persistence to the story of Margaret and her sons, and the number
of her family and the circumstances of her marriage and of her death.
Before her there is little but fable; after her the stream of history
flows clear. The story of Macbeth, which is, yet is not, the
Shakspearian drama, and accordingly takes quite a curious distinct flow
of its own, like a new and imperfect version of something already
familiarly known, is the only episode of secular history that has any
reality before we come, in the next generation, to herself and her King.
The earlier annals of Adamnan, the life of Columba and the records of
his sacred isle, belong to those ever-living ever-continuing legends of
the saints in which the story of the nations counts for little. But
Margaret was fortunately secular, and though a saint, a great and
influential personage in the front of everything, and also a woman in
the fullest tide of life to whom all human events were happening; who
lived by love and died of grief, and reigned and rejoiced and triumphed
as well as suffered and prayed.

There followed, however, a terrible moment for that new Scottish-Saxon
royal family, when both their parents were thus taken from them. Donald
Bane set up a brief authority, restoring the old kingdom and banishing,
after the familiar use and wont of such revolutions, his brother's
children from Scotland. Of these children, however, but three sons are
mentioned: Edgar, Alexander, and David, who must all have been under age
at the time. Ethelred, who had the dangerous office of conveying his
brothers and sisters along with his mother's body to Dunfermline, died
or was killed immediately after this feat, and was laid with the King
and Queen before the rood altar in Dunfermline; and of Edmund, an elder
son, we have but a confused account, Wynton and Fordun both describing
him as "a man of gret wertu," who died in religion, having taken the
cowl of a monk of Cluny; whereas William of Malmesbury accuses him of
treachery and complicity in the murder of his base-born brother Duncan.
However this might be, he was at least swept from the succession, in
which there is no mention of him. Malcolm's lawful heirs were thus
reduced to the three boys whom their uncle, Edgar Atheling, had received
in England. But Donald Bane was not long permitted to enjoy his conquest
in peace. Duncan, the illegitimate son (but this counted for little in
those days) of Malcolm, who was a hostage in England