Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 46

ALEXANDER III, then only in his eighth year, succeeded to his father in 1249. Yet, when only two years older, he went to York to meet with the English King, and to marry his daughter, the Princess Margaret.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER V

Scone Palace, hard by the city of Perth in the geographical heartland of Scotland, is one of the stateliest of the country’s private homes, the seat of the Earl and Countess of Mansfield. The first house, built at the end of the sixteenth century, was almost totally rebuilt in pseudo-Gothic style in 1802–12 by the third Earl of Mansfield; this huge mansion is a treasury of beautiful objets d’art and paintings and furnishings of rare historic interest.

It was here at Scone, seated on the Stone of Scone in what had been the power-base of the old Pictish kingdom of Fortriu (see Chapter 3), that the seven-year-old Alexander III was inaugurated as King of Scots on 13 July 1249, a week after the death of his father. The boy-king was accompanied to Scone by seven earls and many other leading magnates and churchmen of Scotland. The scene was described, a century later, in John of Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scottorum:

[They] led Alexander, soon to be the king, to the cross which stands in the churchyard at the east end of the church of Scone. There they set him on the royal throne, which was decked with silken cloths inwoven with gold; and the Bishop of St Andrews, assisted by the rest, consecrated him king, as was meet. So the king sat down upon the royal throne – that is, the Stone – while the earls and other nobles, on bended knee, spread their garments under his feet before the Stone.

Now, this stone is reverently kept in that same monastery for the coronation of the kings of Alba; and no king was ever wont to reign in Scotland unless he had first, on receiving the name of king, sat upon this Stone at Scone, which by kings of old had been appointed the capital of Alba.

It was a solemn and striking occasion. Afterwards a traditional Highland sennachie (bard) recited in Gaelic the new king’s genealogy far back into the distant mythical past, to the eponymous Scota and Gaedel Glas: ‘Hail, king of Alba, Alexander, mac Alexander, mac William, mac Henry, mac David …’ It was a powerful public recognition of the strength of the living inheritance from the Celtic kingdoms of the past.

It is impossible to be certain where at Scone the ceremony took place. In the thirteenth century there was an abbey where the present palace now stands. The inauguration of Alexander III seems to have taken place in the open air, close to the abbey at a site traditionally known as Moot Hill (Hill of Meeting) directly opposite the palace; the Stone of Scone (‘Stone of Destiny’) would have been carried from the abbey and decked as a throne. Moot Hill, now half-screened by yew trees, was reduced in height in the nineteenth century. On it today stands a small family mausoleum, all that remains of the church which was built there in 1624 and in which Charles II was crowned in 1651. Outside the mausoleum is a replica of the Stone of Scone; it is as close to actual history as the visitor can get.

The accession of a minor might well have caused a political crisis (as it would do, time and time again, during the Stewart dynasty), but on this occasion Church and nobility closed ranks to protect the crown. Alexander’s kingship was perceived to be blessed by divine grace within two months by the canonisation of the matriarch of the dynasty, Queen Margaret, wife of Malcolm Canmore, in 1250. This was a notable coup which gave the royal line the lustre of a saintly ancestry and which was celebrated in June 1250 by the solemn translation of her remains to a new shrine near the great altar in Dunfermline Abbey.

In December 1251, at the age of ten, the boy-king was taken by his court to York to be knighted by Henry III before being married to Henry’s daughter Margaret. It gave the English king an immediate opportunity to raise the dormant question of Scotland’s subjection to England; according to the contemporary St Albans Chronicle, Alexander was then asked to do homage for the kingdom of Scotland. His advisers must have seen this coming, for the boy replied gravely that he had come to marry, not to answer so difficult a question. That answer helped to defuse, for a time at least, the perennial issue of overlordship.

The years of Alexander’s minority in the 1250s had their political tremors as different noble factions and parties within the regency vied for control of the king’s person (and therefore the government), with Henry III interfering busily in the background – ostensibly out of concern for his daughter’s welfare. The young couple were not allowed to live together as man and wife and were kept under the strict control of tutors or guardians

When Alexander’s minority ended in 1259, on his eighteenth birthday, the reins of government were firmly held by pro-king nobles – particularly the powerful Comyn family, who exercised power on behalf of the king in both the north and the south-west – and he was able to hit the ground running, as the saying goes. He showed strength of character and even-handedness in dealing with his quarrelsome nobles. Soon he was resuming his father’s attempt to wrest the Hebrides from Norwegian control. In 1261 he sent an embassy to Norway to discuss the Scottish claim to the Hebrides, but King Håkon was in no mood for concessions. In the summer of 1262 news reached Norway of savage raids on the Isle of Skye from the mainland; furthermore, the messengers from Skye reported that the King of Scots had declared openly that he intended to take possession of the Hebrides by force or die in the attempt.

