URQUHART, Robert 14th (and last) of Burdsyards ¹

   User ID: Q66

  General Notes:

"URQUHART
ROBERT
DUNCAN URQUHART/JEAN GORDON
M
07/08/1767
137
20 / 81
Forres"

from Births and Baptisms




"Robert Urquhart of Burdsyards, Advocate, to his father Duncan Urquhart of Burdsyards, who died - April 1790. Heir special in Thornhill, Burdsyards, Sanquhar, Borg, in the parish of Forres. 6th Sept. 1790 (Decennial List of Heirs).

After Colonel Duncan's death, his son's affairs went from bad to worse, and the estate was finally sold in 1795. Robert, who was born in 1767, was admitted student at Lincoln's Inn, 4th February 1786, and afterwards became an advocate. [....]

He had been an officer in the Army and had a good estate, but he became wasteful, extravagant and dissipated, and in a few years spent all his fortune. The estate was still in his possession in 1796, but in, or previous to, 1798, was sold to George Grant. There was probably little or no reversion, and the proprietor was soon reduced to beggary. A recent writer says, ' Not very long ago, indeed within the memory, perhaps, of some still alive, Urquhart, laird of Burdsyards, a scion of the famous family of Urquhart of Cromarty, after passing many years as an officer in a distinguished regiment and mixing in the first society of London and Edinburgh, was necessitated by his extravagance to sell his estate, sank step by step to the lowest depth of misery, and came at last a wandering beggar to his own door, or rather to that door which had once been his own' (Reference for this story, Burke's Vicissitudes of Families, Vol. I, p. 6)."

from History of the Family of Urquhart ¹