Saint Margaret of Scotland (Scottish Gaelic: Naomh Maighréad; Scots: Saunt Marget, c. 1045 – 16 November 1093), also known as Margaret of Wessex, was Queen of Alba from 1070 to 1093 as the wife of King Malcolm III. Margaret was sometimes called "The Pearl of Scotland". She was a member of the House of Wessex and was born in the Kingdom of Hungary to the expatriate English prince Edward the Exile. She and her family returned to England in 1057. Following the death of Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, her brother Edgar Ætheling was elected King of England but never crowned. After the family fled north, Margaret married Malcolm III of Scotland by the end of 1070.
Margaret was a pious Christian, and among many charitable works she established a ferry across the Firth of Forth in Scotland for pilgrims travelling to St Andrews in Fife, which gave the towns of South Queensferry and North Queensferry their names. Margaret was the mother of three kings of Scotland, or four, if Edmund of Scotland (who ruled with his uncle, Donald III) is counted, and of Matilda of Scotland, queen consort of England. According to the Vita S. Margaritae (Scotorum) Reginae (Life of St Margaret, Queen (of the Scots)), attributed to Turgot of Durham, Margaret died at Edinburgh Castle in 1093, days after receiving the news of her husband and son's deaths in battle.
In 1250, Pope Innocent IV canonised Margaret, and her remains were reinterred in a shrine in Dunfermline Abbey in Fife. Her relics were dispersed after the Scottish Reformation and subsequently lost. Mary, Queen of Scots, at one time owned her head, which was subsequently preserved by Jesuits in the Scots College, Douai, France, from where it was lost during the French Revolution.
Margaret was the daughter of the English prince Edward the Exile and his wife Agatha, and also the granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, King of England. After the death of Ironside in 1016, Canute sent the infant Edward and his brother to the court of the Swedish king, Olof Skötkonung, and they eventually made their way to Kievan Rus'. The provenance of Margaret's mother, Agatha, is disputed.
As an adult, Edward travelled to Hungary. In 1046 he supported the successful bid of King Andrew I for the Hungarian crown. Margaret was born in Hungary about 1045. Her brother Edgar Ætheling and sister Cristina were also born in Hungary around this time. Margaret grew up in a very religious environment in the Hungarian court.
Margaret came to England with the rest of her family when her father, Edward the Exile, was recalled in 1057 as a possible successor to her great-uncle, the childless King Edward the Confessor. Whether from natural or sinister causes, her father died immediately after landing, and Margaret, still a child, continued to reside at the English court where her brother, Edgar Ætheling, was considered a possible successor to the English throne. When Edward the Confessor died in January 1066, Harold Godwinson was selected as king, possibly because Edgar was considered too young. After Harold's defeat at the Battle of Hastings later that year, Edgar was proclaimed King of England, but when the Normans advanced on London, the Witenagemot presented Edgar to William the Conqueror, who took him to Normandy before returning him to England in 1068, when Edgar, Margaret, Cristina, and their mother Agatha fled north to Northumbria, England.
According to tradition, the widowed Agatha decided to leave Northumbria with her children and return to the continent. However, a storm drove their ship north to the Kingdom of Scotland, where they were shipwrecked in 1068. There they were given refuge by King Malcolm III. Margaret's arrival in Scotland, after the failed revolt of the Northumbrian earls, has been heavily romanticised, though one medieval source suggested that she and Malcolm were first engaged nine years earlier. That is, according to Orderic Vitalis, one of Malcolm's earliest actions as king was to travel to the court of Edward the Confessor, in 1059 to arrange a marriage with "Edward's kinswoman Margaret, who had arrived in England two years before from Hungary". If a marriage agreement was made in 1059, it was not kept, and this may explain the Scots invasion of Northumbria in 1061 when Lindisfarne was plundered. Conversely, Symeon of Durham implied that Margaret's first meeting with Malcolm III may not have been until 1070, after William the Conqueror's Harrying of the North.
Malcolm III was a widower, with two sons, Donald and Duncan, and would have been attracted to marrying one of the few remaining members of the House of Wessex, the Anglo-Saxon royal family. The marriage of Malcolm and Margaret occurred in 1070. Subsequently, Malcolm executed several invasions of Northumbria to support the claim of his new brother-in-law Edgar and to increase his own power. These, however, had little effect save the devastation of the county.
Margaret and Malcolm had eight children – six sons and two daughters:
Edward (c. 1071 – 13 November 1093), killed along with his father in the Battle of Alnwick
Ethelred, abbot of Dunkeld, Perth and Kinross, Scotland
Edgar (c. 1074 – 11 January 1107), king of Scotland, reigned 1097–1107
Alexander I (c. 1078 – 23 April 1124), King of Scotland, reigned 1107–24
Edith (c. 1080 – 1 May 1118), renamed Matilda, queen of England
Mary (1082–1116), countess of Boulogne
David I (c. 1084 – 24 May 1153), king of Scotland, reigned 1124–53
Turgot of Durham, Bishop of St Andrews, became close to the Scottish court and a friend and spiritual adviser to Margaret.*Green, Lionel (July 2013). Hopkins, Peter (ed.). Building St Cuthbert's Shrine Durham Cathedral and the Life of Prior Turgot. Sacristy Press. p. 90. ISBN 9781908381620. Between 1100 and 1107, Turgot wrote a vita of her at the request of her daughter, Matilda, wife of King Henry I of England. Turgot credits her with having a civilising influence on her husband Malcolm by reading him narratives from the Bible. She instigated religious reform, striving to conform the worship and practices of the Scottish church to those of the continental church, which she experienced in her childhood. This she did on the inspiration and with the guidance of Lanfranc, a future archbishop of Canterbury. Due to these achievements, she was considered an exemplar of the "just ruler", and moreover influenced her husband and children, especially her youngest son, the future King David I of Scotland, to be just and holy rulers.
"The chroniclers all agree in depicting Queen Margaret as a strong, pure, noble character, who had very great influence over her husband, and through him over Scottish history, especially in its ecclesiastical aspects. Her religion, which was genuine and intense, was of the newest Roman style; and to her are attributed a number of reforms by which the Church [in] Scotland was considerably modified from the insular and primitive type which down to her time it had exhibited. Among those expressly mentioned are a change in the manner of observing Lent, which thenceforward began as elsewhere on Ash Wednesday and not as previously on the following Monday, and the abolition of the old practice of observing Saturday (Sabbath), not Sunday, as the day of rest from labour (for more information on this issue see Skene's Celtic Scotland, book ii chap. 8)."