But, if English writers in later times, and even men who wrote at the time in distant parts of England, found some flowers to strew on the tomb of the husband of the saintly daughter of the old kingly line, no such feelings were shared by those who had seen Malcolm and his invading host at their own doors. Local estimate of Malcolm’s death. The chronicler who wrote nearest to the spot stops, as he records the death of Malcolm, to mark the judgement of God which cut off the merciless enemy of England. He stops to reckon up all the times that Malcolm had laid waste the fields of Northumberland, and had carried away the folk of Northumberland into bondage.[29] He tells with glee how the invading host utterly vanished; how they were either cut down by the sword of the avenger, or swept away by the floods of Alne, swollen by the winter’s rain beyond its wonted depth and strength.[30] He records the burial at Tynemouth; but he takes care to tell how none of the Scottish host was left to bury the Scottish king, but how the charity of two men of the land bore him on a wain to the place of burial.[31] And he adds the moral, equally applicable to all ambitious kings, that he who had deprived so many of life and goods and freedom now, by God’s just judgement, lost his life and his goods together.[32]
The invading king was dead, and with him the son whom he had designed to wear his crown after him was dead also. The saintly wife of Malcolm and mother of Eadward was soon to follow her husband and her son. Character of Margaret. Of the true holiness of Margaret, of her zeal, not only for a formal devotion, but for all that is morally right, none can doubt.[33] A woman evidently of great natural gifts and of a cultivation unusual in her time, she deeply impressed all whom she came across, her own husband most of all. Malcolm’s devotion to her. To Malcolm his Margaret was indeed a pearl of great price, to be cherished, almost to be worshipped, as already a saint on earth. She taught him to share her devotions, till men wondered at such piety in a man of this world.[34] It is touching to read how the unlettered king loved to look with wonder on the books in which his queen delighted; how those which she delighted in more than others he would cherish and kiss like holy relics, how he would have them adorned with gold and gems, and would then bring them back to his wife in their new splendour, as sacred offerings.[35] Her prayers, her fasts, her never-failing bounty to the poor, stand out in her biography even more conspicuously than her gifts to churches, to distant Iona among them.[36] Margaret’s education of her children. It is perhaps a rarer merit that the influence of her personal example hindered the slightest approach to foul or profane speech in her presence,[37] and that her careful education of her children handed on her virtues to another generation. For Margaret was not one of those who sought for their own soul’s health in neglecting the most obvious duties of the state of life to which God had called them. In the petty and selfish devotion of her great-uncle she had no share; called to be wife, mother, and queen, it was by doing her duty as wife, mother, and queen that she won her claim to a higher saintship than that of Æthelthryth at Ely or of Eadgyth at Wilton. The witness of Margaret is in her children, children many of whom bore the great and kingly names of her own house. The careful training which the Conqueror gave to his children showed its fruits in his daughters only; the teaching of Margaret lived in her sons as well. Her sons; Eadward died with his father; but in Eadgar and Alexander and the more renowned David, she gave three kings to Scotland, of whom the two latter were kings indeed, while all three inherited the gentleness and piety of their mother, along with the virtue so rare among the princes of that day, the strictest purity of personal life.[38] David; David, son-in-law of Waltheof, who gave Scotland worthy heirs to succeed him, surely ranks higher on the roll of royal saints than Eadward, son-in-law of Godwine, who left England to the chances of a disputed succession. One child only of this goodly stock is spoken of as falling away from the bright example of his parent.[39] Eadmund. Yet Eadmund, alone of the children of Margaret, lived to become a cloistered monk; and he was perhaps deemed degenerate only because he fell back on the character of a Scottish patriot of an older type.
