History Of The Scottish Nation
Vol 3, Chapter 13 - Queen Margaret; Conference with Culdee Pastors

The place where this company has assembled is the Malcolm Tower at Dufermline. Strength and not magnificence has been consulted in the erection of this keep. It is strong, massive, and square, and its walls, which are of great thickness, are built of hewn blocks. Its site adds to its strength and security. It is placed on a rocky plateau, around which on the west and the south, nature, as if in foresight that here the kings of Scotia were one day to dwell, has dug a formidable ravine, seventy feet in depth, its face bristling with rocks and its bottom the bed of a summer rivulet, which in winter grows into a torrent, and thunders along with loud rough roar. Behind it, landward, rises a clump of trees, tall and strong of stem, as if to bar the advance of foe, and shade with their summer foliage the royal inmates of the "forest tower." It was every way fit for the dwelling of a king in unsettled times, and yet it was only the beginning of what was soon to grow into a magnificent palace and a sumptuous monastery, and which, after sheltering four Scottish kings, have left their broken and ruined walls as memorials to our day of the style in which our monarchs were housed in the eleventh century.

One day as Malcolm Canmore rested in his tower, a messenger brought him word that the royal family of England had arrived in his dominions, and that the ship that carried them lay moored in the Forth, almost underneath his palace windows. Malcolm hastened to the shore, only some six miles off, and invited the illustrious exiles to his castle. Driven from England by the terror of William the Conqueror, they had come to throw themselves on the protection of the Scottish monarch. The party consisted of Eadgar Aetheling, heir of the English throne, his mother Agatha, and his sisters Margaret and Christina. With them, forming their retinue, came a considerable number of Anglo-Saxon nobility. The high birth and great misfortunes of those to whom we see Malcolm Canmore extending the hand of welcome and leading the way to his castle, appealed touchingly to one who himself had been disinherited, and compelled to eat the bread of an exile and seek the protection of strangers. Of the party now become guests in the King Malcolm’s palace, one in particular began to find special favour in the eyes of the gallant monarch. This was Margaret, the elder sister of Eadgar Aetheling. This royal lady brought with her to Malcolm’s court the refinement and grace of the south, to which she added what neither courts nor climate can impart, sweetness of disposition and great goodness of heart. She possessed a vigorous understanding, a firm will, a sympathetic nature, and a graceful and copious eloquence. These endowments of mind and character made her stand out, doubtless, from the Scottish maidens of that day, who had not Margaret’s opportunities of acquiring refinement and polish. Two centuries earlier Scotland could boast a deeper and richer civilisation than England. There was then a powerful principle of refinement at the heart of the Scottish nation, but the influence of the Culdee element had declined, and the ruggedness incident to the northern land had begun again to assert itself. From the day Margaret entered it there was a new light in the "forest tower" of Dunfermline, and a new brightness on the face of its royal master. Margaret became Malcolm Canmore’s wife, and Queen of Scotland. The marriage drew after it most important consequences to the nation of the Scots.

We must spend a few moments in the contemplation of a woman who had so large a share in the moulding of the Scotland of the following centuries, and those influence has not even yet perhaps quite passed away. Queen Margaret undoubtedly possessed great decision and elevation of soul. Standing between two eras she was representative of both, combining what was best in the one, with not a little of what was worst in the other. Pious she was, but not after the type of the Columban Church. She went for her ideals of devotion and her models of sanctity to the deserts of the Thebaid rather than to the school of Columba and the "elders of Iona." Her religion was a rule to walk by, a formula to be observed, rather than an indwelling principle, spontaneously developing in a life of good works, and a character of evangelical virtue. Margaret did not take into account that right relations to God is the key to all right relations to man. Much of Margaret’s worship consisted of that "bodily exercise which profiteth little." Every year she kept a literal fast of forth days before the advent of Easter, and another of equal length when Christmas came round. How much more easy is it to robe the body in sackcloth than the soul in penitence! How much more easy to rend the garment than to rend the heart, to strike upon the breast than to break in pieces the idol enshrined within it!

