James Grant

James Grant (1706–1778) was a priest and bishop who served as a missionary for the illegal and underground Catholic Church in Scotland upon the Isle of Barra and later as the vicar apostolic of the Lowland District. Life Born in Wester Boggs, Enzie, Banffshire in July 1706, he was ordained a priest at the Scots College in Rome on 4 April 1733. During the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, Grant was operating as the underground missionary priest of Barra, in the Outer Hebrides. According to Bishop John Geddes, "Early in the spring of 1746, some ships of war came to the coast of the isle of Barra and landed some men, who threatened they would lay desolate the whole island if the priest was not delivered up to them. Father James Grant, who was missionary then, and afterwards Bishop, being informed of the threats in a safe retreat in which he was in a little island, surrendered himself, and was carried prisoner to Mingarry Castle on the Western coast (i.e. Ardnamurchan) where he was detained for some weeks. He was then conveyed to Inverness, and thrown into the common prison, where there were about forty prisoners in the same room with him. Here he was for several weeks chained by the leg to Mr. MacMahon, an Irish officer in the service of Spain, who had come over to be of use to the Prince. In this situation they could not in the night time turn from one side to the other without the one passing the other. The people of the town, out of humanity, furnished them with some little conveniences, and among other things gave to each a bottle, which they hung out of the window in the morning and got filled with water. But one morning the sentinels accused the prisoners to the visiting officer of having entered into a conspiracy to knock them on the head with bottles, which they had procured for that purpose. Father Grant and the others pleaded the improbability of this ridiculous accusation, but they were not heard, and the bottles were taken away."