Alexander III’s reign both began and ended in crisis.
Alexander was born in 1241, the only child of King Alexander II of Scotland and his second wife, Queen Marie de Coucy. Alexander II had previously been married to Princess Joan of England, a union which had secured Alexander’s extensive estates in northern England. However, the marriage also provided her English royal relatives with a degree of additional leverage in their attempts to exercise their claims of suzerainty over the Kingdom of Scotland. Joan was just nine at the time of her marriage in 1221. The marriage would therefore not be consummated, and Joan would not have been expected to have started producing royal offspring for at least another five or six years.
Yet as the years wore on and the royal marriage remained childless, increasing concerns in the matter began to circulate through the Scottish court. Alexander II was the only legitimate son of William the Lion; he therefore had no brother to succeed him if he died childless, as had been the case with previous generations of Scottish kings. His legitimate sisters, Margaret, Isabella and Majorie were all married to powerful English magnates. Were Alexander to die without children, then it was likely that there would be a dispute over the throne which would either go to one of his English brothers-in-law or one of the disparate descendants of his great uncle Prince David.
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Such dynastic concerns placed Alexander II in a difficult position, were he to attempt to divorce Joan or annul their marriage, her brother Henry III of England, to whom she was very close, was likely to declare war and use the opportunity to place the Scottish king yet more firmly under the thumb. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that Joan, who was largely isolated and without allies in the Scottish court, spent increasing amounts of time away from Alexander in her English estates.
Joan’s death from illness in 1238 therefore presented Alexander II with the opportunity to both produce a sorely needed heir for Scotland and perhaps fenagle his way somewhat out of the looming shadow of English overlordship. His choice of new Queen, Marie de Coucy, reflected these mingled concerns and hopes. Marie’s father was Lord Enguerrand III of Coucy, one of the King of France’s major vassals and a distant relative of the French royal house. Her marriage therefore worked to draw Scotland closer to the French royal court, an influence which if carefully cultivated could help to guard against Henry III’s claims to Scottish overlordship.
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In 1249, Alexander II died from a fever he caught while on an expedition to detach the Kingdom of the Isles from Norwegian sovereignty and formally absorb its territories, which included a large portion of the mainland’s northwestern coast such as Argyle, into the kingdom of Scotland. His only heir, his young namesake, Alexander III, was a mere child at the time. Clearly in a political system constructed around a single figure and that person’s ability to reach an understanding with and properly incentivize multiple factions of power brokers and stakeholders, a period of minority rule was a time of acute danger. In the absence of a strong senior partner to distribute patronage and mediate between the various aristocratic factions, certain groups were liable to either attempt to shuck off their former associations and with them royal control or seek to expand their own powerbases by vying for control over key offices and the apparatus of royal government.
At the time of the seven- or eight-year-old Alexander III’s accession to the throne, the most powerful and influential figure within the Scottish court was probably Walter Comyn, Lord of Badenoch and through his wife, Earl of Menteith.
Coronation of King Alexander III as depicted in a late medieval manuscript of the Scottichronicon by Walter Bower. From folio 206 in Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 17
Under Walter’s father, William, the Comyn family had become firmly entrenched within the Scottish court because of their extensive contributions to the growth of royal authority within the north of Scotland. Walter’s brothers, John and David, were able to acquire the Earldom of Angus and the lordship of Kilbride respectively through advantageous marriages they were able to acquire, in part because of the depth of royal favour that the family enjoyed. Their paternal half-brother, Alexander, eventually requested the Earldom of Buchan from his mother, while their sisters Johanna, Margret and Elizabeth, found matches with Earl William of Ross, Sir John de Keith, the Marshall of Scotland, and Earl William of Mar.
The Comyn were a powerful, expansive and crucially tightly knit family whose various branches cooperated closely with one another in pursuit of their mutual interests. Naturally, this prominence combined with their multitude of close familial connections to other major families within the Scottish aristocracy made them a force to be reckoned with and something of a default choice for provisional leadership of the Scottish political community during the king’s minority.