In Margaret’s creed good works held a higher place than "faith." We do not wonder that she mistook the right order of the two. It was the common error of her age. The teaching of Paul on the point had been lost, and Luther had not yet arrived to proclaim to Christendom that "it is not the good works which make the good man, but the good man that makes the good works." This truth we fear Margaret did not understand. She filled her life with a beautiful and virtuous deeds. This must be acknowledged, unless indeed Bishop Turgot, her friend and confessor, has given us a romance pure and simple instead of a "life." Her biography, as it comes from his pen, is that of a perfect woman! It is the life of one in whose character no imperfection existed, in whose soul no virtue was lacking, in whose deportment no blemish or fault ever was found; it is the life of one who left no day without its deed of charity, and no hour without its act of piety. A beautiful picture if only it be true! We ask—Is this a possible life? It goes without saying that Bishop Turgot has not given us the real Margaret. How then are we to judge of her? We shall take Malcolm Canmore’s queen as Turgot has painted her, clothed in virtues as other queens in jewels, and see whether it be a fact that in this perfect character there is neither flaw nor fault. The radical defect in Queen Margaret’s piety, we venture to think, is that it is faultless. She rises to Bishop Turgot’s ideal, is a low one. It is sensuous, not spiritual The better half of her religion is an outside development, not the working of an inward principle. It is stiff and artificial. It has the musty odour of the religion of the Pharisee, and like his too, it is done before men. The impression it leaves is that of the good works making the good woman, to be followed of course by a reward to be counted not of grace but of debt.

To care for the widow and orphan as Margaret did, and to deal her bread to the hungry, were truly Christian acts, and sprang doubtless from that principle which is the source of all really good works. We cannot say the same, however, of some other services in which Queen Margaret showed great regularity and devotion, as, for instance, in her washing daily of the feet of so many paupers or vagrants. "When the office of Matins and Lauds was finished," says Turgot, "she, returning to her chamber, along with the king himself, washed the feet of six poor persons, and used to give them something wherewithal to relieve their poverty. It was the chamberlain’s special duty to bring these poor people in every night before the queen’s arrival, so that she might find them ready when she came to wait upon them."1

We like better the act with which Margaret began the day. It is more genuinely kind. "When it was morning," says her biographer, 2 she rose from bed and devoted a considerable time to prayer and the reading of the Psalms, and while reading the Psalms she performed the following work of mercy. She ordered that nine little orphans utterly destitute should be brought in to her at the first hour of the day, and that some soft food, such as children at that tender age like, should daily be prepared for them." When these children had been duly fed, there followed the gathering of three hundred people into the royal hall, and when they had been seated at table, "the king on the one side," says Bishop Turgot, "and the queen on the other waited upon Christ in the person of His poor, and served them with food and drink." Queen Margaret was a punctual observer of "holy days," and passed their hours in the prescribed litanies of the "Holy Trinity," the "Holy Cross," and "Holy Mary," as also in the recital of the Psalter, and in the hearing of five or six masses. After these prolonged services she again "waited on twenty-four poor people, whom she fed." 3 Her fasts were frequent and very rigorous; in fact she weakened and ultimately broke her constitution by her abstinences.

There is much artificiality and toil in all this; but as regards the good accomplished, it comes to very little in the end. The power and grandeur of a life spring out of the principles on which it is founded. The man who plants at the foundation of society some great principle which is a permanent cure of its evils—some principle which regenerates the society as a whole, and not merely benefits a few of its members—is the real benefactor. Margaret’s good deeds were local and temporary alleviations, not lasting reforms. They were a drop in the bucket of Scotland’s necessities, and they were counterbalanced a hundredfold by the evil she initiated when she planted at the heart of the Scottish nation a principle which was at war with all the elevating forces which till her day had been acting on the country. She turned Scotland backwards.

By and by Margaret took in hand weightier matters than the distribution of the palace alms. She essayed to act the role of the national reformer. Scotland needed a reformation; it was the true idea. This alone would bring back the grand Scotland of the Columban age. Margaret might deal out alms to all the beggars in her husband’s dominions. She might wash the feet of every vagrant in the kingdom: what better would Scotland be? The next day or the next year would bring more beggars and more vagrants. She was but rolling the stone of Sisyphus. What Scotland needed was to have its dying lamp relit, that the men who were stumbling in the dark might see where their happiness lay, and find their road to it. Margaret, in her mistaken zeal, was more likely to put that lamp out than rekindle it.

