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Alesius possible for him to enter so pestiferous a place). The other canons were liberated, but Alesius was thrown into another and worse dungeon, which he describes as a cave of horrors. The king having commanded that he should be set free, the provost had him taken out of prison for a day, and then thrown in again. An appeal to the archbishop only produced a message from the provost that Alesius's speech had convinced the primate of his good-will towards the Lutheran heretics. Thus Alesius remained in prison for a year, till, during the absence of his persecutor, he was liberated by his brother canons. But the provost soon returned, and, after nearly tearing away Alesius from the altar where he was saying mass, cast him into prison once more. This time some of the canons, feeling that it was a matter of life and death, counselled immediate flight beyond the seas. They furnished him with some money; and thus, after a short hesitation, ‘constituit piissimus Christi famulus abire’. He found his way to the port, and to a ship where he was affectionately welcomed by a German. His enemy's horsemen arrived at the waterside in pursuit of him when the ships had already left the port (, as he says almost verbally from Alesius's Answer to Cochlæus). The date of his flight and arrival in Germany was 1532, not 1534, which is that mentioned by some authorities. It was, however, in August 1534 that sentence was pronounced at Holyrood House by James Hay, bishop of Ross, sitting as commissioner for the Archbishop of St. Andrews, ‘against Alexander Alesse, Master John Fife, John Macbee and one Macdougal, who were summoned to the said diet, and compeered not’ (, History of the Church and State of Scotland, 66).

After his arrival in Germany Alesius spent a little time at Cologne, where he saw two right-thinking men burnt, and in some other cities, and in 1533 reached Wittenberg, where he made the acquaintance of Luther and Melanchthon, and declared his adherence to the Augsburg Confession of the year 1530. He had hesitated even now before definitely choosing his side, characteristically declaring that while he did not assent to ‘all the dreams of the monks,’ he missed in the Lutherans a certain moderation and fairness in some things (, ut supra). His first publication on the protestant side of course provoked a retort on the part of one of the literary champions of Rome. The question as to the free circulation of the scriptures among the laity was rapidly becoming one of the crucial questions of the reformation conflict, and one which was to lead that conflict towards issues undreamt of in its earlier phases. As yet the church of Rome had made no authoritative declaration on the subject, nor indeed was she to do so till the rules as to the ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum’ were drawn up by the council of Trent and sanctioned in 1564 by Pope Pius IV (see art. Bibellesen, &c., in Realencyklopädie (1878), ii. 375). The matter was for the present still essentially an affair of episcopal or archiepiscopal discipline, there was no absolute uniformity of practice, and the endeavour to circulate the bible in the vulgar tongue had supporters of undoubted orthodoxy. In Scotland, the knowledge of the scriptures was diffused among the people, before a single instance had, so far as is known, occurred of a public teaching of the reformation doctrine (, Life of Knox, 20). The decree of the Scottish bishops against which Alesius protested accordingly possesses considerable importance in the history of the religious conflict in Scotland. The ‘Epistola contra decretum quorundam Episcoporum in Scotia’ was published in 1533, as has been stated, at Leipzig, but it is expressly said by Cochlæus, and is indeed far more probable antecedently, that it was published at Wittenberg. It had not been long in print when Johannes Cochlæus (Dobeneck),the orthodox Duke George of Saxony's secretary and theological man-at-arms, who hurled ‘Philippics’ against Melanchthon and subjected all the doings and writings of Luther ‘from 1517 to 1546 inclusive’ to an exhaustive ‘commentary,’ was at hand with a refutation. This treatise (‘An expediat laicis legere noui Testamenti libros lingua Vernacula’) Cochlæus dedicated, in a rather ingeniously conceived preface, to King James V of Scotland, whom neither his own popular sympathies nor counsellors of Sir David Lyndsay's way of thinking had induced to quarrel with the church. (A copy of this treatise, dated 1533, is in the Cambridge University Library.) From an entry in the treasurer's accounts, under the year 1534, it would seem that the Scottish bishops were at least no strangers to the composition of Cochlæus's treatise: ‘Item, to ane servand of Cocleus, quhilk brot fra his maister ane buik intitulat     , to his reward Xli’ (, Life of Knox, i. 395 note). Alesius replied with a ‘Responsio ad Cochlæi calumnias,’ likewise addressed to King James V.

The Scottish ‘King of the Commons’ died in 1542 without, as it seems, having fully recognised the strength of the impulse which was so vitally to affect the future of his people. His uncle, King Henry VIII, had