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Yet the position of Walter Comyn and his family within the Scottish royal government during the minority of Alexander III was vigorously contested by Alan Durward and his allies. Alan was the son of Thomas de Lundin, the royal Hostarius or doorkeeper; a coveted court position which gave him remarkable access to the king and entailed a level of responsibility for the protection of the king’s person and personal property. Thomas was the maternal grandson of Earl Gille Críst of Mar and had upon the Earls death in the early 1200s successfully launched a legal challenge that saw him secure a significant portion of the Earldom’s southern territories. The identity of Alan’s mother is unknown but his later political activities and repeated attempts to secure the earldom of Athol, strongly suggest that she was a daughter of Earl Máel Coluim of Atholl.
Alan was therefore well connected to major factions within the Scottish aristocracy, but his familial situation was such that he was highly unlikely to inherit a comital title. Instead, he followed his father’s example by attaching himself to the royal court and the king’s great project of bringing the North and West of Scotland more firmly under royal control. By 1233, he had not only inherited his father’s position as Hostarius but also been awarded control of Urquhart, near Inverness.
Alan’s true rise to prominence came five years before the coronation and strangely resulted almost directly from the intemperate actions of his future Comyn rivals. The Comyns alongside the king’s cousin, Earl Patrick of Dunbar, began ravaging the lands of the Bisset family who they held responsible for the death of their relative, Earl Patrick of Athol. The Bisset family soon found themselves overwhelmed and unable to resist the powerful aristocratic coalition arrayed against them. Members of the family successfully took shelter within the royal court of Alexander II.
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However, the Scottish crown, almost certainly acting under pressure from the Comyns and the family of Patrick of Dunbar and their allies, subsequently judged the Bissets to be responsible for the murder and ordered the confiscation of their Scottish lands and property. The Bissets responded by once more striking out for the protection of a royal court and a perceived higher authority, this time that of Henry III of England. The English king, ever eager to expand his authority within Scotland, argued that Alexander had no legal right to confiscate the lands of one of his vassals without first receiving approval from his own overlord, Henry. While the incident was eventually resolved, it was something of a black eye for the Comyn family and in the subsequent reshuffling of royal government, undertaken by Alexander II to consolidate his authority in the face of the English king’s heavy-handed tactics, Alan Durward was appointed Justicar of Scotia.
This position gave Durward near vice-regal authority and responsibility within the north of the Kingdom and was accompanied by a shift in which Alan replaced Walter as Alexander II’s most trusted and intimate counsellor. However, it is worth noting that Alan took the position of Justicar not from Watler but from Philip de Melville and Robert de Monte Alto who had both proven largely ineffectual during the crisis. As noted above, Alexander II’s reaction to the Bisset incident and his subsequent reforms had more to do with staving off further English intervention than attempting to curb the power of overmighty subjects.
While the Comyn family did not emerge from the incident covered in glory, having inadvertently drawn the covetous eye of Henry III to Scotland, it was not damaged in any meaningful way and remained the single most powerful and influential aristocratic family within Scotland. What the crisis did mean, however, was that by the time of Alexander II’s unexpected death in 1249, Alan and his allies were deeply entrenched within the Scottish royal government.
Divided as it was by internal rivalries, the minority government of Alexander III initially proved itself to be almost surprisingly effective in its efforts to preserve the integrity and independence of the Scottish throne. Henry III had seized upon Alexander III’s minority as another chance to impose his personal overlordship over Scotland. In his attempts to cajole a recognition of overlordship from the young Alexander and his advisors, Henry went as far as writing to the Pope to launch an ultimately unsuccessful legal challenge to the validity of Alexander’s coronation. This claim was strongly refuted by Alexander’s councillors and the massed ranks of Scottish nobility, even as concessions were made to Henry succeeded regarding other limited aspects of the minority.
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Indeed, the Scottish royal government, at this crucial juncture, skilfully negotiated around Henry’s pretensions to suzerainty over the British Isles while denying him much in the way of practical concessions. Evidently both the Comyns and Durward recognized that while there were significant short-term political advantages to be gained from cooperation with Henry III, their positions and personal security ultimately relied upon the existence of a strong Scottish-based monarchy.
It was a difficult and tense balancing act. We should be careful to remember though that as severe a challenge as forced acknowledgement of English overlordship was to the independence and prestige of the Scottish throne; the threat was not an existential one. Submission, so heroically resisted, would have drastically changed the form and function of the Scottish royal government but did not entail its dissolution. Henry III sought to bring Scotland and its throne firmly under his thumb rather than occupy it himself. Indeed, his later actions and attempts to impose change upon the minority government strongly suggest that the ceiling of his ambition was tapping the kingdom’s military resources for his revanchist wars in Europe. This, of course, was not an inconsiderable ambition, and it is easy to see why the Scottish nobility and both factions within the royal government did all they could to refute or otherwise blunt his intervention in Scotland.
A notion that can be slightly hard to parse through the lens of modern conceptions of statehood and national identity is that before Edward I’s reign, the medieval kings of England’s preferred instrument in the exercise of their overlordship were the kings of Scotland. While they might require a deal of cajoling or outright bullying to acquiesce to the imposition of outside authority, in general, it suited the kings of England to conduct affairs in Scotland through a junior partner or powerful subordinate capable of decisive intervention within Scotland rather than risk becoming bogged down in the mire of Scottish politics. Henry III, therefore, had a vested interest not only in controlling Alexander III but in preserving his authority and suite of royal power from the fractious courtier’s intent on carving up the spoils of royal administration.
Alexander III, King of Scots, as a guest of Edward I of England at the sitting of an English parliament. From a 16th-century manuscript / Wikimedia Commons
While Henry III failed to extract an acknowledgement of his overlordship in 1251, he did succeed in arranging for Alexander to marry his daughter, Margaret. As part of his settlement, two members of Henry’s court, John Balliol and Robert de Ros, were appointed as the guardians of Alexander and his young bride. However, the members of the Scottish government demonstrated their continued independence by firmly rebuffing English attempts to extract hostages in exchange for Margaret’s safety. It is also worth noting that the wife of John Balliol, Dervorguilla of Galloway, had a strong claim to the Scottish throne. If anything were to happen to the still young and childless Alexander II then the couple’s infant son, also called John, would be accounted amongst the king’s most likely heirs.
The guardianship of these two strongly English-aligned Anglo-Scottish nobles proved to be short-lived as word of Robert de Ros’ eager corruption and abuse of power soon reached Henry’s ear. In any case, the authority of dual guardians had been extremely limited, with both men appearing relatively low down the witness lists of charters issued in the name of Alexander III during this time.
With the failure of this scheme, Henry changed tactics and began to cultivate a closer relationship with the Durward faction as a way of increasing his influence in Scotland. Durward and his allies were, after all, perfectly positioned to bypass the Scottish nobility and as the weaker faction within the minority government were more likely to cooperate with Henry, as long as that cooperation did not result in anything too obviously damaging to the integrity of the Scottish government.
Durward used this new association in an attempt to undermine the Comyn’s position and further widen the rift between them and Henry III who increasingly blamed the family’s hostility and influence for his daughter’s allegedly poor treatment in Scotland. Events reached a head in 1255 when Durward and his supporters made a concerted effort to oust Walter and the Comyns from the royal government. This involved the speedy relocation of the king and the royal court to Edinburgh castle, denying the Comyns access to either, while their aristocratic rivals, including the Bruce and Stewart families, as well as their one-time ally Patrick of Dunbar, were given license to openly challenge them. While this coup was successful in preventing the Comyns from gaining access to the king and apparatus of royal government, Durward’s new allies failed to effectively disrupt the Comyn authority or networks of affinity within the regions.
Henry III hoped to use the change in the Scottish royal government to enact a more formal structure for the minority in which authority was to be held by a council of seven guardians who served for a fixed number of years. However, he soon found that without the support of the Comyns and their allies, such reforms could not practically be enacted. Alexander was rapidly approaching the end of his minority and it seems probable that many Scottish aristocrats and bishops would have seen any further retooling of the royal government as unnecessary or suspicious.
By 1257 the Comyns were both desperate and largely undiminished in terms of military capacity and political influence, a dangerous combination. A prolonged series of negotiations with Henry III proved ultimately fruitless as it became clear that the English king increasingly preferred to cultivate influence in Scotland by leveraging the position of Anglo-Scottish magnates whose divided loyalties he already had some claim over.