Nevertheless the Queen of Malcolm Canmore put her hand to the work of reforming the Scottish Church. We return to the council in the Palace of Dunfermline, convoked by her husband’s orders, to "travail" in this matter. It was composed of a few Culdee pastors on the one side, and three English ecclesiastics on the other, chosen and dispatched by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, at Margaret’s request.4 The archbishop, himself a learned disputant, knew the right men to send on a mission of this sort, where a kingdom was to be won to the papal interest. The Queen came to the front in the debate, but as she could speak only Saxon, and the Culdees understood no language but Gaelic, Malcolm, who could speak both languages with equal facility, acted as interpreter. The conference lasted three days. Margaret soon let it be seen that what she aimed at was a reformation on the model of Canterbury, that is of Rome. The restoration of the ancient Scottish Church was not what she desired. What she sought and hoped to accomplish was rather its overthrow, and the erection of a foreign ecclesiasticism in its room. "Observing," says Bishop Turgot, "that may practices existed among the Scottish nation which were contrary to the rule of the right faith, and the holy customs of the universal church, she caused frequent councils to be held, in order that by some means or other she might, through the gift of Christ, bring back into the way of truth those who had gone astray. Among these councils the most important is that in which for three days she, with a very few of her friends, combated the defenders of a perverse system with the sword of the Spirit, that is to say, with the Word of God. It seemed as if a second Helena were there present."5

As regards the points raised in the debate, Bishop Turgot gives with considerable fulness and force the defections charged upon the Columban clergy, but he omits to give with equal fulness their explanations and defences. He permits Queen Margaret and her Saxon assessors to be heard, but he shuts the mouths of the Culdee pastors, or affords them liberty of reply to only the extent of bowing assent. It may be very judicious in Bishop Turgot thus to enjoin silence upon one of the parties, but in a conference lasting for three days it is absurd to suppose that the spokesman were ally on the one side. Still the fact that a debate took place is itself a most important admission, as we shall immediately see.

The points raised were these: uniformity of rite, the Lenten fast, the observance of the Sabbath, the practice of marriage, the celebration of the eucharist, and the time of the observance of Easter. The Scottish Church and her clergy were charged on all these points, as being in error, and needing to be "brought back into the way of truth." Is not this a clear admission that the Columban Church in the end of the eleventh century still occupied separate ground from Rome? that she refused to receive the Roman laws and customs, and that she was not subject to the Roman jurisdiction, but on the contrary maintained her ancient independence? And does it not cut the ground from beneath the feet of those who assert that the Scottish Church by this time was, and had for some centuries previous, been one with the Church of Rome in doctrine and worship? Surely Queen Margaret would not have convoked a conference to bring about a union between two churches if they were already one and the same? A more decided proof there could not be of the independence and anti-Romanism of the Scottish Church of the eleventh century.

Let us look a little more closely at the points of difference betwixt the two churches as they were brought out in this discussion. The Queen opened the conference by insisting on uniformity of rite as essential to uniformity of doctrine. "All who serve God in one faith with the Catholic Church," said Margaret, "ought not to vary from that church by new or far-fetched usages."6 No church has so often employed this argument, and no church has so often contradicted it by her example as the Roman Church. Within her pale an iron uniformity of rite has always existed with a boundless latitude of opinion. But the point to be noted here is that Margaret’s remonstrance carries in it that neither in rite nor in faith did the Columban Church and the Roman Church agree.

The Queen next charged the Culdees with having fallen into grievous heterodoxy in the matter of the Lenten fast. "Our Lord fasted forty days," Margaret urged, "so does the Roman Church; but the Scots by refusing to fast on the Sabbaths in Lent, shorten their fast to thirty-six days." Margaret told them that they sinned in so abbreviating this fast. Margaret, if any one, had a right to call the Culdees to repent of this heinous transgression, seeing she herself was so very exemplary in the observance of the duty of fasting. According to Turgot, the pastors professed penitence and a promised amendment.

