In October 1683 he was in Paris, whither he had perhaps journeyed in company with Burnet, who had left England at the beginning of September. Viscount Preston who was then at Paris as Envoy-Extraordinary from the English Court, wrote to Halifax about Fletcher. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘is one Fletcher, lately come from Scotland. He is an ingenious but a very dangerous fanatic, and doubtless hath some commission, for I hear he is very busy and very virulent.’ Burnet returned to England in the beginning of the following year; and Fletcher seems then to have gone to Holland, where he saw he would be safer than anywhere else, for we next find him travelling about in that country and in Belgium, visiting the libraries of Leyden, and picking up volumes among the bookstalls of Haarlem. It was perhaps at this time that the curious incident recorded by Mrs. Calderwood of Polton, in the Coltness Collection, occurred. The story is almost incredible; but Mrs. Calderwood gives it in the most matter-of-fact way. ‘They tell,’ she says, ‘a story of old Fletcher of Salton and a skipper: Salton could not endure the smoak of toback, and as he was in a night-scoot, the skipper and he fell out about his forbidding him to smoak; Salton, finding he could not hinder him, went up and sat on the ridge of the boat, which bows like an arch. The skipper was so contentious that he followed him, and, on whatever side Salton sat, he put his pipe in the cheek next him, and whifed it in his face; Salton went down several times, and brought up stones in his pockets from the ballast, and slipt them into the skipper’s pocket that was next the water, and when he found he had loadened him as much as would sink him, he gives him a shove, so that over he hirsled. The boat went on, and Salton came down amongst the rest of the passengers, who probably were asleep, and fell asleep amongst the rest. In a little time bump came the scoot against the side, on which they all damned the skipper; but, behold, when they called, there was no skipper; which would breed no great amazement in a Dutch company.’ In the meantime the Government had not lost sight of Fletcher; for on the 21st of November 1684 he was cited at the Market Cross of Edinburgh, and at the pier and shore of Leith, to appear within sixty days, and answer to the charge of ‘Conversing with Argyll and other rebels abroad.’ With regard to this charge, Lord Fountainhall says that Fletcher’s intrigues with Monmouth, at the time of the Whig Plot, could not be criminal, as Monmouth had received his pardon in December 1683; but this was not the opinion of the Lord Advocate, for in the following January the Laird of Saltoun and a number of other ‘fugitive rebels,’ including Lord Loudoun, Lord Melville, and Sir James Dalrymple of Stairs, were charged with high treason, and declared outlaws.