Scotland under her early kings, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Eben William Robertson

Widely different in character from his peaceful and indolent predecessor was the next king who filled the throne of Scotland. To a purity of life, a fondness for the devotional exercises and austerities of the age, and a reverential demeanour towards the clergy—qualities which he inherited from his mother—Alexander united the high courage and warlike bearing of his father; whilst his own restless ambition and indomitable will involved him in continual contests throughout his reign, and earned for him the appellation of the Fierce. In many points he resembled his sister the queen of England; and the same lavish generosity towards strangers, with the same somewhat ostentatious display of charity in feeding, clothing, and washing the feet of the poor, to which “the Scottish Esther” (as she is sometimes called) in vain endeavoured to incite her youthful brother David, formed in Alexander a striking contrast to his haughty and imperious bearing towards the great body of his subjects. Naturally viewing with a jealous eye the dismemberment of his kingdom for the advantage of his younger brother, he refused at first to carry out the bequest of Edgar until David threatened to support his rights by the sword; when the fear of the mail-clad auxiliaries, whom the long residence and popularity of the Earl at his sister’s court would have enabled him to call to his aid, at length extorted from Alexander a tardy and reluctant recognition of his brother’s claims upon Scottish Cumbria.[207]

The effects of the new king’s determination to enforce submission to his will, soon became apparent in a simultaneous rising of the ancient enemies of his family, who must have recovered much of their former power during the anarchy and confusion resulting upon the death of Malcolm the Third. Donald Bane was perhaps indebted to the crown for their support, and his immediate successor was not of a disposition to curb the increasing independence of his powerful and refractory Mormaors; but Alexander, accustomed to the ideas of feudalism with which he had become acquainted at the English court, was deterred by no fear of consequences from exacting a very different species of obedience from that which had satisfied the peaceful Edgar; and his measures for controlling the disaffection of his subjects resulted, before long, in a rebellion in the north.

The conspirators laid their plans with secrecy, and the men of Moray and Mærne marched in haste to the south, in the hope of surprising Alexander, and repeating the catastrophe of his brother Duncan. The king was holding his court at Invergowrie—a residence to which he always exhibited a marked partiality, as he had enjoyed the earldom of the district from a very early period—when he received intelligence of the near approach of his enemies, and with the prompt vigour of his character, hesitated not an instant in confronting the danger, his bold advance so daunting the conspirators that they turned and fled for the mountains. Thither he followed without delay, so closely pressing the pursuit that he swept through the northern earldoms without opposition, until he reached the boundaries of Ross, where his opponents were occupied in gathering their whole strength upon the opposite shores of the Moray Firth. It was evidently their intention to dispute the passage of the Firth, and to attack the army of the king whilst engaged in crossing; but again anticipating their purpose, he reached the point of passage, known as the Stockford, when it was high tide, plunged at once into the stream, and crossing with his mounted followers in safety, advanced upon the enemy before they could escape to mountain or morass, and inflicted such a slaughter upon their surprised and bewildered masses, that all disposition to revolt against his rule was stifled in the blood of his opponents—his stern and sanguinary vengeance upon this occasion earning for him the title of the Fierce. The Monastery of Scone is supposed to have owed its erection to the pious gratitude of Alexander for his speedy and triumphant success; and in the foundation-charter of that ancient Abbey, the name of Heth, Earl of Moray, stands prominently forward amongst the other Gaelic Mormaors, who were assembled in dutiful attendance at the court of their lord the Scottish king.[208]

This reign was destined to become the era of the first collision between the ecclesiastical and secular powers in Scotland. The last known Gaelic or Culdee bishop of St. Andrews was Fothadh, who died in the same year as Malcolm Ceanmore,[209] the see remaining vacant during the three succeeding reigns; but when Alexander ascended the throne, he immediately determined upon appointing a bishop, who would be ready to carry out the views upon religious subjects in which all the family of Malcolm Ceanmore had been educated by their Anglo-Saxon mother. Accordingly, in the first year of his reign he selected Turgot to fill the vacant see of St. Andrews; but a difficulty, upon which he had scarcely calculated, awaited him at the very outset of his undertaking.

Ever since the time when Bruno, Bishop of Toul, yielding (according to the general opinion) to the advice of Hildebrand, Prior of Clugny, relinquished the Papal insignia with which he had been invested by the Emperor, and entered Italy in the garb of a pilgrim to abide by the election of the Roman clergy, it had been the aim of the ambitious churchman, whose master-mind is supposed to have directed the Papal policy for a quarter of a century before he occupied the Pontifical Chair, not only to emancipate the church from all dependence upon royal authority, but to establish her dominion, as a temporal power, over the whole extent of Christendom. The name of the Emperor disappeared from Papal bulls; the titles of Apostolic Bishop and of Pope were declared to belong to the occupant of St. Peter’s Chair alone; Archbishops were appointed Metropolitans over other primates in spite of all opposition; and Metropolitans were instituted without consulting their clergy, solely by the force of Papal bulls;[210] measures calculated to extinguish the remnants of independence in national churches, and to place the whole Christian hierarchy at the disposal of the sole and absolute will of the Pope. Whilst the clergy were thus to be reduced to a dependent body, animated by the soul of one man, and carrying out his vast schemes for temporal authority throughout the kingdoms of the world, the secular power was attacked in more ways than one. The right of granting kingdoms, and of releasing subjects from their allegiance, was both claimed and exercised; Sicily was conferred upon the Norman Guiscard; fealty was demanded from the conqueror of England;[211] Spain and Hungary were claimed as Papal fiefs, and even the distant Russian received his dukedom from the hands of the Bishop of Rome. It was then also that the notorious Donation of Constantine first saw the light, and the Papal claims to universal dominion were supported by apocryphal documents, supposed to exist amongst the archives of Rome.[212] But the great struggle was about the right of Investiture, or of granting the Ring and Pastoral staff to a newly made bishop, in token of his appointment.[213]

