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 after finding a temporary shelter in England, apparently at Salisbury, under the protection of Bishop Shaxton, who was then a favourer of the reformed opinions, were, like Alesius himself, to find their ultimate home and special work on the Continent--the one in the University of Copenhagen, the other in the University of Frankfort on the Oder. They seem to have gone first to Wittenberg, and while the others for a time resumed their studies there, Alesius almost immediately on his return was selected by Melanchthon to accompany him to the colloquy at Worms, and then to that at Regensburg, which were attended not only by the Lutheran and the Catholic theologians, but also by Bucer, Calvin, and other reforming divines of Strassburg. So it came about that Alesius, who had suffered exile in the cause of the Reformation in Scotland, and still had striven to promote it, was probably the first of our countrymen to be brought into contact with Calvin, who was ultimately to exercise so marked an influence on the