The Man Who Supposedly Laughed Himself To Death

Thomas Urquhart was born in 1611 in Cromarty, in the Scottish Highlands, into a long line of well-off landowners. His family had held the area for generation after generation. That being a given, he practically had everything handed to him on a silver platter already.

At the age of 11, Urquhart headed off to King’s College in Aberdeen. Yes, eleven! Whatever else you may say about the man later on, he was clearly no fool, even if he did, in fact, spend his life acting like one.

After his studies, Urquhart went on a “Grand Tour,” traveling through France, Spain, and Italy. It was basically a gap year for the wealthy, where they mixed culture-hopping, sightseeing, and showing off. Flexing, as the young like to say it now. He soaked up European ideas and languages before heading home to Scotland in 1636.

Back home, Urquhart threw himself into Scotland’s political mess. He became a loyal Royalist. In 1639, he fought against a group called the Covenanters at a battle that has one of history’s greatest names (behind The Great Stink of London, probably): the Trot of Turriff.

For his loyalty and his part in the fighting (the Royalists won, by the way), Urquhart was knighted by King Charles I on April 7, 1641, at the Whitehall Gallery in London, and so he became known as Sir Thomas Urquhart.

In 1642, Urquhart’s father died and left him the family’s large estates. Sounds great until you learn he also inherited enormous debts along with the land. So instead of a comfortable windfall, he got a financial headache.

To deal with his debts, Urquhart did what any immoral person would do: he left the country. He spent time on the Continent partly to dodge the people he owed money to.

Urquhart actually published a book in 1645. You’d think he would write anything else other than math, but that’s what he did. The book, titled Trissotetras, dealt with trigonometry using the theory of logarithms.

Urquhart had a signature style, and that style was, well, quite chaotic. He loved using strange, overblown, made-up words, often to the point of being nearly impossible to read. But all that is on purpose. Just think of the most pretentious person you know who keeps using words they basically pulled out of a thesaurus. That’s basically him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if “highfalutin” was actually his middle name.

Chaotic as he is, Urquhart just could not stay out of trouble. It’s like a curse at this point. In 1649, he joined a Royalist uprising against Oliver Cromwell’s forces near Inverness. As you would guess, it did not go well. The Scottish Estates of Parliament in Edinburgh officially declared him a traitor for it. So now he was a knight, and then a debtor, then an eccentric author, and now… a wanted man.

Never one to quit a losing side, Urquhart backed Charles II in 1650 and marched with his army to the Battle of Worcester in 1651. It was a disaster, though. Cromwell’s forces crushed the Royalists completely.

After the defeat at Worcester, Urquhart was captured and thrown into the Tower of London. It was one of the most feared prisons in the country. And to make things worse than they already were, he lost his manuscripts and had his family estates confiscated. Freedom, writing, and home, all gone in one go. Yikes!

Even locked in the Tower of London, having lost nearly everything, Urquhart just kept writing and writing and writing and publishing books. Cue the song Non-Stop from the Hamilton musical.

One of Urquhart’s books, birthed from prison, was a genealogy that had an absolutely unhinged claim. He traced his family line all the way back to Adam and Eve. Yes, Adam, as in the biblical first human! By that logic, though, aren’t we all descendants of Adam and Eve?

In 1652, Urquhart also produced a prose miscellany defending Scotland’s honor, with an enormous title usually just shortened to The Jewel. Okay, I’ll tell you the full title: “Ekskybalauron: or, The discovery of a most exquisite jewel.” Its hero was based on a real-life Scottish adventurer known as the Admirable Crichton. So on top of everything else, this chaotic debtor-knight helped defend Scotland’s reputation in print. Range!

In a surprising turn, the very forces that imprisoned Urquhart set him free. In 1652, Cromwell paroled Urquhart, allowing him to return briefly to Cromarty before eventually heading back to the Continent around 1653.

In 1653, Urquhart published his plan for a perfect universal language that everyone in the world could use. There was just one small problem… it did not include any actual vocabulary. He described this so-amazing language in such glowing detail, but claimed the words themselves were in a huge manuscript that had been lost after the Battle of Worcester. Maybe it was an early record of Minionese? Who knows!

Rather than admit that his wordless language (such a funny oxymoron) was unfinished, Urquhart found someone to blame: his creditors. He argued that the people chasing him for money had distracted him and stopped him from completing his linguistic masterpiece.

For all his oddball projects, Urquhart’s most respected work was actually a translation. He rendered the wild, funny, filthy French novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais into English, and people still praise it as one of the most vivid, original translations ever made. Of course, the man obsessed with strange, playful language would produce a legendary version of Renaissance Europe’s most gleefully bizarre book! Not much of a surprise on that part.

According to long-standing legend, Urquhart was living overseas in 1660 when he heard that Charles II had been restored to the throne. The news apparently delighted him so much that he burst into a fit of laughter, one so violent it actually killed him on the spot. Regardless of skepticism regarding this, all I can say is that, either way, what a way to go!

This content was created with the help of AI.