Margaret the Queen

by Nigel Tranter

  Exhausted by this effort, she seemed to sink away. Maldred thought that her breathing had stopped, and took an involuntary step forward to the bedside. Edgar sank on his knees.

  But then the large eyes opened again. "I come," she said, with distinct authority. "It is finished. Fetch me . . . the Holy Rood. Quickly!" That last was urgent.

  Maldred saw the Queen's eyes turned towards a corner of the bedchamber. Expecting to see the famous relic there, he was surprised to perceive a man kneeling there in the shadows, the Cluniac friar Thurstan, the current confessor found for the Queen by Turgot. Silently this priest rose, bowed and hurried from the room.

  "Quickly!" Margaret sped him.

  "Mother . . ." Edgar began, but stopped when he saw that the Queen's lips were working again. He leaned close, to listen. "I cannot hear what she says," he exclaimed, in agitation.

  Maldred bent, ear down. "It is the psalm," he said softly. ". . . from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof. . ."

  As though it was desperately important that they did not miss a single word, they listened to those painfully-panted well-known phrases of the Fiftieth Psalm.

  "Out of Sion hath God appeared: in perfect beauty . . ."

  It took them a little while to recognise that seeming mistakes and stumblings in the faint recital were in fact the Queen inserting the word 'quickly, quickly' here and there, with a sort of feverish impatience. Her hearers looked at each other helplessly.

  The murmuring had all but died away when the priest came hastening back from the Queen's chapel outside, with the Black Rood in its silver casket, the same relic which Maldred had first seen in that dark ship's cabin at Wearmouth, twenty-four years before. Thurstan brought it and laid it on the bed.

  Thankfully Margaret reached her trembling hand to it, fumbling for the lid's catch. Unable to raise her head and see the thing, she groaned, fretting. "Merciful Lord — quickly!" she gasped.' There was even a touch of temper there.

  Edgar leaned over and released the reluctant clasp, to open the lid and lift out the fragment of dark wood studded with the diamonds, two fragments, bound together to form a cross, to put into her hands.

  She clutched the wood to her breast, panting shallowly.

  "Thank God!" she breathed. "Thank God!" She looked up, then, at her son and her friend, and the tortured, desperate look had quite gone from her eyes. The old assurance and serenity were back, leavened with love, affection, understanding, even the hint of a smile. She raised the cross. "It is good," she whispered. "All ... is well. At last!" She sought to make the sign of the cross with the relic towards each of them, but could not keep her arm up. "Bless," she got out. "Bless."

  They waited, hardly daring to breathe. There was nothing that they, or any, could do. Besides, the Queen was still very much in command in that chamber.

  Then, seeking again to sign with the cross, but over herself this time, and in a slow but quite confident and quite curiously different voice, she began to repeat the prayer after communion received, in the Roman office. "Lord Jesu Christ who by the Father's will. . . hast given the world life . . . through Thy death . . . deliver me ..."

  The whispering stopped. Again they waited, willing her strength. The Rood drooped.

  It was the priest's voice which next spoke, presently, however. "God in His infinite mercy has received her soul," he declared simply. "Requiescat in pace!"

  The other two stared, at Thurstan, at each other, and then back at Margaret Atheling. She seemed no different from moments ago, just gathering her strength again, the light not faded from her lovely eyes. But when they leaned close they perceived that she no longer breathed.

  Strong again, she was on her way.

  Later, when Edgar could speak coherently, he picked up the cross from his mother's breast.

  "This was her guide and strength and solace always," he said. "One day, when I am King — and it may be that I am King now — I shall build a great abbey here, in her memory. To contain this her Holy Rood. God aiding me."

  Maldred shrugged. "Perhaps. But her memory will require no stone-and-mortar monument. I think, so long as there are Scots, they will remember her. They may not all bless her, always — but they will never forget Margaret the Queen..."

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  THE QUEEN'S BODY was taken from Edinburgh to be buried in Holy Trinity, now Dunfermline Abbey, along with Edward's. Discounting alleged miracles en route, we can take it that Donald Ban allowed passage. Malcolm's body was buried by the English at Tynemouth, but in time was disinterred and brought to lie beside Margaret at Dunfermline, the first King of Scots not to have been interred at Iona. William Rufus, although almost certainly implicated in Malcolm's death, made a show of anger over such an end for a royal personage, and confined Moubray, Earl of Northumbria, to perpetual imprisonment. Cospatrick, for some reason, possibly on the urging of Prior Turgot, was taken to the new cathedral of Durham and buried there.

  Edgar did not become King of Scots for over four years. The mormaors, under the Celtic law of tanistry, accepted Donald Ban as rightful monarch. But he only reigned for six months, when his nephew Duncan marched north at the head of a large English army, having sworn fealty to William Rufus for Scotland — an action which was to give rise to much trouble for centuries thereafter — and unseated him. But Duncan reigned for only six more months, when he was slain at Mondynes by Malpender, Mormaor of the Mearns, who supported Donald. Donald then resumed the crown for three years, and seems to have reigned well; when Edgar at last, also with English aid — for the Margaretsons were in exile in England — overthrew his uncle, and ascended the throne; and the long regimes of the Margaretsons commenced. It is to be feared however that his mother would not have approved of Edgar's revenge, indeed his general behaviour. He had Donald Ban's eyes put out and sent him to be a scullion in the royal kitchens. When Donald died he was the last Scots king to be buried on Iona.

  Edgar died unmarried in 1107 and was succeeded by his next brother, Alexander the First. He seems to have made a better monarch, and continued his mother's work of Romanising the Columban Church. One of his first acts was to have Prior Turgot installed as Romish Bishop of St. Andrews and Primate, thus ending the hereditary primacy of the Dunkeld line. He reigned for fourteen years, during which his sister Matilda married Henry Beauclerc; who when Rufus died in 11oo, became Henry the First of England. Alexander produced no heir, and was succeeded by David the youngest of the Margaretsons — they were never referred to as the Malcolmsons — who occupied the throne for no less than twenty-nine years, a great king by most standards, of whom his mother would have approved. He completed the Romanising of the Scottish Church and added his own Normanising policy in the state. By the end of his reign both the Celtic Church and the Celtic polity were largely a thing of the past, and Scotland had moved from the patriarchal and tribal into the feudal age, with Papacy triumphant. So Margaret won her battle in the end. She was officially canonised in 1250. Bishop Turgot wrote her biography, the earliest such production in Scotland, although it is to a large extent hagiography.

  Edmund the black sheep, on Donald Ban's downfall, found it wise to reform, and entered Holy Church. Ethelred in due course had to give up the earldom of Fife to its true heir; and lost his primacy to Turgot. Oddly he seems to have been more or less converted to the Columban faith, and as his brothers turned towards the Normans, he turned to the Gaels, indeed Gaelicised his name to Eth, or Hugh, and lived in the Highlands, producing a son MacEth who in due course became Earl of Moray and whom some claim as the founder of Clan Mackay.

  St. Margaret's influence on Scotland has been enormous, much greater than that of any other woman, and few men have had as much. Whether the pulling down of the Columban Church was a good thing or a bad, is still a matter for debate. Certainly the non-hierarchal, independent and more homely faith seems more in keeping with the Scots character; also more akin to the Church which arose out of the Reformation and is now the Church of Scotland. But the cha
nge-over might well have been inevitable, in the Middle Ages.

  It is perhaps of interest that, while a descendant of Malcolm and Margaret still sits on the throne of the United Kingdom, in 1963 a direct descendant of Cospatrick, Alec Cospatrick Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of Home, became Prime Minister thereof. He still lives in the Merse.

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