Читать книгу The Three Edwards: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 24

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The waters of St. Tredwell’s Loch, which always turned red when a death occurred in the royal family of Scotland, must have astonished the natives one autumn night in the year 1290 by the vivid color they assumed. The Maid of Norway had died, and her death was to involve the country in years of such sanguinary strife that many other waters would run red with blood.

The Maid of Norway was the granddaughter of the very pretty Princess Margaret of England, oldest daughter of Henry III, who had been married when eleven years of age to Alexander III of Scotland. This vivacious and dark-eyed child had been taken to Edinburgh by her strait-laced Scottish guardians and confined most strictly in the castle, to prevent her from seeing her husband, who was only ten years old. She was given nothing to eat but oaten bannocks and “paritch” and for recreation she could look out into the foggy skies and listen to a piper in the courtyard below. She was not released from this dismal life until an English army appeared at the border to demand her liberty. Later she was very happy with her husband, to whom she presented three children, two sons and one daughter, named Margaret also. The daughter in course of time married Eric II of Norway and died after giving birth to a third Margaret, who was called thereafter the Maid of Norway.

In the meantime the first Margaret had died and within two years both of her fine sons, Alexander and David, had passed away, leaving the succession to the infant princess in Norway. King Alexander, most reluctantly, for he had been very much in love with his English wife, married then a daughter of the French Count de Dreux, whose name was Joleta, in the hope of having more sons. Pending this development, it was agreed by the nobles of the country that the third Margaret should be considered the successor to the throne.

At this point Edward of England showed signs of possessing what was called in Scotland “the sign of the thread”; in other words, an instinct for bargaining. Seeing a way to bring England and Scotland together under one ruler, he negotiated with the King of Norway a marriage between the Maid and his son Edward, who had now reached the age of six and showed evidence of becoming a very handsome fellow indeed.

The hand of fate then intervened to give the situation a final ironic twist. Alexander of Scotland, still without children by his second marriage, came one night to Burntisland on his way to Kinghorn, where his wife was staying. It was dark and stormy and he was urged to delay his departure until morning. But the king was not one to be balked by inclement weather and, like Tam o’ Shanter, he started out into the wild night. His horse missed its footing on the edge of a steep cliff and Alexander was killed in the fall.

He had been a good king and all Scotland mourned for him. As one chronicler put it:

He honoured God and holy kirk,

And medfull dedys he oysed to werk.

The people had every reason to mourn, for now all hope of a peaceful accession was centered in the small child in Norway. Arrangements were made to bring her at once to Scotland. A well-equipped ship was sent for her, fitted out with everything to please the heart of an infant queen—fine clothes and bonnets, soft mattresses, and sweetmeats and frails of dates and figs (a frail being a large basket), and all manner of toys, including perhaps a crown.

Playing cards had not yet been introduced into western Europe, but if they had it might have been said that now Edward of England had all the trumps in his hands. He arranged at once for a meeting at Salisbury to which commissioners from Scotland and Norway were summoned, to make the needful arrangements for the succession and marriage. Under the pretext that the rights of the youthful pair must be conserved, he demanded that Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, be made governor of Scotland in the interim. This was reluctantly agreed to, for the Scottish commissioners, having a trace of the same thread, knew a shrewd maneuver when they saw one.

When the ship returned from Norway and put in at the island of Orkney, the news was conveyed to the anxiously waiting people of Scotland that the little queen had succumbed to the hardships of sea travel while crossing the stormy waters between the two countries.

Almost immediately no fewer than thirteen claimants to the throne came forward. The land was threatened with civil war, and in desperation the lords of the northern kingdom appealed to Edward to act as arbitrator. This duty he undertook with readiness.

A mystery developed almost immediately in connection with the death of the Maid of Norway. It was whispered about that it was not the princess who had died, that in fact she had been spirited off the vessel before it sailed; how or why being left to the individual imagination. In 1301 a handsome young woman came to Norway from Leipzig and gave it out that she was the Princess Margaret. Her story was that she had been kidnaped by a woman named Ingeberg, the wife of Thor Hokansson, and sold into servitude. She bore sufficient resemblance to the deceased Maid to win her some adherents. Her story could not be substantiated in any way, however, and the law did not delay in dealing with the matter. The pretender was imprisoned and later burned at the stake as a witch. She became, to those who had believed in her, a legendary figure and for a long time she was revered as a saint.