Eighteen months of retirement and the advice of his friends, who reminded him, with justice, that it was his duty to maintain the rights and liberties of the church and kingdom in which he had accepted the office of bishop, rather than to find suffragans for York, or promote the claims of Canterbury,[222] wrought an alteration in the opinions of Eadmer; and he wrote submissively to Alexander, urging his claims to be reinstated in the see of St. Andrews, and adding these remarkable words, which at once place in view the real objects of the dispute—“I entreat you not to believe that I wish to derogate in any way from the liberty or dignity of the Scottish kingdom; since if you still persist in retaining your opinion about your former demands in respect of the King of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the sacerdotal Benediction (an opinion with which I would not then concur, from entertaining ideas which, I have since learnt, were erroneous), you shall find that I will no longer differ from your views, nor will I let these questions separate me from God’s service, and from your love, that in all things I may follow out your will.”[223] But it was now too late; A. D. 1123. Alexander was inexorable; and at the close of the following year he appointed Robert Prior of Scone to fill the see, which he persisted in looking upon as vacant by the voluntary resignation of Eadmer.[224]
The contest thus maintained by Alexander against the pretensions of the English Metropolitans extended to the diocese of Glasgow, in which a bishopric had been re-established by Earl David shortly after the death of Turgot. The earl had appointed his own tutor John to the see; but the bishop-elect, terrified at his unruly flock, and shrinking from the laborious, and perhaps dangerous, undertaking of introducing amongst them the remodelled Roman discipline, fairly fled from the country; though he was subsequently consecrated by Pope Paschal, and sent back to his diocese, where he remained till the return of Thorstein, Archbishop of York, to England.[225] By a judicious line of policy towards the Papal court, and by the essential services which he contrived to render to the cause of Henry in Normandy, Thorstein had been enabled to triumph over the opposition of Canterbury, and he now summoned the Bishop of Glasgow to acknowledge his canonical dependance upon the see of York, A. D. 1122. suspending him from his sacred office on his refusal.[226] John appealed to Rome, but as the archbishop was then in high favour, his cause does not appear to have prospered, and he removed to Jerusalem, where he remained some months with the Patriarch, occasionally exercising his episcopal functions until he was recalled by the Pope and sent back to his diocese; A. D. 1123. the dispute between the two churches remaining undecided until many years afterwards, when Glasgow was liberated from the claims of York, and declared to be in direct dependance upon the see of Rome.[227]
Towards the close of his reign Alexander lost his queen Sibylla, a natural daughter of the English king, of whom little is known, and—if the account of a contemporary writer is to be trusted—that little is not to her advantage, for her personal deficiencies were not redeemed by the presence of moral virtues. She died suddenly at Loch Tay, in the course of 1122, and within two years she was followed to the grave by her husband, A. D. 1124 who expired on the 25th of April 1124, whilst still in the vigour of manhood.[228]
It would be unreasonable to estimate the little that Alexander was enabled to accomplish by the standard of his younger brother’s success in following out a similar line of policy. Both brothers endeavoured to assimilate their dominions to the feudal monarchies of the age, and to introduce amongst their clergy the revised system of the Roman Church; but the elder had greater difficulties to contend against, with fewer advantages in his favour. The dismemberment of his kingdom by the separation of Scottish Cumbria must have materially diminished his power; and had not Alexander died without an heir, the impolitic bequest of Edgar might have been fraught with most disastrous consequences to Scotland. The principality of David must inevitably, in course of time, have become dependant upon one of the greater kingdoms by which it was surrounded; it could only have existed by skilfully promoting disunion between its more powerful neighbours; and it is more than probable that it would have eventually been annexed to the greater kingdom, and been held by his descendants as a fief of the English crown. The marked separation existing between the dominions of the two brothers during the lifetime of the elder, is best ascertained by a reference to the charters of the period. The dignitaries at the court of Alexander were exclusively, Gaelic Mormaors—Earls of Moray, Fife, Atholl, and Strathearn, and other native magnates of similar origin—the grandsons of the Northumbrian Cospatric, ancestor of the Earls of March and Dunbar; Edward the Constable, the son of Siward Beorn—in short, the nobility of ancient Alban and the Lothians; whilst around Earl David gathered Moreville and Somerville, Lindsay and Umphraville, Bruce and Fitz-Alan, Norman names destined to surround the throne of his descendants, two of them to become royal, and all to shed a lustre upon the feudal chivalry of Scotland.[229]
Alexander may have attempted to enforce, by resolute will, the changes and alterations which were only carried out by David through an union of consummate tact and policy; and it may have been to this part of the king’s conduct that Ailred alludes when he describes him as “endeavouring to compass things beyond his power;” for he was evidently of a disposition to frame his policy, rather according to the dictates of his own will, than to his ability to carry it out. He achieved enough, however, to entitle him to be remembered as the first king who essayed to place Scotland on a footing with the feudal states of Western Europe; for Edgar left his kingdom much as he found it—his very bequest of Cumbria, as an absolute property, was totally at variance with the policy of either Saxon or Norman—and the innovations of Margaret were confined to the court and the clergy.[230] The laws and customs of the Gaelic people remained undisturbed in her days, and her ideas of ecclesiastical reform were widely different from those of Hildebrand, of whose system the church of her native country, at the time she quitted it, was ignorant.