Had Margaret confined her cares to bringing up her own children in strict piety and virtue, one of her sons would in all likelihood have mounted his father’s throne immediately after the bloody day of Alnwick. Margaret’s reforms. But in Malcolm’s kingdom she came, in her own eyes at least, as the representative of a higher morality, a purer religion, and a more advanced civilization, and she felt specially called on to play the part of a reformer. State of religion in Scotland. The ecclesiastical condition of Scotland was by no means perfect, according to the standard which Margaret had brought with her. The Scots still kept Easter at a wrong time; they said mass in some way which at Durham was deemed barbarous;[40] they cared not for the Lord’s day; and they are said to have neglected the most ordinary Christian rules in the matter of marriage. They took to wife, after Jewish models, the widows of their brothers, and even, after old Teutonic models, the widows of their fathers. All these evils, ecclesiastical and moral, Margaret set herself zealously to root out. Councils were gathered to work the needful reforms, and Malcolm acts as his wife’s interpreter. Margaret found her husband an useful interpreter. For the king who had been placed on the Scottish throne by the will of Eadward and the arms of Siward naturally spoke the English tongue as readily as that of his own people.[41] But Margaret was a queen as well as a saint; and she either took a personal pleasure in the pomp of royalty or else she deemed royal state to be wholesome in its effects on the minds of the barbarous people. She increases the pomp of the Scottish court. The King of Scots was taught to show himself in more gorgeous apparel, to ride with a greater and more stately train, than his forefathers had been wont to do. But the righteous queen knew something of the evils which might come of a king’s great and stately following, and she took care that the train of King Malcolm should not, like the train of King William, pass among the fields and households of his people like a blight or a pestilence[42] . That Margaret should innovate in the direction of state and ceremony was not wonderful. Her early associations. Daughter of kings, kinswoman, perhaps daughter, of Cæsars, she had, in her childhood and youth, seen something of many lands. She may have seen the crown of Saint Stephen, still in its freshness, on the brow of a Magyar king, and the crown of Charles and Otto on the brow of an Imperial kinsman. She had assuredly seen King Eadward, King Harold, and King William, in all the glory of the crown to which her husband’s crown owed homage. And we may be sure that the kingly state of Scotland was mean besides that of Germany, of England, and even of Hungary. Margaret might well think it a duty to herself and to her husband to raise him in outward things nearer to a level with his brother kings both of the island and of the mainland. Feeling of the Scots. But the policy of such a course, among such a people as the Scots of that age, may well be doubted. A fierce race, hard to control at any time, may well have had no great love for an outward show of kingship, which would be taken, and rightly, as the sign of a growth of the kingly power such as agreed neither with their customs nor with their wishes.
English influence in Scotland. Margaret moreover was a stranger in Scotland. One can well believe that the native Scots were already beginning to be jealous of English influence in any shape. Before Margaret came, they must have felt that the English element in the triple dominion was growing into greater importance than their own. Lothian was becoming greater than the true Scottish land beyond the Scots’-water. Fife, it may well be, was already becoming as Lothian. Malcolm himself had been placed on the throne by English arms; he had become the man of two kings who were politically English, though they held England as a conquered realm. His five invasions of England must have been quite needful to keep up even Malcolm’s character among his own people. Scottish feeling towards Margaret. And his English queen, bringing in English ways, trying to turn Scotland into another England, stopping good old Scottish customs and good old Scottish licence, tricking out the King of Albanach in some new devised foreign garb, English, Norman, German, or Hungarian, must have been looked at in her own time, by the Scots of her own day, with very different feelings towards the living queen from those with which they soon learned to look towards the national saint. English and Norman settlers. She came too with her English following, and her English following was only the first wave of many which came to strengthen the English element which was already strong in the land. While Malcolm and Margaret reigned, Scotland, the land which had sheltered Margaret and her house in their days of banishment, stood open to receive, and its king’s court stood open to welcome, every comer from the south. Native Englishmen flying from Norman oppression and Norman plunder,—Normans who thought that their share in the plunder of England was too small—men of both races, of both tongues, of every class and rank among the two races,—all found a settlement across the Scottish border. The King spoke English; the Queen most likely spoke French also; Englishmen and Normans alike seemed civilizing elements among the people whom Margaret had to polish and to convert. Both Normans and English kept Easter at the right time, and neither Normans nor English thought of marrying their step-mothers. Scotland and the court of Scotland were crowded with English and Norman knights, with English and Norman clerks. They got benefices, temporal and spiritual, in the Scottish land. They may have converted; they may have civilized; but conversion and civilization are processes which are not always specially delighted in by those who are to be converted and civilized. Anyhow they were strangers, brought into the land by kingly favour, to flourish, as men would naturally deem, at the cost of the sons of the soil. Jealousy of the native Scots. The national spirit of the Scottish people arose; the jealousy of the strangers established in the land waxed stronger and stronger. It might be in some measure kept down as long as novelty was embodied in the persons of the warrior king and the holy queen. As soon as they were gone, the pent-up torrent burst forth in its full strength.
