We come back to the battles of the sword.
Before, however, returning to the church reforms of Queen Margaret, and the war ventures
of Malcolm the "Bighead," it may be well to run our eye over the outlying parts
of Scotland on the north, and take note of the little bye-drama being transacted there.
Orkney and Zetland and the adjacent coasts had for some centuries a history of their own.
A variety of causes contributed to separate their fate, for a while, from that of the
mainland. In the first place, they lay remote from the center of government, and only at
times were they careful to give obedience to the commands which issued from the royal
palace of Scone, or of Dunfermline. In the second place, they lay on the highway of the
Vikings. When these sea robbers came forth to load their vessels with a miscellaneous
booty, consisting of stolen goods and miserable captives, Orkney and Zetland were the
first to feel the heavy hand of the plunderers. These islands, moreover, were placed
betwixt two hostile powers, who struggled for the possession and mastery of them. They had
Alban on the one side and Norway on the other, and they accounted it good policy to submit
to the master, whether Scot or Dane, who should prove himself for the time the stronger.
The Scottish King was the nearer to them. They were parted from Alban by only the narrow
Pentland, whereas Norway was removed from them by the whole breadth of the German Sea. But
before the King of the Scots could transport his army by slow and laborious marches over
land to the northern extremities of his kingdom, a powerful fleet, manned by fierce
warriors, would sweep across from the distant Norway, and the islanders had no alternative
except to wage hopeless battle or accept the Norwegian or Danish rule. Thus their
allegiance kept oscillating from side to side of the German Ocean. They hung suspended
betwixt Alban and Norway, and their existence for two or three centuries was full of
vicissitudes and calamities. Even Alban was not at all times equally near to them. When
the Scottish sceptre was weak, Alban would fall back to the Spey, and the Norwegian jarl
was master in the intervening lands of Caithness and Sutherland. And when that sceptre
again gathered strength, Alban would stretch itself northward to where the great headlands
of Caithness look across the waters of the Frith to the bold precipices and cliffs that
line the coast of Orkney. The
inhabitants of Orkney and Zetland belonged to the same race with those on the mainland.
They were members of the great Caledonian or Pictish family. Their early religion was
Druidism, that is, the worship of the sun or Baal. This, which was the universal worship
of primeval times, would seem to have spread wider than any other religion since, if we
may judge from the fact that it has left its imprints in every land. In the course of its
progress it reaches these islands in the northern sea. Their secure situation, their
equable climate, and the tractable dispositions of the natives recommended them to the
Druid as a suitable centre where he might establish his worship and develop his system.
Here he could celebrate his horrid rites and exercise his tyrannical sway without
molestation. In this secure retreat, with the tides of the stormy Pentland as a rampart,
he could exact his dues and offerings, celebrate his festivals with becoming pomp, and
drag as many victims to his blood-stained altars as he chose to immolate or his god
demanded. The rude but massy remains of the structures in which the priests of this cruel
superstition practised their rites, remain to our day, and attest the strength and
splendour in which Druidism flourished in Orkney at an early age.
But light at last broke in, and the cloud
which had so long hung above that region was dispelled. The emancipation of these islands
from this terrible yoke was one of the first fruits of Columbas labours. When the
great missionary visited Brude, king of the northern Picts, in his palace at Inverness, he
solicited and obtained from him a promise that he would use his power for the protection
of any missionaries from Iona that might visit the Orkneys on a tour of evangelisation. In
due time the missionaries were sent, and the result was that the Druid fell before the
preaching of the Cross, and the islands became Christian. Their conversion is recorded in
the Scandinavian chronicles, and attested by the traditions and memorials which still
linger in these parts of this early visit from the fathers of Iona. The missionary zeal of
that famous community was then just opening out into the first vigour of its enthusiasm.
Enterprises were being planned to countries more remote, and involving greater perils to
those who undertook them, than this expedition to the Orkneys, and it would have been
strange, if, while the darkness was being rolled aside from France and Germany, the night
should be left to brood over a territory lying only a few days sail from Iona. The
first missionary to visit the Orkneys was Cormac, a companion of Columba. His visit was
made about the year 565.
