Chapter X

King Hakon and the North of Scotland.

We can now turn with some sense of relief from the intricate maze of the genealogy of the Caithness earls to the more open ground of Scottish history, which we left at the date of the death of William the Lion in December 1214, when he was succeeded on the throne of Scotland by his son, Alexander II, a youth who had then just entered his seventeenth year. We can then work the results of our genealogical conjectures into the general history of the northern counties.

Alexander II, like his predecessors, was in the year after his accession immediately confronted with a revolt headed by Donald Ban MacWilliam the younger, another of the descendants of Ingibjorg of Orkney, widow of Earl Thorfinn and first wife of Malcolm Canmore. The scene of the rising was, as usual, Moray; and Donald was aided not only by the inhabitants of that province, but also by a large force of Irish mercenaries. This rebellion, however, was speedily crushed by Ferchar Mac-in-tagart of the family of the Lay Abbots of Applecross in the west of Ross, a county to which Henry, the eldest son of Harold Maddadson had in vain laid claim.

Argyll, Galloway, and Moray being subdued and settled, and the old Earldom of Caithness broken up, and divided among trustworthy feudal tenants holding their lands by military service from the Scottish king, the whole of the mainland of Scotland may now be said to have been effectively incorporated into one kingdom under the Scottish Crown. Ecclesiastically, also, the whole realm was divided into dioceses, whose bishops were appointed by consent of the king.

The dream of Malcolm II at last was realised.

The western islands of the Hebrides, however, still owed allegiance to the king of Norway, who was till 1240 engaged in civil war with Duke Skuli in his own kingdom. Alexander II therefore equipped a naval expedition to reduce the islands, but, soon after he had embarked, he sickened and died on the island of Kerrera, near Oban, in 1249, leaving as his successor, his son Alexander III, then only in his eighth year, who was married in 1251, before his eleventh year, to Margaret, daughter of Henry III of England, then a child of about the same age as himself. The marriage was followed by a nine years' struggle between the rival factions of Alan Durward, Justiciar of Scotland, and of Walter Comyn, Earl of Menteith, in which England constantly interfered, till the Comyn, or Scottish, faction finally gained the upper hand. In 1261, Alexander III's only child Margaret, who afterwards became Queen of Norway, was born.

As already stated, Alexander II's attempt on the Sudreys had proved abortive through his death in 1249, and the further attacks on them in Alexander III's reign by William, son of Ferchar Mac-in-tagart, and Earl of Ross, had been made in 1261; and by 1262 or 1263, Freskin had died, leaving two daughters Mary and Christian, both minors and unmarried, to inherit his share of Caithness, as co-parceners, each entitled to one quarter of that county.

Such is the story, so far as Sutherland and Caithness are concerned, of Hakon's expedition as told in his Saga, which adds that after losing one ship in the Pentland Firth, while another was all but sunk in the Swelchie near Stroma, he sheltered for the night in the Sound north of Osmundwall, and finally landed again near Ragnvaldsvoe and went to Kirkwall. Retaining twenty of his ships, he let such of the rest of them as had not already gone home sail for Norway.

Deserted by his Jarl, the aged king found a home in the Palace of the faithful bishop, Henry of Orkney, who, alone of all Orkney men, had followed the fortunes of the fleet. Then King Hakon's health gradually failed, and after laying up his ships in Scapa Flow, and seeing to the welfare of his men, he lay down to die of a broken heart, listening as he sank to Masses indeed, but afterwards with greater joy to the Sagas of the Norse kings. "Near midnight" on the 15th of December "Sverri's Saga was read through. But just as midnight was past Almighty God called King Hakon from this world's life."

The consequence of King Hakon's failure was the immediate conquest of the Isle of Man and of the Hebrides by Alexander III.

Sutherland and Caithness were saved for Scotland, it would seem, only by the vote of King Hakon's freemen before sailing for Largs, while the defeat of his fleet there led directly to the cession by King Magnus, his successor, under the treaty of Perth in 1266, of all the Western Highlands and Islands, for a payment of 4000 marks down and of 100 marks a year, and the treaty also secured their permanent political union with Scotland.

Orkney and Shetland, however, remained part of Norway for two hundred years more, and have since 1468 been held by Scotland and afterwards by the United Kingdom only under a wadset or mortgage securing 58,000 crowns, the unpaid balance of the dower of Margaret, wife of James III of Scotland and daughter of King Christian of Norway. The right to redeem them was frequently though fruitlessly claimed by Norway and Denmark in succession until the reign of Charles II and even later; and possibly this right remains, to the legal mind, open until the present day.

On the 20th February 1471 the Earldom of Orkney and Lordship of Shetland were, by an Act of the Scottish Parliament, finally annexed to the Scottish Crown. But Norse law and usages and the Norse language long lived on in Orkney and longer still in Shetland.