Albany married about 1475 his cousin in the fourth degree, Catharine Sinclair, daughter of William, third earl of Orkney and first earl of Caithness [q. v.], by Margaret Douglas; and three sons and a daughter appear to have been born of the marriage. The daughter Margaret is believed to have married Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel, and to have been the mother of Patrick Hamilton [q. v.] the martyr. One son, Alexander, became bishop of Moray in 1527. This marriage was dissolved on the ground of propinquity by the official of Lothian on 9 March 1478, a dissolution confirmed by parliament on 13 Nov. 1516. This step was taken in order to set at rest doubts as to the legitimacy of Albany's son John, duke of Albany [q. v.], the only child of his second wife, Anne, third daughter of Bertrand, count de la Tour d'Auvergne. Albany married her in France in 1480, and she appears to have died in 1487. The confirmation by parliament raised the doubts of later historians, and its occasion was certainly not above suspicion. Chalmers (Caledonia, ii. 268 note p) argued with ingenuity that the certificate of the divorce under the hand of George Newton, clerk of the official in 1516, which was laid before parliament, was forged. But the chief ground of his doubt that John of Otterburn, the official by whom the decree was pronounced, was not official at its date has since been removed (Exchequer Rolls, vol. ix. p. lvii note 1). The facts that the bishop of Moray did not contest the sentence which declared his own illegitimacy, and that in 1488 a proposal was made by James III for the marriage of Albany to a sister of Edward IV, the Duchess of Burgundy, widow of Charles the Bold, outweigh the doubts of Chalmers, which have not been accepted by other historians. Edward declined the proposed marriage through his envoy, Dr. Legh, then in Scotland, not upon the ground of Albany's being already married, but because, ‘after the old usage of our realms, no estate or person honourable communeth of marriage within the year of their dool’ (Edward IV to Dr. Legh, Cotton MS. Vesp. cxvi. f. 121, printed in Pinkerton, i. 501).
[Acts of Parliament of Scotland, ii., Exchequer Rolls, vols. viii–ix.; Rymer's Fœdera; the Histories of Leslie and Lindsay of Pitscottie; Michel's Les Écossais en France, les Français en Écosse; Pinkerton's and Tytler's Histories.]
STEWART, ALEXANDER (1493?–1513), archbishop of St. Andrews, was the natural son of James IV by Margaret, daughter of Archibald Boyd of Bonshaw. In succession to James Stewart (1476–1504) [q. v.], he was before 23 July 1505 appointed archbishop of St. Andrews, being so styled in the Stirling account of that date (Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, x. 334). He is usually stated to have obtained the primacy at the age of eighteen; but in a letter of James IV to Julius II regarding the appointment he is referred to as being below the age of puberty (Gairdner, Letters of Richard III and Henry VII, ii. 179); and as, moreover, Erasmus states that he was twenty years of age when he was killed at Flodden, he was probably born about 1493. In his earlier years his education was entrusted to Dr. Patrick Panter [q. v.]; but he was sent to the continent, probably in 1506, under the guardianship of Sir Thomas Halkerston, and, after visiting the Low Countries and France, he settled in 1508 at Padua, where he studied rhetoric and logic under Erasmus, who in his ‘Adagia’ highly extols his character and scholarship. ‘Heavens,’ wrote Erasmus, ‘how quick, how attentive, how eager he was, how many things he would undertake together!’ In July 1509 James IV wrote a letter of thanks to the pope for reserving to his son, the archbishop of St. Andrews, his primacy and legateship, and confirming the liberties of the chapel royal (Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII, i. No. 379), and the same year he also wrote to the pope, proposing that the priory of Coldingham, hitherto attached to Durham, and then vacant, should be annexed and made canonically subject to the abbey of Dunfermline, then held by the archbishop of St. Andrews (ib. No. 774). In these and similar schemes of aggrandisement the archbishop himself displayed all the quickness and eagerness which Erasmus noted in the scholar. His ambition was further gratified by his appointment, some time before 2 April 1510, to the office of lord chancellor of Scotland (Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, xiii. 358). It is in fact very evident that the youthful archbishop was as resolutely bent on worldly preferment as any churchman of his time, and probably had he lived the reformers would have fared as hardly at his hands as they did at those of Beaton. At the same time he was an enlightened patron of learning. In 1512 he augmented the stipends of the professors of the pedagogium, of the foundation of Bishop Henry Wardlaw [q. v.] (afterwards St. Mary's College), and gave them the fruits of the church of St. Michael of Tarvat, near Cupar, and he also rebuilt the chapel of St. John the Evangelist, in the same pedagogium, after it had fallen. In the same year, along with Prior John Hepburn [q. v.], he was founder of the college of St. Leonard's, endowing it with the tithes
