The Scottish king was still occupied in the province of Moray, where he appears to have assembled a considerable force, to which Ireland contributed her share. Strengthened by the return of Thorkell Fostri, and by the arrival of the friendly clans from the Highland districts of the north and west, Thorfin crossed the Moray Firth, and assuming the offensive, attacked the royal army, which is said to have been stationed in the neighbourhood of Burghead.[139] Duncan was defeated after a severe struggle, and Thorfin, following up his success, plundered the country to the frontiers of Fife, and returned without molestation to his northern earldom; whilst the double failure in Northumbria and Moray hastening the catastrophe of the youthful king, he was assassinated “in the Smith’s bothy,” near Elgin, not far from the scene of his latest battle, the Mormaor Macbeth being the undoubted author of his death.[140]
The reigns of this king and his predecessor have been adorned in the pages of Buchanan and Boece with numerous victories gained over the Northmen which were totally unknown to the earlier authorities Wynton and Fordun. Many difficulties beset the path of the early compiler of Scottish history. The dearth of materials; the English claims so thoroughly interwoven with the accounts which the rival chronicler was fain to accept for his principal authorities; the necessity under which he lay of distinguishing the “genuine Scots”—as he considered them—as well from the “Irishry” to the northward of “the Mounth,” as from the English to the southward of the Tweed, all combined to render it a matter requiring no little trouble and ingenuity to compose an appropriate history of his country. Under these circumstances the numerous tumuli along the coast, each marking some spot where the men of the olden time repulsed or fell before the invaders, suggested the groundwork of a historical fabric which might at any rate escape much questioning; and of these memorials of bygone conflicts Boece has availed himself without scruple. Lords of the Isles and Thanes of Strathearn valiantly sustain the contest against Sueno or Camus, Olave or Onetus; and at a time when surnames were as yet unknown, a Keith or a Hay, a Graham or a Dunbar, revives the failing courage of his countrymen and points the way to victory. The fate of Loncarty must attend upon the triumphs of Malcolm and his grandson. The crumbling bones of the dead bear faithful witness to the reality of the battles, but the circumstances and the characters called into existence by the pen of Boece, must fade away from the page of history, and pass into the realm of fiction.[141]
The Line of Moray.
| Macbeth | 1040–1058. |
| Lulach | 1058. |
A. D. 1040.
Very few kings of so remote a period have attained to the undying celebrity of Macbeth. As long as the English language endures, his name will be as widely known as that of the great Alfred, his character will retain the familiar features impressed on it by the magic genius of Shakspeare, and it will be as impossible to disentangle the historical personage from the weird being of romance, as to picture “the meek and hoary Duncan,” a young and inexperienced prince, meeting his untimely fate in the flower of youth.
The quaint verses of the prior of Lochleven have embodied some of the tales and traditions handed down by the partizans of the rival families; and it will create little surprise to find that in a state of society in which “the rights of blood” were paramount, the stigma of illegitimacy was freely cast upon both competitors for the crown. Wyntoun has recorded how Duncan, wearied with the chase, and separated from his usual attendants, found rest and shelter within the humble mill of Forteviot; how love bade the king return where chance had shown the way; and how Malcolm, whose blood has flowed in the veins of every English and Scottish king but Stephen, from the days of Henry Beauclerc, sprung from this intrigue with the “milnare’s dowchtyr of Fortewyot.” As the taint upon the blood of Malcolm was supposed to be inherited from his mother, so the stain upon the pedigree of Macbeth was attributed to the Mormaor’s father; and in the same old verses it may be read how the mother of the Moray chieftain, wandering by chance in the woods, met with “ane fayr man, nevyr nane sa fayre as scho thowcht than,” and how Macbeth was born “the Dewil’s sone,” and the inheritor of all his father’s evil propensities. As the talisman of success was eventually upon the side of Malcolm, so the tales of the tyranny and crimes of his antagonist increased and multiplied, until they assumed the well-known form in the pages of Boece, which, copied into the chronicle of Holinshed, attracted the notice of the master-mind that has stamped the fiction with immortality.[142]
