Note 229 — Chapter VII

Lib. de Scone, No. 1. Six earls attest the charter; Heth (written through a clerical error Beth) of Moray, Madach of Atholl, Malise of Strathearn, Dufagan of Fife, and Gartnach and Rory, who may be assigned to Angus, Mar, or Buchan. Heth appears to have married the sister of Malsnechtan (for his successor, Angus, is described as the son of Lulach’s daughter, An. Ult. 1130), and thus to have inherited and transmitted the claims of the line of Kenneth MacDuff. He must have been an inveterate opponent of the reigning family, as his son Malcolm is described by Ailred as “the inheritor of his father’s hatred.” The real descent of the Stewarts was well known as late as the fourteenth century, when Richard Fitz-Alan, Earl of Arundel in 1336, sold the Stewardship of Scotland to Edward III., a transaction which was confirmed by Edward Balliol (Tiernay’s Hist. of Arundel, vol. i., pp. 193, 299, notes). The sale was of course a political fiction, founded on the assumed forfeiture of the Scottish branch of the earl’s family, through which their hereditary office was supposed to have reverted to their English connections. The real king and the pseudo-king united in the joint exercise of an act of shadowy sovereignty—a joint protest of their claims as vassal king and overlord of Scotland—the sole substantial gain, the purchase-money, falling to the earl; though, had the Plantagenets succeeded in conquering Scotland, the transaction would have become a reality, and the ancestry of the hereditary Earls Marshal of the present day would have lost their claim to supplant the ancestry of the reigning sovereign. The father of Alan was Flahald or Fleald, a name which reappears under the familiar form of “Fleance, son of Banquo, Thane of Lochaber.”