These reports ‘caused King Håkon the gravest concern’, as his saga puts it, and that Christmas he called on all the regions of his realm to muster the traditional defence levy in Bergen the following spring. He fitted out a royal flagship which had been specially built in Bergen – a magnificent oaken vessel with snarling dragon-heads fore and aft, gleaming with gold inlay. It was an exceptionally large ship, with thirty-seven pairs of oars, and Håkon had designed it as a troop-carrier for the cream of his soldiers: one half-bench for each oar carried four men, making a total complement of 296, including a retinue of priests and civil servants. According to the contemporary Icelandic Annals Håkon’s fleet contained ‘the largest army which had ever sailed from Norway’, and it is clear that Håkon was using his ships as transports laden to the gunwales with troops in case he decided to launch a full-scale invasion of the Scottish mainland and engage the Scottish army in pitched battle.

The fleet set sail from Bergen for Shetland early in July 1263, but things did not go smoothly in mustering more ships in the Northern Isles. Eventually, on 10 August, Håkon set sail westwards through the Pentland Firth and across the Minch to Lewis. He mustered again near South Rona, off Skye, where he was joined by reinforcements from the Isle of Man, and from there the great, glittering fleet passed through the narrow Kyle of Lochalsh at a point which was thereafter named after him: the Strait of Håkon, Kyle-Håkon – Kyleakin.

South they coasted, to Kerrera and Oban Bay, where they were joined by some loyal Islesmen. Here Håkon paused again, and sent off a squadron of fifty ships to plunder in Kintyre, while another fifteen rounded the Mull of Kintyre and attacked the Isle of Bute, where Rothesay Castle was taken again as it had been in 1230. Kintyre and Islay submitted at the first taste of pillage, and the plundering was called off in return for a tax of a thousand head of cattle. After that, with the islands to the west brought to heel, Håkon weighed anchor and sailed south down the coast of Kintyre and rounded the Mull into the Clyde estuary, where he anchored in Lamlash Bay, on Arran, in the lee of Holy Island. It was now September, and Håkon’s strategy was clear: the stronghold on the Isle of Bute had been reduced, and he lay poised with a huge army to strike at the mainland at will.

Alexander, meanwhile, had apparently been mustering the Scots army somewhere in Ayrshire. He now sent an embassy of Dominican friars to Arran to make overtures of peace. Håkon responded by sending over a delegation of two bishops ‘skilled in the Scots tongue’. When the talks began, Alexander seemed only too willing to come to terms. He said he would think things over and send his delegation back to renew the talks on Arran the next day. Håkon had made up a list of all the islands to the west which he claimed to own; Alexander jibbed over Arran, Bute and the Cumbraes – but that was merely a technicality, he implied. Agreement was just around the corner; a settlement was almost within their grasp – but somehow it remained just beyond their grasp. The saga suggests that the Scots were deliberately spinning things out: ‘The Scots had decided to prolong the negotiations, and make sure that a settlement was never quite achieved, as summer was passing and the weather would soon worsen.’

The drift of the Scottish tactics was not lost on King Håkon. In another threatening move he took his fleet much closer to the Scottish coast, to the lee of the Cumbraes just off Largs. More talks followed, but the outcome was always the same: there were still some minor differences to be settled, nothing serious – but meanwhile Alexander allowed the Norsemen a glimpse of his army assembling on the hills inland. Håkon was rapidly losing patience, and now he sent Alexander an ultimatum – that they should meet on land, each with his full army, and talk, and if the talks failed they would fight. Alexander responded that he was not averse to fighting, but gave no definite answer either way.

Håkon was now running out of time and provisions. Abruptly he called off the talks and sent a squadron of sixty ships up Loch Long to Arrochar, where they dragged their ships’ boats across a porterage to Tarbet and Loch Lomond and burned and terrorised the islands in the loch and the surrounding Lennox countryside. On their way back, however, the saga relates that ten of their ships were wrecked in Loch Long in a gale.

The same gale was to play havoc with Håkon’s main fleet sheltering under the Cumbraes. It struck on the night of Sunday, 30 September, howling in from the south-west. During the night a merchantman was blown against the king’s ship; its stays fouled the dragon-head, snapping off the nostrils. As the tempest blew harder, ship after ship dragged its anchors; it took no fewer than eight anchors to hold the king’s huge ship steady. By dawn the loose merchantman and three longships had been blown across the sound and lay stranded on the mainland shore below the steep slopes of the Cunninghame hills (hence the name ‘Largs’, meaning ‘slopes’). So ferocious was the storm that many were convinced it had been conjured up by sorcery.