Alexander gathered his great fleet in the Sound of Kerrera, the three-kilometre-long fertile island which shelters the Oban coastline. But as his galleys lay at anchor in Horseshoe Bay, poised to launch the assault on Dunstaffnage, Alexander had an ominous dream, according to Hákonar Saga:
When King Alexander was lying at anchor in Kerrera Sound he had a dream. In his dream he thought that three men came to him. One of them seemed to him to be dressed in royal robes. He looked very menacing, ruddy of face and rather stout, of medium height. The second man seemed slender in build and gallant-looking, very handsome and of noble bearing. The third man was much the biggest in build and the most menacing of them all. His forehead was quite bald. He spoke to the king and asked him if he were heading for the Hebrides. The king replied that this was so: he was on his way to subjugate the islands. The man in his dream asked him to turn back, saying that nothing else would do.
The king recounted his dream, and most of his companions urged him to turn back, but the king refused. Soon afterwards the king fell ill and died. The Scots then dispersed their army and transported the king back to Scotland. The Hebrideans say that the men who appeared to the king in his dream would have been Saint Ólaf, King of Norway, and Saint Magnús, Earl of Orkney, and Saint Columba.
Whether one believes in dreams or not, Alexander II did indeed fall ill in Kerrera Sound. He died there, either on his ship or on land, on 8 July 1249; no cairn commemorates the spot, but a grassy field beside the shore is known to this day as ‘Dalrigh’ – Gaelic for ‘the field of the king’. He was buried in Melrose Abbey, in accordance with his last wishes; his unmarked tomb is in a recess in the wall of the presbytery to the south of the High Altar, but there is no plaque to identify it for visitors, as yet.
With Alexander’s death, his army melted away and the great fleet dispersed; but the crown’s ambition to annex the Hebrides was only put on hold, not abandoned.
The inauguration of Alexander III
ALEXANDER III, then only in his eighth year, succeeded to his father in 1249. Yet, when only two years older, he went to York to meet with the English King, and to marry his daughter, the Princess Margaret.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER V
Scone Palace, hard by the city of Perth in the geographical heartland of Scotland, is one of the stateliest of the country’s private homes, the seat of the Earl and Countess of Mansfield. The first house, built at the end of the sixteenth century, was almost totally rebuilt in pseudo-Gothic style in 1802–12 by the third Earl of Mansfield; this huge mansion is a treasury of beautiful objets d’art and paintings and furnishings of rare historic interest.
It was here at Scone, seated on the Stone of Scone in what had been the power-base of the old Pictish kingdom of Fortriu (see Chapter 3), that the seven-year-old Alexander III was inaugurated as King of Scots on 13 July 1249, a week after the death of his father. The boy-king was accompanied to Scone by seven earls and many other leading magnates and churchmen of Scotland. The scene was described, a century later, in John of Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scottorum:
[They] led Alexander, soon to be the king, to the cross which stands in the churchyard at the east end of the church of Scone. There they set him on the royal throne, which was decked with silken cloths inwoven with gold; and the Bishop of St Andrews, assisted by the rest, consecrated him king, as was meet. So the king sat down upon the royal throne – that is, the Stone – while the earls and other nobles, on bended knee, spread their garments under his feet before the Stone.
Now, this stone is reverently kept in that same monastery for the coronation of the kings of Alba; and no king was ever wont to reign in Scotland unless he had first, on receiving the name of king, sat upon this Stone at Scone, which by kings of old had been appointed the capital of Alba.
It was a solemn and striking occasion. Afterwards a traditional Highland sennachie (bard) recited in Gaelic the new king’s genealogy far back into the distant mythical past, to the eponymous Scota and Gaedel Glas: ‘Hail, king of Alba, Alexander, mac Alexander, mac William, mac Henry, mac David …’ It was a powerful public recognition of the strength of the living inheritance from the Celtic kingdoms of the past.
It is impossible to be certain where at Scone the ceremony took place. In the thirteenth century there was an abbey where the present palace now stands. The inauguration of Alexander III seems to have taken place in the open air, close to the abbey at a site traditionally known as Moot Hill (Hill of Meeting) directly opposite the palace; the Stone of Scone (‘Stone of Destiny’) would have been carried from the abbey and decked as a throne. Moot Hill, now half-screened by yew trees, was reduced in height in the nineteenth century. On it today stands a small family mausoleum, all that remains of the church which was built there in 1624 and in which Charles II was crowned in 1651. Outside the mausoleum is a replica of the Stone of Scone; it is as close to actual history as the visitor can get.
The accession of a minor might well have caused a political crisis (as it would do, time and time again, during the Stewart dynasty), but on this occasion Church and nobility closed ranks to protect the crown. Alexander’s kingship was perceived to be blessed by divine grace within two months by the canonisation of the matriarch of the dynasty, Queen Margaret, wife of Malcolm Canmore, in 1250. This was a notable coup which gave the royal line the lustre of a saintly ancestry and which was celebrated in June 1250 by the solemn translation of her remains to a new shrine near the great altar in Dunfermline Abbey.
In December 1251, at the age of ten, the boy-king was taken by his court to York to be knighted by Henry III before being married to Henry’s daughter Margaret. It gave the English king an immediate opportunity to raise the dormant question of Scotland’s subjection to England; according to the contemporary St Albans Chronicle, Alexander was then asked to do homage for the kingdom of Scotland. His advisers must have seen this coming, for the boy replied gravely that he had come to marry, not to answer so difficult a question. That answer helped to defuse, for a time at least, the perennial issue of overlordship.
The years of Alexander’s minority in the 1250s had their political tremors as different noble factions and parties within the regency vied for control of the king’s person (and therefore the government), with Henry III interfering busily in the background – ostensibly out of concern for his daughter’s welfare. The young couple were not allowed to live together as man and wife and were kept under the strict control of tutors or guardians
When Alexander’s minority ended in 1259, on his eighteenth birthday, the reins of government were firmly held by pro-king nobles – particularly the powerful Comyn family, who exercised power on behalf of the king in both the north and the south-west – and he was able to hit the ground running, as the saying goes. He showed strength of character and even-handedness in dealing with his quarrelsome nobles. Soon he was resuming his father’s attempt to wrest the Hebrides from Norwegian control. In 1261 he sent an embassy to Norway to discuss the Scottish claim to the Hebrides, but King Håkon was in no mood for concessions. In the summer of 1262 news reached Norway of savage raids on the Isle of Skye from the mainland; furthermore, the messengers from Skye reported that the King of Scots had declared openly that he intended to take possession of the Hebrides by force or die in the attempt.
These reports ‘caused King Håkon the gravest concern’, as his saga puts it, and that Christmas he called on all the regions of his realm to muster the traditional defence levy in Bergen the following spring. He fitted out a royal flagship which had been specially built in Bergen – a magnificent oaken vessel with snarling dragon-heads fore and aft, gleaming with gold inlay. It was an exceptionally large ship, with thirty-seven pairs of oars, and Håkon had designed it as a troop-carrier for the cream of his soldiers: