Scotland: The Story of a Nation

For monks of St Benedict from Kelso,

Of the family of Tiron.

King William died at Stirling, 4 December 1214,

And was buried in this Abbey Church.

It is symptomatic, ironically, that the burial place of this much misprised King of Scotland should still be a matter of mystery and lingering doubt.

Chapter 8 THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY: ALEXANDERS II AND III (#ulink_6931cbaa-4fb9-5724-a616-507fe586e22e)

William the Lion was succeeded by his son, Alexander II, a youth in years, but remarkable for prudence and for firmness. In his days there was some war with England, as he espoused the cause of the disaffected barons, against King John. But no disastrous consequences having arisen, the peace betwixt the two kingdoms was … effectually restored …

Relieved from the cares of an English war, Alexander endeavoured to civilize the savage manners of his own people. These were disorderly to a great degree.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER V

The reigns of two Alexanders – Alexander II (r.1214–49), the son of William the Lion, and Alexander’s son, Alexander III (r.1249–86) – spanned most of the thirteenth century. That century came to be wistfully remembered by John of Fordun in the 1380s as a golden age of princely stability and prosperity – especially as it was a prelude to tragedy and to the desperate times of the Wars of Independence. But how much of a Golden Age was it? Professor Ted Cowan has his reservations:

This ‘Golden Age’ was only golden because of what came after. It so happens that the second half of the thirteenth century was a period of prosperity everywhere in Europe. It seems to have just been one of those boom periods, for whatever reason, and Scotland shared in this. This was a period, after all, which is associated with the development of some of our greatest religious architecture, of abbeys and Romanesque churches, and of castle-building. The development of the royal burghs established by David I went on apace. Church organisation was strengthened and a proper parish system was established. So to that extent it was a period of development, prosperity and consolidation. It was also a time of relative peace – and ‘peace’ is always equated with ‘golden age’.

That is not to say that the thirteenth century was uneventful. The ‘peace’, as Ted Cowan points out, was relative. As soon as Alexander II ascended the throne at the age of sixteen his fledgling authority was challenged by a Celtic uprising in the north, but this was quickly quelled by a loyal lieutenant there. In England the old enemy, King John, was in deep trouble with his barons and was constrained to sign away some of his more arbitrary powers in the Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. Alexander II seized what he saw as a fine opportunity to regain the lost territories in the north of England which had so obsessed his father. It was a misjudgement: King John turned on Scotland with a snarl, ‘to chase the red fox-cub back to his lair’, as a chronicler put it, and vicious warfare flared on both sides of the border. But now the forces ranged against John were threatening to overwhelm him, and he was fighting for his life: his barons were at war with him and had brought over a French claimant to the throne – Louis, son and heir of King Philippe II of France. In October 1216 the English king was struck down by a mysterious illness which caused his death – from poison, according to some.

The death of King John changed everything. His son Henry, only nine years old, was quickly enthroned at Gloucester as Henry III under the regency of the stalwart old William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. In England, baronial support for Louis of France melted away and he sailed back home; and in Scotland, Alexander II laid aside his military ambitions in the north of England. Indeed, in 1221 he married Henry III’s elder sister, Joan, which did much to stabilise relations between the two countries. This left Alexander free to assert and consolidate royal authority in the ever-recalcitrant north and west of the mainland of Scotland.

In the 1230s Alexander came to realise that he was never going to recover Northumberland as a family possession, and in the autumn of 1237 he signed an amicable agreement (the Treaty of York) whereby he renounced all claims to territory south of the Tweed and the Solway. In recompense he was given tenure (under the overlordship of the English king) of certain lands in Northumberland and Cumberland – though not their castles. The Treaty of York, curiously enough, finds no mention in Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, but it was of extreme historical importance in that it established the Anglo – Scottish frontier along a line from the Tweed to the Solway – a line which was to remain unchanged from then on, with the conspicuous exception of Berwick-upon-Tweed. It was an implicit acceptance by England, for the time being at least, of Scotland’s right to exist as a free and independent kingdom.