Christian Orkney had risen with Iona and it
fell with Iona. Across the sea came the Viking, and the condition of these dwellers in the
northern isles was speedily changed for the worse. In his first visits all that the
Norseman sought was plunder. In his subsequent ones he aimed at making conquests. Having
at last established his dominion on this side the German Sea, the heathen population of
the Norwegian and Danish kingdoms flocked across to settle in Orkney and Caithness, and
with this mongrel multitude returned the old darkness. It thickened in proportion as the
number of the pagan immigrants increased, till at last the Orkneys and the adjoining
coasts on the mainland were nearly as much in need of light from Iona as when the first
missionaries of Columba visited them. The Norsemen opened their invasions at the beginning
of the ninth century in the spoiling of Iona, and they closed them in the middle of the
thirteenth at the battle of Largs, where they sustained so decisive a defeat that their
power in Scotland was finally broken.
After a century of raids, in which much blood
had been shed, and vast numbers of wretched captives carried across the sea, Harold
Harfager, King of Norway, at the beginning of the tenth century, appeared with his fleet
in the Scottish seas. It was evident that something more than plunder was now meditated.
The Norwegian monarch made himself master of the Orkneys. The subjection of the Hebrides
followed. Harold Harfager committed his new conquests to the care of his earls, whom he
appointed to govern in his name. Remote from the centre of the Norwegian authority, these
governors forgot sometimes that they were deputies and vassals, and exercised as despotic
a command as if they had been kings. They and their descendants governed the earldom of
Orkney for some centuries. Not content with exercising sway over the northern and western
isles, they became solicitous of extending their masters possessions or their own,
for it was often difficult to say who was the real king, the monarch or the vassal ear.
With this in view they crossed the Pentland Firth, and annexed Caithness and Sutherland to
their island earldoms. The Scandinavian sagas say that at one time they extended their
sway as far south as the shores of the Moray Firth. But nothing in the Scottish
chroniclers gives countenance to this, and we regard it as a fictitious apotheosis of
Scandinavian heroes and heroism rather than an accomplished fact to have a place given it
in history.
It fared ill with Christianity in northern
Scotland during these centuries. The invaders, when they entered the country, and for some
time after, were still pagans. Accordingly, the first brunt of their fury fell upon the
Christian establishments, which their religion, cruel alike in it, instincts and in its
policy, taught them to destroy. The Columban churches were razed, the schools connected,
with them rooted out, and all that had been won slowly and with labour during the three
centuries that had elapsed since Columbas visit to King Brude, in which their
conversion had had its rise, was in danger of being swept away by this torrent of heathen
invasion. Here was a fine opportunity offered the Culdees of proving that they were sprung
of the old stock, and still retained something of the zeal and courage which had faced
hordes as barbarous, and carried the light into lands yet darker. And they were not wholly
wanting to the occasion. While the Norsemen were crossing the Pentland Firth, southward,
sword in hand, to slay, the Culdees were on their way northward to cast in the salt of
Christianity and heal these waters of desolation at their source. The second
evangelisation, however, proceeded slowly as compared with the first, and the Culdee
missionaries with great toil would have reaped little fruit if it had not been for an
important event which came at this time to second their efforts. This was the conversion
of Norway itself to the Christian faith under King Olave Tryggvosson. In the opinion of
the Norwegian colonists the fact that their king and nation had embraced Christianity
greatly strengthened the argument for its truth, and disposed them to give more heed to
the instructions of those who were seeking to win them to what was now the religion of
their countrymen on the other side of the German Sea. Moreover, King Olave Tryggvosson
sought to spread the Christian faith among his subjects in Orkney and the Hebrides as a
means of safeguarding his home dominions. The Norwegian colonists retained in their new
country their old habit of roving and their love of plunder, and would at times cross the
sea on a predatory expedition to the mother country. Olave Tryggtvosson wisely judged that
if he could make them Christians, he would put an end to these unpleasant visits. He sent
missionaries from Norway to take part with the Culdees in their good work in the Orkney
Islands, and the work of evangelisation now went more rapidly onwards. By his influence,
too, Sigurd the "Stout," one of the more notable of the earls who governed in
his name in Orkney, was led to accept Christianity, and, as the result of all these
concurring agencies, by the Norwegian settlers in Orkney and the North of Scotland by the
end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth century were nominal adherents of the
Christian Church. The spiritual change effected on these converts might not go far down,
but it would draw after it doubtless many political and social ameliorations, and
contribute to mix and finally amalgamate the two peoples.
