Duncan I of Scotland

“ JOHN DUNCAN was a lowland Scot, who lived in Edinburgh until he was between twenty and twenty-five years old. He was educated at one of the Scots schools, and knew his way about the University if he was not actually a student there. He certainly had enough money to live on. A love affair in which he must have been infamously treated caused him to leave Scotland. ”

“ I am here, with my sword in my hand, willing to spend the best blood of my body to make amends for my error, and mortal man can do no more."
"Well, my lord," said Sir Duncan, "I shall be sorry to carry back this language to the Marquis of Argyle. I had it in farther charge from the Marquis, that, to prevent the bloody feuds which must necessarily follow a Highland war, his lordship will be contented if terms of truce could be arranged to the north of the Highland line, as there is ground enough in Scotland to fight upon without neighbours destroying each other's families and inheritances." ”

“ The early portion of Duncan’s reign is void of incident, but, before long, the mainland possessions of Thorfin appear to have become an object of dispute, [114] the king demanding the usual tribute due from a dependancy of Scotland, whilst the Jarl denied the justice of his claim, maintaining that he held his earldom by Odal right, as an absolute and unconditional gift from their joint grandfather Malcolm. ”

“ Duncan, king of Scotland, was a prince of a gentle disposition, but possessed not the genius requisite for governing a country so turbulent, and so much infested by the intrigues and animosities of the great. Macbeth, a powerful nobleman, and nearly allied to the crown, not content with curbing the king’s authority, carried still farther his pestilent ambition: he put his sovereign to death; chased Malcolm Kenmore, his son and heir, into England, and usurped the crown. ”

“ Still rigid in his saddle, Duncan shifted his eyes from the crowd to the cathedral portal. A tall, spare man in a stained surcoat of soft leather appeared beside Cospatrick, the provost, and acknowledged the citizens' welcome. This was Sir Hugh Kennedy, Earl of Carfrae, the king's justiciar. A terrible man was he, feared throughout Scotland for his grim gray sword and his fierce gray eye; his visit usually boded little good to the city he honored with his presence.
Nor was Kinlochan the most conscience-free city in the land, either ”

“ The flight of Duncan’s children—mere infants—one to Cumbria, the other to the Isles, is a fiction founded on the ideas of the time when it first appears, three or four centuries later. They probably remained amongst their hereditary partizans in Atholl and the southern provinces, occupying the same position which their cousin Lulach had done during the reign of their father—the position of the Head of the Hy Nial, when Brian Boru achieved the sovereignty of Ireland ”

“ Under Sigurd’s son Thorfinn, the most powerful of the Orkney Jarls, after the defeat and death of King Duncan in 1040, the whole of the northern districts of Scotland, as far as the river Tay, fell under the power of the Norwegians, who likewise possessed the Sudreys or Western Isles and the Gaelic district of Galloway, while Macbeth, the Mormaer of Moray, ruled as king over the dominions left to him, and the other districts south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde adhered to the family of Duncan ”

“ By the population of Lothian and Cumbria, who had probably had enough of Donald and his Gaelic followers, Duncan would no doubt be received at once; for though the people of Lothian might have preferred a son of the Saxon queen, and might not dislike to see him set aside for one of that family, they would have no hesitation in supporting his cause against that of his uncle. The Gaelic inhabitants of Scotland proper seem to have been divided. ”

“ For five years after the fall of Duncan his successful rival reigned in peace, when an attempt was made by the adherents of the late king to regain their lost ascendancy. A. D. 1045. The children of Duncan were still in their infancy, and their cause was sustained by their grandfather, Crinan, the aged abbot of Dunkeld; but his defeat and death, “with nine times twenty warriors,” extinguished for a time the hopes of the House of Atholl, and only served to secure the throne more firmly in the power of Macbeth. ”

“ The very earliest Scotch writing ever discovered is only a charter, and is dated 1095, more than fifty years after Duncan was "in his grave," and it was more than three hundred years later that a Scotch prior, named Androwe of Wyntonne, wrote a long historical poem which he called an Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland. In it he relates the story of Macbeth and the three witches, and the murder of Duncan, though he says that Macbeth afterward made a very wise and just king, whose reign of seventeen years was marked by great abundance, and by royal almsgiving and zeal for "holy kirk." ”