But the grant of the Cursus Apri made by Alexander to St. Andrews—a grant which must be regarded, not so much in the light of an original donation, as of a restoration to the church of the lands which had been alienated to the royal family in their capacity of Cowarbs, or hereditary abbots of the old monastic establishment—was, unquestionably, the earliest step towards remodelling the Scottish church, though the king’s intentions were frustrated by his dissensions with Turgot and Eadmer, and he died before the consecration of Robert, Prior of Scone, the last bishop whom he appointed. He was the first king also to introduce beyond the Forth the custom of confirming grants by charter, in place of the outward forms and ceremonies by which, in an earlier state of society, such gifts were invariably accompanied; though upon the occasion of his restitution of the Cursus Apri all the ancient formalities were observed. The great feudal office of Constable is also first traceable in this reign, and to the same king may be attributed the earliest introduction of the sheriffdom—for the Vicecomes is to be met with in some of his charters. Alexander may therefore be said to have laid the first stone of the social edifice which David raised from the foundation; though many a year was fated to elapse, and more than one generation was destined to pass away, before the system inaugurated by the sons of Malcolm Ceanmore, was effectually established throughout the whole extent of their dominions.
CHAPTER VIII.
David the First 1124–1153.
The death of Alexander, without heirs, reunited to the Scottish kingdom the appanage of Cumbria, which had been so unwisely severed from it by Edgar; and the last surviving son of Malcolm and Margaret, the rightful heir by ancient Gaelic custom as well as by feudal law, ascended the throne without dispute. An intimate connection with the Court of England for upwards of a quarter of a century, had effectually “rubbed off the Scottish rust” from David,—to use the words of the contemporary Malmesbury,—converting him into a feudal baron; and many years before he was called upon to fill the throne, he had gathered around him in his Cumbrian principality a body of knights and barons, from whom sprung the older Norman chivalry of Scotland. During his residence in the south he married Matilda, the widow of Simon de St. Liz and heiress of Earl Waltheof of Northumberland, a portion of whose vast estates had been conferred upon each of her husbands in succession—St. Liz having been created Earl of Northampton, whilst the Honour of Huntingdon was granted to the Scottish prince; but the great earldom of Northumberland was retained in the Crown, for after the forfeiture of Robert de Mowbray, the English kings were jealous of intrusting that important province out of their own hands.[231] The sole offspring of the second marriage of Matilda was an only son, to whom his parents gave the name of Henry, born about ten years before the accession of his father to the throne of Scotland.
David was the first of his family who united the character of an English baron to that of a Scottish king; and in the former capacity he was soon called upon to exercise the political sagacity through which he had reaped the reward of the appanage of Cumbria, which he held during the lifetime of his brother Alexander. Upon the death of Henry the Fifth of Germany, the English king, despairing of any male heir from his second marriage, determined upon adopting as his successor his daughter Alicia, who fifteen years before had been betrothed, whilst a mere child, to the deceased Emperor. The princess, it is said, was reluctant to leave a country in which she had resided since her infancy, and where she still enjoyed vast possessions with the title of Empress; but she had become a necessary instrument for furthering the views of her father, and he turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of the princes of Lombardy and Lorraine, whose desire to retain their Empress interfered with the tenor of his policy. The assistance of the Scottish king was early sought to join in securing the succession to his sister’s child, and he passed a whole year in England in concerting measures for this purpose. In the great council of London, to which every baron of note was summoned, David was the first to swear fealty to his niece,—who now, like her mother, had assumed the popular name of Matilda—as heiress of the kingdom in which he held the Honour of Huntingdon; and it was by his advice that the unfortunate Robert Curtois was removed from the custody of the bishop of Salisbury, and placed in Bristol Castle under the safer charge of the Earl of Gloucester: A. D. 1226. for the fears of Henry were at this time directed against Robert and his son William, nor did he harbour any suspicion of his frank and jovial nephew, Stephen of Boulogne, upon whom he had heaped honours and dignities in return for his gallant services in war.[232]