"The son of Duncan
From whom this tyrant holds the due of birth,
Lives in the English court; and is received
Of the most pious Edward with such grace
That the malevolence of fortune nothing
Takes from his high respect."
Malcolm, after "the deep damnation of his taking off," fled from the red wrath of Macbeth and into the far prophecy of Banquo, to the court of Edward the Confessor. There perhaps he met Margaret; or perhaps not, since she was grand-niece to the Confessor, and Malcolm was a middle-aged man when this first royal Scottish romance occurs. When he returned he built himself a castle here on the safe north side of the Forth; if ever any place were safe in that eleventh century. He waited here the coming of Margaret, and she came, the first Margaret of England.
It was the first year after the Conquest, and Princess Margaret with her brother and sister were fleeing to her mother's people in Bohemia. They were wrecked far north in the Firth of Forth—which thereby becomes part of the legendary coast of Bohemia. She landed at St. Margaret's Hope, the first bay to the west of North Queensferry. Malcolm saw her from his high tower—and they were married—and they lived happily ever after, and richly for a quarter of a century; and they live immortally now.
Their history is certain, but it reads like a romance. It may be read, very exquisitely set forth, in "The Tides of Spring," a one-act drama by Arthur Upson, the young American poet whose sonnet on Calton Hill I have just quoted; a poet who went to his death so tragically and so beautifully in Lake Bemidji in Minnesota, a few years ago.
The story in the play, of Malcolm and Margaret, is all apple blossoms and spring tides; it is very lovely. Margaret has met Malcolm before, and destiny brings her to Scotland and to the king. It is a beautiful beginning to a long enduring love story that through all the reality of history shows a tender devotion from this stern northern king to the saintly queen from the Saxon South.
They safeguarded themselves and their royal flock in Edinburgh, but they lived in Dunfermline. Margaret knew a richer and a more religious life than Malcolm, and she it was who laid the foundations of the kingdom, in court and church. "Whatever she refused, he refused also; whatever pleased her, he also loved, for the love of her," says her confessor. English Margaret, unlike the later English Margaret of Alexander III, did not find the North "a sad and solitary place"; and unlike the English Margaret of James IV she was saintly, a white pearl in this wild red time.
Malcolm and Margaret became the father and mother of a royal brood, four kings of Scotland, and of Queen Matilda of England—surely Banquo saw clearly on that terrible night; his prophecy began with a royal rush.
But who would not live a lovely and pleasant life in this well-placed royal burg, serene upon her hill? Rich green fields spread down to the Forth, the red network of the bridge lifts itself into view, far to the left sweeps the Firth out to North Berwick Law and the Bass, and Edinburgh swims in the haze against the leonine mountain that is ever her guard.
The Abbey gives the town its special dignity. There is nothing left of the church built by Queen Margaret—where she robbed the box of the money the king had just given at mass if she found the poor requiring more immediate help. But this ancient nave built by Margaret's son David is so very ancient that one could well spare the accurate historic knowledge that it is a generation too late for emotion. There are ponderous round pillars that could have sustained all the history we require of them, high casements, a bare triforium, altogether a Davidic place, a simplicity, a truth about it, that we would not dispute.
The new church was built a century ago over the old, and the ancient nave is like an aisle in the new. Certain details, like the little Norman doorway, once walled-up in the time of Knox, reward us with their preserved beauty.