“ Then Duncan, groaning, threw back his head and closed his eyes.
"Men of Bute," said Allan, returning to his shipmates, "yonder, in that isle that you see across the waters, our lord Kenric lies perishing of hunger in a castle dungeon. No more need I say to you, my brave comrades, for well do I know that there is no man of you who will think of rest until we have saved him. Speed you, my lads, work well your oars, and God grant that we be yet in time." ”

“ Affairs of Scotland While the Red King was warring and bribing in Normandy, Scotland had, as in the days of Siward, received a king from England, and, what had not happened in the days of Siward, her people had slain the foreign nominee, and had again chosen a king of their own. The first reign of Donald, the momentary reign of Duncan, the beginning of the second reign of Donald, all of them events which were not mere changes of sovereign, but real revolutions in the state of the nation, had happened between the death of Malcolm and the return of William from Normandy thirteen months later. ”

“ During the absence of William in Normandy, whilst he was in attendance at the court of Henry upon the subject of his dispute with the papal see, some of the leading nobility of Scotland—probably of Moravia—taking advantage of the distracted state of the kingdom, made overtures to Donald Bane, a son of William Fitz Duncan, inviting him to assert his claim upon the throne of Scotland. ”

“ The grant of the English fief of Furness to Wimund, by which a troublesome enemy was converted into a questionable feudatory, and the confirmation of Skipton, also a dependency of the English crown, to William Fitz Duncan, were carried out by the Scottish king without the slightest reference to the prerogatives of the English sovereign; and owing to the distracted state of England during the reign of Stephen, never was Scotland at any [225] period of her history more powerful relatively to her southern neighbour, than during the last ten years of David’s reign. ”

“ As for men who still are single,
’Tis best to have nought to do with women.
Another bard whose sentiments would shock suffragettes, is suspected for no other than Black Duncan himself, who would thus appear as taking a cynical view of the world he did so much to change. Some verses again are of ecclesiastically edifying tone; yet there are sly hits at monastic life, a sign of the times in which Henry VIII. took a strong view of the same subject, that, to be sure, supplies a favourite topic for mediæval poetry, and is all along very freely handled by the Muse of Lowland Scotland. ”

“ They are in many Peerages [4] said to descend from the Robertsons of Struan, or Strowan, in Perthshire, who descended from Duncan de Atholia, Earl of Athole, hence descendants of Duncan, King of Scotland. My grandfather, the 4th Baron Rokeby, in an unfinished pedigree, believed this, but there have been Robinsons bearing the same [5] coat-of-arms in Yorkshire as early as the time of copyhold record in Edward III.’s reign. ”

“ The great success of the Anglo-Danish earl is generally supposed to have reinstated Malcolm on the throne, but no such inference can be drawn from the accounts of contemporary writers, by whom no allusion is made to the Scottish prince; the espousal of the suppliant’s cause by the Confessor, and the directions given by the saintly king to Siward to re-establish the heir of Duncan in his ancestral kingdom, only appearing in the pages of the Anglo-Norman chroniclers for the purpose of indirectly furthering the subsequent feudal claims of the English kings. ”

“ Duncan, however, was not equally successful in an invasion of the territories of Eadulf, for Simeon of Durham, in his history of that church, tells us that Duncan, king of the Scots, advanced with a countless multitude of troops and laid siege to Durham, and made strenuous but ineffective efforts to carry it, for a large proportion of his cavalry was slain by the besieged, and he was put to a disorderly flight, in which he lost all his foot-soldiers, whose heads were collected in the market-place, and hung up upon posts. ”

“ We see it first as a Culdee church, founded shortly before the accession of the Scottish kings to the Pictish throne; then as a Scottish monastery, its abbot filling the high office of bishop of Fortrenn, the new kingdom acquired by the Scots. Then the bishopric passes to Abernethy, and the successor to the abbot who was first bishop, appears as ‘princeps,’ or superior, of Dunkeld, a term which leaves it doubtful whether he was a cleric or a layman. Then we find Duncan, abbot of Dunkeld, slain in battle while fighting for one of the kings in a war of succession—evidently a layman. ”

