St. Margaret's confessor holds back what would seem too hard to believe

DURHAM, England, about 1100 AD — About 1100 AD Turgot, the prior of the monastery at Durham, answered a request from Queen Matilda of England. She wanted the life of her mother, Saint Margaret of Scotland, written down, and she wanted Turgot to write it because he had heard St. Margaret’s confessions. His reply is the letter that opens his Life of St. Margaret. In it he swore before God that he invented nothing, then admitted that he had left things out.

St. Margaret was queen of the Scots, the wife of King Malcolm III. Turgot was her chaplain and her confessor. “I knew her conscience, for to me she revealed it,” Turgot writes in the Life.

Matilda, St. Margaret’s elder daughter, grew up far from her mother. St. Margaret sent Matilda and her younger daughter, Mary, to Romsey Abbey in England, where their aunt Christina was abbess, to be taught. The two girls stayed among the nuns for a long time.

In 1093 AD, some months before she died, St. Margaret sent for Turgot to see her alone. St. Margaret went over her whole life with Turgot, from the beginning, and wept as she told it. Turgot wept too, and at times neither of them could speak. Then St. Margaret told Turgot: “I now bid you farewell. I shall not continue much longer in this world, but you will live after me for a considerable time.” St. Margaret asked Turgot for two things: to remember her in his prayers, and to take care of her sons and daughters. Turgot promised both. “After that day I never saw her face in the flesh,” Turgot writes.

St. Margaret died at Edinburgh Castle in November 1093 AD, days after her husband was killed near Alnwick, where their eldest son was fatally wounded.

In 1100 AD Matilda married King Henry I of England. Now a queen, she wanted to know the mother she had barely known, and her request reached Turgot at Durham.

Turgot addressed his answer “to the honourable and excellent Matilda, queen of the English,” and signed it as “servant of the servants of St Cuthbert” — one of the monks of Durham, whose church kept the body of Saint Cuthbert. Turgot told the queen that “a request of yours is to me a command.” Matilda had chosen him, Turgot writes, because she understood “that I am acquainted with the most part of her secrets.” He also set down why Matilda wanted the book. She wished, he wrote to her, to have her mother’s life “continually before your eyes in writing, that so, although you were but little familiar with her face, you might at least have a perfect acquaintance with her virtues.”

Turgot wrote that he obeyed willingly, but he doubted he was equal to the task. “So I am in two minds, and drawn two ways at once,” he writes. There was more to tell than he felt he could put into words, and that made him want to refuse. But the queen’s authority, and “the memory of her of whom I am to speak,” kept him from saying no. “I cannot do justice to my subject, yet my duty is to make it known so far as I can,” Turgot writes. “I owe this to the love I have for her, and to the obedience which is due from me to you.”

Turgot had a second worry. If he told everything he could to St. Margaret’s honor, readers might think he was praising the mother to flatter the daughter, a reigning queen. Turgot was an old man by now, and he said so: “far be it from my grey hairs,” he writes, “to mingle falsehood with the virtues of such a woman as she was.” He swore, “as God is my Witness and my judge,” that he added nothing to the truth. Then he said what he had kept back, borrowing an orator’s image of a plain black crow dressed up in a swan’s white feathers: “On the contrary, I suppress many things, fearing that they might appear incredible, and I might be charged (as the orator says) with decking out the crow in the plumage of the swan.”