On the day following his escape, when the vessel which sheltered him had already sailed, there came horsemen to the shore, sent by the prior from St Andrews, to make search for the fugitive. When they returned without success to their master, he is reported to have summoned before him a certain citizen of Dundee, whom he suspected to have aided in providing a ship for the canon. This merchant citizen[295] took with him another true-hearted favourer of the Reformation, James Scrymgeour, provost of the town; and on the former denying that he had given the assistance which he was accused of doing to Alesius, and which probably he could deny with a good conscience, his sons in St Andrews and Dundee having been too prudent to involve him in their little plot, the provost spoke out boldly to the haughty prior, and said: Why make a work about this? I, myself, if I had known that Alexander was preparing to go away, would with the greatest pleasure have furnished him both with a ship and with provisions for his voyage, that he might be put in safety beyond the reach of your cruelty. Assuredly, had he been my brother I would long ago have rescued him from those perils and miseries in which you have involved him.
Thus Alexander Alesius was driven from his much-loved native land, destined never to return to it more, or again to see the friends and relations to whom he was so warmly attached. "Could any one then have whispered in the ear of the disconsolate exile that he was on the road to far more extensive usefulness" and freedom; that he would gain many friends in foreign lands, and would not only be spared to labour there for more than thirty years, but would also be honoured to be the first to plead by his writings for the free circulation of the Scriptures in his native Scotland, and one of the first to help on Cranmer in England, and Hermann von Wied, the reforming Archbishop of Cologne, in Germany; that he would be privileged to attend, as one of the Protestant representatives, many of the most important colloquies of the leaders of the old and the new church on the Continent, to be the intimate friend of Luther and Melanchthon, to labour as a professor of theology in two German universities, and to live and die in the greatest honour and respect among those with whom he laboured,--"how incredible would it all have seemed to him!" Yet it was thus God meant it, and thus He brought it to pass; and if there was one among the Scottish exiles of those times who was less embittered towards his persecutors than another, or more ready to yield to them in things indifferent or of minor importance, if only he could gain their hearts for Christ and His cause in matters of highest moment, it was he.