[2] As a young man, William became tutor to the Earl of Argyll and accompanied him on his travels in France, Spain and Italy.

In 1613, he began a correspondence with the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, which ripened into a lifelong intimacy after their 1614 meeting at Menstrie Castle, where Alexander was on one of his short annual visits.

[10] He briefly established a Scottish settlement at Charles Fort, later Port-Royal, Nova Scotia, led by his son William Alexander (the younger).

English colonists attempted to settle at Cow Bay at what today is Port Washington, New York in 1640, but after an alert by Native leader Penhawitz were arrested by the Dutch and released after saying they were mistaken about the title.

[14] After 1640, eastern Long Island was quickly settled by the English while the western portion remained under Dutch rule until 1674.

Alexander was one of the most highly regarded Scottish poets in early seventeenth-century Scotland and England: he was praised by William Drummond of Hawthornden, Arthur Johnstone, Andrew Ramsey, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel and John Davies of Hereford.

[15] Alexander's earliest work was probably Aurora (London, 1604), which was described on its title-page as 'the first fancies of the author's youth' and is a late addition to the corpus of Elizabethan Petrarchan sonnets.

His closet dramas - Croesus, Darius, The Alexandrean, and Julius Caesar - were published together as The Monarchick Tragedies (London, 1604; further editions in 1607, 1616, 1637).

[16] According to Daniel Cadman, in these plays Alexander 'interrogates the value of republican forms of government and provides a voice for the frustrations of politically marginalised subjects of absolutist regimes'.

[19] Alexander collaborated with James VI and I on a new paraphrase of the Psalms, composed a continuation to Philip Sidney's Arcadia that links the end of Book 3 in Sidney's incomplete revised version to the ending in the 1593 text, and also wrote down his thoughts on poetry in Anacrisis: Or a Censure of some Poets Ancient and Modern (c.