Scottish king refuses to surrender St. Margaret to William the Conqueror

FIRTH OF FORTH, Scotland, 1067–1069 AD — In these years after the Norman Conquest, a storm drove a ship carrying Saint Margaret of Scotland, her brother, her mother and her sister into the Firth of Forth. The ship anchored, badly damaged, in a sheltered bay on the Fife shore below Dunfermline. King Malcolm III of Scots took the family in. When William of Normandy, now King of England, demanded that St. Margaret and her brother be handed over, Malcolm refused.

St. Margaret was a young woman of little more than twenty, the elder of two sisters. Her brother, Edgar, was the last male heir of King Edmund Ironside and the old English royal line, and their mother was Agatha. They were fleeing William, who held the crown their family had lost. William was already arranging to marry St. Margaret and her younger sister, Christina, to Norman nobles, and to dispose of Agatha’s property.

The family had been exiles before. St. Margaret was born in Hungary about 1045 AD. Her father, Edward, the son of King Edmund Ironside, had been sent there by King Cnut and had grown up there. In 1057 AD her father’s uncle, Saint Edward the Confessor, King of England, brought the family home. St. Edward had named her father his heir and given him great riches. Her father died almost as soon as he landed, before he had even seen the king. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle called his death “a rueful time, and injurious to all this nation.”

Agatha and her children stayed on at the English court. St. Edward died in January 1066 AD, and Harold Godwinson was crowned in his place while Edgar was passed over. On October 14 of that year William killed Harold near Hastings and took the kingdom.

Agatha decided to take her children back to the Continent. Edgar slipped out of England in secret, and his mother and sisters went with him. St. Margaret carried “many relics of saints, more precious than any stone or gold,” and a large share of her father’s riches. Among the relics was a cross that Scotland would come to know as the Black Rood and venerate for centuries.

Saint Ailred of Rievaulx wrote that Edgar “endeavoured to return to the land in which he had been born. But a storm arose on the sea and he was compelled to land in Scotland.” Foul winds and heavy seas drove the ship up the North Sea. It turned at last into the sheltered water of the Forth and dropped anchor in a small bay on the northern shore. The bay has been called St Margaret’s Hope ever since. The storm had done the ship real damage, and the exiles went ashore as soon as they could, near the headland at Rosyth.

Malcolm was in his tower at Dunfermline, inland and uphill from the bay. He heard first that an English ship was struggling in the storm, and then that a group of important foreigners had landed and were asking to stay with him. The messengers who brought the news singled out the elder princess, praising “her incomparable beauty and the pleasantness of her jocund speech.”

Malcolm sent his counsellors down to the Forth at once. They welcomed the exiles in the king’s name, invited them to Dunfermline and told them the king was already on his way to meet them and lead them there. Dunfermline was easy to defend: thick woods and steep rocks surrounded it, and in the middle was a stretch of flat ground enclosed by rock and water.

The land rises in ridges from the Forth to Dunfermline. Tradition holds that St. Margaret and her companions sat down to rest by a great stone on the hillside, about midway between Queensferry and Dunfermline. They were tired from the climb, and they waited there for the king to come. The stone has been called St Margaret’s Stone ever since.

The king coming down the road had once been an exile too. Malcolm, the son of King Duncan, was about forty and a widower. As a young man he had fled for his life when Macbeth killed his father, and he found refuge at St. Edward’s court in England, the court where St. Margaret had grown up. With an army St. Edward lent him, he won back his kingdom in 1057 AD. Alban Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, wrote that this gave Malcolm “the more tender feeling for the misfortune of the royal exile.”

Butler wrote that when the exiles arrived in Scotland, “the sight of the young prince and princess made him feel all the weight of their affliction.” “They came to Scotland under king Malcolm’s protection,” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records, “and he received them all.”

Then William sent to Scotland to demand that Edgar and his sister be handed over to him. The sister was St. Margaret, the young woman William had been arranging to marry to a Norman. Malcolm, in Butler’s words, “rejected with horror so base a treachery.”

In 1070 AD St. Margaret married Malcolm at Dunfermline, not far from the bay where her ship had come in.