By the law of Norway Queen;
But that Maiden sweet for-thi [therefore]
Was put to death by martyry.
In accordance with the usage of the period, the expression of the chronicler describing the manner of her death would be universally understood to mean burning at the stake; and the evident anachronism, as well as the inherent improbability of the narrative, is accounted for by the fact that it quite accurately describes the death of the Claimant, but assigns it to the time of the death of the Princess. The reason given by Wyntoun for the ‘martyrdom’ is, that the Norwegians—though their law allowed—could not brook the idea of a woman succeeding to the crown; and this also may be accounted for by the fact that the woman who suffered was a pretender to the crown.
No incident in Scottish history is more pathetic than that of the untimely death of the young Princess on her voyage to Orkney; and no single event in the whole course of that history has exercised a more important influence on the destinies of the nation. In these circumstances, we cannot cease to wonder how it came to pass that there is no authentic record of its details in the contemporary or nearly contemporary chronicles of Scottish or Norwegian history. The only contemporary document in Scottish record which notices her death is the letter of the Bishop of St Andrews to Edward I., dated at Leuchars the 7th of October 1290, in which the bishop states that there was a rumour of her death; but that he had heard subsequently that she ‘had recovered of her sickness, but was still weak.’ It was plain, however, that the bishop did not believe the rumour of her recovery, for he concludes his letter by praying King Edward to approach the Borders with his army to prevent bloodshed, seeing that Sir Robert Bruce had come to Perth and Mar and Athole were collecting their forces. On the Norwegian side, there is a total absence of authentic contemporary record of the time and manner of the death of the Princess; and there would have been absolutely nothing known of the details of her decease, if it had not been for the appearance ten years later of the Claimant, whom Munch, the historian of Norway, following Bishop Audfinn, has no hesitation in designating ‘The False Margaret.’
In his official interdict of 1320, forbidding the people ‘any longer to invoke that woman with great vows and worship as if she had been one of God’s martyrs,’ the bishop states that he has deemed it his duty to declare the truth as to her case; ‘She said, indeed, that she was the child and lawful heir of King Eirik; but when she came from Lübeck to Bergen she was gray-haired and white in the head, and was proved to be twenty years older than the time of King Eirik’s marriage with Margaret of Scotland. He was then only thirteen winters old, and consequently, could not have been the father of a person of her years. And then he had no other child than one daughter by Queen Margaret. This only child of King Eirik and Queen Margaret was on her journey to Scotland, when she died in Orkney between the hands of Bishop Narve of Bergen, and in the presence of the best men of the land, who had attended her from Norway; and the bishop and Herr Thore Hakonson and others brought back her corpse to Bergen, where her father had the coffin opened and narrowly examined the body, and himself acknowledged that it was his daughter’s corpse, and buried her beside the queen her mother, in the stone wall on the north side of the choir of the cathedral church of Bergen.’
Although we owe these details of the Princess’s death and burial, meagre as they are, to the bishop’s anxiety to confute the pretensions of the Claimant, there can be no room for doubt as to their strict truth. And yet it was possible, ten years after the event, for a Claimant so to influence the popular belief, that, although burned to death as a traitorous impostor, she was regarded by many of the priesthood as a martyr; and by the common people was not only worshipped as a saint in the church erected to her memory on the spot where she suffered, but celebrated in songs which long continued to be handed down among them. Even to this day, the precise date of the death of the Princess Margaret remains unknown; and until quite recently, it was generally believed that she had been buried in Kirkwall Cathedral, as is indeed stated by the Danish archæologist Worsaae in his account of that edifice given in his work on The Danes and Northmen in England. No History of Scotland, until the issue of the last edition of Dr John Hill Burton’s, has noticed the curious episode of the False Margaret, a knowledge of which is necessary in order to account for the fact that, in Wyntoun’s time, it was the popular belief in Scotland that the Maid of Norway had suffered martyrdom at the hands of her own countrymen.
It is curious that in connection with the history of Scotland, and before the close of the fourteenth century, we find the story of another Claimant not less audacious in his pretensions, but much more fortunate in his patrons, by whom he was maintained till his death as a state pensioner, and buried in one of the churches of Stirling under the royal name and regal title to which he had laid claim. There was this strange element in his case that he was the second personator of the same dead king. Readers of English history are familiar with the incidents of the revolution which placed Henry of Lancaster on the throne, and consigned ‘the good King Richard’ to a perpetual prison in Pontefract Castle. But the subsequent events in the life of the imprisoned monarch, and the date and manner of his death, are shrouded in an impenetrable obscurity. One of the ablest of our Scottish historians, Patrick Fraser Tytler, has even declared, after an elaborate investigation of the whole available evidence, that this second Claimant, whose story we are about to notice, was Richard II. in reality.
It is well known that shortly after the king’s imprisonment, there was a conspiracy to replace him on the throne. The conspirators attempted to attract the people to their cause by spreading abroad the rumour of his escape from Pontefract; and, as is stated by a contemporary chronicler, ‘to make this the more credible, they brought into the field with them a chaplain called Father Maudelain, who so exactly resembled good King Richard in face and person, in form and speech, that every one who saw him declared that he was their former king.’ The conspiracy failed; and those most deeply concerned in it, among whom was the first personator, Father Maudelain, were beheaded.
Shortly afterwards, it was given out that King Richard had died in Pontefract Castle, on or about the 14th of February 1399. Rumour, indeed, spoke freely of the suspicion, that if he were dead, he had surely been murdered by his enemies, and with the connivance of the reigning king. It was not till nearly a month after the alleged date of his death that, in order to silence the popular rumours, King Henry caused the body to be brought publicly to London ‘with the face exposed,’ and laid in state for two days in the church of St Paul, ‘that the people might believe for certain that he was dead.’ ‘But,’ says the old chronicler formerly quoted, ‘I certainly do not believe that it was the king, but I think it was Maudelain, his chaplain,’ who had been beheaded little more than a month previously.