Alexander III (Scotland)

Alexander III 1241-86, king of Scotland (1249-86), son and successor of Alexander II . He married a daughter of Henry III of England and quarreled with Henry, and later Henry's son Edward I , over the old English claims to overlordship in Scotland. The great achievement of Alexander was his final acquisition for Scotland of the Hebrides and of the Isle of Man, which his father had already claimed from Norway. King Haakon IV of Norway attempted to drive the Scots from the islands, but a storm battered his ships, and he was defeated in the battle of Largs in the Clyde river. In 1266, Alexander signed a treaty with Magnus VI, assigning the islands to Scotland. Alexander survived his children, and when he died his only near relative was his little granddaughter Margaret Maid of Norway .

Alexander III (1241–86) King of Scotland (1249–86). He defeated Haakon of Norway at the Battle of Largs (1263) and received the Hebrides by the Treaty of Perth. Despite close ties with England (his father-in-law was HENRY III), Alexander resisted English claims to the Scottish kingdom. The early death of his children left the succession to his granddaughter Margaret of Norway.

Alexander III (1241–86), king of Scots (1249–86). Only son of Alexander II and his second wife, Marie de Coucy. The view that his reign from 1249 was a ‘golden age’ for Scotland was first fully articulated by 14th- and 15th-cent. Scottish chroniclers, who boosted his reputation in order to stress Scottish national identity and the political independence of the kingdom. Nevertheless, there is much to be said for their retrospective assessments. The reign began badly with the factional squabbles of Alexander's minority (1249–60), notably between the Comyns and the Durwards. Thereafter, however, Alexander dealt with the great lords firmly but sensitively, and crown–magnate relations were stable. Continuing earlier processes of consolidation and expansion, he and his war captains campaigned extensively in the west, and brought matters to a successful conclusion in 1266, when sovereignty over Man and the Western Isles was relinquished by Norway. Their annexation to Scotland, one of the greatest triumphs of Scottish state-building, was facilitated by amicable relations with England. Alexander had married Henry III's daughter Margaret in 1251, and although Henry intervened in the minority power struggles, he repeatedly reassured the Scots of his respect for their liberties, thus implicitly recognizing Scotland's status as an independent realm. It was a cruel set of circumstances which jeopardized this ‘golden age’—the deaths of Alexander's three children between 1281 and 1284, and his own untimely death at the age of 44, when he was thrown from his horse while travelling during a storm to visit his second wife, Yolande de Dreux. Even so, by 1286 Scotland had emerged as a unified and sturdily autonomous state, able to meet and ultimately to overcome the challenges posed by both dynastic misfortune and the Anglo-Scottish warfare ignited by Edward I's imperialist ambitions in 1296.

Keith J. Stringer