The queen who hardly knew her mother's face

DURHAM, England, about 1100 AD — Queen Matilda of England grew up far away from her mother, Saint Margaret of Scotland. St. Margaret was queen of the Scots and the wife of King Malcolm III.

St. Margaret sent Matilda and her younger sister, Mary, to Romsey Abbey in England to be taught. Their aunt Christina was the abbess there. The two girls stayed there among the nuns for a long time.

In 1100 AD Matilda married King Henry I of England. Now she was a queen, and she wanted to know the mother she had barely known. She asked Turgot, a monk of the monastery at Durham, to write down her mother’s life. She picked him because he had been St. Margaret’s confessor. Turgot wrote in his book: “I knew her conscience, for to me she revealed it.”

The last time he saw her

Turgot had said goodbye to St. Margaret in 1093 AD, some months before she died. St. Margaret sent for Turgot to see her alone. She went over her whole life with him, from the beginning, and cried as she told it. Turgot cried 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. She wanted him to pray for her and to take care of her sons and daughters. Turgot promised both. Matilda was one of the children he promised to look after.

“After that day I never saw her face in the flesh,” Turgot wrote. In November 1093 AD St. Margaret died at Edinburgh Castle, days after her husband was killed near Alnwick.

A letter to the queen

Turgot answered Queen Matilda with a letter. That letter opens his book. “A request of yours is to me a command,” he told her. Turgot also wrote down why Matilda wanted the book. She wanted her mother’s life in writing, Turgot told her, “that so, although you were but little familiar with her face, you might at least have a perfect acquaintance with her virtues.”

Turgot was glad to obey, but he wasn’t sure he was good enough for the job. “So I am in two minds, and drawn two ways at once,” he wrote. There was more to tell than he felt he could put into words. “I cannot do justice to my subject, yet my duty is to make it known so far as I can,” Turgot wrote. “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 praised St. Margaret too much, people might think he was only flattering her daughter. Matilda was a queen now. Turgot was an old man by then, and he said so: “far be it from my grey hairs,” he wrote, “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 Turgot told Queen Matilda what he had kept back. He had left many things about St. Margaret out of the book. He was afraid people would not believe them. An old saying told of a plain black crow. It was dressed up in a swan’s white feathers to look like something finer. Turgot did not want anyone to say he had dressed up St. Margaret that way. So he wrote: “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.”