It were needless to pursue minutely events
which were transacted on a provincial stage, and the influence of which was not sensibly
felt beyond the narrow limits within which they were done. Sigurd the Stout, whose
conversion has just been mentioned, is said by the Scandinavian Sagas to have married a
daughter of Malcolm II., King of Scotland. There was born to him, as has been recorded in
a former chapter a son, whom he named Thorfin. Sigurd fell in the great battle of Clontarf
in Ireland, in 1014. From the death of Sigurd dates the decline and fall of the Norwegian
power in Scotland. The province of Caithness was taken possession of by the Scottish
crown. The shadowy authority the Norwegians had exercised over Moray and Ross vanished,
and the Scottish sceptre was stretched to the Pentland Firth. Caithness was erected into
an earldom by Malcolm II., and given to his grandson, Thorfin, who was the founder of the
church of Birsay in Orkney.
About this time an event took place which
probably attracted little notice at the time, but which had graver issues than have
resulted from some great battles. This was the marriage of the eldest daughter of Malcolm
II. to Crinan, Abbot of Dunkeld. From this marriage sprang a race of kings destined not
indeed to extinguish, but to displace or supersede the ancient Church of Scotland for some
centuries by the importation of a foreign priesthood, with their rites, ceremonies, and
doctrines also of foreign origin. Crinan, to whom we see the Scottish King giving his
daughter in marriage, was the prince-abbot of Scotland, as his great predecessor Columba
had been the presbyter-abbot of the same land. There was this difference betwixt them,
however: the duties of the Abbot of Iona lay in the spiritual sphere, those of his
successor, the Abbot of Dunkeld, in the military domain. He had taken the sword, and in
verification of the warning of the old book, he perished by the sword: for like his
predecessor in the chair of Dunkeld, Crinan fell in battle in 1045. He was one of the
wealthiest temporal lords in the kingdom. The lands pertaining to the Abbacy of Dunkeld
were extensive and fertile, and their value was further enhanced by their position in the
centre of the kingdom. To this rich heritage they lay-abbot of Dunkeld had annexed the
property of the monastery of Dull, in the districts of Atholl and Argyle. From this
marriage sprung Duncan, who was afterwards King of Scotland. From Duncan sprang Malcolm
III., the "Big head," who came to the throne after the usurpation of Macbeth.
From the marriage of Malcolm Canmore with Margaret of England sprang those kings who gave
the finishing touch to the transformation of the Scottish Church, which Malcolm and
Margaret had inaugurated, changing it from the Culdee to the Roman type, and transferring
g its government from the Columban abbots to the chair of the pontiffs.
We return to Malcolm and Margaret. The
conference with the Columban pastors in the palace of Dunfermline has ended, and Turgot
claims the victory for Margaret. Her reasoning were so convincing, Turgot tells us, and so
strongly supported by the testimonies of Scripture and of the fathers, "that no one
on the opposite side could say one word against them."1 That the
Columban disputants were silenced we may grant. The odds were sorely against them. These
simple men had to bear up against royal rank, trained dialectic skill, and the reputation
of saintly character, and their answers may have been less ready and their bearing less
courageous than would have been the case had the two sides been more equally matched. But
to be silenced is not to be convinced. This undoubtedly they were not. Nor is it true what
Turgot affirms, that "giving up their obstinacy and yielding to reason, they
willingly consented to adopt all that Margaret recommended."2 This
we know to be the opposite of the fact. The Columban pastors we find long after
celebrating their worship as their fathers had done, and clinging as tenaciously as ever
to those "rites" which Turgot denounces as "barbarous," and which he
tells us the Columbites now renounced We find, moreover, David I. fighting the same battle
which the bishop says his mother had already won, and which had conclusively settled the
matter for all coming time.3 In truth,
so far as we can gather, the conference appears to have yielded little or no immediate
fruit. No great measures were adopted in pursuance of it. The introduction of a foreign
hierarchy, and the partitioning of the kingdom into dioceses was the work of a subsequent
reign. The conference was the turning of the tide, however; it brought great changes
ultimately with it, but these came slowly, and after some considerable time.
