By CHE, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Image: The Cowgate, Edinburgh. In this street Alexander Alane/Alesius was born (1500)
With tears and deep anguish Alexander Alane witnessed the agonising six-hour burning of his friend Patrick Hamilton by the council of the cruel. As a fellow Augustinian and scholar he had tried his utmost to persuade Hamilton to abandon his biblical views, but the more he observed Hamilton’s Christ-like behaviour and calm confidence in God, the more his admiration grew. Twelve of the best experts in Scotland had been assembled at St Andrews to try and convince Hamilton to change his mind, but he refused to get involved in their philosophical and religious games, answering them only from the pure word of God. By the time Hamilton had died, Alane had also been converted to Christ.
The council of the cruel was baying for more victims, like a pack of dogs smelling blood. Archbishop Beaton, angered by the support of Hamilton from some of the Augustinian monks, invited Alane to preach for the Provincial Synod of Clergy at St Andrews in 1529. With sly intentions he aimed to catch Alane with his message and have him condemned like Hamilton, but Alane chose his words carefully, sensing a trap. Nevertheless Alane used the opportunity to call decadent clergy out of sin and back to Christ. Patrick Hepburn, the Vice-abbot of the Monastery of St Andrews was seething with hatred and revenge for Alane’s audacity in exposing his own sin. He loved to swim in a cesspit of immorality, and making use of his position of authority, he had Alane thrown into a filthy prison, with the intention of forcing a confession out of him so that he might be burnt like Hamilton. Thankfully some friends managed to organise a secret jailbreak and Alane set sail from Dundee for the continent, never to return to Scotland.
Settling in Germany at Wittenberg he became a friend of Luther and Melanchthon, and it was Melanchthon who gave him the name ‘Alesius’ (‘wanderer/pilgrim’). When Alane learnt that the Scottish bishops had banned people in his country from reading the New Testament he was full of indignation and concern, and he wrote two letters to the Scottish king, pleading with him to stop this, and instead allow his people to read it throughout Scotland in their own language. Having been brought up in the Cowgate in Edinburgh, his vision for a Bible in every home would be taken up a few centuries later by the Scottish Bible Society in the same city, who would fulfil this vision to Scotland and to many distant nations.
Alane would go on to live a full life abroad: he would be appointed by Thomas Cromwell, under King Henry VIII, as England’s first Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge in 1535; he would become a medical doctor in London, and the Professor of Theology at the University of Frankfurt-on-Oder, and at the University of Leipzig, both in Germany. In 1549 the Protestant King Edward VI was on the throne, and Alane was invited by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer to come to England again, this time to translate the First Book of Common Prayer into Latin.
By the time he died in Leipzig on 17th March 1565, he could look back and rejoice that by God’s grace he had played a significant part in the Reformation that had come to both England and Scotland through times of great persecution and trials. ‘We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.’ (Acts 14:22, NKJV)