ABSTRACT
This he follows with self-justiÀ catory musings on the value of travellers’ accounts for the cultivation of and acquisition of the ‘science of the world’, one which
He began by crossing from Dover to Calais, thence to Gravelines, Dunkirk and to Ostend, sadly devastated by warfare, and spent two months travelling around the Low Countries. The Low Countries had since medieval times been closely linked, through trade and exchanges of population, with Britain. They had been popular destinations for Protestants Á eeing from the Marian persecutions, and in Lithgow’s day were equally receptive of those independentminded Protestants who were uncomfortable under the contemporary trends in the Jacobean and Caroline Anglican Church. English volunteers Á ocked to the United Provinces to assist them in their À ght against the Habsburgs, and between 1585 and 1616 the towns of Flushing and Brill were actually held by the English Crown as pledges for money lent to the Dutch States. The bookshops in the Dutch towns were meccas for scholars, especially as Dutch printers were assiduous in reprinting at cheaper prices books published elsewhere. There were English church congregations, Presbyterians and Independents, in places such as Amsterdam, Delft, Utrecht, Rotterdam and Leiden. Conversely, English Catholics sent their children for education in the part of the Netherlands still under Spanish rule, to places like Douai and St Omer and to a multiplicity of monastic communities and nunneries in the region, and Catholic soldiers served in the armies of the governors of the Spanish Netherlands. Also, since James VI and I had made peace with Spain (there was an English ambassador in Brussels, Sir Thomas Edmondes, from 1605 onwards), there seems to have been a steady trickle of upper-class summer visitors, gentlemen and their wives, to ‘the Spaw’, that is, Spa near Liège, in order to take the waters, although
the general insecurity of conditions on the continent after c. 1630 reduced numbers here.3
