Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 36

At the summit of the citadel of Edinburgh Castle stands a tiny, simple building which is the oldest surviving structure in the castle: St Margaret’s Chapel. It was built in the 1130s or 1140s by Margaret’s youngest son, King David I (see Chapter 6), and dedicated to his mother, who had died in the castle in 1093. It began as a private oratory for the royal family; in the sixteenth century it passed out of use as a chapel and was converted into a gunpowder magazine. Its original purpose was rediscovered in 1845 and it was restored to its present condition. It is now a very popular venue for weddings and christenings: castle guides tell visitors, tongue in cheek, that it is the ideal place for a Scottish wedding, for it only holds twenty people and the bride’s father can have the reception in the telephone box on the way down!

The interior is as charming as the exterior is austere. The semi-circular chancel at the east end which housed the altar now has stained-glass windows depicting St Andrew and St Ninian. St Columba is represented, too, as is William Wallace in full battle array. But pride of place goes to St Margaret herself, flaxen-haired and beautiful, flanked by handmaidens at their sewing and holding an open book on her lap.

Margaret arrived in Scotland as a direct result of the Norman Conquest of 1066. She was of the English royal family which was swept aside by William of Normandy. Born in Hungary about the year 1047, she was a granddaughter of Edmund Ironside (half-brother of Edward the Confessor, r.1042–66), who had been killed resisting the conquest of England in 1016 by the Danish king Knút (Canute); she was the daughter of Edmund’s son Edward, who had married a Hungarian princess during his long exile in Hungary but died soon after the family’s return to England in 1057; and she was the sister of Prince Edgar (‘Edgar the Atheling’), whose claims to the throne at the death of the childless Edward the Confessor early in 1066 were passed over in favour of the warrior Harold Godwinsson.

After the Conquest, William the Conqueror treated Edgar and his family well, despite the fact that Edgar had been, rather optimistically, declared king-elect after Harold’s death at Hastings. But this cosy state of affairs did not last long, and in 1068, after an abortive rebellion in the north of England which he supported, Edgar tried to escape back to the greater safety of Hungary with his mother and two sisters, Margaret and Christina. Their ship, bound for the Continent, was driven off course by gales to Scotland and made land in Fife in a small bay now called St Margaret’s Hope (Inlet).

The story goes that Malcolm Canmore, now a forty-year-old widower, rode from his residence at Dunfermline to welcome the royal refugees to Scotland; he fell instantly in love with the young Princess Margaret, who was then in her early twenties, and within a few months he married her in Dunfermline.

Be that as it may, it was clearly a good political marriage. From Edgar’s point of view, it meant becoming brother-in-law to a formidable warrior King of Scots who could provide him with powerful support against the Norman ‘usurpers’ in England. For Malcolm, Margaret brought not just an alliance with the old royal house of England, but also a significant dowry in the form of the rich treasures which King Stephen of Hungary had given to her mother.

She was an excellent woman, and of such a gentle, amiable disposition, that she often prevailed upon her husband, who was a fierce, passionate man, to lay aside his resentment, and forgive those who had offended him.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

Sir Walter Scott’s picture of Queen Margaret as a Saxon diamond among Celtic dross is the conventional image of her which has come down in history. Margaret’s confessor in Scotland was a chaplain named Turgot (subsequently the first Roman, as opposed to Celtic, Bishop of St Andrews), who wrote a vivid biography of her soon after her death. In Turgot’s account she emerges as a determined and saintly woman who dominated her brash but doting husband who was so besotted with her that, although illiterate himself, he would kiss her devotional books and have them bound with gold and jewels.

As is to be expected in a biography which was also a hagiography, Turgot placed huge emphasis on the saintly queen’s piety. She enjoyed the rich trappings of royalty, but she also spent many hours in prayer, and fed the poor regularly and washed their feet. Soon after her marriage she attended to the building of a small Romanesque church at Dunfermline, and three Benedictine monks were sent at her request from Canterbury to form the nucleus of a Benedictine priory there. She restored the church on Iona and was a benefactress of St Andrews, where she revived the cult of St Andrew and encouraged pilgrims to go there by giving them free passage across the Forth – the names of South and North Queensferry, on either side of the estuary of the Forth, still carry the memory of this initiative. Her devotion to the Roman Church which had embraced her during her childhood in Hungary was undoubtedly significant in the struggle between the doctrines and formulas of the Celtic Church of Scotland, founded by St Columba, and the established practice of the Universal Catholic Church in which she had been reared.

Apart from the influence she may have had on spiritual matters in Scotland, Margaret has also been credited with, or blamed for, the anglicisation of the court and culture of southern Scotland:

a very great number of the Saxons who fled from the cruelty of William the Conqueror, retired into Scotland, and this had a considerable effect in civilizing the southern parts of that country; for if the Saxons were inferior to the Normans in arts and in learning, they were, on the other hand, much superior to the Scots, who were a rude and very ignorant people … No doubt, the number of the Saxons thus introduced into Scotland, tended much to improve and civilize the manners of the people …

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

Walter Scott never missed a chance to rub in his view that the Scots of medieval times were a decidedly backward people compared with their southern neighbours. But certainly at this time, in the latter half of the eleventh century, Scotland can be seen to be moving from a Gaelic-speaking realm of semi-autonomous princedoms to a much more centralised monarchy on the English and Continental model. If Macbeth was the last truly Celtic King of Scots, as some claim, it is because during Malcolm’s reign there was a greater intermingling of the Celtic and Anglo-Norman cultures and mores.

It was perhaps on the future of Scotland and Anglo – Scottish relations, rather than on their present, that Queen Margaret had most effect – through the children she had by Malcolm. She gave birth to six pious sons, three of whom would reign successively as Kings of Scots: Edgar (r.1097–1107), Alexander I (r.1107–24) and David I (r.1124–53). She also had two daughters, both of whom married into the English royal house: Edith, the elder, married William the Conqueror’s son, Henry I of England (r.1100–35), and became known in England as the Empress Matilda (see below); and Mary, the younger, married Eustace, Count of Boulogne, and their daughter (also named Matilda, or Maud) married Stephen of Blois, who was King of England from 1135 to 1164.