Scotland: The Story of a Nation

The ‘Battle’ of Largs (2 October 1263)

Visitors to Largs arriving from the south are greeted by the sight of a tall cylindrical tower standing, like an unlit lighthouse, on a low outcrop of rocks on the foreshore at Bowen Craig, overlooking the modern marina there; constructed of rough whinstone with a sharply conical cap of red sandstone, it rears eighteen metres from the ground and is known, familiarly, as the Pencil. This prominent landmark was built by public subscription in 1912 on the traditional site of the so-called battle, and formally unveiled in appropriately foul weather on 12 July of that year.

The memorial, which cost £290 to build (plus £8 for the ornamental stonework of the doorway), was modelled on the eleventh-century ‘Round Towers’ of Brechin and Abernethy on the popular misconception that these had been erected for protection against viking raids. The only access is through a padlocked oaken door, two and a half metres off the ground. Inside, there is absolutely nothing, apart from a generous legacy of guano bequeathed by the local pigeons who use the memorial as a convenient dovecote. There were originally four wooden floors which allowed access by ladder to the ‘look-out’ floor at the level of the small window at the top, but the flooring has long since been removed for safety reasons. Soon after the tower was built, it was locally believed that the vikings themselves had stored their swords and shields in it! In our perceptions of Scotland’s history, the sharpened Pencil has often proved mightier than the Sword.

The ‘Battle’ of Largs which it commemorates was not a proper battle; it was more of a series of skirmishes on the beach. Nonetheless it is celebrated annually at an autumn Viking Festival in Largs which culminates with fireworks at the Pencil and (of course) the burning of a viking boat. For the people of Ayrshire, Largs has much of the significance of Bannockburn itself – a battle by which Scotland was saved from the hordes who threatened the nation’s freedom. It may have marked a significant turning-point in history, but it was never quite like that …

On the Monday morning after the great gale (1 October 1263) some of the local Scots militia came down to the shore and indulged in some long-range skirmishing with the Norsemen in the stranded longships, but pulled back out of range when Håkon sent some reinforcements ashore during a lull in the weather. Under cover of darkness that night the Scots managed to loot some of the cargo of the merchantman, but on the Tuesday morning Håkon himself landed with a task-force to rescue what was left of the cargo. The work was almost done when the Norwegians sighted Scottish troops approaching. It looked a very large force, and the Norsemen thought at first that it was commanded by Alexander in person. Håkon allowed himself to be rowed back to his fleet, albeit reluctantly; and now hostilities began.

According to Hákonar Saga there were an estimated eight or nine hundred Norwegians on land by then. The Scots had up to five hundred knights mounted on mail-clad horses, and a host of foot-soldiers armed with bows and axes. No estimate of their numbers is given. At one stage the saga says that the Norwegians were outnumbered by ten to one; but the context suggests that this refers only to a particular stand made by one group of Norsemen and should probably not be interpreted to mean that the Scottish army numbered eight or nine thousand men – which is hardly credible, particularly in the light of how things turned out.

The fighting was confused and inconclusive, and much of it consisted of desultory exchanges of arrows and stones. The wind now got up again, and Håkon had to sit helplessly on his ship and watch as his beleaguered men fought a grim rearguard action southward along the beach, withdrawing and counter-attacking in turn. As dusk fell the Norsemen mounted another fierce attack and drove the Scots from the beach; in the respite thus gained the Norsemen were able to embark and struggle back to the main fleet. A couple of days later Håkon sent another party ashore to burn the ships which lay wrecked there. There was no opposition: the Scottish army had obviously withdrawn inland and had no intention of engaging again. Nor had Håkon: on that same day his fleet upped anchor and sailed to Lamlash Bay on Arran. The ‘Battle’ of Largs was over.

It had been neither a famous victory nor a crushing defeat. The numbers given in the saga seem overblown, no doubt on the principle that if you cannot beat them you multiply them. Since the Norwegians had ultimately been left in possession of the beach at Largs, it cannot be said that they lost the day. George Buchanan’s magisterial Latin History of Scotland (1582) claimed that Håkon had landed a force of twenty thousand men who were routed to the tune of sixteen thousand dead at a cost of five thousand Scottish lives; but that is now recognised by historians as nonsense. It is a nonsense, however, which has died hard.

Yet if the Norwegians did not lose that particular engagement, they certainly lost the campaign: Håkon had failed to secure the islands against future encroachments by Alexander, which had been his original objective.

Håkon now limped away with his battered and mutinous fleet. After a trying voyage, he reached haven in Orkney at the end of October. He took up residence in the Bishop’s Palace, whose ruins are such a striking feature of Kirkwall, just across the road from the beautiful rose-red Cathedral of St Magnus. No sooner was he installed in the palace, however, than he fell ill:

In his sickness, he had Latin books read to him at first; but he found it too much trouble to work out what the Latin meant. Then he had books read to him in Norse, first the sagas of the Saints, and then the sagas of the Kings of Norway all the way from Hálfdan the Black onwards, one after the other, until the saga of King Sverrir [his grandfather] was reached … Near midnight the reading of Sverrir’s Saga was concluded; and just as midnight passed, Almighty God called King Hákon from this earthly life.