It may be gathered from the circumstances of his early life that Macbeth did not attain even to the position of Mormaor without a struggle. The two sons of Ruadhri—Roderic or Rory—the first known member of the Moray family, succeeded according to the Gaelic custom, Finlay filling the office of Tanist during the lifetime of his brother Malbride. He was slain, as has been already mentioned, by his nephews, who evidently intended to retain the right of succession within their immediate branch of the family; Gilcomgain, who must have been chosen Tanist on his brother’s accession to the Mormaordom, following Malcolm to the exclusion of Finlay’s son, Macbeth, whose right to the Tanistship was undoubted, and who must have thus found himself shut out from the seniority to which he was fully entitled to aspire as the representative of the junior branch of Rory’s family. The union of Gilcomgain with a daughter of the MacAlpin family must have still further strengthened his position, and as Macbeth is subsequently entitled Dux by the contemporary Marianus, it may be conjectured that if he filled the office of Toshach—Duke or Constable of the kingdom—during the reign of Duncan, it may have been conferred upon him originally as the natural opponent of the rival line of Kenneth MacDuff, with which the kinsman who had supplanted him was closely connected. The last two years of Malcolm’s reign, however, witnessed the deaths of Gilcomgain and of his wife’s brother; and though the name of the Mormaor’s enemy is not mentioned, it is hardly possible to doubt, that when he was surprised and burnt with fifty of his followers, it was the deed of Macbeth avenging the murder of his father, and re-asserting his claim upon the Mormaorship. The subsequent death of Boedhe’s son transferred his claims upon the throne to his sister Gruoch, whose marriage with Macbeth reversed the position in which the Mormaor had hitherto stood, and placed him in the position of Gilcomgain. Henceforth his interest was closely bound up with the family to which he had hitherto been hostile, though, had Duncan been prosperous, his fidelity might have stood the test. It was the disastrous career of this unfortunate prince which first seems to have aroused the ambition of Macbeth; but even then his hostility was secret. It was not in open battle that Duncan lost his life, nor was the crown of Scotland the prize of the victor in a hard fought field, the final scene in “the Smith’s bothy” being strongly suggestive of treachery.
The historical Macbeth appears to have been an able monarch, and religious after the fashion of the age, for his reign has been handed down in tradition as an era of fertility and prosperity—generally a sign of the ability of the ruler; and he is recorded with his queen amongst the earliest benefactors of the Culdee society of Lochleven.[143] With their joint grant to the little priory is associated the only historical mention of the true descent of the Lady Gruoch; and the venerable Culdee who briefly registered their donation, little thought that, in entering the simple notice, he was perpetuating the sole record of the real nature of the claims of his benefactors upon the throne they were accused of usurping. His liberality to the poor of Rome is also mentioned by a contemporary historian; but in such a manner as to leave it a matter of doubt whether the king was ever present in person at the Eternal City.[144]
For five years after the fall of Duncan his successful rival reigned in peace, when an attempt was made by the adherents of the late king to regain their lost ascendancy. A. D. 1045. The children of Duncan were still in their infancy, and their cause was sustained by their grandfather, Crinan, the aged abbot of Dunkeld; but his defeat and death, “with nine times twenty warriors,” extinguished for a time the hopes of the House of Atholl, and only served to secure the throne more firmly in the power of Macbeth.[145] Seven years elapsed and the fortunes of the House of Moray were still in the ascendant, when several of the Confessor’s Norman favourites, A. D. 1052. who were driven from England on the return of Earl Godwin, fled for refuge beyond the Tweed,[146] and the asylum granted to the fugitives at Macbeth’s Court may have afforded a pretext for the hostility of Siward, who, two years later, invaded the dominions of the Scottish king. A. D. 1054. The whole force of the Northumbrian provinces collected around the banner of the Danish earl, and attacked Macbeth on the day of “the Seven Sleepers;” 27th July. fifteen hundred of the Anglo-Danes fell in the contest, with the son and nephew of the earl, but Siward gained the day, slew three thousand of the enemy—the detested Normans amongst the number—and carried off a booty unprecedented in the annals of Border warfare.[147]