Finding the Columban pastors obdurate, and
their flocks bent on following the perverse ways into which Columba had let them, Margaret
changed her tactics. She saw that little was to be gained by holding barren debates with
the Columban clergy, and that a more likely means of compassing her end was to show the
Scots the beauty and pomp of the Roman worship, assured that they could not possibly
resist its fascination. By the advice of Turgot, her confessor, she built a superb church
at Dunfermline.4 Previous to her arrival in Scotland, the churches
north of the Forth were constructed of wood or wattles, roofed with reeds. Such
sanctuaries in Margarets eyes were fit for nothing but the "barbarous"
rites of the Columbites. A temple of stone did she rear "for an eternal memorial of
her name and devotion in the place where her nuptials had been held," says Turgot.
"This church," he continues, "she beautified with rich gifts of various
kinds, among which, as is well know, were many vessels of pure and solid gold, for the
sacred service of the altar. . . .She also placed there a cross of priceless value,
bearing the figure of the Saviour, which she had caused to be covered with the purest gold
and silver studded with gems, a token, even to the present day, of the earnestness of her
faith. . . .Her chamber was never without such objects, those I mean which appertained to
the dignity of the divine service. It was, so to say, a workshop of sacred are; copes for
the cantors, chasubles, stoles, altar cloths, and other priestly vestments and church
ornaments, were always to be seen, either already made of an admirable beauty, or in
course of preparation."5
In this passage Bishop Turgot unconsciously
take stock of Margarets piety. It worked by Art, and it brought forth the good
fruits of "copes, chasubles, stoles, and altar cloths." He also painted her
ideal of worship taken at the highest. Her "ideal" as not borrowed from that
book, which, seeing it has the Deity for its author, alone contains the authoritative
definition of worship. It is there shown to be severely simple and exclusively spiritual.
Worship is not gold and silver in however large a sum. Nor is it art, however skilful and
beautiful; nor is it a temple, however superb; nor is it a priest, however gorgeously
attired. Worship is the communion of the soul with God, direct, immediate, and without the
intervention of earthly priest. And religion is that principle in the heart from which
this communion springs. So does the book to which we have referred define worship. This
gives it a sublimity that soars far above temple however grand, and priest however
mystically robed. To this true and grand conception of worship Queen Margaret had not
lifted her mind. She needed a crucifix formed of the wood of the true cross that her faith
might lay hold on the Crucified, and an altar of marble, with priests in splendid
vestments ministering before it, that her piety might burn and her devotion soar. The
patriarchs of an early day worshipped without these accessories; their altar of unhewen
stone on the open Palestine plain had little of show, yet the devotions performed there
lacked neither faith nor fire. It was not amid magnificent fanes that the zeal was kindled
which bore Columban and his disciples over so large a portion of Europe in the execution
of their great mission. Queen Margaret had seen the Culdee pastors, in their wattle-built
and rush-thatched cells, celebrating their supper at wooden tables; this, said she, is not
worship, it is barbarism; she would show them a better way. Summoning her masons, a superb
church arose; calling her craftsmen, curiously fashioned vessels of gold and silver were
forthcoming; assembling her ladies, it was marvellous in how short a time stores of richly
embroidered vestments, meet for priestly shoulders, were fabricated; a staff of priests
completed Margarets preparations for banishing the "barbarous" customs of
the Culdees, and replacing them with the elegant services of a church in which it was her
wish to fold the Scots.