And what of the common people of this independent nation of Scotland, as it could now be called – the people whose manners Walter Scott called ‘savage’ and ‘disorderly’ and much in need of civilising? The population of Scotland at this time was only about 300,000. Most of them were poor peasants living in small stone-and-turf houses which they usually shared with any livestock they might have had: subsistence farming – mainly pastoral in the north and west, more arable south of the Forth – with the tenants paying rent to the laird in kind and in labour; but at least the weather conditions were markedly better than they had been in previous centuries. Only a small proportion of the population – perhaps 10 per cent – lived in the trading towns established by David I and continued by the Alexanders as new links were forged with overseas markets; Europeans with commercial and manufacturing skills were encouraged to come and settle in these burghs, of which there were nearly fifty by the end of the thirteenth century.

The Treaty of York gave Alexander II greater freedom of manoeuvre, now that he no longer had to devote so many of his energies to coping with his much larger and more powerful neighbour. In 1238 his wife Joan died childless, and Alexander immediately applied himself to one of the most urgent functions of medieval kingship – producing a male heir to the throne. He turned not to England but to the nobility of France, and in the following year he married Marie de Coucy, a kinswoman of the French king. In September 1241 she duly bore him a son, who was named after his father – the future Alexander III.

There was to be another spat with England, in 1244, when Scottish and English armies eyed one another menacingly across the border. There seems to have been an element of brinkmanship involved, and in the event no battle ensued; but as part of the peace negotiations the infant Alexander was betrothed to Henry III’s daughter Margaret, herself only a year older than her future bridegroom. It seemed to adumbrate a future when the two kingdoms would be much more closely allied – perhaps even a Union of the Crowns many centuries before that actually came about in 1603.

Alexander II had consolidated the crown’s control over mainland Scotland and welded it into a more cohesive realm than it had ever been. Now the time was ripe to extend this centralised royal authority over the islands to the west – the Hebrides. For long (too long, in thirteenth-century Scottish eyes) they, and the Northern Isles, had been subject to the crown of Norway (see Chapter 3 (#ud5c44cc5-53fe-5f09-9aba-40732ec86403))

Norwegian royal authority in the Western Isles had been waning steadily as the Gaelic-speaking leaders of the warrior Somerled dynasty vied for the title of ‘Lord of the Isles’. In Norway, however, there was now a king of great drive and imperial ambition – King Håkon IV (r.1217–64), who has come down in history with the sobriquet Håkon ‘the Old’.

Historians seeking to gain a clear picture of relations between Scotland and Norway at this period now look to overseas sources – particularly the medieval Icelandic sagas such as Orkneyinga Saga and Hákonar Saga, the biography of Håkon the Old written soon after his death by the Icelandic saga-historian Sturla Thórðarson; there are no contemporary Scottish sources for the events, and later Scottish historians were to invent and embellish to fill the gaps.

In 1230, Håkon the Old decided to re-establish effective Norwegian suzerainty over the Hebridean warlords, who owed him revenues and allegiance. He sent a punitive expedition in 1230 which caused considerable havoc. One furious engagement is described in graphic detail in his saga – a three-day assault on Rothesay Castle on the island of Bute, in the Firth of Clyde. The Norsemen finally got in by hacking through the castle’s thick circular stone walls with their axes despite cascades of boiling lead and pitch raining down upon them from the battlements. Rothesay Castle, with its unique (for Scotland) circular walls, is now in state care and has been vividly restored by Historic Scotland; romantics like me can persuade themselves that they can still see the marks of the implacable Norse axes which forced an entry.

The Norsemen did not stay long to enjoy their exploit, but the expedition as a whole was considered to have been a success: those whose allegiance to Norway had been suspect were killed or driven out, and new men were put in their place; the Western Isles had been ‘pacified’ to Håkon’s satisfaction.

It was only natural that Alexander II should want to exercise dominion over the Western Isles himself, if only to curb the piratical Islesmen whose galleys menaced the seaways off the western Highlands. Accordingly, he sent embassies to Norway from 1244 onwards to try to negotiate a deal over the islands. The Scottish envoys even indicated that Alexander would be prepared to buy the Western Isles for good silver, to which King Håkon gave a haughty answer: ‘He said he was not aware that he was so short of silver that he needed to sell his lands for it.’

