Alexander II (1198–1249): The King Who Made the Border

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Alexander's reign is reasonably well documented in English government records, the Melrose Chronicle, the English chroniclers Matthew Paris and the Lanercost chronicle, and the Chronicle of Man. The weak points are Scottish narrative sources after 1222, which survive only through later compilations by Wyntoun and Bower, and the Highland and Hebridean campaigns, for which the Norwegian sagas give a view from the other side. Dates for the interdict of 1216–17, the MacWilliam rising of 1228–30 and the Galloway war vary between sources. Richard Oram's Domination and Lordship ends in 1230; for the later reign this article also draws on the People of Medieval Scotland database and other sources listed below.

Heir to an old king

established Alexander was born at Haddington on 24 August 1198, when his father was in his mid-fifties and had waited a decade for a son. His birth displaced his uncle, David, earl of Huntingdon, as heir. Oram stresses that in 1198 primogeniture was not yet firmly established in Scotland: no Scottish king since 1097 had been succeeded by his son. William therefore had the magnates swear fealty to the three-year-old prince in October 1201.

established As a boy Alexander was drawn into his father's dependence on King John. Under the Treaty of Norham in 1209 he did homage to John at Alnwick for the lands of the Scottish king in England. In 1212 John was given the right to arrange his marriage, and on 8 March 1212 knighted him so that he could lead a force, including John's mercenaries, against Godred MacWilliam.

A disputed succession

established William died at Stirling on 4 December 1214 and Alexander was inaugurated at Scone the next day. Oram reads the haste as a sign of anxiety. The MacWilliams still had support, and Earl David, though old and distant from Scotland, was a possible alternative. Within weeks Donald Ban MacWilliam rose in the north. By June 1215 he was dead, killed in Ross by a local Gaelic lord, Ferchar MacTaggart, who sent his head to the king and was knighted for it.

The war of 1215–17 and Magna Carta

established Alexander kept the advisers who had served his father, some of them since the 1160s, and at first stayed out of the quarrel between John and his barons. Two of the negotiators at Runnymede, Alan of Galloway for John and Saher de Quincy for the barons, were close to Alexander, and Magna Carta, sealed in June 1215, included a clause (chapter 59) promising that John would treat with Alexander "concerning his sisters, the return of hostages, and his liberties and rights" as he would with his English barons.

established When civil war broke out in September 1215 and the barons recognised his claims to the northern counties, Alexander joined them. He invaded on 19 October 1215 and besieged Norham without success. Many northern barons did homage to him as earl. In January 1216 John came north, sacked Berwick and devastated Lothian. In August 1216 Carlisle fell to the Scots, though its castle held out. Alexander then crossed England with a fast-moving force, losing his brother-in-law Eustace de Vescy at the siege of Barnard Castle, and met Prince Louis of France at Dover. He did homage to Louis for the northern counties, and Louis promised not to make peace without him.

traditional The English chronicler Matthew Paris reports that John boasted he would hunt "the little red fox-cub" from his lair, a jibe at Alexander's red hair and youth. It is a chronicler's anecdote and cannot be checked.

established John's death on the night of 18–19 October 1216 changed everything. Many rebels went over to the boy king Henry III. Louis's army was defeated at Lincoln in May 1217, and in December 1217 Alexander submitted and did homage to Henry for Tynedale and Huntingdon, with no mention of the northern counties. Oram calls it a humiliating end to a war that began with high hopes.

shared The papal legate Guala Bicchieri excommunicated Alexander and placed Scotland under interdict for his support of Henry III's enemies. Sources and historians date this differently, from October or November 1216 to September 1217. The lay magnates were absolved in December 1217 and the clergy in 1218.

shared Keith Stringer, whose study of the war Oram follows, argues that the collapse was not simply the result of English barons breaking their word. The Scots lacked the resources to take strong castles, the papacy backed the Plantagenets, and, after the loss of Normandy, English nobles increasingly thought of themselves as English and would not accept a Scottish lord.

Marriage and status

established Talks resumed after the interdict was lifted. A settlement at York in 1220 confirmed that Alexander would marry one of Henry III's sisters, while his own sisters were to marry English nobles rather than kings. Alexander married Joan, King John's eldest daughter, at York on 19 June 1221. His sister Margaret married Hubert de Burgh, the English justiciar, the same year. Oram notes that no earlier Scottish king had married the full sister of a reigning English king.

established Alexander also wanted the full Christian rites of kingship, anointing and coronation. In 1221 he asked the papal legate to crown him. Pope Honorius III replied that this could not be done without Henry III's consent, since the king of Scots was said to be subject to the king of England. Alexander kept asking into the 1230s without success. Scottish kings were not anointed until 1331.

established In the Church, the bull Filia specialis of 21 November 1218 confirmed the Scottish Church's direct dependence on Rome. There was still no archbishop.

