Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 44

To be saddled with the sobriquet of ‘Lion’ (or ‘Lion-heart’, for that matter) can be a handicap if one’s actions are not perceived as being sufficiently leonine. William was never known as ‘the Lion’ in his lifetime – it was a nickname invented by later historians – and there is little agreement about how or why he acquired the name. In Tales of a Grandfather, Sir Walter Scott assumed that it was because of the emblematic lion rampant on his coat of arms. Others have thought it was because of his ‘rough and stern countenance’. The most likely explanation, to my mind, lies with the earliest Scottish chronicler to imply the name, John of Fordun in the fourteenth century, who referred flatteringly to William as leo justitiae, a ‘lion of justice’. Nonetheless, if he really was the first Scottish king to emblazon his standard with the lion rampant, William bequeathed to his nation a symbol of defiance with which generations of Scots have been happy to identify ever since.

Arbroath Abbey was the other major legacy of his reign, and thereby hangs an intriguing tale. William was not greatly renowned for piety or devotion to the Church, as his brother Malcolm IV had been (although towards the end of his life he seems to have achieved a reputation for personal sanctity). But in 1178, three years after his release from Henry’s captivity after the disaster at Alnwick, he not only founded Arbroath Abbey but also endowed it so lavishly that it became one of the richest religious houses in all Scotland.

According to the original charter, William founded a monastery and church ‘at the place near the mouth of the Brothock Burn in honour of God and of St Thomas à Becket, Archbishop and Martyr’. That should give us pause, for there is more to this than meets the eye. Why should this violently anti-English king choose to dedicate this magnificent Scottish foundation to Thomas à Becket, an Anglo-Norman prelate?

Thomas, in his time, was the most brilliant figure in the court of Henry II, a man of great personal charisma, apparently, an assiduous party-giver, a skilled diplomat and, moreover, well-versed in all the martial arts of chivalry. He became Henry’s chancellor in 1155 (the year after Henry’s accession), and in 1162 Henry appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury. Almost overnight the sybarite became an ascetic; his former loyalty to Henry was replaced by an unswerving zeal for the Church and its rights against the state. This led to exile, followed by an uneasy reconciliation; but as soon as Thomas returned to Canterbury the old antagonism flared up again, and Henry uttered his celebrated, impetuous wish to be rid of ‘this turbulent priest’. It was as a direct result of these intemperate words that Thomas à Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 by four of Henry’s hard-tempered Norman knights. The murder and its circumstances sent a thrill of horror throughout Europe, and stories soon spread of miracles worked at Thomas’s tomb. In 1173 he was canonised and quickly became the most widely venerated of all English saints.

King Henry was nothing if not a pragmatist. Becket’s martyrdom had swung the struggle between Church and crown in the Church’s favour, and Henry had to swing it back again. After settling some differences in Normandy in the summer of 1174, Henry came back to England to do public penance for the death of Thomas à Becket. On 12 July he submitted himself to be scourged by each one of the eighty assembled clergymen in turn.

A week later, when Henry was back in London, he was brought the news that King William of Scotland had been captured at Alnwick on the previous Saturday – 13 July. Praise be to God! And, in particular, praise be to Thomas à Becket, who had in this way clearly rewarded Henry for his (albeit belated) repentance.

But why, four years later, should William wish to thank God and Thomas à Becket for his capture? One can understand his motives, in the middle of the most abjectly humiliating period of his reign, for building Arbroath Abbey in the first place, as a deliberate and defiant statement of his continuing importance and prestige. And perhaps – just perhaps – the dedication to St Thomas was intended as a monumental insult to the English royal house, by extolling the man who, both in life and in death, had humbled the crown of England, yet couched in such unassailable piety that none could publicly take offence, not even Henry of England himself. I tend to believe that it was the one truly subtle thing which this blunt and headstrong king ever did.

After his death at Stirling in 1214 the body of King William the Lion was taken to the abbey he had founded and was buried there ‘in front of the high altar’, according to John of Fordun. But where ‘in front of the high altar’? For many years there was no monument nor plaque to commemorate his interment, because no one knew the precise spot where his body had been laid. And then, in 1816, a local antiquarian named Dr Stevenson who was poking around with spade and trowel in the ruins, four metres in front of the High Altar, chanced upon an old stone coffin containing some mouldering bones, its lid surmounted by a headless recumbent effigy with its feet resting upon a crouching lion.

We should remember that this period was the heyday of earnest amateur antiquarianism. 1816 was also, by an agreeable coincidence, the year in which Sir Walter Scott published one of his most charming works, his own ‘chief favourite among all his novels’, as he himself put it: The Antiquary. The antiquary of the title, Jonathan Oldbuck, the learned and garrulous Laird of Monkbarns, is an affectionately mocking caricature of all those earnest snappers-up of unconsidered historical trifles – including Walter Scott himself:

He had his own pursuits, being in correspondence with most of the virtuosi of his time, who, like him, measured decayed entrenchments, made plans of ruined castles, read illegible inscriptions, and wrote essays on medals in proportion of twelve pages to each letter of the legend.

Dr Stevenson, the real-life Jonathan Oldbuck, leaped to the instant and uncritical conclusion that he had found a royal tomb – the royal tomb, indeed: the tomb of William the Lion. The find created a local sensation; it also created a small fortune for unscrupulous local entrepreneurs who were soon exhibiting and selling bits of bones from the coffin (assiduously replenished whenever stocks ran out). Dr Stevenson himself sent various items of ossified royalty to his fellow-virtuosi and antiquarians, including a tooth (‘a royal grinder’, as he called it) to a gentleman in Montrose: ‘Very few relics are so well authenticated,’ he wrote, ‘even the most venerated of the Church of Rome.’

But it was all wishful thinking. After more than a century and a half of fierce argument the effigy on the sarcophagus lid was dated, on stylistic grounds, to be that of a wealthy commoner from no earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century – 150 years after King William’s death. It was placed for safe keeping in the Abbot’s House outside the skeleton walls of the abbey and put on proper display as part of an imaginative Visitor Information system in 1982 (the first to be put in place at a historic monument in the care of the state). Finally, in 1986, to give the vexed issue of William’s place of interment a dignified conclusion, the Historic Buildings and Monuments Directorate of Scotland (now Historic Scotland) planted that sandstone memorial slab in the area in front of the High Altar. It marks not the alleged site of the burial, but only the event itself:

King William the Lion

King of Scots 1165–1214

Founded this monastery in 1178

In honour of St Thomas of Canterbury,

Archbishop and Martyr,

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.