1541, 8vo (this is the Frankfort oration referred to above). 27. ‘Catechismus Christianus.’ 28. ‘Epistolæ tam ad me [Bale] quam ad alios.’
The translations from the Latin mentioned by Bale are Bucer's ‘Ordinationes Anglorum Ecclesiæ,’ among Bucer's ‘Scripta Anglica,’ Basel, 1577, fol.; ‘Præfatio super obedientiam Gardineri; de mea [Bale's] vocatione.’
[The fullest account of Alesius is to be found in the Oratio de Alexandro Alesio, spoken by Jacob Thomasius at Leipzig on 20 April 1661, and printed as the fourteenth of his Orationes, Leipzig, 1683. (The quotations in the text are from a copy kindly lent by the Leipzig University Library.) This is chiefly based on Alesius's own writings; but Thomasius also refers to the brief eulogy of Alesius in the Icones of Theod. Beza, Geneva. 1580. See also the biographies in Bayle's Dictionnaire, ed. Des Maizeaux, 1740; Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (by A. T. Paget); Herzog's Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie u. Kirche (by G. Weber); Bale, Scriptorum Brytanniæ Post. Pars (Basel, 1559), Centuria xiv. pp. 227–228; Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Biography, vol. ii.; M'Crie's Life of Knox, note i.; Strype's Memorials of Cranmer.]
ALEXANDER I, king of Scotland (1078?–1124), was the fourth son of Malcolm Canmore and Margaret, grandniece of Edward the Confessor, and was perhaps named after Pope Alexander II. Being too young to share in his father's campaigns, he received a careful training from his mother. After the death in 1093 of Malcolm and Margaret, Alexander, together with his brothers Edgar and David, and his sisters Matilda, afterwards wife of Henry I, and Mary, afterwards wife of Eustace, count of Boulogne, was protected by Edgar Atheling, his mother's brother, from the troubles caused in Scotland by the claim of Donald Bane, his paternal uncle, to the crown by the Celtic custom of tanistry. Through distrust of Rufus, Edgar is said to have concealed his nephews and nieces in different parts of England, and Alexander remained in that country during the reign of Donald Bane and the brief restoration of Duncan, son of Malcolm, and his Norse wife Ingebiorg. He probably returned, however, when, in 1097, his brother Edgar was placed on the throne by Edgar Atheling with the aid of Rufus. Nothing is recorded of him during the ten years (1097–1107) of his brother's peaceful reign, except that he was at Durham in 1104, when the corpse of St. Cuthbert, whose protection had been invoked when Edgar resumed the kingdom, was exhibited by the monks as a rebuke to the incredulous. On his brother's death Alexander succeeded to the old kingdom of Scotland north of the Forth and Clyde, but its newer conquests, under the name of Cumbria, which seem in this instance to have included not merely Strathclyde but a considerable part of the eastern borderland and portions of Lothian, were, by a deathbed gift of Edgar, erected into an earldom or principality in favour of David, who bore the title of Comes, and was almost an independent sovereign. Alexander opposed the division of the kingdom, but the Norman barons supported David, as they reminded him at the battle of the Standard (1138), and it had to be acquiesced in. Possibly the motive of the gift was to interpose a barrier between Scotland and England. More probably the grant of independence was intended to satisfy the inhabitants of the southern districts of modern Scotland, between whom and the northern Celtic population there was no goodwill. About the time of his accession Alexander married Sibylla, a natural daughter of Henry I, and the union of the two countries, thus cemented by a double bond of affinity, secured uninterrupted peace between them during the whole of Alexander's reign. A letter of Anselm records the fact that the archbishop's prayers were asked by Alexander for his brother's soul. Anselm, in return, counselled the king to preserve the religious habits he had acquired in youth and to protect the monks who had been sent to Scotland at Edgar's request. To the see of St. Andrews, rendered vacant by the death of Fothad, the last Celtic bishop, Alexander appointed Turgot, prior of Durham, the confessor, and perhaps the biographer, of his mother; but the consecration was delayed till 1109 through a dispute between Anselm and Thomas, archbishop of York, and then the latter prelate performed the ceremony with a salvo of the authority of Canterbury—a compromise obtained by Henry I. This appointment, made with the object of furthering reforms in the Celtic church which Queen Margaret had begun, and of introducing diocesan episcopacy on the Roman and English model, did not fulfil its promise. Probably Turgot may have shown an inclination to subject the Scottish church to York, as his successor Eadmer did to Canterbury. After several years of dispute with Alexander, Turgot's health failed, and he returned to Durham, where he died in 1115.
The separation of Cumbria threw the centre of the Scottish kingdom further north, and while Alexander retained Edinburgh and Dunfermline, the chief residences of his parents, we find him more frequently at
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