The Comyns therefore adopted a new highly reckless solution to their problems, they kidnapped Alexander. That they were able to do so, holding him at Kinross Castle in the family’s heartlands, is quite a feat in itself. As incredible as their success was in gaining control of the king, the strangest thing about the kidnapping incident was the anti-climactic way in which it concluded. By April of 1258, the king, now sixteen, was free and presiding over his first parliament in Stirling. It is maddeningly unclear if Alexander escaped, was liberated by the efforts of his other supporters, or was simply let go after coming to some understanding with the Comyns. It seems probable that the Comyns were at least able to persuade the king that they meant him no harm since the family faced little in the way of repercussions for a crime as momentous and serious as the abduction of the monarch and continued to work closely under the king for the remainder of his reign.
Just as the Comyns and Durward understood that their power and prosperity relied upon close cooperation with the Scottish throne and access to the rewards royal service brought, Alexander would surely have appreciated the collaborative nature of the Scottish government. To begin his majority with a violent clash with the most powerful members of the Scottish aristocracy would clearly endanger his rule and pave the way for further English intervention. It is also possible that the death of the family’s head, Walter Comyn, the following November helped to clear away any remaining royal ill feelings about the incident and presented the king and the remaining Comyns with the opportunity for a fresh start.
Walter’s younger half-brother, Earl Alexander of Buchan, quickly emerged as the new head of the Comyn family who took Alan Durward’s place as the Justiciar of Scotia, reaffirming the almost vice-regal power that the family wielded in the north. That the Comyns continued to cooperate closely with one another even as authority passed to another branch of the family speaks to both an admirable degree of familial solidarity and a keen awareness that the family owed its ongoing power and prosperity to its engagement in royal service. The family members in the best position to participate in royal government and negotiate with the crown on the family’s behalf naturally wielded enormous influence over the rest of the family.
Throughout Alexander III’s reign, Alexander Comyn served as Alexander III’s most trusted lieutenant and was one of the most prominent and regular witnesses to royal charters. Alan Durward and many of his allies remained in office or continued to serve Alexander III in the Scottish royal government in some capacity but the king’s active presence and the existence of a succession of mutual enemies curtailed the worst of the infighting.
Freed of the hindrances Alan and aristocratic factionalism had burdened them with, the power and influence of the Comyn family’s various branches continued to wax. Alexander III proved a highly capable ruler who through a series of shrewd military actions and relentless diplomatic pressure continued his father’s efforts to bring the Western Isles into the kingdom of Scotland. Alexander was opposed vigorously to this ambition by the Norwegian King Haakon IV who was eager to reassert his role as the Kingdom of the Isles’ traditional overlord. Thanks in large part to Alexander’s strategically minded handling of the campaign and the cultivation of productive relations with his deputies and regional proxies, the Norwegian invasion of Scotland was thwarted.
Shortly after Haakon’s defeat and death, his successors acknowledged Scottish control of the Western Isles in the Treaty of Perth. While the presence of Henry III still loomed large over the early years of Alexander’s minority, his involvement in Scotland was eventually compromised by the emergence of the extreme political difficulties in England which prefaced the Second Barons Rebellion.
The crisis that surrounded the beginning of Alexander III’s reign prefigures in many important ways, the succession crisis that followed his death in 1286. Alexander Comyn, one of the future guardians of Scotland and foremost political figures during the early years of the succession crisis had already experienced one crisis in which an opportunistic English king had attempted to leverage instability within the royal Scottish centre into a recognition of English overlordship.
This example loomed large in the minds of Alexander and his peers within the Scottish aristocracy and heavily informed their negotiations with Edward I of England over the succession and the relationship between the two kingdoms. Unfortunately for them and their immediate descendants, Edward I’s imperial ambitions within the British Isles were far greater and far more direct than those of any of his predecessors.
Likewise, the factionalism and infighting that marked the Comyn and Durward parties’ attempts to reap the rewards of royal government in the absence of an active adult king was repeated in the bitter rivalry that emerged between the Comyns Balliol relatives and their Bruce rivals. Together Edward’s ambitions and the emergence of two distinctive factions within the Scottish aristocracy would shape the Wars of Scottish Independence and the new wholly different Scotland that would emerge in their aftermath.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on Twitter @HistorySchmstry
By James Turner
Alexander III’s reign both began and ended in crisis.
