Princess Margaret

The Princess Margaret was fleeing from the Normans who had conquered England. She was a refugee and, with her brother Edgar, heir to the throne of England, she was in flight to the land of their birth, Hungary. But a storm had driven their ship into the Forth and wrecked it on the rocks at that very Queensferry which was later to earn its name from her. King Malcolm sent messengers to the shore to question the strangers. They came back to him with such stories of the great beauty of the Princess on board that Malcolm went himself to meet them. As soon as he saw the Princess Margaret he determined that she should be his Queen.

Guest Became a Bride

She came as his guest to that tower on a cliff 70 feet above the burn, in the heart of what is now Carnegie's park. There he asked her to marry him and there, at length, she accepted him. They were married in the Culdee Chapel which stood on the spot where today stands the nave of Dunfermline Abbey.

The storm which had cast that ship on the shores of Scotland changed the whole course of Scotland's history. It brought to Scotland a Queen who, saintly and learned, endowed the Court and the nation with grace and beauty. Under her influence the Court of Scotland became the most civilised in the Western world-gentle, courteous and modest. From foreign traders were purchased "clothing of various colours", and new fashions were adopted, "the elegance of which made the wearers appear like a new race of beings".

Describing the change she made in Malcolm's Court Robert L. Mackie writes in his History of Scotland: "Rich hangings now brightened the bare walls of the King's palace, gold and silver plate glittered on his table; his meat was seasoned with spices brought from the ends of the earth; the liquor that sparkled in his cup was not home-brewed ale, but wine from France."

Margaret had at first refused Malcolm's proposal of marriage on the grounds that she had intended to enter the Church and become a nun, and although she accepted him and became a Queen, her life was always one of devotion to her faith. She and her maidens were constantly busy embroidering vestments and altar cloths, and she is said to have prayed constantly in the little cave near the tower. She prepared with her own hands food for the poor, and she it was who built the first of Scotland's inns-resting-places on the road and at either side of the Forth for pilgrims on their way to St Andrews. She was responsible for that memorable Council of Dunfermline at which the Celtic Church was reformed into orthodoxy. In honour of their marriage Malcolm and Margaret founded, on the site of the ancient Culdee Chapel, a new church-the Church of the Holy Trinity, and among the gifts Margaret made to it was a wondrous crucifix studded with jewels and containing a carved piece of wood said to be a portion of the Cross of Christ.

In 1093 she was lying seriously ill in Edinburgh Castle when news was brought of Malcolm's assassination. After a long siege of Ainwick Castle, Malcolm had seen an emissary of the Normans approaching his tent. The emissary carried in one hand a white lily and in the other the keys of the castle suspended on his spear point. Unarmed, Malcolm walked from his tent to receive these tokens of surrender; the ambassador plunged his lance into Malcolm's breast and left him dying. The fearful deed goaded the Scots into a desperate unheeding assault on the castle in which Malcolm's heir. Prince Edward, was mortally wounded. Margaret's confessor, Turgot, describes how the news was brought to Margaret on her deathbed.
"During a short interval of ease she devoutly received the Communion. She stretched herself upon her couch, and calmly waited the moment of her dissolution. Cold, and in the agonies of death, she ceased not to put up her supplications to heaven. These were some other words:-'Have mercy upon me, 0 God, according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies. . . . Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation!' At that moment her son Edgar, returning from the army, approached her couch. 'How fares it,' said she, 'with the King and my Edward ?' The youth stood silent. 'I know all,' cried she, 'I know all. By this Holy Cross, by your filial affection, I adjure you to tell me the truth!' He answered, 'Your husband and your son are both slain.' Lifting up her eyes to heaven she said, 'Praise and blessing be to Thee, Almighty God, that Thou hast been pleased to make me endure so bitter anguish in the hour of my departure, thereby, as I trust, to purify me from the corruption of my sins; and Thou, Lord Jesus Christ, who through the will of the Father hast enlivened the world by Thy death, oh deliver me!' While pronouncing the words 'deliver me' she expired."