Argyll, the Clyde and Caithness

established Oram argues that the war, despite its failure, strengthened Alexander at home, and that he used his authority to become the sole royal power within Scotland. In 1221 and 1222 he led campaigns into the west. The second was probably aimed at Ruaridh son of Ranald, a grandson of Somerled. Ruaridh was driven from Kintyre, which went to his brother Domnall. Alexander built a royal castle at Tarbert, made Dumbarton a royal burgh in July 1222, and perhaps granted Cowal formally to the Stewarts, so imposing royal lordship on both shores of the Firth of Clyde.

established In 1222 the men of Caithness murdered Bishop Adam, the former abbot of Melrose, in a dispute over teinds. Earl Jón of Orkney and Caithness was said to have refused to save him. Alexander hurried north with an army, punished the killers and took part of Jón's lands. Oram contrasts this decisive action with William's long struggles in the north. Jón was murdered at Thurso in 1231, and the earldom of Caithness later passed by inheritance to Scottish heirs.

The last of the MacWilliams

established Between 1228 and 1230 the MacWilliams rose for the last time. Bower's source tells how "a certain Scot called Gillescop" burned the castle of Abertarff on Loch Ness with its owner inside and sacked Inverness. Alexander campaigned in person; William Comyn, earl of Buchan, was left to finish the work, and Gilleasbuig and his two sons were killed by 1229. Alexander came north again in 1230 and spent Christmas at Elgin, where he may have made Ferchar MacTaggart earl of Ross.

established In 1230 Gilleasbuig's infant daughter was captured and put to death in public at Forfar. The Lanercost chronicle, an English source compiled later in the thirteenth century from earlier material, describes the killing of the child "innocent as she was" in the market place after a proclamation by the town crier. Oram calls it a brutal judicial murder that ended the lineage which had challenged David I's heirs for a century.

shared Historians present the killing as an act of state policy rather than local cruelty: it was done publicly, in a royal burgh, to show that the line was extinct. A. A. M. Duncan treated it as the end of the MacWilliam threat. It remains one of the darkest acts recorded of any medieval Scottish king, and this article reports it without softening or dwelling on it.

established The suppression of the north went with new lordships for trusted families: the Bissets at the Aird, the Comyns in Badenoch and Lochaber, and the Durwards in Urquhart and Stratherrick. Oram notes that some of these, such as Abertarff, were already in place before 1228.

Man, Norway and the Isles

established In the 1220s Alexander allowed Alan of Galloway, his constable and one of the greatest lords in Britain, to pursue his own war in Man and the Isles in support of King Rognvald against his half-brother Óláfr. Alan's attempt in 1225–26 to secure the Manx throne for his illegitimate son Thomas failed when the Manx rejected it. Rognvald was killed in 1229. When Óláfr turned to his overlord, Hákon IV of Norway, a Norwegian fleet came west in 1230 under Uspak, a member of the MacDougall family whom Hákon had made king in the Isles. It captured Rothesay Castle on Bute before withdrawing. Óláfr recovered Man.

shared Older accounts blamed Alan for nearly provoking war with Norway and saw Alexander turning against Galloway as a result. Oram questions this, arguing that Alan's alliances helped end Irish support for the MacWilliams and that the break-up of Galloway after 1234 was an opportunity rather than a punishment.

The fall of Galloway

established Alan of Galloway died in 1234. He left three legitimate daughters, Helen, Christiana and Dervorguilla, and an illegitimate son, Thomas. Alexander refused to let Thomas inherit and divided the lordship among the daughters and their husbands, all men close to the crown. Dervorguilla's husband was John Balliol, and their son became King John Balliol in 1292.

shared Oram argues that Alexander treated Galloway as a feudal holding to be split among heiresses because he could, and calls the policy opportunism dressed up as respect for the law. The decision ended Galloway's long ambiguous relationship with the Scottish crown.

established The Gallovidians rose for Thomas in 1235. Alexander led an army into Galloway in July and was nearly caught in an ambush, saved by the arrival of Ferchar, earl of Ross. Thomas fled to Ireland. After a first attempt to hold the region failed, an army under the earl of Dunbar forced the rebels to surrender in 1236. Thomas spent most of the rest of his life in captivity. Oram's verdict is that by 1235 Alexander was "more surely master of Scotland than any of his predecessors".