“ The Act of Parliament establishing Savings' Banks in Scotland, which was passed in July 1819, was procured through his indomitable exertions, and likewise the Act of 1835, providing for the better regulation of these institutions.
At Ruthwell, Dr Duncan introduced the system of popular lectures on science, which has since been adopted by Mechanics' Institutes. Further to extend the benefits of popular instruction and entertainment, he edited a series of tracts entitled "The Scottish Cheap Repository," one of the first of those periodicals devoted to the moral improvement of the people. ”

“ The temporary success of Duncan appears to have thrown Donald Bane upon the support of a partizan of the northern faction, and he enlisted in his behalf the assistance of Malpeter MacLoen, the Mormaor of Mærne; whilst another party to his conspiracy for regaining the crown was Edmund, one of the surviving sons of Malcolm and Margaret, who was to be rewarded for his connivance in the death of his half-brother by sharing the royal power with his uncle Donald. ”

“ When the possessions of the king of the Scots were confined to the kingdom proper north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, the expression ‘he became his man’ would have a definite significance; but after the cession of Cumbria and Lothian it loses its force, as we cannot tell whether the homage was paid for the kingdom or for one or both of these outlying dependencies. The hostage given was, as we 425are afterwards informed by the Saxon Chronicle, Duncan, the eldest son of Malcolm by Ingibiorg, his first wife, who must then have been a boy of about ten years of age. ”

“ Duncan is an honest lad, I'll warrant him, an' willin to work, too, though he's no very guid o't. But, for a' that, dinna think that I want ye to draw up wi' him; for I wouldna hae ye to gie ony encouragement to anither man on earth, as lang as Andrew Sharp pays mair respect to you than the lave. But only tak my advice—neither rin awa when ye see Duncan coming, nor seem to notice his attentions when he comes, and he'll soon bestow them on some ither body. ”

“ It was not in open battle that Duncan lost his life, nor was the crown of Scotland the prize of the victor in a hard fought field, the final scene in “the Smith’s bothy” being strongly suggestive of treachery.
The historical Macbeth appears to have been an able monarch, and religious after the fashion of the age, for his reign has been handed down in tradition as an era of fertility and prosperity—generally a sign of the ability of the ruler; and he is recorded with his queen amongst the earliest benefactors of the Culdee society of Lochleven. ”

“ The children of Duncan must have been in mere infancy at his death, and if the immediate succession of a son to his father’s throne was still somewhat strange to the Celtic population, that of an heir who was not of sufficient age to be capable of governing personally was totally opposed to their laws. ”

“ On the 11th of October, 1797, admiral Duncan obtained a splendid victory over the Dutch fleet off Camperdown, near the isle of Texel, on the coast of Holland. For this memorable achievement he was created a viscount, with a pension of two thousand pounds per annum. His lordship died on the 4th of August, 1804; he was born at Dundee, in Scotland, on the 1st of July, 1731. ”

“ This Nemedian colony belongs to the older legendary history of Scotland before the Chronicles were corrupted, and may therefore indicate these clans as forming part of the older inhabitants of the districts they occupy. On examining the genealogy of the Campbells we may consider it as authentic as far back as Duncan, son of Gilleaspic, son of Gillacolum, son of Duibne, who is certainly the Duncan M‘Duibhn mentioned in one of the Argyll charters as possessing Lochow and Ardskeodnich, and who was contemporary with Alexander the Second. ”

“ Malcolm II. succeeded in defeating the Angles on the Tweed, seized Lothian, incorporated this bit of old England with his own kingdom, then died, in 1034, leaving his throne to his grandson, Duncan. There was the same play of fierce ambitions upon this small stage as on larger ones. Scottish thanes strove to undermine and supplant other thanes, just as Norman barons and Scotch-English earls would do later, and as in other lands and at all times, the dream of aspiring, intriguing nobles {252} was by some happy chance to snatch the crown and reign at Scone. ”