Margaret was born in 1045 in Hungary to a Hungarian princess related to Saint Stephen, king of Hungary. Margaret was the grand-daughter of King Edmond Ironside and the sister of Edgar Atheling. During the Danish domination of England she and her family lived in exile in England while Saint Edward the Confessor was on the throne. After his death they were forced to flee to Europe when the Normans occupied England, but a storm drove their ship to the coast of Scotland. King Malcolm III welcomed them and married Margaret. As his Queen she used her powerful position for the good of religion and the promotion of justice. Margaret was extremely pious and devout, spending nights and prayer and undertaking severe fastings. The Book of the Gospels she studied is preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. She founded and renewed a number of churches and convents and was charitable to the poor. She foretold the day of her death, 16 November 1093, and that is the day she is honoured in Scotland. Margaret was canonised by Pope Innocent IV in 1250.
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
One week has elapsed since the day on which we beheld Clotilde arise, and from yonder land of France won over to Christ by her, make known to the whole world what is the special role of woman beside the cradle of a nation. Until Christianity came, man altogether lowered in his own person and in the social order by the consequences of sin, was wholly ignorant of the grandeur of the divine intention in this respect. Philosophy and history never dreamed it possible that maternity could be raised to such heights. But since the Holy Ghost has been given to man to instruct him, both theoretically and practically, in all truth (John xvi. 13), examples have been multiplied by which the wondrous vastness of the divine plan has been clearly set forth — strength and sweetness here presiding, as ever, at the Counsels of Eternal Wisdom.
Scotland had already long been Christian when Margaret was given to her, not to lead her to the baptismal font, but to establish amid a population so diversified and so often at mutual enmity, as was hers, that unity which makes a nation. Ancient Caledonia defended by her lakes, mountains and rivers had up to the fall of the Roman Empire kept her independence. But while herself inaccessible to invading troops, she had become the refuge of the vanquished of every race, and the proscribed of every epoch. Many an advancing wave that had paused and crouched at the feet of her granite frontiers had swept pitilessly over the Southern provinces of the great British Island. Britons, Saxons and Danes in turn dispossessed and driven from their homes, fleeing northwards, had successively crept in and settling down, as best they might, had maintained their own customs in juxtaposition with those of the first inhabitants, adding consequently their own mutual jealousies to the inveterate divisions of the Picts and Scots. But from the very evil itself, the remedy was to come. God, in order to show that He is master of revolutions, just as He is of the surging waves, was about to confide the execution of His merciful designs on Scotland to such casual instruments as a storm or a political overthrow may sometimes prove to be.
At the opening of the eleventh century, Danish invasion had driven from the English shore the sons of the Saxon king Edmund Ironside. The crowned apostle of Hungary, Saint Stephen I, generously received the fugitives at his court, welcoming in these helpless children, the great-nephews of a Saint, namely Edward the Martyr. To the eldest he gave his own daughter in marriage, and the second he affianced to the niece of Saint Henry, Emperor of Germany. Of this last mentioned union, were born three children: Edgar, surnamed Atheling, Christina afterwards a Nun, and Margaret whose feast the Church is keeping today. Erelong by the turning tide of fortune, the exiles once more returned to their country and Edgar was brought to the very steps of the English throne. For, in the meanwhile, the sceptre had passed from the Danish princes back again to the Saxon line in the person of their uncle, Saint Edward the Confessor, and by very birthright seemed destined to pass ultimately to Edgar Atheling. But almost immediately after their return from exile, the death of Saint Edward and the Norman Conquest again banished the royal Saxon family. The ship bearing these noble fugitives, bound for the Continent, was driven in an opposite direction by a hurricane and stranded on the Scottish shore. Edgar Atheling, despite the efforts of the Saxon party, was never to raise up the fallen throne of his sires. But his sister, the Saint of this day, made conquest of the land where the storm, God’s instrument, had carried her.
Having become the wife of Malcolm III, her gentle influence softened the fierce instincts of the son of a Duncan, and triumphed over the barbarism still so dominant in those parts of the country, as to separate them utterly from the rest of the known world. The fierce Highlander and haughty Lowlander, reconciled at last, now followed their gentle Queen along until then unknown paths thrown open by her to the light of the Gospel. The strong now bent him down to meet the weak or the poor and all alike, casting aside the rigidity of their hardy race, let themselves be captured by the alluring charms of Christian charity. Holy penitence resumed its rights over the gross instincts of mere nature. The frequentation of the Sacraments once more brought into esteem, produced seasonable fruits. Everywhere, whether in Church or in State, abuses vanished. The whole kingdom became one family of which Margaret was called the mother, for Scotland was born by her to true civilisation. David I (inscribed like his mother, in the catalogue of the Saints), completed the work begun by her, and another child of Margaret’s, alike worthy of her, Matilda of Scotland, surnamed the “good Queen Maude,” was married to Henry I of England and thus an end was put on the English soil to the persistent rivalries of victors and vanquished by this admixture of Saxon blood with the Norman race.