Alexander was born in 1241, the only child of King Alexander II of Scotland and his second wife, Queen Marie de Coucy. Alexander II had previously been married to Princess Joan of England, a union which had secured Alexander’s extensive estates in northern England. However, the marriage also provided her English royal relatives with a degree of additional leverage in their attempts to exercise their claims of suzerainty over the Kingdom of Scotland. Joan was just nine at the time of her marriage in 1221. The marriage would therefore not be consummated, and Joan would not have been expected to have started producing royal offspring for at least another five or six years.
Yet as the years wore on and the royal marriage remained childless, increasing concerns in the matter began to circulate through the Scottish court. Alexander II was the only legitimate son of William the Lion; he therefore had no brother to succeed him if he died childless, as had been the case with previous generations of Scottish kings. His legitimate sisters, Margaret, Isabella and Majorie were all married to powerful English magnates. Were Alexander to die without children, then it was likely that there would be a dispute over the throne which would either go to one of his English brothers-in-law or one of the disparate descendants of his great uncle Prince David.
Such dynastic concerns placed Alexander II in a difficult position, were he to attempt to divorce Joan or annul their marriage, her brother Henry III of England, to whom she was very close, was likely to declare war and use the opportunity to place the Scottish king yet more firmly under the thumb. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that Joan, who was largely isolated and without allies in the Scottish court, spent increasing amounts of time away from Alexander in her English estates.
Joan’s death from illness in 1238 therefore presented Alexander II with the opportunity to both produce a sorely needed heir for Scotland and perhaps fenagle his way somewhat out of the looming shadow of English overlordship. His choice of new Queen, Marie de Coucy, reflected these mingled concerns and hopes. Marie’s father was Lord Enguerrand III of Coucy, one of the King of France’s major vassals and a distant relative of the French royal house. Her marriage therefore worked to draw Scotland closer to the French royal court, an influence which if carefully cultivated could help to guard against Henry III’s claims to Scottish overlordship.
In 1249, Alexander II died from a fever he caught while on an expedition to detach the Kingdom of the Isles from Norwegian sovereignty and formally absorb its territories, which included a large portion of the mainland’s northwestern coast such as Argyle, into the kingdom of Scotland. His only heir, his young namesake, Alexander III, was a mere child at the time. Clearly in a political system constructed around a single figure and that person’s ability to reach an understanding with and properly incentivize multiple factions of power brokers and stakeholders, a period of minority rule was a time of acute danger. In the absence of a strong senior partner to distribute patronage and mediate between the various aristocratic factions, certain groups were liable to either attempt to shuck off their former associations and with them royal control or seek to expand their own powerbases by vying for control over key offices and the apparatus of royal government.
At the time of the seven- or eight-year-old Alexander III’s accession to the throne, the most powerful and influential figure within the Scottish court was probably Walter Comyn, Lord of Badenoch and through his wife, Earl of Menteith.
Under Walter’s father, William, the Comyn family had become firmly entrenched within the Scottish court because of their extensive contributions to the growth of royal authority within the north of Scotland. Walter’s brothers, John and David, were able to acquire the Earldom of Angus and the lordship of Kilbride respectively through advantageous marriages they were able to acquire, in part because of the depth of royal favour that the family enjoyed. Their paternal half-brother, Alexander, eventually requested the Earldom of Buchan from his mother, while their sisters Johanna, Margret and Elizabeth, found matches with Earl William of Ross, Sir John de Keith, the Marshall of Scotland, and Earl William of Mar.
The Comyn were a powerful, expansive and crucially tightly knit family whose various branches cooperated closely with one another in pursuit of their mutual interests. Naturally, this prominence combined with their multitude of close familial connections to other major families within the Scottish aristocracy made them a force to be reckoned with and something of a default choice for provisional leadership of the Scottish political community during the king’s minority.