The Treaty of York, 1237

established In the early 1230s Alexander pressed Henry III to honour the old treaties, pushing the two kingdoms close to war. The papal legate Otto brought the kings together at York, where the treaty was sealed on 25 September 1237. Alexander gave up his hereditary claims to Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland and to the 15,000 merks his father had paid in 1209, and released Henry from the old marriage agreements. In return he received lands worth £200 a year in Northumberland and Cumberland, held with special privileges, for which he did homage.

shared The treaty is often said to have fixed the Anglo-Scottish border. It ended a century of Scottish efforts to rule the north of England and confirmed English sovereignty over the three counties, leaving a frontier along the Tweed, the Cheviots and the Solway that has changed little since. But it did not draw a surveyed line. Small areas remained disputed, Berwick changed hands repeatedly in the later Middle Ages, and the Debatable Land on the western march was divided only in 1552. Oram notes that the treaty dealt with the two rulers as kings on equal terms.

Later years

established Queen Joan died on 4 March 1238 without children. In May 1239 Alexander married Marie de Coucy, daughter of a powerful French baron, Enguerrand de Coucy. Their only child, the future Alexander III, was born in 1241. Alexander also had an illegitimate daughter, Margaret, who married Alan Durward.

shared In 1242 Patrick, the young earl of Atholl, died in a fire at Haddington. His kin blamed the Bisset family, who were forced into exile despite their protests. Oram describes this as the one brief outbreak of noble defiance of the king's will in the later reign.

established The French marriage and the fortification of castles near the border alarmed Henry III, and in 1244 the kingdoms came close to war. At Newcastle on 14 August 1244 Alexander promised not to make war on Henry except in self-defence, and it was agreed that his son would marry Henry's daughter Margaret. The peace that had held since 1217 continued until 1296.

shared Oram's wider judgement is that the later reign was remarkable for political harmony. Alexander governed inclusively, spread patronage widely, and consulted his magnates more regularly in the assemblies from which the Scottish parliament grew.

The last campaign and death on Kerrera

established The Western Isles were still under Norwegian lordship. Ewen (Eógan) MacDougall, lord of Argyll, held his mainland lands of Alexander and his islands of Hákon IV, and in 1248 Hákon gave him authority as king in the Isles. Alexander saw this divided loyalty as intolerable. At Stirling in February 1249 a combined land and sea campaign was planned. By the first week of July Alexander's fleet had reached the island of Kerrera, off Oban, but the king was already gravely ill. He received the sacraments and died on 8 July 1249.

traditional The Norwegian saga of King Hákon tells that Alexander dreamed of three men, identified as St Olaf, St Magnus and St Columba, who warned him to turn back. Local tradition recorded by the Ordnance Survey in the 1870s names a field at the south end of Horseshoe Bay on Kerrera "Dail Righ", the king's field, where he is supposed to have died.

established The campaign ended with his death. His body was taken to Melrose Abbey for burial, as he had ordered, and his son was inaugurated at Scone on 13 July 1249, aged seven. Alexander III would complete his father's aim when Norway ceded the Western Isles by the Treaty of Perth in 1266.

Reputation

shared Alexander has had less attention than his father or son. The essays edited by Oram in The Reign of Alexander II, 1214–49 (2005) present him as one of the most effective medieval Scottish kings: the ruler who ended the dynastic challenges, extended royal power over Galloway, Argyll and the far north, and settled relations with England on terms of equality. The same record includes ruthless acts, above all the killing at Forfar, and a war in 1215–17 that won nothing.

• Alexander was knighted by King John in 1212 and then fought against him three years later.
• He is named in Magna Carta.
• In 1216 he marched the length of England to meet Prince Louis of France at Dover.
• His first wife, Joan, was the daughter of King John and the sister of Henry III.
• He asked the pope to have him crowned and anointed; Scottish kings did not receive anointing until 1331.
• The Treaty of York of 1237 set a border that has changed little since.
• His father-in-law by his second marriage was one of the greatest barons of France.
• He died on Kerrera, an island off Oban, and was buried far away at Melrose.

• Myth: the Treaty of York drew the exact modern border. It settled the frontier by agreement along roughly its modern line, but small areas remained disputed, Berwick changed hands repeatedly and the Debatable Land was divided only in 1552.
• Myth: Alexander's invasion of 1215–17 won Northumberland. He received homage from northern barons and from Louis of France, but gave everything up in December 1217.
• Myth: the MacWilliams were "Celtic rebels" against Norman rule. They were a branch of the royal house with a hereditary claim to the throne.
• Disputed: when the interdict was imposed. Sources give dates from October 1216 to September 1217.
• Disputed: whether Alexander broke up Galloway to punish Alan's adventures in Man. Oram argues it was an opportunity taken when Alan died without a legitimate son.
• Disputed: the dream before his death. It comes from the Norwegian saga of King Hákon, written by the other side, and cannot be checked.