The party in the kingdom who supported him now put up, as king, Lulach, who was the son of Gilcomgan, Mormaer of Moray, and the heir to whom the hereditary rule over that province fell on the death of Macbeth, while his mother was a granddaughter of Boete or Bodhe, and through her he inherited whatever rights to the Scottish throne that family possessed; but his reign, nominal as it was, lasted only seven months, and he was slain at Essy in Strathbolgy on the 17th day of the following March.[[594]]
A.D. 1057-8.—1093.
Malcolm, eldest son of King Duncan, king of Scotia.
These isolated events may be accepted as facts, transmitted to us as they are by contemporary writers, but they leave us quite in the dark as to how Malcolm so speedily and thoroughly accomplished what the powerful Siward with his army and his fleet had failed to effect three years before. It seems difficult too to understand how, if the northern provinces up to Fife were under the rule of the powerful earl of Orkney with his Norwegians, Malcolm could have carried the war so far into them as to drive Macbeth beyond the Dee and defeat and kill him there. The Orkneyinga Saga tells us that Thorfinn possessed nine earldoms in Scotland, and that on his death ‘many of the rikis which the earl had subjected fell off, and their inhabitants sought the protection of those native chiefs who were territorially born to rule over them.’[[595]] Besides the four earldoms in Scotland of Sutherland, Ross, Moray, and Dali, which his father Sigurd had subjected before him, he had brought for the first time under the Norwegian yoke the four earldoms of Buchan, Marr, Mearns, and Angus, and these would bring his possessions up to Fife, and with Galloway,[[596]] which he probably also possessed, would make up the nine earldoms, and the most probable explanation of Malcolm having selected this year to make a great effort to recover his father’s throne and of its apparent rapid success, is that it was also the year of Thorfinn’s death, when many of the provinces which had been subjected by him fell again under native rule. Of these, the first to free themselves from the Norwegian yoke would be the four earldoms extending from the Spey to the Firth of Tay, forming the northern half of the kingdom proper. It was, however, in this part of the kingdom, and mainly in Angus, that the branch of the royal house of which Malcolm, son of Kenneth, was the head, and which Malcolm, the son of Duncan, now represented in the female line, had its main seat, and it was there that their power and influence lay. If these provinces were now freed from the Norwegian yoke, Malcolm might find there powerful support, while his paternal descent from the lay abbots of Dunkeld would likewise bring the people of Atholl and of the extensive possessions of that church to his aid. The death of Thorfinn would thus present to him a great opportunity for making another attempt to add the kingdom of Scotland to that of Cumbria, with the district of Lothian which he already possessed; and Macbeth, finding himself isolated, with the forces of Cumbria and Lothian in front of him and a hostile population behind him, in place of the support of the Norwegian earl, would fall back upon his own hereditary province of Moray, and being followed by Malcolm with his army, gathering strength as he proceeded, was overtaken and slain at Lumphanan.
If this view, that Thorfinn died in 1057, appears to afford us the most plausible explanation of the sudden termination of Macbeth’s kingdom, there is nothing in the Sagas which raises any serious objection to it. They nowhere state any fact which gives us a fixed date for Thorfinn’s death. The Orkneyinga Saga says, that from the year when he was made earl, that is, in 1014, ‘he was earl for seventy winters,’ which would make him live till the year 1084. The Saga of Saint Olaf reduced the number of years to sixty winters, that is, to the year 1074, but both Sagas agree that he died in the end or in the latter days of Harald Sigurdson, who was slain at the battle of Stamford Bridge in the year 1066; and when Harald came to the Orkneys, on his way to England, he found Thorfinn’s sons ruling as earls of Orkney, and took them with him. No events are recorded of Thorfinn in the Sagas after the year 1050, and if he died in 1057 his death would take place about eight years before that of Harald Sigurdson, and in the last half of his reign. It might still be said that he died towards the end of his reign.
Simeon of Durham too tells us that in the year 1061 ‘Aldred, archbishop of York, went to Rome with Earl Tostig and received the pall from Pope Nicholas. Meanwhile Malcolm, king of Scots, furiously ravaged the earldom of his sworn brother Earl Tostig, and violated the peace of St. Cuthbert in the island of Lindisfarne.’[[597]] What led to Malcolm thus taking advantage of Tostig’s absence to attack his earldom we do not know, and the chronicler throws no further light upon it; but it is hardly possible to suppose that Malcolm could have ventured to attack Northumbria, and break off his alliance with Tostig, if he had not by this time effected the subjugation of his entire kingdom, and if the northern half of it still remained under the rule of the Norwegian earl of Orkney. On Thorfinn’s death Malcolm appears to have endeavoured to conciliate the Norwegian element in the country by making Ingibiorg, the widow of Thorfinn, his wife, by whom he had a son Duncan. His Norwegian wife did not, however, apparently survive the birth of her son many years, and gave way to a more important alliance for Malcolm, and one that was to exercise a powerful influence on the internal condition of the country, and the character of the reigning house. The Saxon Chronicle tells us, that in the summer of the year 1067 ‘Eadgar child went out (from Northumberland) with his mother Agatha, and his two sisters Margaret and Christina, and Mærleswegen, and many good men with them, and came to Scotland under the protection of King Malcolm, and he received them all.’ One edition of the chronicle adds, ‘Then King Malcolm began to yearn after his sister Margaret to wife, but he and all his men long refused, and she herself also declined, and said that she would have nor him nor any one if the heavenly clemency would grant that she in maidenhood might propitiate the mighty Lord with corporal heart in this short life in pure continence. The king earnestly urged her brother, until he answered yea, and indeed he durst not otherwise, because they were come into his power.’ The other edition of the chronicle simply adds, ‘and he took the child’s sister Margaret to wife.’ Florence of Worcester, who is the next best authority, places this event in the year 1068, which is probably the correct year,[[598]] and tells us that ‘Marleswein and Gospatric, and all the nobler Northumbrians, to avoid the severity of the king, and dreading the imprisonment which so many had suffered, sailed to Scotland with Eadgar Aetheling, his mother Agatha, and his two sisters Margaret and Christina, and wintered there under the protection of Malcolm king of Scots.’[[599]] The marriage probably took place the following spring at Dunfermline, which King Malcolm appears to have adopted as his principal seat, and not without reason, according to Fordun’s description of it: ‘For that place was of itself most strongly fortified by nature, being begirt by very thick woods and protected by steep crags. In the midst thereof was a fair plain, likewise protected by crags and streams, so that one might think that was the spot whereof it was said, scarce man or beast may tread its pathless wilds.’[[600]]
Child Eadgar, as the Saxon Chronicle calls him, was the son of Eadward Aetheling, who had returned from exile in Hungary in the year 1057, and died in England the same year. As Eadward Aetheling was the son of King Eadmund, the elder brother of Eadward the Confessor, he might have been held, if he had been at home instead of in distant exile, to have had a preferable right to the throne; but after the death of Eadward the Confessor his family were looked upon as representing the royal house of Wessex, and as possessing a legitimate claim upon the allegiance of the Saxon population, which, had the personal character of Eadgar been different, might have made him a more formidable opponent to the Norman Conqueror than he proved to be. The connection of Malcolm with this family by marriage with his sister was a very important one for him, and he now combined in his own person advantages which gave him a claim to the obedience of each of the different races now united under his rule. In the male line he represented the powerful lay abbots of Dunkeld, and inherited their influence over the ecclesiastical foundations dependent upon that monastery. In the female, he possessed the more important representation of the Scottish royal house who had ruled for a century and a half over the kingdom of Scotland. His father Duncan had been recognised for twenty years by the Welsh population of Cumbria or Strathclyde as their king, and by his mother he was connected with the Danes of Northumbria and their powerful earl Siward. His marriage with Ingibiorg gave him a claim to the good-will at least of the Norwegians, and the Anglic population of Lothian and Northumbria would look upon his marriage with the daughter of the Aetheling as giving him an additional right to their steadfast support. The northern province of Moray alone, whose hereditary rulers were of the same family as Macbeth, would probably render but an unwilling submission to his authority, and his rule over them would be little more than nominal.
Of the events of his thirty-five years’ reign, however, very few have been recorded. The combination of so many advantages in his own person would naturally lead to a further amalgamation of the different provinces of the kingdom, with their varied population, into one monarchy; but this is a silent process, which little attracts the notice of the chroniclers of the time. The personal character of Margaret, no doubt, was one to exercise a great influence upon the internal condition and progress of the people, as we learn to some extent from her life by Turgot; but this belongs to a different part of our subject, and beyond a few isolated notices we know really nothing of the internal history of his reign.
Malcolm invades Northumbria five times.
As to external events, Simeon of Durham, whose language, however, is coloured by an indignant hatred of the Scots on account of their frequent attacks upon Durham, tells us that Malcolm had ‘five times wasted the province of Northumbria with a savage devastation, and carried captive the wretched natives to reduce them to slavery: once in Eadward’s reign, when Tostig, earl of York, had gone to Rome;’ twice in the reign of King William the Conqueror; and twice in that of his successor.[[601]]
The first we have already noticed. The two next were probably connected with the claims of the Aetheling; but it is also possible that Malcolm may now have begun to realise the growing importance of Lothian and its Anglic population as an integral portion of its dominions, and been not unwilling to take advantage of the unsettled state of the north of England to extend to the Tyne the limits of that province which was now assuming the prominent place it ever after occupied in the future Scotland. Simeon seems to hint at some such motive, when he accuses him of being ‘instigated by avarice.’ If this was Malcolm’s real object, his policy seems to have been, by harassing and devastating the earldom north of the Tyne, from time to time, to force them to put themselves under his protection—a policy not unknown to the descendants of a part of his subjects, when black mail was a familiar term.