Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 45

William the Lion was succeeded by his son, Alexander II, a youth in years, but remarkable for prudence and for firmness. In his days there was some war with England, as he espoused the cause of the disaffected barons, against King John. But no disastrous consequences having arisen, the peace betwixt the two kingdoms was … effectually restored …

Relieved from the cares of an English war, Alexander endeavoured to civilize the savage manners of his own people. These were disorderly to a great degree.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER V

The reigns of two Alexanders – Alexander II (r.1214–49), the son of William the Lion, and Alexander’s son, Alexander III (r.1249–86) – spanned most of the thirteenth century. That century came to be wistfully remembered by John of Fordun in the 1380s as a golden age of princely stability and prosperity – especially as it was a prelude to tragedy and to the desperate times of the Wars of Independence. But how much of a Golden Age was it? Professor Ted Cowan has his reservations:

This ‘Golden Age’ was only golden because of what came after. It so happens that the second half of the thirteenth century was a period of prosperity everywhere in Europe. It seems to have just been one of those boom periods, for whatever reason, and Scotland shared in this. This was a period, after all, which is associated with the development of some of our greatest religious architecture, of abbeys and Romanesque churches, and of castle-building. The development of the royal burghs established by David I went on apace. Church organisation was strengthened and a proper parish system was established. So to that extent it was a period of development, prosperity and consolidation. It was also a time of relative peace – and ‘peace’ is always equated with ‘golden age’.

That is not to say that the thirteenth century was uneventful. The ‘peace’, as Ted Cowan points out, was relative. As soon as Alexander II ascended the throne at the age of sixteen his fledgling authority was challenged by a Celtic uprising in the north, but this was quickly quelled by a loyal lieutenant there. In England the old enemy, King John, was in deep trouble with his barons and was constrained to sign away some of his more arbitrary powers in the Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. Alexander II seized what he saw as a fine opportunity to regain the lost territories in the north of England which had so obsessed his father. It was a misjudgement: King John turned on Scotland with a snarl, ‘to chase the red fox-cub back to his lair’, as a chronicler put it, and vicious warfare flared on both sides of the border. But now the forces ranged against John were threatening to overwhelm him, and he was fighting for his life: his barons were at war with him and had brought over a French claimant to the throne – Louis, son and heir of King Philippe II of France. In October 1216 the English king was struck down by a mysterious illness which caused his death – from poison, according to some.

The death of King John changed everything. His son Henry, only nine years old, was quickly enthroned at Gloucester as Henry III under the regency of the stalwart old William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. In England, baronial support for Louis of France melted away and he sailed back home; and in Scotland, Alexander II laid aside his military ambitions in the north of England. Indeed, in 1221 he married Henry III’s elder sister, Joan, which did much to stabilise relations between the two countries. This left Alexander free to assert and consolidate royal authority in the ever-recalcitrant north and west of the mainland of Scotland.

In the 1230s Alexander came to realise that he was never going to recover Northumberland as a family possession, and in the autumn of 1237 he signed an amicable agreement (the Treaty of York) whereby he renounced all claims to territory south of the Tweed and the Solway. In recompense he was given tenure (under the overlordship of the English king) of certain lands in Northumberland and Cumberland – though not their castles. The Treaty of York, curiously enough, finds no mention in Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, but it was of extreme historical importance in that it established the Anglo – Scottish frontier along a line from the Tweed to the Solway – a line which was to remain unchanged from then on, with the conspicuous exception of Berwick-upon-Tweed. It was an implicit acceptance by England, for the time being at least, of Scotland’s right to exist as a free and independent kingdom.

And what of the common people of this independent nation of Scotland, as it could now be called – the people whose manners Walter Scott called ‘savage’ and ‘disorderly’ and much in need of civilising? The population of Scotland at this time was only about 300,000. Most of them were poor peasants living in small stone-and-turf houses which they usually shared with any livestock they might have had: subsistence farming – mainly pastoral in the north and west, more arable south of the Forth – with the tenants paying rent to the laird in kind and in labour; but at least the weather conditions were markedly better than they had been in previous centuries. Only a small proportion of the population – perhaps 10 per cent – lived in the trading towns established by David I and continued by the Alexanders as new links were forged with overseas markets; Europeans with commercial and manufacturing skills were encouraged to come and settle in these burghs, of which there were nearly fifty by the end of the thirteenth century.

The Treaty of York gave Alexander II greater freedom of manoeuvre, now that he no longer had to devote so many of his energies to coping with his much larger and more powerful neighbour. In 1238 his wife Joan died childless, and Alexander immediately applied himself to one of the most urgent functions of medieval kingship – producing a male heir to the throne. He turned not to England but to the nobility of France, and in the following year he married Marie de Coucy, a kinswoman of the French king. In September 1241 she duly bore him a son, who was named after his father – the future Alexander III.

There was to be another spat with England, in 1244, when Scottish and English armies eyed one another menacingly across the border. There seems to have been an element of brinkmanship involved, and in the event no battle ensued; but as part of the peace negotiations the infant Alexander was betrothed to Henry III’s daughter Margaret, herself only a year older than her future bridegroom. It seemed to adumbrate a future when the two kingdoms would be much more closely allied – perhaps even a Union of the Crowns many centuries before that actually came about in 1603.

