John Fergushill (1592–1644), was a 17th-century Minister of the Church of Scotland who supported the 1638 National Covenant and was an associate of Presbyterian fundamentalists, including Archibald Johnson. He died on 11 June 1644. Life John Fergushill was born in 1592, the only son of David Fergushill, merchant and Provost or Chief Magistrate of Ayr and Janet Kennedy. He began his studies at Edinburgh University in 1601, at the age of nine but an outbreak of plague resulted in him being sent to complete his studies in France. In 1604, his father wrote to a family connection, Robert Boyd, then Professor of Philosophy at the French Huguenot university of Montauban, asking him to supervise John's schooling. However, he spent the next year studying in Bordeaux, before returning to Scotland in 1605; in a letter of 29 December 1608 to Boyd, he explains the delays in his schooling as due to 'the weakness of my body and especially my eyes.' This was clearly successful, since he completed his degree in Theology at the University of Glasgow and appointed Church of Scotland minister at Ochiltree in 1614. He is recorded as having completed his qualification as a minister and being certified by the Presbytery in Glasgow in September 1616. Fergushill married twice, first to Agnes Eccles, then to Annabel Wallace. He died in Ayr on 11 June 1644, aged about 52. Background and Career Fergushill was ordained at a time of intense conflict over religion; the 1562-1598 French Wars of Religion caused over three million deaths from war and disease, followed by the 1618-1648 Thirty Years' War, one of the most destructive conflicts in recorded history, with an estimated eight million deaths. In Britain, similar arguments over religious practices would ultimately lead to the 1638-1652 Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Like most Scots, James VI was a Calvinist but he favoured rule by bishops or Episcopalian governance as a means of control; when he also became King of England in 1603, he saw a unified Church of Scotland and England as the first step towards a centralised, Unionist state. However, the Church of England was very different from the kirk in both governance and doctrine and even Scottish bishops viewed many English practices as essentially Catholic. On 10 March 1615, John Ogilvie, a Scottish Jesuit convert, was executed in Glasgow; his 'fall' was of particular concern, since he came from an upper