The Idea of Charles II as King Was a Fatal Joke to Thomas Urquhart
Urquhart was captured and imprisoned for two years, first in the Tower of London, then at Windsor. While locked up, he lobbied Oliver Cromwell to release him. He went about it in a weird way: a series of increasingly bizarre pamphlets, with a detailed description of how the Urquharts were supposedly descended from Adam and Eve via a host of luminaries. One such was his great 109th grandmother, whom Urquhart claimed had discovered baby Moses in the Nile’s rushes. He also claimed that his great 87th grandmother was the Queen of Sheba; his great 66th grandfather had been a general for the mythical Fergus I of Scotland, and that one of King Arthur’s daughters had married into the Urquharts.
Cromwell eventually ordered him freed in 1653. However, Urquhart lost all his manuscripts, and had to forfeit all his properties as a condition for his parole and release. He also had to leave Britain for the continent. In 1660 Urquhart heard that Charles II – whose incompetence in the 1651 attempt to gain the throne had ended in disaster and cost Urquhart so much – had been restored and welcomed back as king. That struck him as such an unlikely joke that he died from laughter. As it turned out, it was all too real. Charles II reigned for twenty five years, until his death in 1685. All things considered, at least Urquhart died from laughter at the idea of Charles as monarch, rather than die from heartbreak at the reality that a man he so despised had been crowned.