Lithgow, William (1582–c. 1650)

Scottish traveller and writer. He left Scotland about 1610 and for 19 years travelled in Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and North Africa. An account of his adventures, including his narrow escape from the Inquisition at Malaga through the intervention of the English consul in 1621, is contained in The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painfull Peregrinations of long Nineteene Yeares Trawayles (1632; new edition 1906).

He was born in Lanark, Scotland. Other writings of his are A True and Experimentall Discourse upon the last Siege of Breda (1637), an account of the siege of Newcastle and battle of Marston Moor during the English Civil War, and six poems published between 1618 and 1640.