Eighteen years later, Father Michael Gaudan was sent as papal nuncio to Mary Stuart. He entered Edinburgh disguised as a Scottish peddler and succeeded in reaching the queen. As a Frenchman could not have acted the part of a Scottish peddler, it is more than likely that Gaudan is a gallicized form of Gordon. Indeed, there is on the records a Father James Gordon, S. J., who had so exasperated the Calvinists by his refutation of their errors that he was driven out of the country. He returned again, however, immediately, as he simply got a boat to take him off the ship which was carrying him into exile, and on the following day he stood once more upon his native heath, remaining there for some years sustaining his persecuted Catholic brethren (Claude Nau, Mary's secretary).
That the "blind Archbishop" also succeeded in reaching his see is clear from a passage in Moore's "History of Ireland" (xlvii), which tells how during the reign of Edward VI two French gentlemen, the Baron de Fourquevaux and the Sieur Montluc, afterwards Bishop of Valence, went to Ireland as envoys of the French king and were concealed in Culmer Fort on Loch Foyle. They kept a diary of their journey which may be found, we are assured, in the "Armorial-général ou registre de la noblesse de France." The diary relates that while at the Fort "they received a visit from Robert Wauchope, better known by his pen name as Venantius, a divine whose erudition was the more remarkable as he had been blind from birth and was at the time, titular Archbishop of Armagh." He did not, however, remain in Ireland. MacGeoghegan says "he returned to the Continent and died in the Jesuit house at Paris in the year 1551." Stewart Rose in her "Saint Ignatius Loyola and the Early Jesuits" tells us it was at Lyons, but that was impossible, for there was no Jesuit establishment in Lyons until after the great pestilence of 1565, when the authorities offered the Society the municipal college of the Trinity as a testimonial of gratitude to Father Auger. The generosity of this offer, however, was not excessive. The Fathers were to take it for two years on trial. They did so and then the provincial insisted that the gift should be absolute or the staff would be withdrawn. After some bickering on the part of a number of Calvinist échevins or aldermen, the grant was made in perpetuity and confirmed by Charles IX in 1568.