His death was big news in Norway. In Scotland, however, the Melrose Chronicle displayed a very different order of priorities:

In this year [1264] upon the Day of St Agnes [21 January], the queen of Scotland gave birth to a son, who, at his father’s desire, was named Alexander … And it happened that on the same day upon which the king of Scotland was informed that God had given him a son, intelligence also arrived that the king of Norway was dead. Rejoiced by these twofold tidings of joy, the king gave thanks to God, who exalts the humble and humbles the proud.

The death of King Håkon was a real turning-point; but the entry in the Melrose Chronicle was of particular poignancy, not so much because of what had gone before, as of what was to come.

With Håkon’s death the way was now open for Alexander’s own territorial ambitions in the Hebrides. Alexander was a young and vigorous man, still only twenty-three years old; he had thwarted the naval might of Norway and seen off a major threat to his own kingdom, and now, with every reason to expect a long and successful reign ahead of him, the future of the realm seemed assured with the birth of an heir to the throne. And so, at first, it seemed.

As far as the Western Isles were concerned, Alexander was now in the driving seat. According to the Saga of Magnús; Hákonarson, the Norsemen in the Orkneys sent an embassy to Scotland in the spring of 1264 to make overtures for peace, but were brusquely rebuffed. Alexander was not slow to press home his advantage; he was now in a position to pick off the Western Isles one by one, and was clearly determined to do so.

In Norway, Håkon’s successor King Magnus (known as ‘the Law-Reformer’) was realistic enough to recognise that Norwegian suzerainty over the Western Isles dependencies was no longer tenable. In the autumn of 1264 he again sent messengers to Alexander; this time their reception was less chilly, and Magnus was told that treaty terms could be discussed in Scotland the following summer. Eventually, on 2 July 1266, peace was made and sealed through the Treaty of Perth. It was in all respects a sensible and welcome settlement, which King Magnus was able to announce in Bergen on 9 August without loss of face: in return for the cession of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, the Scots were to pay a lump sum of four thousand merks of refined silver in four annual instalments, and an annual tribute of a hundred merks in perpetuity. According to the Melrose Chronicle, King Alexander paid out the whole sum of four thousand merks on the spot; but the annual tribute of a hundred merks seems soon to have petered out. From the Norwegian point of view, the most important provision of the Treaty of Perth was a firm guarantee that Scotland would respect Norway’s sovereignty over the Orkneys and Shetland; indeed, the Northern Isles remained a Scandinavian preserve until the middle of the fifteenth century, when they were pawned by the impecunious King Kristian I of Norway and Denmark in lieu of a dowry for the marriage of his daughter Margrethe to the future James III of Scotland (see Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)).

Hindsight suggests that it was the right and realistic outcome, and that Håkon the Old had been flying in the face of the inevitable. The Western Isles were too far from Norway to remain an outpost of Scandinavia, physically, socially or culturally; their only ties with Norway in the thirteenth century were those imposed by power-politics, and those bonds were being inexorably loosened.

With this deal, Alexander, at the age of twenty-five, had vastly enlarged the kingdom of Scotland. Only the Northern Isles now remained outside his royal control. Just as his father’s Treaty of York had consolidated the southern frontier in 1237, the Treaty of Perth of 1266 extended and consolidated the western frontiers of the kingdom.

For the rest of his reign, Alexander III is said to have managed the government of his realm with justice and fairness, earning the respect and loyalty of his lieges. Through his consolidation and expansion of royal power and administration he welded the disparate regions of the realm into a cohesive nation with one Church, one law and a common language. The hitherto vague concept of ‘Scottishness’ was developing into a sense of national consciousness, an awareness of national identity which would gain powerful expression in the Wars of Independence to come.

Meanwhile the relationship between Scotland and England remained very close, underpinned by intermarriage between the royal families and many of the leading nobles. Henry III had died in 1272, to be succeeded by his energetic and charismatic elder son, Edward I, whom Alexander found a congenial brother-in-law; they were on excellent terms, and Edward (as prince) and his wife Eleanor of Castile visited the Scottish court in 1268. To be sure, Edward (as king) tried to revive the homage issue: in 1278 he attempted to persuade Alexander to swear homage to him for the kingdom of Scotland at a ceremony at Westminster, but Alexander insisted that he would only swear fealty for the lands he held in the kingdom of England.

The Norway connection

The death of Håkon IV in 1263, and the Treaty of Perth which ensued in 1266, cleared the political air between Norway and Scotland and helped to create a greatly improved relationship. This was cemented when Alexander’s only daughter, Margaret, was betrothed to the grandson of Håkon the Old in the spring of 1281. The bride was nineteen years old, the bridegroom only fourteen; but he was the new king of Norway, Erik II, son of King Magnus the Law-Reformer. The marriage of these two royal youngsters symbolised the new amity across the North Sea and augured well for the future. In the event, however, it was all to end in tragedy, not only for Scotland and Norway but most especially for Alexander III himself; for 1281 also saw the first of a series of crushing family mishaps which were to darken the last years of his vigorous and successful reign.

