference sessions were divided between history and literature. This was not TU for beginners but some scholarly presentations on the religious politics and social background of the 17^th century in the north, literary analysis and criticism. Good intellectual material of the wholemeal variety.

An amiable difference of opinion over the motives in TU’s writing emerged over the two days. Was he aiming for parody in much of the work? He was certainly a humourist, playing with voices and language. For example, in his family history in which he traces his descent back to Adam, was he taking the piss out of his contemporaries engaged on genealogy?

Or was he manically serious eccentric, producing reams of work in jail in a storm of creativity in an attempt to impress his captors that he was a useful man for Cromwell’s state and should be let him out?

By the end, had we made sense of the man, as Dr John Nightingale, chairman of the Cromarty Arts Trust, hoped in his welcoming address we might? The answer must be no – but there again has anyone ever made sense of any artist, let alone one of the logorrheic and multi-faceted character of TU?

© Jim Miller, 2011

Links

• Conference Website