It is a universal law that when the vital
principle in an organism grows weak and begins to decay, the body transfers its vitalities
to the surface, and covers itself with new growths. This is an effort to stave off
approaching dissolution. The forest tree, when its root is old and its trunk begins to be
rotten, unwilling to yield up its place and disappear from the forest, sends forth with a
sudden effort young shoots and branches to hide the rottenness of its stem, or it woos
some parasitic plant which clothes it with a greenness not its own. Instead of death, the
tree seems to be renewing its youth. The expiring lamp will unexpectedly blaze up, and
fill the chamber it is about to leave in darkness with a sudden gleam of light. In
obedience to the same law, worn out races, with the sentence of extinction hanging over
hem, will suddenly burst into an unexpected prolificness, and multiply their numbers in
proportion as the constituents of their corporate existence die out. This, too, is an
effort of nature toward off death.
The same law holds good in bodies
ecclesiastical. When the inner and vital principle of religion in churches is stricken
with incipient decay, there is sure to come an outward efflorescence of ceremonies and
rites. This fungus growth, which is so apt to overrun churches which have sunk into
spiritual decay, and to give to their withered age the aspect of efflorescent youth, is
analogous to the herbage and moss that convert the rotten trunk into a seeming garland,
and deceive the eye with an appearance of health while deadly disease is preying upon the
plant. A church, vigorous and strong at the core, conscious of inward health and power, is
content to abide in the calm path of prescribed duty, and to feed its piety and zeal by
the appointed acts of spiritual worship. It eschews spasmodic effort and ostentatious
profession. They are felt not to be needed, and therefore are not sought. But when inward
decay sets in, then it is that exterior helps and supports are had recourse to. The quiet
that is indicative of peace is exchanged for outward bustle and parade. The acceptability
of worship to the Deity is believed to be in the ratio of the grandeur of the temple in
which it is performed, and the worshippers, unable to transact directly with the skies,
are fain to employ the mediation of consecrated altars, apostolically descended priests,,
and rites of mystic virtue and aesthetic beauty. "The age," say the onlookers,
"how pious it is! The Church, how her activity and zeal are awakening!" It is a
mistake. What appears a marvellous outburst of religious life is only the vitalities
smitten at the heart rushing to the extremities, dying piety concealing its decay under
the guise of a fictitious energy. The sun has gone below the horizon, and there comes the
afterglow on the mountains which is the harbinger of the coming darkness.
The last years of Malcolm III. and Queen
Margaret were clouded with calamity. We have already traced the story of the terrible wars
waged between England and Scotland in the early part of Malcolms reign. At length a
peace was established betwixt the two kingdoms, of which the public signatory was the
stone cross on Stanmoor common. That peace remained unbroken while Malcolm was occupied
with the ecclesiastical reforms of which his queen had taught him to be enamoured.
Meanwhile a great change had taken place in England. William the Conqueror had gone to the
grave. He was succeeded on the throne by his son, William Rufus. The new English king had
different tastes and pursuits from those of his royal father, and also from those of his
brother monarch of Scotland. There is the less likelihood on that account, one should
think, of the two sovereigns coming into collision. But no; the master passions of the
age, ambition and war, once more assert themselves, and compel the sword to leave its
scabbard. The cause of quarrel is obscure. The two border provinces of Cumbria and Lothian
were fruitful in misunderstandings; and the pretensions of Edgar Aetheling, Queen
Margarets brother, to the English throne, strained at times the relations between
the two kings. Whether the strife grew out of these matters or had its rise in another
cause will now never be know. Let it suffice that in the old doomed borderland we find the
Scotch and English armies again confronting one another. King Malcolm, with his two sons,
Edward and Eadgar, had penetrated into England, and were besieging the Castle of Alnwick.
Robert de Mowbray and his men-at-arms rushed suddenly out upon them, and in the onset King
Malcolm and his elder son Edward were slain.6 The Scottish army,
dispirited by the fall of the King, broke up in disorder, many falling by the sword, while
numbers were drowned in the River Alne, then swollen by the winter rains. Next day the
body of Malcolm was found among the slain by two peasants who had visited the field.