The repeated diplomatic snubs from Norway only increased Alexander’s determination to deal with this thorn in his western side, by force if necessary, especially after Håkon appointed Ewen, Lord of Argyll and head of the powerful Macdougall clan, as his vassal king over the islands. In the spring of 1249 Alexander mobilised a massive expedition by land and sea to crush this threat to ‘the soft underbelly of Scotland’, as the novelist Eric Linklater called it.

Alexander’s first target was to be Dunstaffnage Castle at the entrance to Loch Etive on the western seaboard; it was the chief stronghold of the Macdougalls and had only recently been built by Ewen of Argyll (or his father). What a fortress it was, and is! It stands proud on a rocky knoll on a promontory some four miles north of Oban. Its massive stone curtain walls, still intact after nearly eight centuries, must have seemed almost impregnable; its lofty battlements command a tremendous view west across the seaway towards the island of Lismore and east into the narrows of Loch Etive towards the looming bulk of Ben Cruachan.

Alexander gathered his great fleet in the Sound of Kerrera, the three-kilometre-long fertile island which shelters the Oban coastline. But as his galleys lay at anchor in Horseshoe Bay, poised to launch the assault on Dunstaffnage, Alexander had an ominous dream, according to Hákonar Saga:

When King Alexander was lying at anchor in Kerrera Sound he had a dream. In his dream he thought that three men came to him. One of them seemed to him to be dressed in royal robes. He looked very menacing, ruddy of face and rather stout, of medium height. The second man seemed slender in build and gallant-looking, very handsome and of noble bearing. The third man was much the biggest in build and the most menacing of them all. His forehead was quite bald. He spoke to the king and asked him if he were heading for the Hebrides. The king replied that this was so: he was on his way to subjugate the islands. The man in his dream asked him to turn back, saying that nothing else would do.

The king recounted his dream, and most of his companions urged him to turn back, but the king refused. Soon afterwards the king fell ill and died. The Scots then dispersed their army and transported the king back to Scotland. The Hebrideans say that the men who appeared to the king in his dream would have been Saint Ólaf, King of Norway, and Saint Magnús, Earl of Orkney, and Saint Columba.

Whether one believes in dreams or not, Alexander II did indeed fall ill in Kerrera Sound. He died there, either on his ship or on land, on 8 July 1249; no cairn commemorates the spot, but a grassy field beside the shore is known to this day as ‘Dalrigh’ – Gaelic for ‘the field of the king’. He was buried in Melrose Abbey, in accordance with his last wishes; his unmarked tomb is in a recess in the wall of the presbytery to the south of the High Altar, but there is no plaque to identify it for visitors, as yet.

With Alexander’s death, his army melted away and the great fleet dispersed; but the crown’s ambition to annex the Hebrides was only put on hold, not abandoned.

The inauguration of Alexander III

ALEXANDER III, then only in his eighth year, succeeded to his father in 1249. Yet, when only two years older, he went to York to meet with the English King, and to marry his daughter, the Princess Margaret.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER V

Scone Palace, hard by the city of Perth in the geographical heartland of Scotland, is one of the stateliest of the country’s private homes, the seat of the Earl and Countess of Mansfield. The first house, built at the end of the sixteenth century, was almost totally rebuilt in pseudo-Gothic style in 1802–12 by the third Earl of Mansfield; this huge mansion is a treasury of beautiful objets d’art and paintings and furnishings of rare historic interest.

It was here at Scone, seated on the Stone of Scone in what had been the power-base of the old Pictish kingdom of Fortriu (see Chapter 3 (#ud5c44cc5-53fe-5f09-9aba-40732ec86403)), that the seven-year-old Alexander III was inaugurated as King of Scots on 13 July 1249, a week after the death of his father. The boy-king was accompanied to Scone by seven earls and many other leading magnates and churchmen of Scotland. The scene was described, a century later, in John of Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scottorum:

[They] led Alexander, soon to be the king, to the cross which stands in the churchyard at the east end of the church of Scone. There they set him on the royal throne, which was decked with silken cloths inwoven with gold; and the Bishop of St Andrews, assisted by the rest, consecrated him king, as was meet. So the king sat down upon the royal throne – that is, the Stone – while the earls and other nobles, on bended knee, spread their garments under his feet before the Stone.