Yet the position of Walter Comyn and his family within the Scottish royal government during the minority of Alexander III was vigorously contested by Alan Durward and his allies. Alan was the son of Thomas de Lundin, the royal Hostarius or doorkeeper; a coveted court position which gave him remarkable access to the king and entailed a level of responsibility for the protection of the king’s person and personal property. Thomas was the maternal grandson of Earl Gille Críst of Mar and had upon the Earls death in the early 1200s successfully launched a legal challenge that saw him secure a significant portion of the Earldom’s southern territories. The identity of Alan’s mother is unknown but his later political activities and repeated attempts to secure the earldom of Athol, strongly suggest that she was a daughter of Earl Máel Coluim of Atholl.
Alan was therefore well connected to major factions within the Scottish aristocracy, but his familial situation was such that he was highly unlikely to inherit a comital title. Instead, he followed his father’s example by attaching himself to the royal court and the king’s great project of bringing the North and West of Scotland more firmly under royal control. By 1233, he had not only inherited his father’s position as Hostarius but also been awarded control of Urquhart, near Inverness.
Alan’s true rise to prominence came five years before the coronation and strangely resulted almost directly from the intemperate actions of his future Comyn rivals. The Comyns alongside the king’s cousin, Earl Patrick of Dunbar, began ravaging the lands of the Bisset family who they held responsible for the death of their relative, Earl Patrick of Athol. The Bisset family soon found themselves overwhelmed and unable to resist the powerful aristocratic coalition arrayed against them. Members of the family successfully took shelter within the royal court of Alexander II.
However, the Scottish crown, almost certainly acting under pressure from the Comyns and the family of Patrick of Dunbar and their allies, subsequently judged the Bissets to be responsible for the murder and ordered the confiscation of their Scottish lands and property. The Bissets responded by once more striking out for the protection of a royal court and a perceived higher authority, this time that of Henry III of England. The English king, ever eager to expand his authority within Scotland, argued that Alexander had no legal right to confiscate the lands of one of his vassals without first receiving approval from his own overlord, Henry. While the incident was eventually resolved, it was something of a black eye for the Comyn family and in the subsequent reshuffling of royal government, undertaken by Alexander II to consolidate his authority in the face of the English king’s heavy-handed tactics, Alan Durward was appointed Justicar of Scotia.
This position gave Durward near vice-regal authority and responsibility within the north of the Kingdom and was accompanied by a shift in which Alan replaced Walter as Alexander II’s most trusted and intimate counsellor. However, it is worth noting that Alan took the position of Justicar not from Watler but from Philip de Melville and Robert de Monte Alto who had both proven largely ineffectual during the crisis. As noted above, Alexander II’s reaction to the Bisset incident and his subsequent reforms had more to do with staving off further English intervention than attempting to curb the power of overmighty subjects.
While the Comyn family did not emerge from the incident covered in glory, having inadvertently drawn the covetous eye of Henry III to Scotland, it was not damaged in any meaningful way and remained the single most powerful and influential aristocratic family within Scotland. What the crisis did mean, however, was that by the time of Alexander II’s unexpected death in 1249, Alan and his allies were deeply entrenched within the Scottish royal government.
Divided as it was by internal rivalries, the minority government of Alexander III initially proved itself to be almost surprisingly effective in its efforts to preserve the integrity and independence of the Scottish throne. Henry III had seized upon Alexander III’s minority as another chance to impose his personal overlordship over Scotland. In his attempts to cajole a recognition of overlordship from the young Alexander and his advisors, Henry went as far as writing to the Pope to launch an ultimately unsuccessful legal challenge to the validity of Alexander’s coronation. This claim was strongly refuted by Alexander’s councillors and the massed ranks of Scottish nobility, even as concessions were made to Henry succeeded regarding other limited aspects of the minority.
Indeed, the Scottish royal government, at this crucial juncture, skilfully negotiated around Henry’s pretensions to suzerainty over the British Isles while denying him much in the way of practical concessions. Evidently both the Comyns and Durward recognized that while there were significant short-term political advantages to be gained from cooperation with Henry III, their positions and personal security ultimately relied upon the existence of a strong Scottish-based monarchy.
