and 1859–66 he was a lord-in-waiting. From 1858 he sat as a representative Scottish peer, until, on 21 May 1866, he was created a peer of the United Kingdom by the title of Baron Barrogill of Barrogill Castle, Caithness. He devoted much of his leisure to scientific pursuits, was a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and the inventor of a steam carriage for travelling on macadamised roads, a gravitating compass which came into general use, and a tape-loom by which a weaver might stop one of the shuttles without interfering with the action of the whole. In 1877 he published ‘Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects,’ which reached a second edition in 1879. He died suddenly, of paralysis of the heart, in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, 28 March 1881, and was buried in the Chapel Royal, Holyrood. By his first wife, Louisa Georgina, third and youngest daughter and coheiress of Sir George Richard Phillips, baronet, of Weston, Warwickshire, he had a son George Phillips Alexander, who succeeded him as fifteenth earl of Caithness. By his second wife, Marie, duchesse de Pomar, widow of General le Comte de Medina Pomar and daughter of Don José de Mariategui, he left no issue.
[Burke's Peerage; G.E.C.'s Complete Peerage; Times, 30 and 31 March 1881.]
SINCLAIR, JOHN (d. 1566), bishop of Brechin, was the fourth son of Sir Oliver Sinclair of Roslin, and a younger brother of Oliver Sinclair [q. v.], who commanded at Solway, and of Henry Sinclair [q. v.], bishop of Ross. While rector of Shaw he was, on 27 April 1540, admitted an ordinary lord of session. He was afterwards dean of Restalrig, and under this title sat in the provincial council of Edinburgh. By Knox he is referred to in 1565 as one of Queen Mary's ‘flattering counsellors’ and a maintainer of her ‘abominations’ (i.e. the mass, &c.), and he is described ‘as blind of one eye in the body, but of both in his soul’ (Works, i. 235). Knox further explains that in 1558 Sinclair began to preach in ‘his kirk of Restalrig,’ and at the beginning ‘held himself so indifferent’ that many ‘had opinion of him that he was not far from the Kingdom of God’ (ib. 266); but that when the friars and others began to whisper against him, he ‘gainsaid the doctrine of Justification and of prayer which before he had taught,’ and ‘set up and maintained the Papistrie to the uttermost prick’ (ib.) His zeal for the old doctrines is supposed to have been further shown by the fact that when Adam Wallace, the protestant martyr, lay in irons waiting his execution, he visited him in prison and ‘reasoned with him after his wit’ (Foxe, Book of Martyrs); but it is not impossible that in doing so he was mainly influenced by a laudable desire to save Wallace's life. Knox includes him among those who instigated the French court to send an army against the protestants in 1560 (Works, ii. 131). He probably accompanied his brother, Henry Sinclair, bishop of Ross, to France in 1564, and returned again to Scotland. On 18 Sept. Queen Mary applied to Elizabeth for a pass for his return to France (Labanoff, Lettres, i. 227), and he is stated to have brought back with him to Scotland the materials which his brother had prepared for the continuation of Boece's ‘History of Scotland.’ The dean married Mary and Darnley in the chapel of Holyrood, 29 July 1565 (Diurnal of Occurrents, p. 80). Shortly afterwards he was promoted to the see of Brechin, but he died of fever in 1566. It is a matter of doubt as to whether he or his brother Henry is the author of Sinclair's ‘Practicks,’ a legal work in manuscript, preserved in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh. Dempster credits him with ‘Additiones ad Apparatum Historiæ Scoticæ Henrici fratris.’
[Keith's Scottish Bishops; Knox's Works; Dempster's Historia Eccles.; Tanner's Bibl. Brit.; Diurnal of Occurrents, in the Bannatyne Club; Brunton and Haig's Senators of the College of Justice.]
SINCLAIR, JOHN, seventh Lord Sinclair (1610–1676), son of Patrick, sixth lord Sinclair, by Margaret, daughter of Sir John Cockburn of Ormiston, was born on 29 Oct. 1610 [see for ancestry under Sinclair, William, third Earl of Orkney and first Earl of Caithness].
The seventh lord Sinclair had a charter of the barony of Ravenscraig in Newburgh on 30 July 1631, and of Balhousie in Fife to him and his wife, Mary Wemyss, on 26 July 1637. At first a zealous covenanter, he was a member of the famous general assembly of 1638 (Baillie, Letters and Journals, i. 123). In 1640, being deputed to the north to maintain the cause of the covenant in and around Aberdeen, he came on 18 May to Aberdeen with sixteen horse and passed thence to Caithness (Spalding, Memorialls, i. 269), returning on 22 Oct. with five hundred soldiers, whom he quartered in New Aberdeen, while he rode south to receive the orders of the committee of estates (ib. p. 351). He returned about 20 Dec. to Aberdeen (ib. p. 375), where he and his associates began to hold committees. In March 1641 he sent his brother, Lieutenant-colonel the Hon. Henry
