There seems at first, a certain grotesqueness in such a fatal exuberance of joy in connexion with such an event as Charles II. regaining the crown which his father had lost, and of which in another generation all of his blood were to be deprived. But we have to keep in mind that Sir Thomas was not alone in his folly, if folly it were; for a great wave of exultation swept over the three kingdoms at that time. Our author had, like many of his fellow-Royalists, staked and lost everything he possessed in the defence of the House of Stuart, and one can have little difficulty in understanding how the announcement of the triumph of the cause, which was so dear to him, should have agitated him profoundly.[129] Sir Alexander Urquhart failed to recover possession of either the barony or the Sheriffship of Cromartie, and a year after the supposed date of his petition, he is said to have ratified his cousin's rights,[130] and in 1663 he formally "disponed" the estate (_i.e._ his title to it) to Sir John.[131] The new possessors were, however, as unfortunate as their immediate predecessors, for in no very long time they were overwhelmed by distresses like those which had burdened and embittered the lives of our author and his father. In 1682 the celebrated Sir George Mackenzie, whose name, like that of Queen Mary of England, is usually associated with an unenviable epithet, as that of a cruel persecutor,[132] "apprized" the estate from Sir John's[133] son, Jonathan.[134] No one who knows what this means[135] will be surprised to hear that it soon afterwards passed into his possession. On his elevation to the peerage (1685) as Viscount Tarbat, first Earl of Cromartie, he put his third-born son, Sir Kenneth, into possession of the estate, with the view of establishing a branch of his family to be known as the Mackenzies of Cromartie. This plan was doomed to be defeated, for Sir Kenneth's son George had no family, and sold the estate to Captain William Urquhart of Meldrum in 1741.[136] The lands were again sold to Patrick, Lord Elibank,[137] in 1763, and by him to George Ross of Pitkerrie, nine years afterwards. Mr Ross had amassed a large fortune in England as an army agent,[138] and part of this he expended in the purchase of the estate, and in the extensive improvements which he effected in it. One wishes he had not thought it desirable to pull down the picturesque old castle, which had stood on the mote-hill of Cromartie for three hundred years, and which had sheltered so many generations of the Urquhart family. Let us now, however, return to our author.