We very much doubt the accuracy of Turgot’s statement on this head. The historic presumption is against the bishop. The Culdee pastors were not likely to profess penitence oar promise amendment in a matter in which they stood fully acquitted in the eyes of their Church. It is important to observe here that the Scottish Church followed the Eastern usages in their fasts and festivals, and by the ordinances of the Eastern Church all fasts were severely prohibited on Sabbath (Saturday) and the Lord’s Day (Sunday).7 Besides, "Fasting" was not the supremely meritorious observance in the eyes of the Culdees which it was in those of Queen Margaret. Even granting that they were not able to take full advantage of the liberty which the Gospel gives to Christians, especially in the matter of bodily mortifications and ceremonial observances, they would not have burdened their consciences, we are disposed to think, with a day more or a day less in the matter, or regarded themselves and their fellow church members as shut out of the kingdom of heaven because they fasted thirty-six days only instead of forty, in the holy season of Lent.

After this came up the question of Culdee observance, or rather neglect, of the Lord’s Day. "It was another custom of theirs," says Turgot, "to neglect the reverence due to the Lord’s Day by devoting themselves to every kind of worldly business upon it, just as they did upon other days."8 It startles one to hear that the Columban clergy had sunk so low on this vital point. If they had turned the day of sacred rest into a day of ordinary labour: if they yoked the plough, worked the scythe, carried home the harvest, and did all their work on that day, as the words of Turgot appear to imply, the verily deserved the sharpest censure which Margaret could administer. The matter, however, is susceptible of a satisfactory explanation. The practices of the Eastern and Western Churches differed very considerably as regards the keeping of the Sabbath, or rather as regards the day obser4ved by them as that of holy rest and worship. Saturday was the Sabbath or Holy Day of the Eastern Church: not indeed to the entire exclusion of the first day of the week, on which it was their custom to sing hymns and celebrate divine service. The Western Church observed the Lord’s Day or Sunday. Britain, including Scotland, received its first evangelisation from the East, and it continued to follow generally the usages of the Eastern Church. The historian Socrates, speaking of the usual times of the public meeting of the members of the Eastern Church, called the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day, that is Saturday and Sunday, "the weekly festivals on which the congregation was wont to meet in the church for the performance of divine services.9 In the early Irish Church we come on traces of this custom, that is, of the observance of Saturday as the day of weekly rest and worship. We find such traces also in the history of the Scottish Church.

A well-known instance is that of Columba, as related by Adamnan. Bering come to his last day, he said this day is named the Sabbath, which means rest; and this day I shall enter into my rest. He died as he had foretold, On Saturday, at midnight. This aspect of the matter completely exonerates the Columban clergy from the rather serious accusation, for which it seems at the first blush, which Turgot preferred against them, and serves to bring out the fact that the Culdees claimed relationship with an older church than Rome.

The Roman Church followed the Western usage, that is, it observed, not the seventh but the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection, as the day of rest and holy worship. What Margaret wished was to get the Culdees to adopt this practice, and so break them into conformity with the Roman and Western Church.

The marriage customs of the Scots were next passed in review in this conference. Here again we are startled by the strong language of the Queen, as if the Scots were plunged in dreadful immoralities by their Culdeeism. "Next she proved," says Turgot, "how utterly abominable, yea more to be shunned by the faithful than death itself, was the unlawful marriage of a man with his stepmother, as also that the surviving brother should take to wife the widow of the deceased brother." 10 We have here another link betwixt the Culdees and the East, and another proof that the Christianity of the Scots did not come to them by way of Rome. It was enjoined in the Old Testament, ion certain circumstances, that a man should marry the widow of his deceased brother. It is for this the Scots are here blamed. Their real offence, we are persuaded, consisted in their opposition to the marriage law of Rome. The Church of Rome was enlarging her code of "prohibited degrees;" she was changing marriage into a sacrament, and declaring all marriages unlawful which were not so solemnised; in short, she was employing marriage as an instrument for the enslavement of society, and in the charges thrown out against the Scots on this head we trace another attempt on the part of Rome to bring them to submit to her yoke.

