XVI DEATHS OF PRINCE HENRY AND KING DAVID 303 when I left him in body to serve my Saviour, I was ever with him in mind and in affection." The prince had other qualities which commended him to a wider circle; for no knight fought more bravely by his father's side than the pride and heir of his house. He had an illness in early manhood from which he is said to have recovered through the prayers of St. Malachy of Armagh, who was on a visit to Scotland. Malachy died at Clairvaux, and St. Bernard wrote his "Life," and incidentally mentions the Scots prince: "This is that Henry who still lives, the only son of king David, a wise and valiant knight, and following his father's footsteps in his zeal for justice and love of the truth." Henry was married to Ada, daughter of the earl of Surrey, by whom he had a family of three sons and three daughters. Malcolm, the eldest, was surnamed the Maiden, and William, the second son, is known by the opposite name, the Lion, from being, it is said, the first of our kings to adopt the lion rampant upon his seal. David, the youngest son, long enjoyed the honour of Huntingdon. Of the three daughters, Ada became wife to the count of Holland; Margaret was married first to the duke of Brittany, and afterwards to the earl of Hereford; and Matilda died unmarried. David, to secure the succession of his grandson Malcolm, a youth of eleven years, which was something of an experiment in king-making among the Scots, caused the earl of Fife, as head of "the seven earls," to conduct the heir through the kingdom. At the same time David himself took his second grandson, William, to Newcastle to receive the homage of the Northumbrian barons as their earl. After Easter of the following year the king retired to Carlisle, where he was seized with his last illness. The few remaining days of his life he devoted with renewed diligence to works of charity, to prayer, and to Communion. He repeated portions of the psalter with great fervour, saying seven times over the words of the hundred and nineteenth psalm, "I have done justice and judgment; leave me not to mine oppressors." He asked, as his mother had done, for the Black Rood to be brought to him, and received it with much reverence. On the morning of the Sunday before the Ascension, the 24th May 1153, he was taken to his rest. He was buried in Dunfermline beside the graves of his father and mother. Though not formally canonised by the Church, king David's memory was venerated by succeeding generations of the Scots as the best and worthiest of their kings. Ailred says in his Eulogium that the king "was the comforter of the sorrowing, the father of the orphan, the ready judge of the widow. I have seen him," he continues, "with my own eyes, when ready to go out hunting, and with his foot on the stirrup, at the prayer of a poor petitioner leave his horse, return into the hall, and give up his purpose for the day, and kindly and patiently hear the cause." David's liberal benefactions to the Church have been censured on the ground of their impoverishing the State. A successor, James I. (of Scotland, not of England, as some mistake) is credited with the complaint that David was "a sore saint for the Crown." None of his successors was less likely than James I. to have impeached David's liberality, for none of them all resembled him more in personal generosity and in devotion to the Church. The king's policy has been challenged by writers of a later age, but the people of that day, and generations after, had no cause to regret his line of action. In an unsettled period the ecclesiastical foundations introduced the elements of permanence of tenure and security of property. In a material point of view, what the king lost in personal XVI SCOTTISH CHURCH UNDER THE ROMAN SEE 305 revenue the country gained by a diffusion of its wealth over a wider area.1 David's reign marks a new departure of another kind fraught with more serious consequences to the Scottish Church. For the first time in our history we read of a papal legate in Scotland. The gradual assimilation of the Scottish to the English Church begun by queen Margaret, and promoted by her sons, necessarily involved a nearer relation to the Roman see. The English Church, though less indebted to Rome than to Iona and Lindisfarne for the Christianising of the Anglo-Saxons, had now been in close relationship with Rome for more than five hundred years. The Scottish Church had hitherto owed little directly to Rome-nothing probably since the mission of St. Ninian, who, after all, only returned to evangelise the Church of his baptism and of his own people. After his day communion between Italy and Scotland was rare. But Rome in St. Ninian's day was the Rome of Jerome and Augustine, when papal supremacy was unknown or only in its germ; and even Rome in the time of king David was free from many accretions and corruptions which were of later growth in the mediæval Church. But, for better and for worse, the history of the Scottish Church for the next four hundred years now becomes intimately bound up with Rome. It is the history of the Catholic Church of Scotland brought for the first time under obedience to the Roman see. Nor were the positions of the Scottish and English Churches parallel. England was strong through the generally united action of the sovereign, the church, and the people,—strong enough to resist, and, when necessary, to bid defiance to papal threats and tyranny. And even under a weak monarch like king John, the English bishops and barons were able to vindi1 See Cos. Innes, Mid. Ages, pp. 113, 114. X cate in the Great Charter the freedom and independence of the Anglican communion, and to assert its rights and liberties against Roman usurpation. In Scotland it was otherwise. The monarchy was not so strong, seldom strong enough to bridle the chronic turbulence of the barons, or to correct, when necessary, the growing abuses in the Church. Only on rare occasions, under kings like William the Lion, Alexander II., and Robert the Bruce, had Scotland the courage to defy papal excommunication and interdict. The hereditary feud with England also weakened the Scottish executive in its resistance to external pressure. It threw Scotland politically into the arms of France, and ecclesiastically into the fold of Rome. To escape the home supremacy of York the Scottish Church welcomed the foreign supremacy of Rome. reigning pontiffs were not loath to accept the situation, and early conferred upon Scotland the special grace of being the favoured daughter of Rome. To this unique position some of our historians ascribe the deeper degeneracy of the Scottish Church in the last century of papal supremacy, when faith and morals reached their lowest ebb. The CHAPTER XVII THE CULDEES-THEIR ORIGIN AND HISTORY THE Culdees are first mentioned in Scottish history in the eighth century. No reference to their existence in Scotland at an earlier date is anywhere to be found. This may be accepted as one indisputable fact in the controversy that has been raised about the Culdees. That controversy is largely due to the untrustworthy history of Hector Boece, a writer of the sixteenth century. His ambition was to make a long pedigree for the Scottish race, to prove that they were a polished, not a barbarous, people in the earliest ages, and that their first kings were models for James V., in whose minority he wrote. The civil history of Boece with its forty mythical kings has long been discredited and discarded, but his ecclesiastical history, equally fallacious, is for polemical purposes still set up as an authority. Boece was not aware that there were no Scots settled in North Britain until the sixth century, and that his supposititious Culdee ministry among them was a historical anachronism. His Culdees play the same mythical part in church history that his early kings do in civil history. Without any authority he makes the Culdees the ministers of a Scottish Church from the years A.D. 200 to 430, at which latter date Palladius was sent as the first bishop " to the Scots believing in Christ." The next assumption was that the first Christian Scots were |