John Farquharson (Jesuit)

John Farquharson (Scottish Gaelic: Maighstir Iain, an-tAthair Iain Mac Fhearchair) (19 April 1699 – 13 October 1782), was a member of the Scottish nobility who became an outlawed priest in the Northwest Highlands for the illegal Catholic Church in Scotland.

John Farquharson was born in the valley of Braemar as the son of the chief of Clan Farquharson and laird of Inverey and Auchindryne. After studying at the Scots College, Douai and being ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, Farquharson returned to Scotland and began studying and successfully learned his Scottish Gaelic heritage language. He lived in a cave with two fellow Jesuits as outlawed "heather priests" and underground missionaries to Clan Chisholm and Clan Fraser of Lovat in and around Strathglass during the era of the Penal Laws.

After their very successful evangelism of the local population provoked a government crackdown, with the collusion of both Chisholm of Chisholm and Lord Lovat, Farquharson composed a work of satirical poetry denouncing Lord Lovat for being unfaithful to the Holy See, as "a traitor to both kings", and the religious persecution of the many Catholics of Clan Fraser. The poem also accurately predicted that Lord Lovat's body would soon be without his head.

Despite not having played a role in the Jacobite rising of 1745, during the Hanoverian crackdown following the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Farquharson surrendered to Major James Lockhart, who had allegedly threatened the whole local population with total war tactics if all local priests were not immediately given up. Following a lengthy and inhumane imprisonment, Farquharson was expelled from the British Isles and ordered never to return. He returned to Scotland almost immediately, however, and went back to his former missionary apostolate in Strathglass, where he remained until being appointed prefect of studies at the Scots College in Douai in 1753.

Following the suppression of the Jesuits, he returned to Scotland and worked as a resident chaplain and tutor to his nephew. He died at Balmoral Castle, then the property of the Chiefs of Clan Farquharson, in 1782.

Farquharson was also a folklorist and Celticist, a collector of oral poetry from the Fenian Cycle of Celtic mythology, and of local Scottish Gaelic literature. He is particularly well known for the role his lost manuscripts played in the later Ossianic controversy. During the Victorian era, the lost folklore collection of John Farquharson served as an inspiration to former British Army officer and folklorist Colin Chisholm of Lietry. Lietry sought to collect and publish as much of the local oral tradition as he could salvage, both from local informants and from his many correspondents throughout the global Scottish diaspora. Along with his brother, Charles Farquharson, "Maighstir Iain" remains a folk hero about whom many stories were collected from the oral tradition by John Grant of Glencairn and published in Legends of the Braes o' Mar.