It was a difficult and tense balancing act. We should be careful to remember though that as severe a challenge as forced acknowledgement of English overlordship was to the independence and prestige of the Scottish throne; the threat was not an existential one. Submission, so heroically resisted, would have drastically changed the form and function of the Scottish royal government but did not entail its dissolution. Henry III sought to bring Scotland and its throne firmly under his thumb rather than occupy it himself. Indeed, his later actions and attempts to impose change upon the minority government strongly suggest that the ceiling of his ambition was tapping the kingdom’s military resources for his revanchist wars in Europe. This, of course, was not an inconsiderable ambition, and it is easy to see why the Scottish nobility and both factions within the royal government did all they could to refute or otherwise blunt his intervention in Scotland.
A notion that can be slightly hard to parse through the lens of modern conceptions of statehood and national identity is that before Edward I’s reign, the medieval kings of England’s preferred instrument in the exercise of their overlordship were the kings of Scotland. While they might require a deal of cajoling or outright bullying to acquiesce to the imposition of outside authority, in general, it suited the kings of England to conduct affairs in Scotland through a junior partner or powerful subordinate capable of decisive intervention within Scotland rather than risk becoming bogged down in the mire of Scottish politics. Henry III, therefore, had a vested interest not only in controlling Alexander III but in preserving his authority and suite of royal power from the fractious courtier’s intent on carving up the spoils of royal administration.
While Henry III failed to extract an acknowledgement of his overlordship in 1251, he did succeed in arranging for Alexander to marry his daughter, Margaret. As part of his settlement, two members of Henry’s court, John Balliol and Robert de Ros, were appointed as the guardians of Alexander and his young bride. However, the members of the Scottish government demonstrated their continued independence by firmly rebuffing English attempts to extract hostages in exchange for Margaret’s safety. It is also worth noting that the wife of John Balliol, Dervorguilla of Galloway, had a strong claim to the Scottish throne. If anything were to happen to the still young and childless Alexander II then the couple’s infant son, also called John, would be accounted amongst the king’s most likely heirs.
The guardianship of these two strongly English-aligned Anglo-Scottish nobles proved to be short-lived as word of Robert de Ros’ eager corruption and abuse of power soon reached Henry’s ear. In any case, the authority of dual guardians had been extremely limited, with both men appearing relatively low down the witness lists of charters issued in the name of Alexander III during this time.
With the failure of this scheme, Henry changed tactics and began to cultivate a closer relationship with the Durward faction as a way of increasing his influence in Scotland. Durward and his allies were, after all, perfectly positioned to bypass the Scottish nobility and as the weaker faction within the minority government were more likely to cooperate with Henry, as long as that cooperation did not result in anything too obviously damaging to the integrity of the Scottish government.
Durward used this new association in an attempt to undermine the Comyn’s position and further widen the rift between them and Henry III who increasingly blamed the family’s hostility and influence for his daughter’s allegedly poor treatment in Scotland. Events reached a head in 1255 when Durward and his supporters made a concerted effort to oust Walter and the Comyns from the royal government. This involved the speedy relocation of the king and the royal court to Edinburgh castle, denying the Comyns access to either, while their aristocratic rivals, including the Bruce and Stewart families, as well as their one-time ally Patrick of Dunbar, were given license to openly challenge them. While this coup was successful in preventing the Comyns from gaining access to the king and apparatus of royal government, Durward’s new allies failed to effectively disrupt the Comyn authority or networks of affinity within the regions.
Henry III hoped to use the change in the Scottish royal government to enact a more formal structure for the minority in which authority was to be held by a council of seven guardians who served for a fixed number of years. However, he soon found that without the support of the Comyns and their allies, such reforms could not practically be enacted. Alexander was rapidly approaching the end of his minority and it seems probable that many Scottish aristocrats and bishops would have seen any further retooling of the royal government as unnecessary or suspicious.
By 1257 the Comyns were both desperate and largely undiminished in terms of military capacity and political influence, a dangerous combination. A prolonged series of negotiations with Henry III proved ultimately fruitless as it became clear that the English king increasingly preferred to cultivate influence in Scotland by leveraging the position of Anglo-Scottish magnates whose divided loyalties he already had some claim over.
