Macbeth of Scotland

Macbeth, rendered in medieval Gaelic as Mac Bethad mac Findlaich, was born around 1005 in northern Scotland. His name means "son of life" and carried religious overtones in the Gaelic world, sometimes interpreted as "righteous man" ^[1]. His father was Findlaech mac Ruaidri, the mormaer of Moray, a vast province in the north of the kingdom whose rulers held authority that at times rivaled that of the kings of Alba themselves. Some Irish annals even styled the rulers of Moray as kings in their own right ^[2].

His mother's identity is not securely recorded, though later medieval sources claimed she was a daughter of Malcolm II, king of Scots from 1005 to 1034. If true, that connection would have given Macbeth royal blood on both sides and a plausible claim to the throne under the flexible succession customs of the age ^[1]. Scottish kingship in this period did not pass automatically from father to eldest son. Instead, adult male members of the wider royal kindred competed for the crown, and violent transitions were common rather than exceptional ^[3].

Violence marked Macbeth's youth directly. In 1020 his father Findlaech was killed, according to the Annals of Ulster by the sons of his own brother, Macbeth's cousins ^[2]. One of those cousins, Malcolm mac Maíl Brigti, then ruled Moray until his death in 1029, followed briefly by his brother Gillecomgain. In 1032 Gillecomgain was burned to death along with fifty of his men, an act some historians suspect Macbeth carried out or endorsed as vengeance for his father ^[4]. By the early 1030s Macbeth had emerged as mormaer of Moray, the position his father had held.

Macbeth strengthened his position through a shrewd marriage. He wed Gruoch, the widow of his slain cousin Gillecomgain and a granddaughter of King Kenneth III, who had ruled Scotland until 997 ^[4]. Gruoch is the only Scottish queen of the era whose name survives in the documentary record, appearing alongside her husband in a grant of land to the Culdee monks of Loch Leven ^[1]. Through her, Macbeth allied himself with a rival branch of the royal house, and he raised her son by Gillecomgain, Lulach, as his stepson.

The reigning king from 1034 was Duncan I, grandson of Malcolm II, a younger man than Shakespeare's aged and saintly victim. Duncan's short reign went badly. In 1039 or 1040 he led a Scottish army south to besiege Durham and suffered a costly defeat ^[3]. In August 1040 Duncan marched north into Moray, apparently to bring the province and its mormaer to heel. He was killed in battle at or near Bothgowanan, often identified with Pitgaveny close to Elgin, on August 14, 1040 ^[2].

Contemporary and near-contemporary sources record a death in warfare, not a murder by a treacherous host. The Annals of Tigernach state that Duncan was killed by his own subjects, and later Scottish king lists name Macbeth as the man responsible ^[2]. Killing a king in open battle and taking the crown was, by the standards of eleventh century Scotland, a recognized route to power. Macbeth was inaugurated as king of Alba, almost certainly at Scone, in 1040, and no source suggests the succession was widely contested at the time ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Macbeth of Scotland in reality, rather than in drama, finds a ruler who kept his throne for seventeen years, a long tenure in a violent age. The early years were not free of challenge. In 1045 Crinan, the lay abbot of Dunkeld and father of the dead King Duncan, rose against him and was killed in battle along with, one annal claims, a large number of his followers ^[2]. After that defeat of the old regime's partisans, Macbeth's grip on the kingdom appears to have been firm for nearly a decade.

The most striking evidence of his security came in 1050, when Macbeth traveled to Rome for the papal jubilee. Marianus Scotus, an Irish chronicler writing within living memory, recorded that the Scottish king scattered money like seed to the poor in Rome ^[5]. No ruler doubtful of his hold on power leaves his kingdom for months to cross Europe. He is the only reigning Scottish king known to have made the Roman pilgrimage, and the journey placed him among the respected Christian monarchs of his generation ^[1].

Macbeth also engaged with the wider politics of Britain. In 1052 he received Norman knights exiled from England after the collapse of their position at Edward the Confessor's court, making him apparently the first Scottish king to take Normans into his service ^[4]. Among the Macbeth of Scotland facts that surprise modern readers, medieval verse tradition remembered his reign as a time of plenty. The prophecy of Berchan, a Gaelic poem of king lists, calls him "the ruddy faced king" and speaks of Scotland being fruitful in his time ^[3].