Alexander II had consolidated the crown’s control over mainland Scotland and welded it into a more cohesive realm than it had ever been. Now the time was ripe to extend this centralised royal authority over the islands to the west – the Hebrides. For long (too long, in thirteenth-century Scottish eyes) they, and the Northern Isles, had been subject to the crown of Norway (see Chapter 3)

Norwegian royal authority in the Western Isles had been waning steadily as the Gaelic-speaking leaders of the warrior Somerled dynasty vied for the title of ‘Lord of the Isles’. In Norway, however, there was now a king of great drive and imperial ambition – King Håkon IV (r.1217–64), who has come down in history with the sobriquet Håkon ‘the Old’.

Historians seeking to gain a clear picture of relations between Scotland and Norway at this period now look to overseas sources – particularly the medieval Icelandic sagas such as Orkneyinga Saga and Hákonar Saga, the biography of Håkon the Old written soon after his death by the Icelandic saga-historian Sturla Thórðarson; there are no contemporary Scottish sources for the events, and later Scottish historians were to invent and embellish to fill the gaps.

In 1230, Håkon the Old decided to re-establish effective Norwegian suzerainty over the Hebridean warlords, who owed him revenues and allegiance. He sent a punitive expedition in 1230 which caused considerable havoc. One furious engagement is described in graphic detail in his saga – a three-day assault on Rothesay Castle on the island of Bute, in the Firth of Clyde. The Norsemen finally got in by hacking through the castle’s thick circular stone walls with their axes despite cascades of boiling lead and pitch raining down upon them from the battlements. Rothesay Castle, with its unique (for Scotland) circular walls, is now in state care and has been vividly restored by Historic Scotland; romantics like me can persuade themselves that they can still see the marks of the implacable Norse axes which forced an entry.

The Norsemen did not stay long to enjoy their exploit, but the expedition as a whole was considered to have been a success: those whose allegiance to Norway had been suspect were killed or driven out, and new men were put in their place; the Western Isles had been ‘pacified’ to Håkon’s satisfaction.

It was only natural that Alexander II should want to exercise dominion over the Western Isles himself, if only to curb the piratical Islesmen whose galleys menaced the seaways off the western Highlands. Accordingly, he sent embassies to Norway from 1244 onwards to try to negotiate a deal over the islands. The Scottish envoys even indicated that Alexander would be prepared to buy the Western Isles for good silver, to which King Håkon gave a haughty answer: ‘He said he was not aware that he was so short of silver that he needed to sell his lands for it.’

The repeated diplomatic snubs from Norway only increased Alexander’s determination to deal with this thorn in his western side, by force if necessary, especially after Håkon appointed Ewen, Lord of Argyll and head of the powerful Macdougall clan, as his vassal king over the islands. In the spring of 1249 Alexander mobilised a massive expedition by land and sea to crush this threat to ‘the soft underbelly of Scotland’, as the novelist Eric Linklater called it.

Alexander’s first target was to be Dunstaffnage Castle at the entrance to Loch Etive on the western seaboard; it was the chief stronghold of the Macdougalls and had only recently been built by Ewen of Argyll (or his father). What a fortress it was, and is! It stands proud on a rocky knoll on a promontory some four miles north of Oban. Its massive stone curtain walls, still intact after nearly eight centuries, must have seemed almost impregnable; its lofty battlements command a tremendous view west across the seaway towards the island of Lismore and east into the narrows of Loch Etive towards the looming bulk of Ben Cruachan.

Alexander gathered his great fleet in the Sound of Kerrera, the three-kilometre-long fertile island which shelters the Oban coastline. But as his galleys lay at anchor in Horseshoe Bay, poised to launch the assault on Dunstaffnage, Alexander had an ominous dream, according to Hákonar Saga:

When King Alexander was lying at anchor in Kerrera Sound he had a dream. In his dream he thought that three men came to him. One of them seemed to him to be dressed in royal robes. He looked very menacing, ruddy of face and rather stout, of medium height. The second man seemed slender in build and gallant-looking, very handsome and of noble bearing. The third man was much the biggest in build and the most menacing of them all. His forehead was quite bald. He spoke to the king and asked him if he were heading for the Hebrides. The king replied that this was so: he was on his way to subjugate the islands. The man in his dream asked him to turn back, saying that nothing else would do.

The king recounted his dream, and most of his companions urged him to turn back, but the king refused. Soon afterwards the king fell ill and died. The Scots then dispersed their army and transported the king back to Scotland. The Hebrideans say that the men who appeared to the king in his dream would have been Saint Ólaf, King of Norway, and Saint Magnús, Earl of Orkney, and Saint Columba.

Whether one believes in dreams or not, Alexander II did indeed fall ill in Kerrera Sound. He died there, either on his ship or on land, on 8 July 1249; no cairn commemorates the spot, but a grassy field beside the shore is known to this day as ‘Dalrigh’ – Gaelic for ‘the field of the king’. He was buried in Melrose Abbey, in accordance with his last wishes; his unmarked tomb is in a recess in the wall of the presbytery to the south of the High Altar, but there is no plaque to identify it for visitors, as yet.

With Alexander’s death, his army melted away and the great fleet dispersed; but the crown’s ambition to annex the Hebrides was only put on hold, not abandoned.