Saint and sinner: The women who changed the face of Scotland, part one

Scottish history, in common with the history of most ancient nations, is very male dominated. Very few women can be said to have been the prime mover of their era in Scotland and only two can have been said to have “changed the face” of this nation – although is hoped Nicola Sturgeon will join this short list as the female leader who regains (the correct word) Scotland’s independence.

There were powerful women from time to time, though only one female Queen of Scots, and that was Mary who was more of a victim of change – think John Knox and the Reformation – than an instigator. Her mother, Mary of Guise, the second wife of King James V, and her grandmother, Margaret Tudor, wife of James IV, were both queen consorts and regents following the deaths of their husbands, and while they were powerful and influential, neither made a fundamental difference to Scotland.

Of the two who did, neither of them was born in Scotland. They lived around 900 years apart. They were both called Margaret. One was the woman who is revered as Saint Margaret of Scotland. The other was Margaret Thatcher.

Realising that there will be some people who will be offended by any sort of comparison between the two, we’ll leave the late Baroness of Kesteven until next week and concentrate on the woman who was both a transforming queen consort and the only Scotswoman ever to be formally canonised – by Pope Innocent IV in 1250.

Edinburgh-born nun the Venerable Margaret Sinclair may be our next female saint but needs a miracle to be attributed to her, and in fact precious few Scots of either gender have been formally canonised, a subject I will return to in a later column).

Saint Margaret really did change Scotland, most especially through her extraordinary influence over her husband, King Malcolm III, better known as Malcolm Canmore, and particularly by her religious activities. She also effected massive change by the simple expedient of giving birth to her children and raising them to be good people as well as assiduous monarchs.

Of her sons, King David I, our greatest king other than Robert the Bruce, was the youngest and most remarkable. With his Norman friends, his burghs and justice system, as well as his great abbeys, he laid the foundations of modern Scotland, and he is also a saint in the eyes of some.

Yet Margaret attained so much in her life that she should be judged on her own achievements as arguably our most famous and influential immigrant.

She was born into the Royal House of Wessex, which provided the first kings of England until the second time the Danes took over the kingdom, a period which began with King Canute in 1016 – I know he is more correctly rendered Cnut, but I prefer the old-fashioned version.

Margaret’s grandfather was Edmund Ironside, King Edmund II of England, who reigned for just seven months in 1016 before he was defeated by Canute at the Battle of Assandun. In legend, Edmund II died shortly after the battle, being assassinated while in a toilet, though more likely he succumbed to wounds sustained in battle.

His son and heir, Edward Ætheling, was just a few months old at the time and was sent by Canute into exile, first in Sweden and then in either Kiev or Poland, where Canute’s extended family were members of the local aristocracy. By 1046, Edward, known to history as “Edward the Exile” was in Hungary where his wife Agatha, a noblewoman of uncertain origin – she may have been of the Hungarian royal family or a leading tribe of the Rus people – gave birth to Margaret, probably in the Castle Reka.

It is now a ruin but is held locally to be the place where Margaret was born, as it was long known as the home of the English exiles. Her brother Edgar Ætheling and sister Cristina were born there after her.

It was in Hungary that Margaret received her excellent early education, and although she never learned Gaelic, in time she would be multilingual, knowing Latin, English, French and Scots. She was also drilled in the Roman faith and its doctrines.

In 1057, the Æthelings were summoned back to England by King Edward the Confessor, but Margaret’s father Edward died shortly after the end of his exile. As the only male left in the Wessex dynasty, Edgar should have been made heir to the throne of England, but the king demurred and when the Confessor died in 1066, Harold Godwinson was voted in as the new king by the Witenagemot, the high council of aristocrats, who would all soon be out of a job due to the Norman Conquest.

Harold died at the Battle of Hastings and the Witenagemot made Edgar king, but he was never crowned and William the Conqueror was on the throne by the end of the year.

Legend has it Edgar and his family fled north at that point but in fact they stayed close to William in England and Normandy until 1068 when a rebellion against Norman rule broke out in the north of England. Edgar joined it, and when it failed utterly as William suppressed the Anglo-Saxons, the Æthelings attempted to flee back to the continent.

Legend also has it that their ship was driven off course and landed in the bay known as St Margaret’s Hope in Fife – not to be confused with St Margaret’s Hope, a village in Orkney.

Malcolm Canmore – his name means great chief in Gaelic – supposedly came from his castle at Dunfermline and greeted the family warmly. In his 40s, and a widower following the death of his Norse wife Ingibiorg, he is said to have taken one look at the fair young princess and fallen deeply in love. That’s probably not true – they didn’t marry until 1070 and it’s more likely that both families saw the advantage of an inter-dynastic marriage.

There is no doubt, however, that Malcolm truly loved his Margaret.

They had eight children over the next 13 years – Edward, the heir to Malcolm’s throne; Edmund who tried to help his uncle Donald take that throne later and ended up a monk; Ethelred who became Abbot fo Dunkeld; Edgar, King of Scots 1097-1107; Alexander I, King of Scots 1107-24; David I, King of Scots 1124-53; Edith, later known as Matilda, who was Queen Consort to Henry I of England; and Mary, later Countess of Boulogne.

There is no doubt Margaret’s arrival triggered off a huge process of change at the Scottish court. Many Anglo-Saxon people from England came north to get away from William the Conqueror, some being given lands by Malcolm while other lesser people that he captured on his five massive raids into England became slaves in Scotland.

VERY rarely for a figure in mediaeval Scottish history, we have an almost contemporary account of Margaret’s life written by someone who knew all about her, Turgot of Durham, later Bishop of St Andrews who penned his Life of Margaret at the request of her daughter Matilda just seven to 10 years after the Queen’s death.

More a hagiography than a biography, it is Turgot’s account that contains the evidence of what became Margaret’s life mission – “civilising” her husband and his court and changing the Christianity of Scotland by the process that came to be known as Romanisation.

Simply put, the clerics of Scotland were not paying much attention to Rome, especially the Culdees. These were communities of supposedly holy men whose name meant servants of God, and they drew their liturgy and theology from Columba and the Celtic saints, not the Pope of Rome.

Margaret was determined to Romanise the church in Scotland and with her husband’s authority as king she brought in orders of monks and began the process of whittling away at the Culdees, carried on by her sons Alexander and David and especially Turgot himself.

One of the Culdees’ rituals was open air worship, which Margaret deemed simply unconscionable, especially as she was dedicated to founding churches, chapels and the building that became Dunfermline Abbey.

Turgot wrote: “There were certain places in Scotland in which Masses were celebrated according to some sort of barbarous rite, contrary to the usage of the whole Church. Fired by the zeal of God, the Queen attempted to root out and abolish this custom, so that henceforth, from the whole of Scotland, there was not one single person who dared to continue the practice.”

Margaret went further, making St Andrews a Romanised place of pilgrimage, though she also showed a diplomatic touch by restoring Iona Abbey and she did meet and converse with many Culdees. Over the 23 years of her joint reign with Malcolm, however, Margaret almost single-handedly brought in Roman rites and Roman theology not to mention many, many monks and priests who usually had one great advantage over the locals – literacy and numeracy.

King Malcolm himself was said to be illiterate and that was Margaret’s other achievement. She turned the court into a place of learning and brought in monks and scribes who began to keep records and teach courtiers to read and write.

She made the education of her children her priority, and Malcolm was so impressed with her efforts that he paid for her stunning gospel book, a mediaeval masterpiece of illuminated manuscript which can be seen in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Supposedly it fell into a river but was preserved by a miracle.

Worn out by her copious good works and her pious devotions, Margaret took ill early in 1093. The descriptions match someone dying of cancer. She was at Edinburgh Castle when her husband and his heir Edward were killed at the Battle of Alnwick on November 13, 1093. News reached the Queen days later and she died within hours.

Turgot tells us: “It was remarkable that her face, which, when she was dying had exhibited the usual pallor of death, became afterwards suffused with red and white tints, so that it seemed as if she were not dead but sleeping. Her corpse was shrouded as became a queen, and we carried her to the Church of the Holy Trinity which she had built.”

Margaret was buried in Dunfermline Abbey which her son David dedicated to her memory. In the year of her canonisation, 1250, the remains of St Margaret were transferred from the original tomb to a reliquary on the high altar. Those remains were scattered from their resting place during the Reformation year of 1560, some being taken abroad for safety.

Her head was still venerated at the Scots College seminary in Douai, France, until the late 18th century but was lost during the French Revolution.

There is one other way in which Margaret changed the face of Scotland.

Turgot recounts: “Since the church of St Andrews was much frequented by the devout, who flocked to it from all quarters, she erected dwellings on either shore of the sea which divides Lothian from Scotland (Firth of Forth), so that the poor people and the pilgrims might shelter there and rest themselves after the fatigues of their journey.”

Those places are North and South Queensferry, named after her for she also supplied the ferries over the Forth. So in a sense we have a brand new monument to our transformational Royal saint – the wonderful Queensferry Crossing.

Next week: Margaret Thatcher