From the period when Christianity became the recognised religion of the Roman empire, the head of the state participated in the nomination of bishops, who were supposed to be chosen by their flock, approved of and consecrated by their fellow clergy, and confirmed in their appointment by their temporal ruler. The voice of the people had long been silenced, on account of the disgraceful tumults and outrages so frequently occurring at the election of bishops, when instead of a little band of devout believers purified by the test of persecution, the flock was composed of the licentious rabble of a city. The voice of the clergy was intended by the policy of Hildebrand to become a mere echo of the Lateran; and the voice of the ruler of the state to be no more heard except in liege acquiescence. The conduct of the princes of that era afforded ample scope to Hildebrand for appearing in the character of a reformer of the abuses of the age, for as the elections of bishops by the popular voice had too often degenerated into scenes of tumult and factious violence, so in the hands of princes they had become but too frequently mere mercantile transactions. Bishoprics and abbacies were either openly bestowed upon the highest bidder, or were suffered to remain vacant for years that their revenues might be appropriated to purposes of private emolument; and too many of the superior clergy were very ready to profit by an abuse which opened an easy access to the high places of the church, to those whose profligacy would otherwise have barred their advance to preferment of which they were utterly unworthy. Had the policy of Hildebrand been directed simply to the correction of such abuses, and to the establishment or restoration of a discipline which he deemed essential, its motives would have been high and holy; but it is only too evident that earthly ambition was the ruling principle of a mind elevated above the meaner vices of the age, and that the reforms which he advocated served as a cloak for promoting with unscrupulous energy that temporal aggrandizement of the Papal See, which attained its culminating point when Innocent the Third proclaimed himself “less than God, but more than man, God’s Christ, and Pharoah’s God.”[214]

With the influx of foreign clergy after the Conquest, the system of Hildebrand penetrated into England, and its effects soon became apparent, nearly every bishop rushing into a contest with the neighbouring prelates about the rights, privileges, or possessions of his see. Canterbury claimed jurisdiction over all the British Isles in virtue of the Bull of Gregory the Great to Augustine; and York asserted ecclesiastical supremacy over Scotland on account of the signature of Wilfrith at the council of Rome, and the short episcopate of Trumwin over the Picts. When, therefore, Alexander requested the Archbishop of York to consecrate Turgot, he was met by a claim to the canonical obedience of the Scottish bishops, to which he was by no means inclined to submit. The difficulty was set aside for the time by Henry of England, who desired the Archbishop of York to perform the necessary ceremonies, reserving the rights of both churches for future discussion;[215] when Anselm of Canterbury wrote to forbid the proceeding, as he had not yet consecrated Thomas of York, who had hitherto evaded all profession of canonical obedience.[216] But this second difficulty was shortly removed by the death of Anselm; and soon afterwards, the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of St. Andrews, A. D. 1109. were both consecrated on the same day by the Bishop of London.[217]

Differences quickly arose between the king and Turgot, and though it is impossible to state their nature with precision, they were probably connected with the opposite views entertained by Alexander, and the bishop, upon the necessity of immediately remodelling the state of the Scottish church. At length the latter requested permission to proceed to Rome for the purpose of laying his case before the Pope; but Alexander steadily refused his sanction to a journey of which he was far too sagacious not to foresee the consequences; A. D. 1115. and Turgot only obtained license to retire to his former residence in the monastery of Durham, where he fell ill and died in 1115.[218]

Alexander determined that the next bishop should be chosen from the province of Canterbury, in the hope of evading the claims of York through the opposing pretensions of the rival see; but although he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to this effect soon after the death of Turgot, several years elapsed before he finally requested that a monk of the name of Eadmer, A. D. 1120. who had been much in the confidence of Anselm, should be sent to undertake the office of Bishop of St. Andrews. Released from his allegiance to the English king, and from his canonical obedience to the see of Canterbury, the new bishop was duly installed in his diocese;[219] but Alexander soon found that “he had gained nothing in seeking for a bishop out of Canterbury,” for it would appear to have been the especial object of Eadmer to exalt the See of Canterbury by reducing the Bishop of St. Andrews to the subordinate situation of a suffragan of the English Metropolitan, in which he was steadily opposed by Alexander,[220] who showed the same determination in refusing permission to Eadmer to retire to Canterbury in the capacity of Bishop of St. Andrews, as he had previously evinced in opposing the departure of Turgot to Rome. The English prelate was warned by the Bishop of Glasgow that he had to deal with a prince of inflexible resolution, and that unless he yielded the points in dispute, or relinquished the ring and crozier, thereby surrendering up the bishopric, he would neither be able to live in peace within the limits of the kingdom, nor would he be permitted to cross its boundaries. Eadmer, at length giving way, resigned his bishopric and retired to Canterbury; consoling himself with the thought that the investiture of the ring, which he had received from Alexander, had lost its spiritual efficacy by passing through the hands of a layman.[221]

A. D. 1122.