Alexander Ales or Alexander Alesius (; 23 April 150017 March 1565) was a Scottish theologian who emigrated to Germany and became a Lutheran supporter of the Augsburg Confession. Life Originally Alexander Alane, he was born at Edinburgh. He studied at St Andrews in the newly founded college of St Leonard's, where he graduated in 1515. Some time afterwards he was appointed a priest at the University's church, where he preached vigorously in favor of scholastic theology, Renaissance humanism, and anti-Protestantism. His views entirely changed, however, upon witnessing the 1528 execution by burning of Rev. Patrick Hamilton, a Lutheran Pastor and former abbot of Fern. Fr. Ales was chosen to meet Hamilton in a theological debate, with a view to convincing him of the errors of Lutheranism, but the theological arguments of the Scottish minister and, above all, his fortitude at the stake impressed Alesius so powerfully that he immediately embraced Lutheran theology. A sermon he preached before the Synod at St Andrews against the dissoluteness of the clergy offended the provost, who placed him in prison, and might have carried his resentment further if Alesius had not escaped to Germany in 1532. After travelling through northern Europe, he settled down at Wittenberg, where he befriended Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon and signed the Augsburg confession. Meanwhile, he was tried by the Bishops of the Catholic Church in Scotland for heresy and condemned to death in absentia. In 1533 a decree by the Scottish Bishops, prohibiting the reading of the New Testament by the laity, drew from Alesius a defence of the right of the people, in the form of an open letter to King James V of Scotland. A reply to this by German Roman Catholic priest and Renaissance humanist Johann Cochlaeus was also addressed to the Scottish king and occasioned a second letter from Alesius, in which he amplified his argument with greater force and entered into more general questions. In August 1534 he and a few others were excommunicated at Holyrood by the deputy of the Archbishop of St Andrews. When King Henry VIII of England (1509–47) declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, Alesius was persuaded to go to England, where he was cordially received (August 1535) by the king and his pro-Protestant advisers, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell. He briefly attended the court of Henry's queen, Anne Boleyn, of whom he thought very