The Comyns therefore adopted a new highly reckless solution to their problems, they kidnapped Alexander. That they were able to do so, holding him at Kinross Castle in the family’s heartlands, is quite a feat in itself. As incredible as their success was in gaining control of the king, the strangest thing about the kidnapping incident was the anti-climactic way in which it concluded. By April of 1258, the king, now sixteen, was free and presiding over his first parliament in Stirling. It is maddeningly unclear if Alexander escaped, was liberated by the efforts of his other supporters, or was simply let go after coming to some understanding with the Comyns. It seems probable that the Comyns were at least able to persuade the king that they meant him no harm since the family faced little in the way of repercussions for a crime as momentous and serious as the abduction of the monarch and continued to work closely under the king for the remainder of his reign.
Just as the Comyns and Durward understood that their power and prosperity relied upon close cooperation with the Scottish throne and access to the rewards royal service brought, Alexander would surely have appreciated the collaborative nature of the Scottish government. To begin his majority with a violent clash with the most powerful members of the Scottish aristocracy would clearly endanger his rule and pave the way for further English intervention. It is also possible that the death of the family’s head, Walter Comyn, the following November helped to clear away any remaining royal ill feelings about the incident and presented the king and the remaining Comyns with the opportunity for a fresh start.
Walter’s younger half-brother, Earl Alexander of Buchan, quickly emerged as the new head of the Comyn family who took Alan Durward’s place as the Justiciar of Scotia, reaffirming the almost vice-regal power that the family wielded in the north. That the Comyns continued to cooperate closely with one another even as authority passed to another branch of the family speaks to both an admirable degree of familial solidarity and a keen awareness that the family owed its ongoing power and prosperity to its engagement in royal service. The family members in the best position to participate in royal government and negotiate with the crown on the family’s behalf naturally wielded enormous influence over the rest of the family.
Throughout Alexander III’s reign, Alexander Comyn served as Alexander III’s most trusted lieutenant and was one of the most prominent and regular witnesses to royal charters. Alan Durward and many of his allies remained in office or continued to serve Alexander III in the Scottish royal government in some capacity but the king’s active presence and the existence of a succession of mutual enemies curtailed the worst of the infighting.
Freed of the hindrances Alan and aristocratic factionalism had burdened them with, the power and influence of the Comyn family’s various branches continued to wax. Alexander III proved a highly capable ruler who through a series of shrewd military actions and relentless diplomatic pressure continued his father’s efforts to bring the Western Isles into the kingdom of Scotland. Alexander was opposed vigorously to this ambition by the Norwegian King Haakon IV who was eager to reassert his role as the Kingdom of the Isles’ traditional overlord. Thanks in large part to Alexander’s strategically minded handling of the campaign and the cultivation of productive relations with his deputies and regional proxies, the Norwegian invasion of Scotland was thwarted.
Shortly after Haakon’s defeat and death, his successors acknowledged Scottish control of the Western Isles in the Treaty of Perth. While the presence of Henry III still loomed large over the early years of Alexander’s minority, his involvement in Scotland was eventually compromised by the emergence of the extreme political difficulties in England which prefaced the Second Barons Rebellion.
The crisis that surrounded the beginning of Alexander III’s reign prefigures in many important ways, the succession crisis that followed his death in 1286. Alexander Comyn, one of the future guardians of Scotland and foremost political figures during the early years of the succession crisis had already experienced one crisis in which an opportunistic English king had attempted to leverage instability within the royal Scottish centre into a recognition of English overlordship.
This example loomed large in the minds of Alexander and his peers within the Scottish aristocracy and heavily informed their negotiations with Edward I of England over the succession and the relationship between the two kingdoms. Unfortunately for them and their immediate descendants, Edward I’s imperial ambitions within the British Isles were far greater and far more direct than those of any of his predecessors.
Likewise, the factionalism and infighting that marked the Comyn and Durward parties’ attempts to reap the rewards of royal government in the absence of an active adult king was repeated in the bitter rivalry that emerged between the Comyns Balliol relatives and their Bruce rivals. Together Edward’s ambitions and the emergence of two distinctive factions within the Scottish aristocracy would shape the Wars of Scottish Independence and the new wholly different Scotland that would emerge in their aftermath.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on Twitter @HistorySchmstry
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