on a feather-bed to Theobalds to exhibit his ‘martyrd anatomy’ to all ‘the Court, even from the King to the Kitchin.’ James twice that year sent him to Bath, where, except so far as his left arm and crushed limbs were concerned, he was cured. From Gondomar, however, he could meantime obtain nothing more than promises of redress, until at last, in April 1622, in the presence chamber he assaulted, or rather, it seems, was assaulted by, the ambassador. A contemporary letter says that ‘the Lo. Gondomar beate a Scottish man the other day openly with his fists, in the presence of the E. of Gwartzenberg and others, for saying that such a great man in Spayne (of whom the Sp. Ambr. and the Scott who had bin in the inquisition in Spayne were speaking) had not used him like a christian. Though the Scottish man tooke his blowes patientlie, yet he was after committed to prison, where he yet remayneth’ (State Papers, Dom., vol. cxxix. No. 50). He lay for nine weeks in the Marshalsea, where for fellow-prisoner he had his ‘fellow-poet,’ George Wither, and where he received a letter from two papists taxing him with having communicated at Rome in 1605.
Lithgow seems, though of this he himself makes no mention, to have been recommitted to prison on 2 Feb. 1623 (ib. vol. cliii. No. xxvi.), and to have only been released on 21 Jan. 1624, on his bond in 200l. for good behaviour (ib. vol. clviii. No. xxxix.), between which dates on 29 May he was served heir to his father. In the next reign, in 1626, he preferred a bill of grievance to the upper house, and followed it daily for seventeen weeks, but the dissolution quashed it, and in the spring of 1627 he walked to Edinburgh. In 1628 he was entertained for some days at Brodick Castle in Arran by the Marquis of Hamilton, and afterwards, with view to a work called ‘Lithgowes Surueigh of Scotland,’ which, though perfected in 1632, was never published, he journeyed through Galloway and Dumfriesshire, and thence northward to Caithness and Kirkwall in Orkney. Some jottings of visits to Stonehenge, the Peak, St. Edmundsbury, &c., ‘left in manuscript,’ and printed in the ‘Travels’ (12th edit.), may belong to this period.
In May 1637, mounted on a ‘Gallowedian nagge,’ Lithgow started from Scotland, and after visiting the Bishops of Carlisle and Durham, and the Archbishop of York, came to London, and so to court. He was bound for Russia, but, finding the summer gone, merely crossed to Holland, and there witnessed the siege of Breda. In the spring of 1643 he came by sea from Prestonpans to London; in 1644 he was present at the siege of Newcastle. The year of his death is unknown, but ‘Scotlands Parænesis to King Charles II’ (1660) cannot have been by him, for we miss in it the inevitable allusions to his travels and sufferings. That he ‘settled down in his native town, married, and had a family,’ is the mere assertion of Chambers's ‘Picture of Scotland;’ but according to the old ‘Statistical Account of Scotland’ (xv. 33, 1793), he ‘died in the parish of Lanark, and is buried in the churchyard, though no vestige of his tomb can be traced.’
Lithgow's principal work is ‘The Totall Discourse of the Rare Aduentures and painfull Peregrinations of long nineteene Yeares,’ &c. (London, 1632, 4to, 507 pages), a first draft of which, now excessively rare, had appeared in 1614, and of which a twelfth edition, ‘illustrated with notes from later travellers,’ was printed at Leith in 1814. In spite of its absurd euphuistic style, where ‘ruvidous vulgarity’ stands for ‘common people,’ and ‘ovile flockes’ for ‘sheep,’ it is a book of uncommon value and interest, for its descriptions of men and manners even more than of places. Thus it is probably the earliest authority for coffee-drinking in Europe, Turkish baths, a pigeon post between Aleppo and Bagdad, the long Turkish tobacco-pipes, artificial incubation, and the importation (since about 1550) of currants from Zante to England, ‘where some Liquorous lips forsooth can now hardly digest Bread, Pasties, Broth, and (verbi gratia) bag-puddings, without these curraunts.’ His other prose writings are three pamphlets: ‘A True and Experimentall Discourse … vpon this last Siege of Breda,’ London, 1637, 4to; ‘The Present Surveigh of London … with the several Fortifications thereof,’ London, 1643, 4to; and ‘An Experimental Relation vpon that famous Siege of Newcastle … the Battle of Bowden Hill, and that victorious Battell of York or Marston Moor,’ Edinburgh, 1645, 4to. Of the last there is a reprint by Brockett (Newcastle, 1820); of the two first in Scott's edition of ‘Somers Tracts.’ Lithgow's six poems, printed between 1618 and 1640, were collected and printed privately by J. Maidment, Edinburgh, 1863, 4to, one hundred copies. The most interesting of them is ‘Scotlands Welcome to King Charles, 1633,’ which gives a very curious picture of North Britain—the decay of education and of football, the runaway marriages to England, the taking of snuff by ladies for the headache, and the immodesty of plaids.
[Works, as above.]
LITLINGTON or LITTLINGTON, NICHOLAS (1316?–1386), successively prior and abbot of Westminster Abbey, was a
