champions of the old learning to a
public disputation, and courageously accepted the challenge; but when
the day appointed for the discussion arrived, his opponent did not
venture to meet him in open fight. He preferred to plot against him in
secret, and to foment tumult among the scholars, till Alesius, finding
that his life was in danger, and that he could not count on the
protection of the university authorities, deemed it his duty to leave
Cambridge and return to London.[309]

[Sidenote: Returns to the Continent.]

For the next three years he remained there, supporting himself chiefly
by the practice of medicine, which he studied under a London physician
of note. He occasionally, however, gave assistance to his reforming
friends in the varying fortunes of these unquiet times. He did so
notably in a convocation or a meeting of the superior clergy in 1536 or
1537,[310] being put forward by Cranmer and Crumwell as the chief
spokesman on the reforming side, the opinions of which he defended with
considerable force and ability, so far as the notes of the debates
preserved by Foxe in his 'Acts and Monuments' enable us to judge.[311]
His appearance on this occasion brought him into sharp collision with
Stokesley, Bishop of London. On the other hand, it secured for him the
warm friendship of Cranmer and Latimer, towards both of whom he
continued to the last to cherish a deep affection, and of whose
martyrdom he spoke with so much grief when he published his Commentary
on the First Book of Psalms. While in England, as Thomasius tells us, he
married an English lady, by name Catherine de Mayn; and when Henry VIII.
once more veered round to his former moorings, and passed the bloody
statute of the six articles, insisting _inter alia_ on the doctrine of
Transubstantiation and the celibacy of the clergy, Alesius, like several
other married priests, had to consult his safety and that of his family
by a hurried retreat to the Continent.[312]

Among those who had to leave England about the same time were John
M'Alpine[313] and John Fyffe--or, as they were henceforth to be surnamed
by Melanchthon, Joannes Macchabaeus and Joannes Fidelis--both, like
Alesius himself, Scotsmen, the former having been prior of the Dominican
monastery at Perth, and the latter an _alumnus_ and teacher in St
Leonard's College. They had, along with several other known favourers of
the Reformation, been obliged to leave Scotland at an earlier period,
and