The purity of the Scots is borne witness to by Alcuin, an English writer of the ninth century. "The Scots," says he, "are said to lead a most chaste life, amid their worldly occupations, by rational consideration. But it is said that none of their laity make confession to priests, whom we believe to have received from Christ our God the power of binding and loosing together with the holy apostles."11 And still more significant, as regards the alleged contempt of marriage by the Irish and Scottish Christians, is what is said in the Life of Malachy, in the twelfth century. "The most wholesome use of confession," says he, "the sacrament of confirmation, and the contract of marriage," by which St Malachy means the Roman sacrament of marriage, "all which they before were either ignorant of or did neglect, Malachy did institute afresh."12

To understand that the Scots did not observe the ordinance of marriage is to contradict all Scottish history, though Giraldus Cambrensis has so represented the matter. And even Lanfranc and Anselm have preferred this same accusation, which is as absurd as it is calumnious. Sedulius reckons marriage among those things that "are gifts but not spiritual."13 The Church of Rome, however, knows nothing of such marriages.

Finally came up the supreme question of the eucharist. The sacrament of the Supper in the church of the West had long ceased to be the simple commemorative ordinance which it is seen at its first celebration in the upper chamber at Jerusalem; but neither had it as yet grown into that ceremonial of pomp and mystery which it was one day to become, and to which it was rapidly approximating. Nothing would have so delighted Margaret as to banish the simple Culdee "Supper," and replace it with the operatic splendour of the Roman Eucharist, because nothing would so conclusively seal the submission of the Scots to the authority of Rome. This was the heart of the controversy. Here must the great blow be struck.

"The Queen," says Turgot, "now raised another point; she asked them to explain why it was that on the festival of Easter they neglected to receive the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, according to the usage of the Holy and Apostolic Church?" The answer of the Culdees, as Bishop Turgot has reported it, was that they felt their unworthiness so deeply that they feared to "approach that mystery" This cannot have been their whole answer, for every one sees that this sense of unworthiness would have kept them away from the holy table not only on Easter day, but on all days and in all places. Now we know that the Culdees celebrated the eucharist in their own churches, and kept Easter after their own reckoning. Nay, it was made matter of accusation against them at an after stage of this same controversy, that they did celebrate this sacrament, although in a way displeasing to Margaret, because not "according to the usage of the Holy and Apostolic Church."

What , the, was the point of the accusation brought against the Culdee clergy, and what was the real attitude taken up by them on the question of the eucharist in this controversy? Turgot’s report has brought out neither. The accusation was not that they neglected observance of the sacrament of the upper. Their opponents knew that this they did not do. The accusation was that they refused to join in the celebration of the eucharist at the Roman altars on Easter day. Why? They "feared," they said, to "approach that mystery," that is, they feared to approach those communion tables on which the "Supper" had become the sacrament of the "Body and Blood" of Christ in another sense than that of its institution. Innocent III. had not yet enacted the dogma of transubstantiation, but after two centuries of discussion the belief of that mystery had worked itself into the general mind of the Roman world, and the Culdees hesitated to compromise their own faith or hurt their consciences by joining in this festival with those who believed that to be the literal flesh and blood of Christ which they knew to be only bread and wine. Therefore it was they eschewed the eucharistic table of Queen Margaret’s church.

If the Culdees "feared" they "mystery" presented on the altars of Margaret, the Queen in her turn was shocked at the bald simplicity of the "Supper" as seen on the Culdee communion tables. "There were certain places in Scotland," says Bishop Turgot, that is, there were Culdee chapels and cells, "in which masses were celebrated according to some sort of barbarous rite contrary to the usage of the whole church."14 The Bishop does not say what these "barbarous rites" were, but we can have no difficulty in guessing. They were the wooden communion tables of the Culdees: they were the vessels of home manufacture used in the celebration of the Supper, and the ordinary woollen dress of the officiating Culdee pastor. These all "were contrary to the usage of the whole church," therefore "barbarous." The same charge might have been brought against the first Supper in the upper chamber at Jerusalem. "Fired by the zeal of God," says the Bishop, "the Queen attempts to root out and abolish this custom, so that henceforth, from the whole of Scotland, there was not one single person who dared to continue the practice" We must here understand the good Bishop as stating what he earnestly desired or fondly hoped would happen as the result of this debate, rather than affirming what he knew to be the fact. It is perfectly known to us, and could not but be known to Bishop Turgot, had he taken any pains to inform himself, that the Scottish Culdees, in many instances at least, still kept their eucharist after the "barbarous" formula of their church, and did so for two hundred years after all the persons who figure in this conference had gone to their graves.