The news of Malcolm’s death brought to Margaret. November 17, 1093. The first to bring the news of the death of her husband and son to the ears of Margaret was another of her sons, the future King Eadgar. As the tale reached Peterborough, Worcester, and Saint Evroul, the Queen, when she heard the tidings, became as one dead at heart; she settled her temporal affairs; she gave gifts to the poor; then she entered the church with her chaplain; she communicated at the mass which he sang; she prayed that her soul might pass away, and her prayer was granted.[43] English version of her death. This is a version which has already received a legendary element. It is not, strictly speaking, miraculous, but is on the way to become so. A person, seemingly in health, is made to die in answer to prayer on the receipt of ill news. The tale, as told by an eye-witness, is different. The Queen had long been expecting death; for half a year she had never mounted a horse, and had but seldom left her bed.[44] On the fourth day after her husband’s death, feeling somewhat stronger, Turgot’s version. she went into her private oratory; she heard mass, and communicated. Her sickness increased; she was taken back to her bed, holding and kissing a relic known as the Black Cross of Scotland,[45] and waiting for her end. She prayed and repeated the fifty-first psalm,[46] with the cross in her hand. The agony was already near when Eadgar came from the war. She was able to ask after his father and brother. Fearing to distress his mother yet more, Eadgar said that they were well.[47] Margaret conjured him as her son, and by the cross which she had in her hand, to speak the truth. He then told her the grievous tale. She murmured not, nor sinned with her lips.[48] She could even give thanks for her sorrows, sent, as she deemed, to cleanse her from her sins.[49] As one who had just partaken of the holy rite, she began the prayer which follows communion, and, as she prayed, her soul left the world. The deadly paleness passed away from her face, and she lay, red and white, as one sleeping.[50] Her burial at Dunfermline. The place of her death was Edinburgh, the castle of maidens;[51] her body was borne to Dunfermline and buried there, before the altar of the church of the Holy Trinity of her own rearing.[52]
We read the touching tale with different feelings from those with which it was heard at the moment by Scots who clave to old Scottish ways, good or bad. We have even hints that the funeral of the sainted queen could not go from Edinburgh to Dunfermline without danger. Scottish feeling towards her. It needed either a miracle or the natural phænomena of the country to enable the body of the English lady to be carried out of one gate of the Castle of the Maidens, while the champions of the old times of Scotland were thundering at another.[53] Such a story may be legendary in its details, but it is clearly no legend, but true tradition, as regards the national feeling of the times which it describes. Scotland, at the time of Malcolm’s death, was still torn by local and dynastic factions;[54] but all parties in the old Scottish realm were agreed on one point. A Scottish king to be chosen. They would have no more innovations from England or from Normandy; they would have no more English or Norman strangers to eat up their land in their own sight. They would have no son of Margaret, no son even of Malcolm, to reign over them; they would again have a king of the true stock of Albanach, who should reign after the old ways of Albanach and none other. The settled English element south of the Scots’-water would be weak against such a movement as this; or indeed it may be that the men of Lothian were no more eager to be reformed after Margaret’s fashion than the men of Scotland and Strathclyde. Election of Donald. Such a king as was needed was soon found in the person of Donald Bane, Donald the Red—Scotland had her Rufus as well as England—the brother of the late king and son of that Duncan who had been cut off in his youth in the civil war between his house and the house of Macbeth.[55] He was at once raised to the Scottish crown as the representative of Scottish nationality. He drives out the English. His first act was emphatic; “he drave out all the English that ere with the King Malcolm were.”[56]
Meaning of the words. This is of course no more to be understood of a general driving out of the settled English inhabitants of Lothian than the massacre of Saint Brice is to be understood of a general slaughter of the settled Danish inhabitants of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.[57] The driving out was confined to the newly come English, who filled the court of Malcolm and Margaret, and who doubtless kept, or seemed to keep, many a true-born Scot from the favour of his king. For these there was to be no longer a place in the Scottish realm or in the other dominions of its sovereign. They had to go and seek shelter in their own land. The language of our guides suggests that they were mainly English in the strictest sense; though we cannot but fancy that some Normans or other strangers may have crept in among them.