The first King of Scots, and the saint who leads to him

The road to Scotland runs through the most improbable person in this whole royal intake: a saint.

Margaret of Wessex was a granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, of the old English royal house that Alfred the Great founded. The Conquest made her an exile, a ship supposedly bound for the Continent put her ashore in Scotland, and the king of Scots, Malcolm Canmore, married her. The chronicles say he could not read, and that she read to him; that she washed the feet of the poor in Lent; that she civilised a rough court and rebuilt the church at Dunfermline. Rome made her a saint in 1250, and she is the only Scottish queen so honoured. Her husband Malcolm is the Malcolm of the story every schoolchild half knows, the king who took the throne after Macbeth.

Their daughter Matilda of Scotland married King Henry I of England, and their daughter was the Empress Matilda, already in this tree at the head of the Plantagenet ladder. So through one marriage the family's line now carries both the old English royal blood of Wessex, a second time and by a lawful road, and the whole ancient line of the Kings of Scots.

And that line is genuinely ancient. Behind Malcolm it climbs through Duncan, the king Macbeth killed in the real eleventh century rather than the play, and through the lay abbots of Dunkeld, to the house of Alpin: Malcolm II, Kenneth II, back to Kenneth MacAlpin himself, who joined the Scots and the Picts under one rule and died in 858, and whom the king-lists have reckoned the first King of Scots for a thousand years. Above him the lists thin into the legendary kings of Dál Riata, and there, as everywhere in this tree, the wiring stops and the honest frontier is marked. A saint, a schoolbook villain's victim, and the first king of a nation, all standing in one line that ends at a farmhouse in Cork. The Scots ladder is drawn in The Royal Houses.