Let us illustrate this point by a side light. The Irish Culdees of the twelfth century are painted in even more odious colours than the Scots of the eleventh, and it helps us to determine what weight to attach to the charges against the latter to find that the former are accused of being plunged in the same barbarity and impiety with the Scots, simply because they preferred the apostolic usages of the primitive church to the Roman inventions of later times. St Bernard, speaking of the Reformation set on foot by Malachy when he became Bishop of Connor, says, "Then this man of God felt that he was appointed not over men but over beasts. Never before had he met with men in such barbarity; never before had he found men so stubborn against morals, so deadly to rites, so impious against faith, so savage to laws, so stiff-necked against discipline; Christians in name, pagans in reality. Not one could be found who would pay tithes or first-fruits; make confessions; ask for penances, or give them; or contract lawful marriages. What was the champion of God now to do? . . . At length, however, the fierceness yields, the barbarism begins to give way; savage rites are done away, and the Roman rites are introduced; the usages of the church are everywhere received, the sacraments are duly celebrated, confessions are made, concubinage disappears; and in short all things are so changed for the better that, to-day, we may well say of that nation, ‘Those which in time past were not a people are now the people of God.’ " 15 This is conclusive as regards the barbarity of which the Scotch and Irish churches of that age were accused. That barbarity consisted in their scriptural simplicity. Their accusers, who saw nothing barbarous in transubstantiation, with all that is implied in it. Were shocked to see the Supper administered in the simple elements of bread and wine. In their eyes no barbarism was equal to this.

This conference in the royal palace of Dunfermline was emphatically the "hour of temptation" to Scotland and her Church. Whether shall the faith of Iona or the authority of Rome henceforth govern the land? Shall Scotland forget her past? Shall she say that Columba was an impostor? That the glory of Iona was an illusion and a mockery, and that only now had the true light risen upon the Scots? This was the question to which Scotland was invited to return an answer in the royal chamber at Dunfermline. All that royal authority, queenly blandishment, ecclesiastical prestige, and trained dialect skill could do to overawe the Culdee pastors and influence their decision was done. To abide by Iona was to incur the frown of power, and invite a future dark with persecution. To go over to Rome was to open the road to preferment and honour. The temptation in Eden seemed to have renewed itself in the conference chamber of Dunfermline. The Culdees had been led, as it were, into a garden in which grew all manner of fruits pleasant to the eye and sweet to the taste of ambitious ecclesiastics. They were shown in prospect, dignities, titles, princedoms, bishoprics, emoluments, in short, all the golden fruits which adorn the trees that flourish on the Seven Hills, and drink of the waters of the Tiber. What fascination and enchantment must the goodly show now summoned up before their eyes have possessed for these unsophisticated pastors, "these dwellers beyond the bounds of the habitable world!" They were invited to pluck and eat, and were assured that in the day that they did so, their eyes would be opened and they would understand all mysteries and be replenished with celestial potencies and heavenly graces. The Temptress was a queen. We see her hold out the golden apple. Will the Culdees accept it? When the curtain falls on the scene, the religion of Rome is seen to be that of the Scottish court, but not as yet that of the Scottish nation.

1. Life of St Margaret, Queen of Scotland, by Turgot, Bishop of St Andrew's, translated from the Latin by William Forbes-Leith, S.J., p. 61. Edinburgh, 1884.

2. Turgot’s Life of St Margaret, p. 61.

3. Ibid. p. 63.

4. Turgot’s Life of St Margaret, p. 44. Letter of Lanfranc to Queen Margaret, Migne Patres Latini, Saec. xi. col. 549.

5. Turgot’s Life of Margaret, p. 44.

6. Turgot’s Life of St Margaret, p. 45.

7. Cave’s Primitive Christianity, Part I., chap. vii. P. 175. Lond., 1672.

8. Turgot’s Life of St Margaret, pp. 49, 50.

9. Hist. Eccl., Lib. vi., c. 8. See also Cave’s Primitive Christianity, Part I., chap. vii.

10. Turgot’s Life of St Margaret, p. 57.

11. Alcuin, Epist., 26. Usher citante.

12. Bernard’s Life of Malachy, c. 8.

13. Sedul. On Romans, chap. i. Quod donum quidem sit, non tamen spirituale, ut nupitae.

14. Turgot’s Life of St Margaret, p. 48.

15. Bernard’s Life of Malachy, chap. viii.