Placing the royal corpse in a cart, they conveyed it to Tynemouth, and there buried it. It
was afterwards disinterred by his son Alexander, and laid beside that of his queen at
Dunfermline. Malcolm did not receive sepulture in Iona; as in life, so in death, he was
separate from the Church of Columba. He died on the 19th November 1093, having
reigned thirty-five years.
Escaping from the battlefield, Eadgar carried
to his mother the tidings of the death of her husband and son. Queen Margaret now lay
dying in the Castle of Edinburgh. Turgot gives us a very touching account of her last
days, as reported to him by the priest whom he had left to minister to her on her
death-bed. Margaret, in our judgment, appears at her best when she comes to die. She has
now done with fastings and feet-washings, and, as a penitent, turns her eye to the cross,
which, let us hope, she saw despite the many obstructionshelps she deemed
themwhich she had industriously piled upon betwixt her soul and the Saviour. Her
earnest simple utterances, her tears, the psalms now so sweet to her, and the promises of
Holy Scripture turned by her into prayers, give us a higher idea of her piety, and
pourtray more truly her character, we are persuaded, than the high-wrought encomiums of
Turgot, in which he claims for Queen Margaret an all but perfect holiness.,
Margaret had been ailing for half a year. And
now in her sick chamber on the Castle rock, lonely and anxious, she could not help
following in imagination her husband and sons to the fateful fields of Northumbria, and
picturing to herself what was destined to be but too literally realized. On the fourth day
before that on which there came news from the battlefieldthe very day on which the
king fellMargarets forebodings of some near calamity were so strong that she
could not refrain from communicating them to her attendants. "Perhaps," she
said, "on this very day such a heavy calamity may befall the realm of Scotland as has
not been for many ages past." "The disease gained ground, and death was
imminent," says Turgots informer. "Her face had already grown pallid in
death, when she directed that I, and the other ministers of the sacred altar along with
me, should stand near her and commend her soul to Christ by our psalms. Moreover, she
asked that there should be brought to her a cross, called the Black Cross,
which she always held in the greatest veneration. . . .When at last it was got out of the
chest and brought to her, she received it with reverence, and did her best to embrace it
and kiss it. And several times she signed herself with it. Although every part of her body
was now growing cold, still as long as the warmth of life throbbed at her heart she
continued steadfast in prayer. She repeated the whole of the fiftieth psalm,7 and
placing the cross before her eyes, she held it there with both her hands."
It was at this moment that Eadgar, just
arrived from the battle, entered her bedroom. The shock of his message was more, he saw,
than the emaciated frame before him could sustain. He forbore to speak it. But Margaret
read it in her sons face. "I know it, my boy," she said, with a deep sigh,
"I know it." She at once began the prayer in the liturgy of the mass, saying,
"Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to the will of the father, through the
co-operation of the Holy Ghost, hast by Thy death given life to the world, deliver
me," "As she was saying the words `deliver me,`" says the narrator,
"her soul was freed from the chains of the body, and departed to Christ, the author
of true liberty."8 She breathed her last on the 16th November
1093, just four days after her husband had fallen in battle on the banks of the Alne,
Northumbria.9
The morning and the evening of
Margarets life were alike darkened by heavy clouds, between which there
shone forth a noon of singular brilliancy. She exhibited amid the strong lights and
shadows of her career an admirable equanimity of soul and great stability of character.
She was large of heart, capacious of intellect, more studious of the happiness of others
than of her own, and wholly devoted to a country on the shore of which she had stepped as
a fugitive and exile, when a chivalrous prince took her by the hand, and let her to a seat
beside himself on the throne of his realm. She repaid his generous love by her wise
counsels, and her efforts to refine and elevate the manners of his court, and improve the
dress, and the dwellings, and the trading relations of his subjects.