Now, this stone is reverently kept in that same monastery for the coronation of the kings of Alba; and no king was ever wont to reign in Scotland unless he had first, on receiving the name of king, sat upon this Stone at Scone, which by kings of old had been appointed the capital of Alba.

It was a solemn and striking occasion. Afterwards a traditional Highland sennachie (bard) recited in Gaelic the new king’s genealogy far back into the distant mythical past, to the eponymous Scota and Gaedel Glas: ‘Hail, king of Alba, Alexander, mac Alexander, mac William, mac Henry, mac David …’ It was a powerful public recognition of the strength of the living inheritance from the Celtic kingdoms of the past.

It is impossible to be certain where at Scone the ceremony took place. In the thirteenth century there was an abbey where the present palace now stands. The inauguration of Alexander III seems to have taken place in the open air, close to the abbey at a site traditionally known as Moot Hill (Hill of Meeting) directly opposite the palace; the Stone of Scone (‘Stone of Destiny’) would have been carried from the abbey and decked as a throne. Moot Hill, now half-screened by yew trees, was reduced in height in the nineteenth century. On it today stands a small family mausoleum, all that remains of the church which was built there in 1624 and in which Charles II was crowned in 1651. Outside the mausoleum is a replica of the Stone of Scone; it is as close to actual history as the visitor can get.

The accession of a minor might well have caused a political crisis (as it would do, time and time again, during the Stewart dynasty), but on this occasion Church and nobility closed ranks to protect the crown. Alexander’s kingship was perceived to be blessed by divine grace within two months by the canonisation of the matriarch of the dynasty, Queen Margaret, wife of Malcolm Canmore, in 1250. This was a notable coup which gave the royal line the lustre of a saintly ancestry and which was celebrated in June 1250 by the solemn translation of her remains to a new shrine near the great altar in Dunfermline Abbey.

In December 1251, at the age of ten, the boy-king was taken by his court to York to be knighted by Henry III before being married to Henry’s daughter Margaret. It gave the English king an immediate opportunity to raise the dormant question of Scotland’s subjection to England; according to the contemporary St Albans Chronicle, Alexander was then asked to do homage for the kingdom of Scotland. His advisers must have seen this coming, for the boy replied gravely that he had come to marry, not to answer so difficult a question. That answer helped to defuse, for a time at least, the perennial issue of overlordship.

The years of Alexander’s minority in the 1250s had their political tremors as different noble factions and parties within the regency vied for control of the king’s person (and therefore the government), with Henry III interfering busily in the background – ostensibly out of concern for his daughter’s welfare. The young couple were not allowed to live together as man and wife and were kept under the strict control of tutors or guardians

When Alexander’s minority ended in 1259, on his eighteenth birthday, the reins of government were firmly held by pro-king nobles – particularly the powerful Comyn family, who exercised power on behalf of the king in both the north and the south-west – and he was able to hit the ground running, as the saying goes. He showed strength of character and even-handedness in dealing with his quarrelsome nobles. Soon he was resuming his father’s attempt to wrest the Hebrides from Norwegian control. In 1261 he sent an embassy to Norway to discuss the Scottish claim to the Hebrides, but King Håkon was in no mood for concessions. In the summer of 1262 news reached Norway of savage raids on the Isle of Skye from the mainland; furthermore, the messengers from Skye reported that the King of Scots had declared openly that he intended to take possession of the Hebrides by force or die in the attempt.

These reports ‘caused King Håkon the gravest concern’, as his saga puts it, and that Christmas he called on all the regions of his realm to muster the traditional defence levy in Bergen the following spring. He fitted out a royal flagship which had been specially built in Bergen – a magnificent oaken vessel with snarling dragon-heads fore and aft, gleaming with gold inlay. It was an exceptionally large ship, with thirty-seven pairs of oars, and Håkon had designed it as a troop-carrier for the cream of his soldiers: one half-bench for each oar carried four men, making a total complement of 296, including a retinue of priests and civil servants. According to the contemporary Icelandic Annals Håkon’s fleet contained ‘the largest army which had ever sailed from Norway’, and it is clear that Håkon was using his ships as transports laden to the gunwales with troops in case he decided to launch a full-scale invasion of the Scottish mainland and engage the Scottish army in pitched battle.