His wife Margaret, sister of Edward I, had died in 1275, but Alexander saw no cause to marry again. However, in June 1281 his younger son, David, fell ill and died at Stirling Castle; he was eight years old. The mourning weeds had to be shrugged aside to celebrate his daughter Margaret’s wedding and coronation in Bergen two months later. But on 9 April 1283, not two years after the marriage, Queen Margaret died at Tönsberg, apparently in childbirth. She was only twenty-two years old, and she left a sickly infant daughter, also christened Margaret, the ‘Maid of Norway’ who would be Queen of Scots for a brief time (see Chapter 9 (#uba4d0175-ef7d-5312-b738-2df3be9932b3)).

And then, less than a year later, came the third and cruellest blow so far: on 17 January 1284 Alexander’s elder son, Alexander the Prince of Scotland, who had been born on the very day twenty years earlier on which news of King Håkon’s death had reached his father, died at Lindores Abbey in Fife after a long illness. Young Alexander had been married for just over a year, and died without issue.

The widower king had now lost all three of his children, and Scotland had lost all the immediate male heirs to the throne. But tragedy has to be overcome, and Alexander and his nation set about picking up the pieces. On 5 February 1284 the magnates of Scotland, meeting at Scone, acknowledged the infant Princess Margaret, the Maid of Norway, as heir presumptive to the Scottish throne, failing any further issue of her grandfather. Some of the nobility were unhappy about it, however: not only was she an infant, she was also a girl – and there was no precedent for a female ruler of Scotland. Besides, many of them felt that they themselves had a better claim to the Scottish throne. They comforted themselves with the thought that Alexander, who was still in his early forties, had plenty of time in which to produce another son.

Alexander recognised that he had to marry again. The bride he chose was Yolande, Comtesse de Montford, daughter of Robert IV, Comte de Dreux, a vassal of Edward I of England. They married in Jedburgh Abbey on 14 October 1285. But once again tragedy struck, the worst tragedy of all. Only five months after the wedding, Alexander III’s thirty-six-year reign came to an abrupt end.

The death of Alexander III

It is now no less than five hundred and forty-two years since Alexander’s death, yet the people of the country still point out the very spot where it happened, and which is called the King’s Crag.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VI

On 19 March 1286 the king held a session of his council in Edinburgh. It became a convivial affair. The weather grew boisterous as the evening lengthened, but after supper Alexander insisted on setting out to spend the night with his young wife, who was staying in a royal castle at Kinghorn, on the east coast of Fife. It meant crossing the Firth of Forth in the teeth of a northerly gale heavy with snow, and a hazardous journey on horseback through the stormy dark. The boatman at South Queensferry at first refused to sail, but complied after being taunted with cowardice. When they landed at Inverkeithing on the north shore the king was urged to stay there overnight, but he refused and took horse to ride to Kinghorn.

On the seaward side of the busy A921 coastal road between Burntisland and Kinghorn there stands a tall memorial, surmounted by a cross, dedicated to the memory of Alexander III. It was unveiled on 19 July 1886 ‘before a huge concourse of spectators – a red letter day in the history of Kinghorn’, according to the Fifeshire Advertiser of that week. Today few motorists take advantage of the small lay-by next to it to stop to have a look at the memorial and read its inscription:

To the Illustrious

ALEXANDER III,

The Last of Scotland’s Celtic Kings,

Who was Accidentally Killed

Near this Spot

March XIX, MCCLXXXVI

To one side of the road lie the broad sands of Pettycur Bay; on the other stand the shrub-shrouded cliffs along which the king was riding that night. No one knows what happened. The surmise has always been that he became separated from his guides in the darkness, his horse stumbled, and Alexander was thrown and fell to his death at the foot of ‘King’s Crag’, as it was later named, where his body was found next morning. He was buried in the south aisle of Dunfermline Abbey, and all Scotland mourned its king. A scrap of verse, preserved in Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle of Scotland (c.1400), records the profound general sense of loss:

Quhen [when] Alexander our kynge was dede,

That Scotlande led in lauche [law] and le [peace],

Away was sons [plenty] of alle [ale] and brede [bread],

Of wyne and wax, of gamyn [sport] and gle [glee],

Our gold was changit into lede [lead].

Crist, borne into virgynyte

Succoure Scotlande, and ramede [remedy],

That stade [placed] is in perplexite.

Alexander’s fatal night-ride is often portrayed as the result of romantic impulse: the ardour of an impetuous lover in the prime of life (he was only forty-four years old) eager to return to the arms of his bride in order to father a son. Be that as it may, his untimely death brought an abrupt end to the mini Golden Age, and plunged Scotland into a fearful constitutional crisis which would lead inexorably to the Wars of Independence with England.

Chapter 9 JOHN BALLIOL – ‘TOOM TABARD’ (#ulink_99150b8a-85b8-5a9a-9fae-272888b89048)

The full consequences of the evil were not visible at first; for, although all Alexander’s children had died before him, yet one of them, who had been married to Eric, King of Norway, had left a daughter named Margaret …