India Company, he showed himself adverse to the great political influence exercised by the company, deeming it wiser to confine their action to commercial enterprise, and to leave the political government of Indian territory to the native princes. Unable to alter a policy already well established, he withdrew from the directorate, and became a parliamentary opponent of the company, giving his support to Fox's India Bill. On the question of the regency, 1788–9, he was opposed to the ministry, and declared that the executive proposed would ‘resemble nothing that ever was conceived before, an un-whig, un-tory, odd, awkward, anomalous monster.’
In 1786 Dempster purchased the estate of Skibo, Sutherland. In 1790 he retired from parliament, and turned his attention to Scottish agriculture and fisheries. He promoted the formation of a society for the extension and protection of the fisheries of Scotland. The company bought large tracts of land, built harbours, quays, and storehouses, when unfortunately the war with France of 1793 broke out, and the association was ruined. Dempster taught his countrymen the art of packing their fresh salmon in ice for transmission to London and other large towns. He spent the greater part of his latter days at his seat in Dunnichen, and at St. Andrews, where he enjoyed the society of his old friend Dr. Adam Ferguson, the founder of the ‘Poker Club.’ Dempster greatly improved the condition of his tenants and that of the Scottish peasantry generally. He resigned most of his feudal rights, improved the land by drainage, and discovered large beds of fertilising marl. In church matters he was inclined to bigotry. When Dr. A. Carlyle [q. v.] was condemned by the assembly for going to a theatrical performance, his ‘firm friend Dempster seconded an act declaratory forbidding the clergy to countenance the theatre’ (Autobiography, p. 322). His publications are: 1. ‘Discourses, containing a Summary of the Directors of the Society for Extending the Fisheries of Great Britain,’ 1789. 2. ‘Magnetic Mountains of Cannay,’ 8vo. 3. Papers in Transactions of the Roy. Soc. Edinburgh. 4. Letters in Agricultural Mag. 5. Speeches in Parliament. 6. ‘General View of the Agriculture of the County of Angus and Forfar,’ Lond., 1794, 4to. He died at Dunnichen on 13 Feb. 1818, in his eighty-sixth year.
[Annual Register; Scots Mag. new ser. ii. 206; Alexander Carlyle's Autobiography, 1860, p. 322; Chambers's Eminent Scotsmen, 1868, i. 441; Foster's Members of Parliament, Scotland, p. 95.]
DEMPSTER, THOMAS (1579?–1625), biographical and miscellaneous writer, was born, according to his own statement, on 23 Aug. 1579. His autobiography, however, is clearly marked by the same habit of grotesquely extravagant falsehood which appears in some of his other writings; and there seems reason to suspect that he may have dated his birth a few years too late with the object of enhancing the marvel of his youthful precocity in learning. If the date assigned by him be correct, his career is certainly extraordinary, even for an age which abounded in juvenile prodigies. Dempster's desire to represent himself as an exceptional person is amusingly exhibited in the first sentence of the memoir. He says that he was one of three children brought into the world at one birth; that he was the twenty-fourth child out of twenty-nine, all the offspring of a single marriage; and that five of the most important events of his life took place on the anniversary of his birth. He adds that when three years old he learned his alphabet perfectly in the space of one hour. It is obvious from this specimen that Dempster's account of his own life is to be received with some suspicion; but what portions of it are fact and what are fiction it is impossible to determine.
According to the autobiography, Dempster was born at Cliftbog, an estate belonging to his father, Thomas, baron (or in modern language ‘laird’) of Muresk, Auchterless, and Killesmont, and ‘viceroy’ (proregem) of Banff and Buchan. His mother was Jane Leslie, sister of the baron of Balquhain, and niece of the Viscount Forbes. His grandmother on the father's side was Eleanor, daughter of the last Stuart, earl of Buchan. It is uncertain whether this aristocratic pedigree is in any point authentic. The last quoted statement, at all events, appears to be chronologically impossible; the other particulars may be in substance correct, as Dempster ventured to insert them in the dedication of his ‘Roman Antiquities’ to James I of England, whom in such a matter it would have been dangerous to attempt to deceive. The article on Dempster in R. Chambers's ‘Eminent Scotsmen’ says that he was born at or near Brechin, but no authority is quoted for this statement, which is perhaps due to a confusion between Thomas Dempster and an earlier namesake, George Dempster, professor of philosophy at Pavia in 1495. The local references in Dempster's account of his own parentage and early life all belong to northern Aberdeenshire. At a very early age he was sent to school at Turriff, and afterwards at Aberdeen, where he remained until his tenth year.
