Tea at Trianon: King Malcolm III Canmore

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 8, 2023

King Malcolm III Canmore

The husband of St. Margaret. From Undiscovered Scotland:

In 1053 Malcolm received military support from King Edward the Confessor of England and invaded southern Scotland, where he received considerable support from nobles in Lothian. On 15 August 1057 Malcolm met Macbeth at the Battle of Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, and Macbeth was killed. Macbeth was succeeded by his step son Lulach, a great grandson of Kenneth III. On 17 March 1058 Malcolm caught up with and killed Lulach, becoming Malcolm III in the process. His coronation took place on the Stone of Scone at Scone on 25 April 1058.

Malcolm's first wife was Ingibjörg, the daughter of Thorfinn Sigurdsson, the Earl of Orkney, and they had three sons before her death: Donnchad (Duncan); Domnall (Donald); and Máel Coluim (Malcolm). In 1070 Malcolm, by now a widower, married Margaret, the great-niece of Edward the Confessor. She had fled to Scotland with her brother Edgar the Atheling, the Anglo-Saxon heir to the English throne, after William I excluded him from the English succession.

Margaret's impact was dramatic. She favoured the Roman Catholic church to the Celtic Church and brought Benedictine monks to establish an abbey at Dunfermline. To allow her to feel more at home, Malcolm decreed that the language used at court should be Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic. As a result Malcolm III was the first to be called "King of Scotland" in his own time. Margaret also had built what is today called St Margaret's Chapel, in the highest part of Edinburgh Castle.

Malcolm and Margaret had eight children: Edward; Edmund; Ethelred; Edgar; Alexander; David; Edith or Matilda; and Mary. The extend of Margaret's influence on the future direction of the Scottish crown and of Scotland more widely can be seen by comparing the Gaelic names of the three children from Malcolm's first marriage and the absence of any Gaelic names among the eight from his second. (Read more.)