[58] One thing is certain; among the English that ere with the King Malcolm were his own children by his English wife held a place. Margaret’s children driven out. Of his sons Eadmund and Æthelred we cannot speak with certainty; but Eadgar, Alexander, and David, had to flee, and the Scottish story describes their uncle the Ætheling Eadgar as in some way helping their escape. He did it, we are told, by stealth, that he might not kindle any suspicion in the Norman King of England.[59] Action of the elder Eadgar. It is hard to see what Eadgar, who could not have been in Scotland at the time of his sister’s death, could have done for her children till they were at least within the English border, and there is nothing to make us think that Eadgar had in any way lost that full favour with William Rufus which he had enjoyed at the beginning of the year. But the mere use of his name witnesses to the belief that he who could do so little for himself was able to do a good deal for others. In this story he is said to have sheltered his sister’s daughters as well as her sons. Malcolm’s daughters; More trustworthy accounts say that Eadgyth and Mary had already been sent by their parents to be brought up in the abbey of Romsey, where their aunt Christina was a nun.[60] Mary; Mary in time married the younger Eustace of Boulogne, and was the mother of a Queen of the English, that valiant Matilda who strove so well to keep the English crown for her husband Stephen.[61] Eadgyth or Matilda; Eadgyth, in her loftier destiny, will meet us again under the new name which she had to share with her niece and to hand on to an Imperial daughter.[62] The second Queen Matilda of our story, the good Queen Maud of tradition, had been designed to be the bride of the Breton Count Alan.[63] That was not to be her fate; neither was it to be her fate to embrace the holy calling which her aunt Christina strove to force upon her. her sojourn at Romsey. For the present she remained unprofessed, loathing the veil which her aunt ever and anon put upon her head, to shield her, as she said, from Norman outrage.[64] When Christina’s back was turned, the lively girl tore the veil from her head and trampled on it.[65] Malcolm at Romsey. Her father too, on some visit to England—could he have turned aside to Romsey before or after his memorable visit to Gloucester?—saw the veil on her head with anger; he had not designed her for that, but for the bridal of Count Alan. Her relations with Henry. It seems plain that her marriage with Henry was a marriage of old affection on both sides, and one version even makes the Ætheling seek for her as his wife in her father’s lifetime. Tale of Eadgyth and William Rufus. One version, strange indeed, but perhaps the more likely to have some truth in it because of its strangeness, gives her an unlooked-for lover. We are told that, for once, in the person of Eadgyth of Scotland, female charms kindled in the heart of the Red King a passion which in his case might be called virtuous.[66] He came to Romsey with a body of his knights; the wily abbess, dreading his purpose, caused Eadgyth to put on the veil. She then drew the King into the cloister to see her roses and other flowers; but he caught a glimpse of the nuns as they passed by; he saw the veil on the head of Eadgyth, and turned away. She was then twelve years old. Presently her father came; he saw her veiled; he tore the veil from her head, he trampled it under his feet, and took away his daughter. Such a tale must be taken for what it is worth; but the picture of William Rufus contemplating either maidens or roses at least puts him in a light in which we do not meet him elsewhere.
A series of events now follow which our guides seem to place within the year of Malcolm’s death, but for which room can hardly have been found in the few weeks of it which were still to come. Christmas, 1093–1094. The winter of that year, it will be remembered, was a stirring winter. It saw the consecration of Anselm; it saw the Gemót at Gloucester at which William received the challenge from his brother in Normandy;[67] it saw the first beginnings of fresh disputes between the King and the Archbishop.[68] Events of 1094. The next year was the year of William’s second Norman expedition, and it is clear that his absence from England had an influence on the affairs of Scotland, as it undoubtedly had on those of Wales. Order of Scottish events. The election of Donald and the driving out of the English from Scotland may have followed as swiftly on the deaths of Malcolm and Margaret as the election of Harold followed on the death of Eadward or the election of Henry on the death of William Rufus. But we can hardly find room for an English expedition to Scotland, for the establishment of a new king, and for a domestic revolution limiting his powers, between the driving out of the English and the last day of the year. One is inclined to think that the Gemót of Gloucester saw a discussion of the affairs of Scotland as well as of the affairs of Normandy, and that the results of that discussion, direct consequences as they were of the death of Malcolm and the election of Donald, were set down under the year in which the chain of events began, though some of them must, almost in the nature of things, have really happened in the year which followed.
Gemót of Gloucester. Christmas, 1093–1094. I am inclined therefore to think that it must have been at the Christmas assembly which decreed the war with Robert that a claimant appeared to demand the Scottish crown at the hands of the southern over-lord. This was Duncan, the son of Malcolm and Ingebiorg. Duncan claims the Scottish crown. He was in truth the eldest of Malcolm’s children, and, though, under the influence of a new set of ideas, it became usual to speak of him as a kind of Ishmael, he was most likely as lawful an heir to the Scottish throne as any of the three kings who were sons of the English saint.[69] In itself the succession of Duncan would have seemed an intermediate course between the succession of Donald and the succession of Margaret’s son Eadgar. But Duncan, given years ago as a hostage to William the Great,[70] had long been a follower of William the Red. Duncan’s Norman education. He lived in his court, and did him faithful service as his man and his knight. He must have been unknown in Scotland, and his feelings and habits must have been those of a Norman rather than those of a Scot. He represented neither the old Scottish traditions which were embodied in Donald nor yet the new foreign reformation which was embodied in Margaret and her sons. It was no wonder then that no party in his father’s kingdom thought of his claims at his father’s death. He receives the crown from William. But he now came to the King’s court; he set forth the usurpation of his uncle Donald and his own rights; he demanded the crown of his father, and did homage for it to the Monarch of Britain.[71] The event is singularly like the earlier event which had placed Duncan’s own father on the Scottish throne; 1054. it is still more like the later event which gave Scotland a momentary king in Edward Balliol. 1332. The King’s designs on Normandy hindered him from either marching himself to the help of Duncan or sending any part of the regular forces of his kingdom. He wins it by the help of Norman and English volunteers. 1094. But Duncan was allowed to get together a body of volunteers, English and French—doubtless of any nation that he could find—at whose head he marched into Scotland. He overthrew his uncle Donald, and took possession of the throne by the help of his new allies.[72] Details are lacking; the Scots must have been overthrown for a moment by some sudden attack. Second revolution; the foreigners driven out. What follows is instructive. The reign of Duncan, as a king surrounded by a Norman and English following, was but for a moment. May? 1094. But there was clearly no feeling in Scotland against allowing him to reign, if he were willing to reign as a national Scot. The people, startled for a moment, took heart again. A new movement broke forth; the King was surrounded, and the foreigners who accompanied him were this time, not driven out, but slaughtered. He himself escaped with a few only.[73] But, this work once done, the son of Malcolm was not less willingly received than his brother. Donald was not restored; but Duncan was accepted as King of Scots on condition of his allowing no English or French settlers within his realm.[74]
We may perhaps suspect that this national movement in Scotland was timed so as to grasp the favourable moment when the King of the English, with the mass of his forces, was beyond the sea. This is more clearly marked in the next revolution, which took place towards the end of the year. While King William was still in Normandy, while the Welsh were in triumphant revolt, a powerful confederacy was formed against Duncan. Donald now leagued himself with Malpeter, the Mormaor of Mærne, the representative of the old party of Macbeth, and also with Eadmund, son of Malcolm and Margaret. This last, their only degenerate son, as he is called, joined with his uncle against his half-brother. He was lured, it is said, by the promise of half the kingdom.[75] Death of Duncan and restoration of Donald. November? 1094. Duncan was slain, by treachery, we are told, and Donald began a second reign.[76] This revolution was perhaps among the causes which brought William back from Normandy.[77] But both English and Welsh affairs were in a state which forbade any immediate intervention in Scotland. William had to put up with the insults which he had received, the driving out of his subjects and the slaughter of the king to whom he had given the kingdom. Second reign of Donald. 1094–1097. Donald was allowed to reign without disturbance for three years.