“Upon Christmas-day, Marina, the ladies’ gentlewoman, got permission to visit me, and with her licence she brought abundance of tears, presenting me also with a dish of honey, sugar, some confections, and raisins in great plenty, to my no small comfort, besides using many sweet speeches, for consolation’s sake. The twelfth day of Christmas expired, they began to threaten me on still with more tortures, even till Candlemas. In all which comfortless time I was miserably afflicted with the beastly plague of gnawing vermin, which lay crawling in lumps, within, without, and about my body; yea, hanging in clusters about my beard, my lips, my nostrils, and my eye-brows, almost inclosing my sight. And for my greater satisfaction to their merciless minds, the governor called Areta, his silver-plate keeper, to gather and sweep the vermin upon me twice in eight days, which tormented me almost to death, being a perpetual punishment; yet the poor infidel, some few times, and when opportunity served, would steal the keys from Areta, and about midnight would enter my room, with sticks and burning oil, and sweeping them together in heaps, would burn the greatest part, to my great release; or, doubtless, I had been miserably eaten up and devoured by them.” Cruelty more diabolical it appears difficult to imagine, than that exercised upon this unhappy Scotchman. Yet he was preserved for still greater suffering. For being now in the power of the inquisitors, they pretended to be anxious for his soul’s salvation; and therefore they implored him to be converted to the Roman Catholic faith, that he might escape condemnation to the flames as a heretic. When the inquisitor interrogated him as to his difficulties, errors, and misbelief, Lithgow replied, like a North Briton taught by the Bible, that “he was confident in the promises of our Saviour, believing the revealed doctrines of the Gospel, professed by the reformed Catholic church; that these being confirmed by grace, he possessed an infallible assurance in his own soul of the true word of Christ.” “To these words,” as Lithgow observes, “he answered, ‘Thou art no Christian, but an absurd heretic, and, without conversion, a member of perdition.’ Whereupon I replied, ‘Reverend Sir, the nature of charity and religion does not consist in opprobrious speeches: wherefore, if you would convert me, as you say, convince me by argument; if not, all your threatenings of fire, death, or torments, shall not make me shrink from the truth of God’s word in Sacred Scriptures,’ Whereupon the mad inquisitor clapt me on the face with his foot, abusing me with many railings; and if the Jesuits had not intercepted him, he had stabbed me with a knife; where, when dismissed, I never saw him more.”