The surviving record of Macbeth's private world is thin but telling. His marriage to Gruoch seems to have been a genuine political partnership. The couple jointly granted lands at Kirkness to the Culdee community of Loch Leven, a religious endowment recorded in the priory's register, and Gruoch is named in the grant as daughter of Bodhe and queen of Scots ^[1]. That document is the closest thing to a personal trace either of them left. Nothing in the eleventh century evidence supports the ambitious, sleepwalking Lady Macbeth of the stage, a character built five centuries later ^[6].

Macbeth and Gruoch had no recorded children together. His designated successor was his stepson Lulach, Gruoch's son from her first marriage, which suggests the royal couple planned the succession deliberately around the Moray line ^[4]. The generosity in Rome, the Loch Leven grant, and his name itself point to a king who took the religious obligations of Christian rulership seriously. Historians of medieval Scotland generally read him as a conventional and reasonably pious monarch of his era rather than the tormented figure of later imagination ^[3].

The threat that finally broke Macbeth's reign came from England. Duncan I's son Malcolm had grown up in exile, and by the 1050s the powerful Earl Siward of Northumbria, likely a kinsman of Malcolm through marriage ties, was prepared to back his restoration. In July 1054 Siward led a large army and fleet into Scotland with the approval of Edward the Confessor. On July 27, the feast of the Seven Sleepers, the two sides met in a bloody battle traditionally located at Dunsinane in Perthshire ^[5]. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records heavy losses on both sides, including Siward's own son Osbern, and among the dead were the Norman knights Macbeth had sheltered ^[7].

Macbeth lost the battle but not immediately the kingdom. He survived and appears to have withdrawn toward his northern power base while Malcolm gained control of southern districts, perhaps Strathclyde and Lothian ^[3]. For three more years Macbeth ruled at least part of Scotland, a detail the theatrical version compresses out of existence. Siward died in 1055, but Malcolm pressed the war on his own account.

The end came at Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire, deep in the northeast, on August 15, 1057. There Malcolm's forces caught and killed Macbeth ^[2]. He was buried on the holy island of Iona, the traditional resting place of Scottish kings, an honor that signals his contemporaries regarded him as a legitimate monarch ^[1]. The kingdom did not pass at once to Malcolm. Lulach was inaugurated as king, reigning briefly until Malcolm had him killed in March 1058, after which Malcolm III took the throne and founded the dynasty that would shape medieval Scotland ^[4].

No medieval king's afterlife has diverged so completely from his life. For four centuries after 1057, chroniclers treated Macbeth as a legitimate, and in some accounts fortunate, king. The distortion built gradually. Fourteenth and fifteenth century Scottish writers, including John of Fordun and Andrew of Wyntoun, working under a dynasty descended from Malcolm III, darkened his reputation and introduced fantastic elements, with Wyntoun supplying an early version of the three weird sisters ^[6]. Hector Boece's sixteenth century history added the characters of Banquo and a scheming wife, inventions that passed through Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of 1577 ^[6].

William Shakespeare drew on Holinshed around 1606 for his tragedy, compressing seventeen years of rule into a brief tyranny and converting a battlefield killing into murder by night. The play flattered King James VI and I, who claimed descent from Banquo, and its power ensured that the fictional Macbeth eclipsed the real one ^[6]. Every modern Macbeth of Scotland biography must begin by clearing away that theatrical debris.

Modern scholarship has largely restored the balance. Historians such as A. A. M. Duncan, G. W. S. Barrow, and Alex Woolf place Macbeth within the normal patterns of eleventh century Gaelic kingship, and dedicated studies have examined his career on its own evidence ^[3]. Assessed by contemporary standards, the chief Macbeth of Scotland achievements were substantial: he won and held the throne of Alba for seventeen years, secured his kingdom well enough to journey to Rome and back, patronized the church, and died fighting rather than deposed. A cairn at Lumphanan still marks the traditional site of his death, and his grave lies among the kings on Iona ^[1].