Banished in 1606, for the sake of the gospel, from Scotland to France by the Scottish Privy Council, at the command of the King, Welsh landed in Bordeaux. Eventually, a door was opened for him to preach the gospel regularly in France, when he was appointed the minister of Jonsac, a small town near Bordeaux, at the end of 1608.
IT was possibly also while Welsh was the minister of Jonsac that a friar, unable to find lodgings in the village, came to Welsh’s door. It was late, but he was taken in, given something to eat and shown to bed. When the friar wakened up in the middle of the night, he heard a quiet, but continuous, whispering noise coming from the other side of the wooden partition. The next morning the friar met a local man as he walked through the fields. The friar told him that he had stayed with the Huguenot minister. And, in answer to a question about how he was looked after, he added, “Very bad, for I always held there were devils haunting these ministers’ houses, and I am persuaded there was one with me this night, for I heard a continual whisper all the night over, which I believe was no other thing but the minister and the devil conversing together.”
The man explained that the minister would have been praying, and added that Welsh prayed more than any other minister in France. He suggested that the friar stay another night to check that this explanation was the right one. So the friar pretended to be unwell and was allowed to stay for the extra night. He joined the family for their meals and for family worship. This second night too, after Welsh had some sleep, he began to pray. The friar crept along to Welsh’s bedroom door, where he could hear the minister’s words clearly. There he heard what he had never heard before. In the morning the friar confessed to the minister that he had been brought up in ignorance and had lived in darkness all his life. He stated his intention to forsake his Romanism, and we are told that he remained a faithful Protestant to the end of his days.
To have visitors from Ayr in the summer of 1613 must have been a warm memory for Welsh for long afterwards. The visitors were two of his former godly elders, John Stewart and Hugh Kennedy. Possibly as shipowners they were in France on business, but that would not have made their visit any the less welcome. It was in Stewart’s house that Welsh lived when he first moved to Ayr, and Kennedy had held the office of provost.
To appreciate the quality of his godliness we may note Robert Boyd’s comments when Kennedy died the year after Welsh: “In June 1623, died at Ayr Hugh Kennedy, many times provost of that town, a man who walked with the Lord, endued with singular piety, exercised in secret, and in the practical part of religion discreet, wise and zealous. He was exercised with many family crosses and afflictions. Before his death he was filled with peace, an inexpressible joy in the Holy Ghost above what it was possible for him to express or apprehend, and one of the most familiar friends of that man of God was Mr John Welsh.” A minister suggested to Kennedy that he was now assured that the angels were waiting at the posts of his bed to conduct his soul into Abraham’s bosom. “I am sure thereof,” he replied, “and if the walls of this house could speak they could tell how many sweet days I have had in secret fellowship with God, and how familiar he hath been with my soul.” Such was the calibre of one of Welsh’s elders, a man of whom Welsh himself wrote, “Happy is that city, yea, happy is that nation, that hath a Hugh Kennedy in it.” Would that Scotland today – and other nations too – were blessed with a multitude of such Hugh Kennedys!
In 1614 Welsh lost his closest friend in France, Robert Boyd, not by death, but on his return to Scotland to become Principal of Glasgow University. Much of what we know about Welsh comes from his frequent letters to Boyd; from now on these letters become understandably less regular – how often would Welsh find someone who could take a letter from southwest France to Glasgow? Welsh counselled his friend about his duty to be faithful to the cause of truth in Scotland, and told him, “My desire to God for you is that He may accompany you with His most abundant benediction, and that He may render your last works greater than the first (see Rev 2:19), and that you may finish your course with joy, without reproach, waiting for the day of His appearing.”
Welsh and Boyd made arrangements to meet halfway between Jonsac and Saumur to bid each other farewell, but Welsh had to call off the meeting when his eldest daughter died after being ill for less than a week. “My soul is in anguish,” he wrote to Boyd, “but the God of consolation, who comforts those that are cast down, knows how to comfort us. I would beseech you to
come this length, though you would find little but subject for sorrow. . . . Let us have a room in your most ardent prayers.” Boyd left Saumur on the day that Welsh wrote to him. When he reached the place where he expected to find Welsh he found only the messenger who brought the letter. So, as Welsh had requested, he continued on to Jonsac. The visit of a fellow-Scot in a foreign land must indeed have been an encouragement to the sorrowing family, but it was the close spiritual bond over at least the previous eight years that would have been far more significant than the mere matter of nationality as they enjoyed that brief and final period of fellowship in this world.
It was probably later the same year that Welsh left Jonsac for the old town of Nerac, 67 miles south-east of Bordeaux. No record remains of Welsh’s ministry in one of the four Protestant congregations there. It is one illustration of the vindictiveness of the Roman Catholic persecution which followed the revocation, in 1685, of the Edict of Nantes that every Protestant book and document, at least in south west France, was destroyed. One letter from that period did survive. It was written to Boyd in 1614 while Welsh was in such poor health that he expected to be called away soon from the world. In this letter he also discusses arrangements for boarding his second son Josias with the Boyds. “Advertise me,” he writes, “if he is capable of profiting in learning, to the end we may lose neither time nor charges upon him.”
Welsh need not have worried overmuch. Josias went on to teach Latin in Glasgow University, but had to leave because of the oppressive ecclesiastical conditions under the bishops. About 1626 he began to preach at Six-Mile-Water in Ulster, and was afterwards minister of Templepatrick. Robert Blair declares that a great measure of his father’s spirit rested also on the son. And Kirkton refers to “his mighty wakening preaching gift”. His preaching at communion seasons seems to have been specially blessed. After being suspended from the ministry for the period of six months he was later deposed, but for no worse reason than what resulted in his father being banished from his native land – his church principles.
Josias Welsh continued his ministry from his own house, preaching at the front door to the large congregations which had to gather outside after the house had been packed out. It could not have been long when, through preaching in the open air, he caught the cold which led to his death. Notwithstanding his lack of assurance of salvation in his lifetime, just before he passed into the eternal world he clapped his hands together and said, “Victory, victory for evermore!”
Josias Welsh left behind him a son John, altogether worthy of his grandfather’s name. He became minister of Irongray in Galloway and was
described by Kirkton as “a godly, meek, humble man and a good, popular preacher”. He too suffered for his principles, and he was ejected in 1662. Though not the best known of the Covenanters, possibly because he did not die a martyr’s death, we can surely say, nevertheless, that he was not a whit behind the chiefest of those faithful witnesses for the crown rights of their Redeemer. Certainly Kirkton reckons him “the boldest undertaker that ever I heard of as a minister in Christ’s Church, old or late; for notwithstanding all the threats of the state, the great price set upon his head, the spite of bishops, the diligence of all the bloodhounds, he maintained his difficult post of preaching upon the mountains of Scotland many times to many thousands for nearly 20 years, and yet was always kept out of his enemies’ hands. It was well known that bloody Clavers, upon intelligence that he was lurking in some secret place, would have ridden 40 miles in a winter night, yet when he came to the place he always missed his prey. I have known him ride three days and two nights without sleep, and preach upon a mountain at midnight in one of these nights.” He died in London in 1679, after a life of consistently devoted service to his Master and by which he showed that he was altogether worthy of the name of his illustrious grandfather, John Welsh of Ayr.
(To be concluded)