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Chapter 4 MACBETH (r.1040–57)

… the three old women went and stood by the wayside, in a great moor or heath near Forres, and waited till Macbeth came up. And then, stepping before him as he was marching at the head of his soldiers, the first woman said, ‘All hail, Macbeth – hail to thee, Thane of Glamis.’ The second said, ‘All hail, Macbeth – hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor.’ Then the third, wishing to pay him a higher compliment than the other two, said, ‘All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King of Scotland.’

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER II

The little village of Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, lies about fifty kilometres to the west of Aberdeen. It is not as celebrated a name in the Macbeth chronicle as Birnam Wood or Dunsinane Hill in Perthshire, or Forres in Moray, but in fact it is much more significant – because it was at Lumphanan that Macbeth (the historical Macbeth, not the Macbeth of Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’) met his death in the year 1057.

What Shakespeare did for Macbeth was to make him perhaps the best known, and certainly the most notorious, character in Scottish history – but at appalling cost to historical veracity. Yet so persuasive is the story, so compelling is the skill of the playwright, so powerful is the characterisation of a noble soul seduced by ambition (and by a ferocious harpy of a wife), that everyone knows it and believes it.

Oddly enough, Sir Walter Scott gave it his imprimatur, too. In his Tales of a Grandfather he related the Shakespeare version wholesale, with some additional embroidery of his own. The puzzle is that Scott knew perfectly well that it was a travesty of events; indeed, in his History of Scotland (1829–30), which he wrote as a spin-off from Tales of a Grandfather, he gave a very different and much more soberly accurate account. Yet in the Tales he preferred to entertain his grandson rather than to educate him. It is a dilemma which faces every ‘popular’ historian.

According to Shakespeare (and the Tales of a Grandfather), Macbeth was a trusted general of the venerable and much-loved King Duncan I of Scotland. With his fellow-general Banquo, Macbeth quells an insurrection and defeats a major viking invasion in Fife. On his way home, on a ‘blasted heath’ near Forres, he encounters three witches. The first addresses him as Thane of Glamis (a title which he has just inherited). The second addresses him as Thane of Cawdor (which Duncan has just named him, although Macbeth does not know it yet). The third, ominously, addresses him as ‘Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!’ For Banquo, they promise less in the immediate future but much more to come: ‘Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.’

Soon afterwards, messengers arrive to announce that Macbeth is to receive the title and possessions of the Thane of Cawdor, who had been a traitor in the rebellion and is shortly to be executed. Macbeth is thunderstruck: ‘Two truths are told,/as happy prologues to the swelling act/of the imperial theme’.

According to Shakespeare, Macbeth now writes a letter to his wife telling her of his encounter with the witches, and sends notice that the king himself is coming to stay with them at their castle at Inverness. Lady Macbeth works on her husband’s latent ambition and incites him to kill the king – which he does, albeit unnerved by the deed.¹ Duncan’s two young sons, Malcolm (the Prince of Cumbria) and Donalbain, fearful of suffering the same fate, flee the country.

Macbeth thereupon assumes the crown. Mindful of the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will be the progenitor of future kings of Scotland, Macbeth sends hired assassins to kill Banquo and his young son Fleance; Banquo is struck down, but Fleance escapes, and his progeny later become the ruling Stewart dynasty of Scotland.

Macbeth now embarks on a reign of terror. He consults the witches again, and they warn him to beware of Macduff, the Thane of Fife. But they also tell him that ‘none of woman born’ will ever harm him, and that he ‘shall never vanquished be, until/Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him.’

Before Macbeth has time to act, Macduff, suspecting that he is next on the king’s hit-list, flees to England to join Duncan’s son Malcolm. In thwarted fury Macbeth sends his assassins to Macduff’s castle in Fife and has Macduff’s wife and young family slaughtered.

At the English court the Scottish refugees, spurred on by Macduff’s arrival, assemble an army with English help and invade Scotland. To hide their advance towards the tyrant’s lair at Dunsinane Castle they camouflage themselves with branches cut from Birnam Wood. Macbeth is shaken by the news that the wood seems to be coming to Dunsinane; he is even more dismayed when he faces the vengeful Macduff, who reveals that he was not ‘of woman born’, but had been ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d’. There is nothing left for Macbeth now but to die valiantly: ‘Lay on, Macduff; and damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”’ Macbeth is duly slain by Macduff, who brings the tyrant’s head to Malcolm – the future Malcolm III, Malcolm Canmore.

Birnam Wood and Dunsinane

A walkway along the River Tay, known as the ‘Terrace Walk’, runs between the neighbouring towns of Dunkeld and Birnam. Just behind the Oak Inn of the Birnam House Hotel a sign highlights the presence of the ‘Birnam Oak’ – a very old, gigantic oak tree, its heavy, brittle branches now propped up on crutches. It is said to be the last remaining tree from the ancient Birnam Wood made famous by the witches’ prophecy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It was from this very tree (it is implied), and others like it, that Malcolm’s soldiers cut branches to disguise their advance on Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane Hill, in the Sidlaws, some twenty-two kilometres as the crow flies to the south-east, off the Perth to Coupar Angus road (A94).¹ Dunsinane is a low hill which is not difficult to ascend. Its flat summit is crowned by the impressive remains of a huge prehistoric hill-fort with triple ramparts which are still clearly visible; unfortunately, it could not have been a castle in Macbeth’s day. However, from the summit one can look north-west along the Tay Valley towards the woods of Birnam and the beautiful Howe of Strathmore, and (with luck and a little imagination) make out the gap in the hills through which a camouflaged army might have advanced towards Dunsinane. Or so they say.

A few miles to the south of Dunkeld, and now bypassed by the A9 to Perth, the little village of Bankfoot provides a ‘Macbeth Experience’ as part of a Visitor Centre which was created in a former motor museum in 1993 by an entrepreneurial local couple, Wilson and Catriona Girvan. A spirited multi-media production offers a view of the ‘millennium of mystery’ surrounding the Macbeth story, or rather two views – the Shakespearean view, and the ‘real’ view. It presents Shakespeare enthusiastically reading his source material – the English chronicler Ralph Holinshed, who compiled The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland in the 1570s – and penning his ‘pretty tale’ of the witch-ridden, bloodthirsty usurper who lost his head to Macduff when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane; interwoven with this yarn is the story of what is now considered the ‘real’ Macbeth.

In this story, Macbeth was one of the great Scottish kings. His name in Gaelic, MacBeathadh, means ‘Son of Life’. He was the son of Findlaech mac Ruairdri, mormaer (earl) of Moray, who was killed by his nephews in 1020; Macbeth had royal blood in his veins as a member of one of the three kindreds of Dalriada (Argyll) who had extended their power up the Great Glen into Moray. In 1032 Macbeth took vengeance when he burned to death one of his father’s killers, Gillacomgain, along with fifty of his men, and was thereby able to assume his father’s rank of mormaer of Moray. He then strengthened his claim to the throne by marrying the dead man’s widow, Gruoch, who was herself descended from the royal line.

In the same vein, Duncan I was not by any means Shakespeare’s gentle, much-revered king, rich in years and loved by his subjects. He was, in fact, a rash and militarily incompetent youngster, the grandson of a ruthless and despotic king, Malcolm II, who had appointed him Prince of Cumbria and arranged that he should succeed to the throne in 1034. His succession caused widespread anger: ancient custom favoured succession by election, not diktat; besides, Duncan had neither the maturity nor the track-record to merit the throne.

Duncan had clearly inherited his father’s ambition, but not his skill: he invaded the north of England and made a disastrous attack on Durham in 1039; he then made an equally ill-fated attempt to impose his authority in the recalcitrant north of Scotland. Duncan met Macbeth, mormaer of Moray, in battle somewhere near the village of Pitgaveny, near Elgin, on the Feast of the Assumption (10 August) in 1040, and was killed.

Macbeth was immediately accepted as King of Scots and crowned at Scone, which suggests that Duncan I’s military failures had antagonised his subjects in the south, too. Macbeth went on to reign for seventeen years (1040–57), and the Chronicle of Melrose noted that ‘in his time there were productive seasons’ (a line borrowed from an early Latin poem – fertile tempus erat). He drove Duncan’s two sons out of Scotland: Malcolm fled to England, where he became a protégé of King Edward the Confessor (r.1042–66); and Donalbain (Donald Bán) fled to the Western Isles.

Macbeth was able to deal effectively with an abortive attempt by Duncan I’s father to oust him in 1046. He was less successful in his confrontations with his half-cousin, Thorfinn the Mighty, the Norse Earl of Orkney.

Thorfinn Sigurðarson, nicknamed ‘the Mighty’, is one of the most compelling figures in the great portrait-gallery of Norse earls presented in Orkneyinga Saga. A huge, powerfully-built, swarthy man, ugly and sharp-featured, beetle-browed and with a prominent nose, he was ambitious, ruthless and very shrewd, a born survivor in an age when survival was always precarious. According to Orkneyinga Saga Thorfinn was one of the sons of Earl Sigurð Hlöðvisson of Orkney, and (like Duncan I) a grandson of a King Malcolm of Scotland (Malcolm II?). He was created Earl of Caithness and Sutherland by King Malcolm at the age of five in 1014; thereafter he fought his way to control of Orkney (by the 1030s), and by the time he died, at some date between 1057 and 1065, he had extended his realm deep into the heartlands of Scotland and over the Western Isles as well, and was recognised as the most powerful ruler in northern Britain. He was a man of compelling personal authority; after the turbulent years of his early piratical reign, he spent the latter part of his life ruling his realms wisely and benevolently from the palace and church he built on the Brough of Birsay, at the northern end of the Mainland of Orkney. His reign was the high point of the golden age of viking power in the north.

This was the man who represented the greatest threat to Macbeth’s authority in the north of Scotland. According to Orkneyinga Saga, Macbeth and Thorfinn had several encounters, all of which ended in Thorfinn’s favour. But it would say that, wouldn’t it?

Macbeth may not have been the most compelling King of Scots in the eleventh century, but he seems to have been a very capable one. He was generous to the Church, which ensured him a good early press (he and Gruoch granted lands in Fife to the Culdees of Loch Leven¹). Certainly, he felt secure enough to leave Scotland in 1050 and go on a pilgrimage to Rome where, according to the Chronicon of Marianus Scottus (1028–83), written in 1073, ‘he scattered his money like seed among the poor’.

In the 1050s, however, Macbeth’s reign became clouded. Duncan’s elder son, Malcolm – the future Malcolm Canmore – was cultivating support in England to reclaim the throne of Scotland. Edward the Confessor seems to have backed his ambitions. In 1054 he sanctioned an invasion of Scotland by Earl Siward, the doughty Danish-born Earl of Northumbria. Siward (probably with Malcolm at his side) invaded Scotland with a mixed army of Anglo-Saxon Northumbrians and Scots. Macbeth seems to have conducted a defensive guerrilla campaign at first; the contemporary English chronicle Vita Edwardi Regis claims that the Scots were ‘an uncertain race of men and fickle, and one which trusts rather in woods than on the plain, and more in flight than in manly courage in battle’. Siward reached Dundee apparently unopposed, where his army was reinforced by supply ships. Shortly afterwards he brought Macbeth to pitched battle on the Festival of the Seven Sleepers (27 July).

Where was this battle? Was this Shakespeare’s final ‘Battle of Dunsinane’? It could well have been – there is no documentary evidence either way. But if it was at Dunsinane, it would have been decided on the level ground below Dunsinane Hill, not in the ancient hill-fort on the summit.

Wherever it took place, it was a long and bloody encounter. There were heavy casualties on both sides. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1054 noted:

In this year Earl Siward invaded Scotland with a great host both by land and sea, and fought against the Scots. He put to flight their king, Macbeth, and slew the noblest in the land, carrying off much plunder such as none had previously gained; but his son Osbern and his sister’s son and numbers of his housecarles, as well as of the king [Edward the Confessor], were slain there.

‘He put to flight their king, Macbeth’. The one historical fact we can be absolutely sure of, pace Shakespeare and Walter Scott, is that Macbeth was not killed at Dunsinane in 1054.

For the next three years the records are silent. Siward’s victory had not been enough to give Malcolm the throne; Siward had to return to Northumbria to deal with an uprising there, and died soon afterwards. Malcolm seems to have been installed by Edward the Confessor as ruler over Strathclyde and the Lothians, but no more. Macbeth retreated northward, back to his original power-base in Moray. By 1057, however, his support seems to have been draining away, and Malcolm felt strong enough to seek out his enemy on his home ground.

The chronicles say that the fugitive Macbeth was eventually hunted down by Malcolm near the village of Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, and killed there in a desperate final stand rather than a pitched battle. His head was then brought to Malcolm, either on a pole or a golden platter.

There is nothing like local tradition to keep historical memory alive, however embroidered it might have become. At Lumphanan, which lies on the A980 between Banchory and Alford, the epicentre of the tradition is the nearby Peel Ring of Lumphanan, which is signposted. The Peel was once a medieval Anglo-Norman fortified motte-and-bailey;¹ now all that remains of it is a large grassy mound surrounded by a swampy moat, with an encircling earthwork. A convenient path offers easy access to the crown of the mound. In the fifteenth century, a local worthy had built himself a stone residence there – Ha’ton House – which was abandoned in the eighteenth century. The Peel has long been linked with Macbeth’s last stand; unfortunately, it dates from the early thirteenth century – nearly two hundred years after Macbeth’s death.

Other features in the district are traditionally associated with the demise of Macbeth, but it takes a very determined pilgrim to track them down. On Perk Hill on the farmlands north of the village, clearly visible from the road, there lies a ruined Bronze Age cairn girdled by a guard of honour of beech trees. It is known locally as ‘Macbeth’s Cairn’. The farmer is quite happy to permit access, although he cannot fathom why anyone should want to trek across his fields to visit it. The site was roughly excavated in 1855 and was found to contain the bones of someone who had died three thousand years earlier. It has nothing at all to do with Macbeth; indeed, the early chroniclers say that Macbeth was buried, like so many Kings of Scots before him, on the holy island of Iona.

There is also an even less accessible ‘Macbeth’s Stone’, unmarked, where the king’s head is alleged to have been severed from his body. It is the largest of a group of boulders on top of a grassy slope on Cairnbeathie Farm, on the west side of the disused railway embankment.

And there is (of course!) an unmarked ‘Macbeth’s Well’, at Burnside, near the parish church to the north-east. It is practically invisible – a small and very low stone lintel set into the base of a steep and overgrown bank at the roadside. There is no hope of finding it without a friendly and particularly knowledgeable local guide – the casual visitor would drive or even walk right past it without spotting it. An incongruous plastic hose-pipe now drips into the well. This is where the doomed monarch is said to have quenched his thirst before the final encounter.

Wherever Macbeth died, and wherever his body ended up, his death did not automatically give Malcolm the throne. Macbeth’s remaining supporters in the north proclaimed as King of Scots his stepson, Lulach (the son of Gruoch from a previous marriage). Lulach appears in history under the unflattering nickname of ‘Lulach the Simpleton’. Simpleton or not, he too was hunted down by Malcolm, and killed in March 1058 in an ambush at Essie (now Rhynie) in Strathbogie, the strategic pass between Moray and Strathdon. Lulach, too, was buried on Iona.

With Lulach dead, Malcolm’s hold on the kingdom was at last secure. A month later he was crowned at Scone at the age of twenty-seven, and embarked on his thirty-five-year reign as King of Scots (see Chapter 5).

Shakespeare and Scott

So what were Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott following him, playing at? Why did they present such an extraordinarily biased view of Macbeth?

Shakespeare had not simply made it all up; nor had Holinshed in his Chronicle. The denigration of Macbeth had started much earlier, by John of Fordun in Chronica Gentis Scotorum (Chronicle of the Scottish People), his proto-version of the Scotichronicon around 1380:¹ here Macbeth is portrayed as an evil murderer and usurper. Andrew Wyntoun, prior of St Serf’s in Loch Leven and author of the metrical Origynale Cronikil of Scotland in vernacular Scots around 1420, introduced the witches and the advancing Birnam Wood and the theme of ‘unnatural birth’. It seems clear that conflicting stories about Macbeth and Malcolm were current soon after Macbeth’s reign: pro-Macbeth stories in the heartlands of Moray, and anti-Macbeth stories which were nurtured by the court propagandists of the victorious Canmore dynasty. These were the tales which Holinshed relied upon in his Chronicle.

Did Shakespeare believe what he read in Holinshed? For a playwright, it scarcely mattered – he must have found Holinshed extraordinarily convenient. He wrote Macbeth in the period around 1606, soon after the Union of the Crowns of 1603 which had brought King James VI of Scotland to London as King James I of England as well. James was the latest of the Stewart dynasty of Scotland, and Banquo (who seems to have been an invented character) was, providentially, the legendary progenitor of the Stewart monarchy. What more flattering than such a theme for a play presented by The King’s Men to welcome the new incumbent of the throne? Shakespeare was in no way averse to twisting history for political ends: ten years earlier he had played fast and loose with the story of Richard III to celebrate the first of the Tudors, Henry VII, in order to please his demanding royal patron, Queen Elizabeth.

It was also well known that King James VI and I was deeply interested in witchcraft – his book on Daemonologie, first published in Edinburgh in 1597, had been republished in London on his accession in 1603. Furthermore, the mere fact that Macbeth had caused the death of a reigning king made him automatically, in Elizabethan eyes, a regicide and a usurper, even though kingship in Macbeth’s day was decided by election, not inheritance – as the succession had been in England at the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066.

There was less immediate excuse for Walter Scott, however. Ted Cowan says:

The Macbeth episode in Tales of a Grandfather has always puzzled me because Scott simply regurgitated the plot of Shakespeare’s play. His account gives the impression of Macbeth the usurper, Macbeth the barbarian king, Macbeth the tyrant who would massacre his own subjects, and so on; yet Scott knew that this was far from the historical truth – if there is such a thing as historical truth!

Scott was perhaps trying to set up a contrast between the disappearing old Celtic world and the wonderful new world of the Normans as portrayed in Ivanhoe and other novels; he was personifying the dissolution of Celtic Scotland in the figure of Macbeth. That may be all right in literary or artistic terms, but it is certainly not legitimate in strictly historical terms.

So Tales of a Grandfather presents the demise of Macbeth as a happy prelude to the normanisation and ultimate anglicisation of Scotland to come. For pro-Unionist historians like Scott, the denigration of Macbeth reflected a profound distaste for the ancient role of Celtic culture in the Lowland Scotland of his day; for Scott, any relevance it might have had was overshadowed by the emerging Norman (i.e. civilising) influence which was to begin in the reign of Malcolm Canmore. Not that Scott himself would have admitted to any such notion; in his History of Scotland he showed clearly that he was aware of the historical inaccuracies of Shakespeare’s plot:

All these things are now known: but the mind retains pertinaciously the impression made by the impositions of genius. While the works of Shakespeare are read, and the English language subsists, History may say what she will, but the general reader will only recollect Macbeth as a sacrilegious usurper, and Richard [III] as a deformed murtherer.

It is only in much more recent times that Macbeth has been rehabilitated as the champion of the Men of Moray and the last truly Celtic king of Scotland.

But there was another player in the Macbeth drama whom Shakespeare did not mention at all – Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney. The sources about Thorfinn’s life (both Icelandic and Scottish) are tantalisingly elusive about his real impact on Scottish affairs – so elusive, indeed, that the eminent Scottish historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett was able to create a brilliantly plausible scenario from them in her novel King Hereafter (1982). Her thesis was that Macbeth and Thorfinn were in reality the same person, known as Thorfinn in Orkney and Macbeth in Scotland. It may sound outrageously unlikely, but …

Orkneyinga Saga relates that on the Feast of the Assumption (10 August) in 1040 – the very day on which Macbeth defeated Duncan near the village of Pitgaveny in Aberdeenshire – Thorfinn defeated a King of Scots called ‘Karl Hundason’ in battle at a fortified site the saga called Torfnes, somewhere on the northern coast of Scotland. It is impossible to identify the site with any certainty, but circumstantial evidence suggests that ‘Torfnes’ may well have been a name for the large and important fortification at modern Burghead, on the north Moray coast, near Elgin. Meanwhile John of Fordun’s early version of the Scotichronicon relates an old Scottish tradition that after Duncan’s death at Pitgaveny in 1040, his body was taken to Elgin; it was this tradition which, two centuries later, in 1235, inspired King Alexander II to found a chapel in the cathedral church in Elgin where masses were sung for Duncan’s soul.

In the year 1050, when Macbeth went on his pilgrimage to Rome, Orkneyinga Saga tells us that Thorfinn the Mighty went to Rome as well. Was it pure coincidence that these two rulers should choose the same year in which to absent themselves from their respective warring domains for such a long time? Thereafter, according to the saga, Thorfinn maintained good relations with the Scottish court.

There are just as many inconsistencies as coincidences between the stories of Thorfinn and Macbeth, of course. According to Orkneyinga Saga, for instance, Thorfinn died peacefully in Orkney and was buried in his beloved minster of Christchurch on the Brough of Birsay; whereas Macbeth, as we have heard, was buried on Iona. But both the saga and the Scottish sources agree that Thorfinn was married to Ingibjörg, the daughter of Earl Finn Arnason of Norway, and that after Thorfinn’s death she married Malcolm III – Macbeth’s conqueror and successor as King of Scots. Intriguing, isn’t it?

1 Local tradition in Inverness insists that the murdered King Duncan was buried in Culcabock, a village to the east of the town (now a suburb of it). In front of a petrol station on the Old Perth Road, at the junction with Culcabock Avenue, is a stone marked with a plaque which reads: ‘Behind is the supposed burial place of King Duncan 1040’ – that is to say, underneath the present petrol station. On the opposite side of the road is a ‘Duncan’s Well’ (Fuaran Dhonnachaidh). According to this tradition, the king’s body was later removed and buried in the royal cemetery on the Holy Island of Iona. In fact, Duncan was killed in battle in Aberdeenshire (see here).

1 Just for the record (literally), the ‘Birnam Oak’ stands next to the largest sycamore tree in Britain; it has a height of thirty metres and a girth of eight metres.

1 The Culdees (Cele dei, ‘Friends of God’) formed early monastic communities which attached themselves to hereditary secular priests.

1 ‘Motte-and-bailey’ is the term used for an early Anglo-Norman fortification consisting of a timber tower raised on an artificial mound. The word ‘motte’ comes from Old French, meaning mound, and the ‘bailey’ was the fortified courtyard within the surrounding ditch, or moat. In English, ‘motte’ came to mean the moat rather than the mound.

1 John of Fordun (c.1320–84) has often been called ‘the Father of Scottish History’. Not a great deal is known about him; he is believed to have been a chantry priest at Aberdeen Cathedral, and may have come from Fordoun in the Mearns. His history was a compilation of (now lost) earlier historical writings on Scotland and took the story down to 1383. His work formed the basis of the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower, which was written in the 1440s.