Miracle of the Tomb

Her body was brought back to the Dunfermline she had made so great. She had asked that she should be buried in the church which she and Malcolm had founded, and although the Castle of Edinburgh was being besieged by the usurper Donald Bain, her sons were determined at all hazards to do as their mother had asked. So while Donald Bain's men guarded the main door of the castle, Ethelred, now the eldest of the sons, and Turgot carried her body through a postern door on the west side of the rock. Then occurred the first of the miracles associated with Queen Margaret: a haar descended and shielded the party carrying her body from the usurper's sentries. Safely the corpse was carried from Edinburgh and rowed across her own Queensferry and brought to the Church of the Holy Trinity. She was buried before the Rood Altar, the first occupant of that consecrated ground. Later the bodies of her King and her sons were laid with her there. Wyntoun records the royal burial which made Dunfermline the sepulchre of Scottish kings:

Before the rude awtare wyth honowre
Scho wes layd in haly sepulture;
There hyr lord wes layd alswa,
And wyth thame hyre sonnis twa,
Edward the First and Ethelred.

With the permission of the English King, Malcolm's bones were disinterred at Tynemouth and brought to the new church. In 1249 Margaret was canonised and a shrine was built at the east end of the conventual church to hold her relics. That translation took place in 1250 on the completion of the building of the great double church -conventual and parochial-which had now succeeded the church Malcolm and Margaret had built nearly two centuries before.

How it was that the remains of Malcolm also came to be laid in the shrine has become one of the great stories of the abbey. This is how A. H. Millar tells of the miracle which attended the translation:
"Margaret had lain in her tomb before the Rood Altar for 157 years, and but for some special interruption of natural law would long ere this time have mingled with the dust. Yet we are led to believe that her body was found in a state of preservation, and that at the digging of the ground so great and agreeable a perfume arose that the whole of the sanctuary was thought to be sprinkled with painter's colours and the scent of springing flowers. Decay had exercised no dominion over her; the flowing hair which had adorned the fair Saxon Princess was still unsullied, and became one of the sacred ornaments of her shrine in after days. When the corpse had been taken from the tomb it was laid upon a consecrated bier and carried reverently from the Rood Altar towards the chapel. To reach their destination the bearers had to pass the spot where the bones of Malcolm, Margaret's husband, had been re-interred, and just while they were preparing to ascend the steps of the high altar with their precious burden a striking and manifest miracle was performed. The sainted Queen, whose remains had been carried with ease from their first resting place, suddenly became too heavy for the priests to lift, and the bier with its sacred contents was fixed immovably by some invisible force besides Malcolm's tomb. The united strength of the assembled prelates was not sufficient to remove the obstinate saint from the position she had chosen, and it seemed as if she meant to avenge the desecration of her grave by making a spectacle of her body. Suddenly an inspiration came to one of the company, and he suggested that Margaret wished her departed spouse to share her new position with her. No sooner had this most fortunate suggestion been made than the prelates laid violent hands upon Malcolm's tomb, and placed his relics upon another bier. The spell which bound St Margaret's corpse was broken, and this wondrous pair, so long separated from each other, were borne in a triumphal procession towards the place prepared for her."

The new church was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, as had been the earlier church of Queen Margaret, but in time it came to have both a primary and a secondary dedication, and was known as the Church of the Holy Trinity and St Margaret. Margaret, the patron saint of Dunfermline, is often wrongly credited with having built the abbey of Dunfermline, but it is at least true to say that it was she who began the building of it, and certainly to her, perhaps more than to any other person, Dunfermline owes its tradition of regality.

The ruins of the shrine in which Margaret and Malcolm were buried are now to be seen outside the east end of the church. But Margaret's relics are no longer there. During the Reformation the Queen-Regent, Mary of Guise, ordered their removal to Edin-burgh Castle as a place of security, and in 1568, when Queen Mary fled to England, the coffer containing the skull, hair and other relics was carried to the castle ofDurie near Dunfermline. In 1597 it was taken by Jesuit missionaries to Antwerp, where, in 1620, the relics were "exposed to the veneration of the people". Later they were placed among the sacred relics of the Scots College of Douai, and in 1645 it was recorded:
"Her relics are kept in the Scots College of Doway in a Buist of Silver. Her skull is enclosed in the head of the Buist, whereupon there is a Crown of Silver gilt, enriched with severall Pearls and Precious Stones. In the Pedestall, which is of Ebony, indented with Silver, her hair is kept and exposed to view of everyone through a Glass of Crystall. The Buist is reputed the third Statue in Doway for its valour (value). There are likewise severall Stones, Red and Green, on her Breast, Shoulders, and elsewhere. I cannot tell if they be upright (genuine); their bigness makes me fancy they may be counter-fitted."

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