Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
defeat. The numbers given in the saga seem overblown, no doubt on the principle that if you cannot beat them you multiply them. Since the Norwegians had ultimately been left in possession of the beach at Largs, it cannot be said that they lost the day. George Buchanan’s magisterial Latin History of Scotland (1582) claimed that Håkon had landed a force of twenty thousand men who were routed to the tune of sixteen thousand dead at a cost of five thousand Scottish lives; but that is now recognised by historians as nonsense. It is a nonsense, however, which has died hard.
Yet if the Norwegians did not lose that particular engagement, they certainly lost the campaign: Håkon had failed to secure the islands against future encroachments by Alexander, which had been his original objective.
Håkon now limped away with his battered and mutinous fleet. After a trying voyage, he reached haven in Orkney at the end of October. He took up residence in the Bishop’s Palace, whose ruins are such a striking feature of Kirkwall, just across the road from the beautiful rose-red Cathedral of St Magnus. No sooner was he installed in the palace, however, than he fell ill:
In his sickness, he had Latin books read to him at first; but he found it too much trouble to work out what the Latin meant. Then he had books read to him in Norse, first the sagas of the Saints, and then the sagas of the Kings of Norway all the way from Hálfdan the Black onwards, one after the other, until the saga of King Sverrir [his grandfather] was reached … Near midnight the reading of Sverrir’s Saga was concluded; and just as midnight passed, Almighty God called King Hákon from this earthly life.
His death was big news in Norway. In Scotland, however, the Melrose Chronicle displayed a very different order of priorities:
In this year [1264] upon the Day of St Agnes [21 January], the queen of Scotland gave birth to a son, who, at his father’s desire, was named Alexander … And it happened that on the same day upon which the king of Scotland was informed that God had given him a son, intelligence also arrived that the king of Norway was dead. Rejoiced by these twofold tidings of joy, the king gave thanks to God, who exalts the humble and humbles the proud.
The death of King Håkon was a real turning-point; but the entry in the Melrose Chronicle was of particular poignancy, not so much because of what had gone before, as of what was to come.
With Håkon’s death the way was now open for Alexander’s own territorial ambitions in the Hebrides. Alexander was a young and vigorous man, still only twenty-three years old; he had thwarted the naval might of Norway and seen off a major threat to his own kingdom, and now, with every reason to expect a long and successful reign ahead of him, the future of the realm seemed assured with the birth of an heir to the throne. And so, at first, it seemed.
As far as the Western Isles were concerned, Alexander was now in the driving seat. According to the Saga of Magnús; Hákonarson, the Norsemen in the Orkneys sent an embassy to Scotland in the spring of 1264 to make overtures for peace, but were brusquely rebuffed. Alexander was not slow to press home his advantage; he was now in a position to pick off the Western Isles one by one, and was clearly determined to do so.
In Norway, Håkon’s successor King Magnus (known as ‘the Law-Reformer’) was realistic enough to recognise that Norwegian suzerainty over the Western Isles dependencies was no longer tenable. In the autumn of 1264 he again sent messengers to Alexander; this time their reception was less chilly, and Magnus was told that treaty terms could be discussed in Scotland the following summer. Eventually, on 2 July 1266, peace was made and sealed through the Treaty of Perth. It was in all respects a sensible and welcome settlement, which King Magnus was able to announce in Bergen on 9 August without loss of face: in return for the cession of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, the Scots were to pay a lump sum of four thousand merks of refined silver in four annual instalments, and an annual tribute of a hundred merks in perpetuity. According to the Melrose Chronicle, King Alexander paid out the whole sum of four thousand merks on the spot; but the annual tribute of a hundred merks seems soon to have petered out. From the Norwegian point of view, the most important provision of the Treaty of Perth was a firm guarantee that Scotland would respect Norway’s sovereignty over the Orkneys and Shetland; indeed, the Northern Isles remained a Scandinavian preserve until the middle of the fifteenth century, when they were pawned by the impecunious King Kristian I of Norway and Denmark in lieu of a dowry for the marriage of his daughter Margrethe to the future James III of Scotland (see Chapter 16).
Hindsight suggests that it was the right and realistic outcome, and that Håkon the Old had been flying in the face of the inevitable. The Western Isles were too far from Norway to remain an outpost of Scandinavia, physically, socially or culturally; their only ties with Norway in the thirteenth century were those imposed by power-politics, and those bonds were being inexorably loosened.
With this deal, Alexander, at the age of twenty-five, had vastly enlarged the kingdom of Scotland. Only the Northern Isles now remained outside his royal control. Just as his father’s Treaty of York had consolidated the southern frontier in 1237, the Treaty of Perth of 1266 extended and consolidated the western frontiers of the kingdom.
For the rest of his reign, Alexander III is said to have managed the government of his realm with justice and fairness, earning the respect and loyalty of his lieges. Through his consolidation and expansion of royal power and administration he welded the disparate regions of the realm into a cohesive nation with one Church, one law and a common language. The hitherto vague concept of ‘Scottishness’ was developing into a sense of national consciousness, an awareness of national identity which would gain powerful expression in the Wars of Independence to come.
Meanwhile the relationship between Scotland and England remained very close, underpinned by intermarriage between the royal families and many of the leading nobles. Henry III had died in 1272, to be succeeded by his energetic and charismatic elder son, Edward I, whom Alexander found a congenial brother-in-law; they were on excellent terms, and Edward (as prince) and his wife Eleanor of Castile visited the Scottish court in 1268. To be sure, Edward (as king) tried to revive the homage issue: in 1278 he attempted to persuade Alexander to swear homage to him for the kingdom of Scotland at a ceremony at Westminster, but Alexander insisted that he would only swear fealty for the lands he held in the kingdom of England.
The Norway connection
The death of Håkon IV in 1263, and the Treaty of Perth which ensued in 1266, cleared the political air between Norway and Scotland and helped to create a greatly improved relationship. This was cemented when Alexander’s only daughter, Margaret, was betrothed to the grandson of Håkon the Old in the spring of 1281. The bride was nineteen years old, the bridegroom only fourteen; but he was the new king of Norway, Erik II, son of King Magnus the Law-Reformer. The marriage of these two royal youngsters symbolised the new amity across the North Sea and augured well for the future. In the event, however, it was all to end in tragedy, not only for Scotland and Norway but most especially for Alexander III himself; for 1281 also saw the first of a series of crushing family mishaps which were to darken the last years of his vigorous and successful reign.
His wife Margaret, sister of Edward I, had died in 1275, but Alexander saw no cause to marry again. However, in June 1281 his younger son, David, fell ill and died at Stirling Castle; he was eight years old. The mourning weeds had to be shrugged aside to celebrate his daughter Margaret’s wedding and coronation in Bergen two months later. But on 9 April 1283, not two years after the marriage, Queen Margaret died at Tönsberg, apparently in childbirth. She was only twenty-two years old, and she left a sickly infant daughter, also christened Margaret, the ‘Maid of Norway’ who would be Queen of Scots for a brief time (see Chapter 9).
And then, less than a year later, came the third and cruellest blow so far: on 17 January 1284 Alexander’s elder son, Alexander the Prince of Scotland, who had been born on the very day twenty years earlier on which news of King Håkon’s death had reached his father, died at Lindores Abbey in Fife after a long illness. Young Alexander had been married for just over a year, and