ABSTRACT
Yet although the Catholic cause in Scotland waned, the Auld Alliance with France had a last Á ickering, but now with the Huguenots. A Calvinist governor in the French provinces such as Philippe du Plessis Mornay at Saumur exercised an inÁ uence on the young Scots lords and gentry who came to his chateau and to the university which he had founded, and the Duc de Bouillon’s college at Sedan had a similar attractive power; but Cardinal Richelieu himself did not refuse a welcome to Calvinist Scots gentlemen. Johnston of Warriston, who became a Lord of Session and in 1649 Lord Clerk Register, and who was to hound Montrose to his execution, completed his studies after leaving Glasgow University in the strict Huguenot atmosphere of Castres in Languedoc; on his mother’s side, his grandfather Sir Thomas Craig had studied at the University of Paris for six years and his uncle was a graduate in medicine of Basle. The Huguenot centres south of the Loire provided a refuge for those unbending Calvinists who would not bow the knee to the ecclesiastical measures of James VI and I and his son Charles. When Andrew Melville was banished from Scotland in 1610, he was À rst offered the chair of divinity at La Rochelle before being invited by the Duc de Bouillon; and John Knox’s son-in-law John Welch, minister of Ayr, was appointed pastor of the Protestant church at Nérac in Guyenne after his banishment in 1606.14 Bearing in mind such powerful strains in Scottish life as all these, Lithgow’s unrelenting zeal for foreign travel and his fortitude in the face of disaster become easily explicable.