The fleet set sail from Bergen for Shetland early in July 1263, but things did not go smoothly in mustering more ships in the Northern Isles. Eventually, on 10 August, Håkon set sail westwards through the Pentland Firth and across the Minch to Lewis. He mustered again near South Rona, off Skye, where he was joined by reinforcements from the Isle of Man, and from there the great, glittering fleet passed through the narrow Kyle of Lochalsh at a point which was thereafter named after him: the Strait of Håkon, Kyle-Håkon – Kyleakin.

South they coasted, to Kerrera and Oban Bay, where they were joined by some loyal Islesmen. Here Håkon paused again, and sent off a squadron of fifty ships to plunder in Kintyre, while another fifteen rounded the Mull of Kintyre and attacked the Isle of Bute, where Rothesay Castle was taken again as it had been in 1230. Kintyre and Islay submitted at the first taste of pillage, and the plundering was called off in return for a tax of a thousand head of cattle. After that, with the islands to the west brought to heel, Håkon weighed anchor and sailed south down the coast of Kintyre and rounded the Mull into the Clyde estuary, where he anchored in Lamlash Bay, on Arran, in the lee of Holy Island. It was now September, and Håkon’s strategy was clear: the stronghold on the Isle of Bute had been reduced, and he lay poised with a huge army to strike at the mainland at will.

Alexander, meanwhile, had apparently been mustering the Scots army somewhere in Ayrshire. He now sent an embassy of Dominican friars to Arran to make overtures of peace. Håkon responded by sending over a delegation of two bishops ‘skilled in the Scots tongue’. When the talks began, Alexander seemed only too willing to come to terms. He said he would think things over and send his delegation back to renew the talks on Arran the next day. Håkon had made up a list of all the islands to the west which he claimed to own; Alexander jibbed over Arran, Bute and the Cumbraes – but that was merely a technicality, he implied. Agreement was just around the corner; a settlement was almost within their grasp – but somehow it remained just beyond their grasp. The saga suggests that the Scots were deliberately spinning things out: ‘The Scots had decided to prolong the negotiations, and make sure that a settlement was never quite achieved, as summer was passing and the weather would soon worsen.’

The drift of the Scottish tactics was not lost on King Håkon. In another threatening move he took his fleet much closer to the Scottish coast, to the lee of the Cumbraes just off Largs. More talks followed, but the outcome was always the same: there were still some minor differences to be settled, nothing serious – but meanwhile Alexander allowed the Norsemen a glimpse of his army assembling on the hills inland. Håkon was rapidly losing patience, and now he sent Alexander an ultimatum – that they should meet on land, each with his full army, and talk, and if the talks failed they would fight. Alexander responded that he was not averse to fighting, but gave no definite answer either way.

Håkon was now running out of time and provisions. Abruptly he called off the talks and sent a squadron of sixty ships up Loch Long to Arrochar, where they dragged their ships’ boats across a porterage to Tarbet and Loch Lomond and burned and terrorised the islands in the loch and the surrounding Lennox countryside. On their way back, however, the saga relates that ten of their ships were wrecked in Loch Long in a gale.

The same gale was to play havoc with Håkon’s main fleet sheltering under the Cumbraes. It struck on the night of Sunday, 30 September, howling in from the south-west. During the night a merchantman was blown against the king’s ship; its stays fouled the dragon-head, snapping off the nostrils. As the tempest blew harder, ship after ship dragged its anchors; it took no fewer than eight anchors to hold the king’s huge ship steady. By dawn the loose merchantman and three longships had been blown across the sound and lay stranded on the mainland shore below the steep slopes of the Cunninghame hills (hence the name ‘Largs’, meaning ‘slopes’). So ferocious was the storm that many were convinced it had been conjured up by sorcery.