Eighteen months of retirement and the advice of his friends, who reminded him, with justice, that it was his duty to maintain the rights and liberties of the church and kingdom in which he had accepted the office of bishop, rather than to find suffragans for York, or promote the claims of Canterbury,[222] wrought an alteration in the opinions of Eadmer; and he wrote submissively to Alexander, urging his claims to be reinstated in the see of St. Andrews, and adding these remarkable words, which at once place in view the real objects of the dispute--“I entreat you not to believe that I wish to derogate in any way from the liberty or dignity of the Scottish kingdom; since if you still persist in retaining your opinion about your former demands in respect of the King of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the sacerdotal Benediction (an opinion with which I would not then concur, from entertaining ideas which, I have since learnt, were erroneous), you shall find that I will no longer differ from your views, nor will I let these questions separate me from God’s service, and from your love, that in all things I may follow out your will.”[223] But it was now too late; [Sidenote: A. D. 1123.] Alexander was inexorable; and at the close of the following year he appointed Robert Prior of Scone to fill the see, which he persisted in looking upon as vacant by the voluntary resignation of Eadmer.[224] The contest thus maintained by Alexander against the pretensions of the English Metropolitans extended to the diocese of Glasgow, in which a bishopric had been re-established by Earl David shortly after the death of Turgot. The earl had appointed his own tutor John to the see; but the bishop-elect, terrified at his unruly flock, and shrinking from the laborious, and perhaps dangerous, undertaking of introducing amongst them the remodelled Roman discipline, fairly fled from the country; though he was subsequently consecrated by Pope Paschal, and sent back to his diocese, where he remained till the return of Thorstein, Archbishop of York, to England.[225] By a judicious line of policy towards the Papal court, and by the essential services which he contrived to render to the cause of Henry in Normandy, Thorstein had been enabled to triumph over the opposition of Canterbury, and he now summoned the Bishop of Glasgow to acknowledge his canonical dependance upon the see of York, [Sidenote: A. D. 1122.] suspending him from his sacred office on his refusal.[226] John appealed to Rome, but as the archbishop was then in high favour, his cause does not appear to have prospered, and he removed to Jerusalem, where he remained some months with the Patriarch, occasionally exercising his episcopal functions until he was recalled by the Pope and sent back to his diocese; [Sidenote: A. D. 1123.] the dispute between the two churches remaining undecided until many years afterwards, when Glasgow was liberated from