But if we would form a just estimate of the
influence of Margaret for good or for evil on Scotland, we must enlarge our view, and take
other considerations into account besides her personal virtues and the ephemeral benefits
which sprang out of them. These are "the good," which the poet tells us, is
interred with the mens bones, but they may be conjoined with the "evil"
that lives after them. The course of a nation may be fatally, although imperceptibly,
altered, and only after the lapse of centuries can the nature of the revolution it has
undergone be rightly understood, and its disastrous issued duly measured. Margaret and
Scotland are an exemplification of this. Had Margaret brought with her a love for the
Scriptural Faith and simple worship of the Scots, the nation to its latest age would have
called the day blessed on which she set foot on its soil. Unhappily she cherished a
deep-seated prejudice against the Scottish religion, and, believing that she was doing an
acceptable service, she strove to supplant it. The revolution she inaugurated was at war
with the traditions of the nation, was opposed to the genius of the people, and while it
did not make the Scots good Catholics, it made them bad Christians. The system of
irrational beliefs which Queen Margaret introduced destroyed intelligence and fettered
conscience, and so paved the way for the entrance of feudal slavery by which it was
followed, and which flourished in Scotland along with it. It is noteworthy that Roman
Catholicism and the feudal system came together. The fundamental principles of the Roman
Church, it has been remarked by the historian Robertson, "prepare and break the mind
for political servitude, which is the firmest foundation of civil tyranny."10
No finer spectacles can we wish to
contemplate than Queen Margaret, if we restrict our view to her shining virtues and her
heroic austerities. She is seen moving like a being from another sphere in Malcolms
court, meek, gracious, loving and maintaining her steadfast mind alike amid the storms
that raged around her in her youth, the splendours that shone upon her in her mid-day, and
the deep, dark shadows that again gathered about her at the close. But we must not
sacrifice our judgment at the shrine of sentiment, nor so fix our gaze upon the passing
glory of a moment as not to see what comes after. When we turn from Margaret the woman to
Margaret the Queen, and trace the working of her policy beyond the brief period of her
life onward into the subsequent centuries, we forget the radiant vision in the darkness of
the picture that now rises to our view. It is the spectacle of a land overspread by
ignorance, of a priesthood wealthy, profligate, and dominant, and a people sunk in the
degrading worship of fetishes. Such issue had the changes which were initiated in Scotland
by Queen Margaret.
Margaret had added a kingdom to the empire of
the Papacy, but an hundred and fifty years passed away before Rome acknowledged the gift.
We do not blame her for being so tardy in bestowing her honours where they were so well
deserved; we rather view the fact as corroborative in part of what we have ventured to
suggest, even, that the changes effected by Margaret were not very perceptible or marked
in her own day, and that it was not till a century and a half that Rome was able to
estimate the magnitude of the service rendered by the Scottish Queen. At length in the
year 1250, under Pope Innocent IV., Queen Margaret received the honour of canonization. It
is for services, not graces, that Rome reserves her highest rewards. Margaret might have
been as fair as Helen, or as learned as Hypatia or Olympia Morata; she might have been as
pious as the mother of Augustine, or as virtuous as the wife of the Roman Poetus; but
unless she had enlarged the bounds of the Papal sway by the addition of a great kingdom,
an place among "those who reign in heaven" would never have been assigned her by
those whose prerogative it is to say who shall sit on the thrones of the Papal Valhalla.
FOOTNOTES
1. Turgot, Life of St Margaret, p. 51.
2.
Turgot, Life of St Margaret, p. 52.
3.
Ibid., pp. 48, 49.
4.
Fordoun says that Malcolm founded the church at Dunfermline long before he founded the
cathedral at Durham, which he did in 1093.
5. Turgot, Life of St Margaret, pp. 29, 30.
6.
John Major says that a soldier offered him the keys of the castle on the point of a spear,
and that Malcolm, approaching incautiously to receive them, was pierced through the eye. Historia
de gestis Scotorum, Lib. iii. cap. 8.
7.
May not this be a mistake for the fifty-first psalm?
8.
Turgot, Life of St Margaret, pp. 75-79.
9.
Fordun says Margaret died in Edinburgh "in castro puellarum," according
to the Chronicle of Mailross. Wynton says the same in his Origynale Cronikil,
placing her death "In-til the Castelle of Edynburgh."
10.
Robertsons History of Scotland, ii. 183. |