* * * * *
We hail you, Queen, truly worthy of the praises lavished on you by posterity, among the most illustrious of Sovereigns! Power in your hands became an instrument of rescue for an entire population. Your earthly passage marks the meridian of true Light for Scotland. Yesterday, holy Church commemorated in her Martyrology him who was your precursor in this far off land, Columkille, who leaving Ireland in the sixth century, had borne the faith there. But Christianity crippled in its soarings by divers combined circumstances could produce scarcely any of its civilising effects on the then inhabitants of the land. Only a mother could perfect the supernatural education of the nation. The Holy Ghost who had chosen you, Margaret, for the task, prepared your maternity in the midst of tribulation and anxiety: thus had He acted in the case of Clotilde. Thus does He ever act in the case of mothers. How mysterious and hidden did not the ways of Eternal Wisdom seem as realised in your person! Your birth in exile, far from the land of your sires; your return home; then fresh misfortunes; then the tempest at sea; and at last, your being cast despoiled of everything on the crags of an unknown coast: what a list of disasters, and who among the worldly wise would ever have dreamed that herein was the direct course of a merciful Providence to make the combined violence of men and the elements serve the sweet purposes of His designs in your regard!
Yet so it was, and this was the very way you were moulded into the valiant woman (Proverbs xxxi 10-31), raised in all your loftiness above the deceits of this present life, and wholly fixed on God, the one supreme Good, alone untouched by Earth’s revolutions. Far from becoming either soured or dried up by suffering, your heart firmly anchored beyond the influence of this world’s ebb and flow on unshaken and Eternal Love, was ever up to the mark, in foresight and in devotedness, such as was needed to hold you always at the height of the mission destined for you. Wherefore, you were indeed that treasure worthy of being sought from the uttermost coasts, that merchant ship bringing bread from afar and all good things to the favoured shore on which she is cast (Proverbs xxxi. 10-31). Yes, fortunate indeed was your land of adoption, had she never forgotten your teaching and example! Happy your descendants, had they ever remembered that the blood of Saints flowed in their veins! Yet, worthy of you in death was at least the last Queen of Scots as she bowed beneath the heads-man’s axe, a brow faithful to her baptism up to her last breath. But, alas, the unworthy son of Mary Stuart, by a policy as false as it was sacrilegious, abandoned at once both the Church and his own mother. Thenceforth heresy blighted the noble stem from which so many kings had sprung. And this at the very moment when England and Scotland were first united under one sceptre’s sway! Nor may the treason of a James I be redeemed by the fidelity of a second James to the Faith of his fathers! Margaret, your throne is firmly fixed forever in the eternal kingdom. But abandon not your own England, the land of your sires, nor Scotland still more your own, of which Holy Church has declared you patroness. The Apostle Andrew shares with you the rights of patronage: in concert with him, then, preserve those who have been steadfast in fidelity, multiply converts to the ancient faith, and prepare the way for a speedy gathering of the whole flock into the fold of the one Shepherd (John x. 16).Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:
At Rome, on the Via Salaria, the martyrdom of blessed Getulius, a noble and very learned man, and of his companions Caerealis, Ainantius and Primitivus. By order of the emperor Hadrian they were arrested by the ex-consul Licinius, scourged, thrown into prison, and then delivered to the flames. But as the fire did not injure them, their heads were crushed with clubs and they thus terminated their martyrdom. Their bodies were taken up by Symphorosa, wife of blessed Getulius, and reverently interred in a sandpit on her own estate.
Also at Rome, on the Via Aurelia, the birthday of the Saints Basilides, Tripos, Mandales and twenty other martyrs under the emperor Aurelian and Plato, governor of the city.
At Nicomedia, St. Zachary, martyr.
At Prusias in Bithynia, St. Timothy, bishop and martyr, under Julian the Apostate.
In Spain, the holy martyrs Crispulus and Restitutus.
In Africa, the holy martyrs Aresius, Rogatus, and fifteen others.
At Cologne, St. Maurinus, abbot and martyr.
At Petra in Arabia, St. Asterius, a bishop, who suffered much from the Arians for the Catholic faith. By the emperor Constantius he was banished to Africa where he died a glorious confessor.
At Naples in Campania, St. Maximus, bishop and martyr. For having vigorously defended the Nicene Creed, he was sent by the same emperor Constantius into exile where he died worn out by his trials.
At Auxerre, St. Censurius, bishop.
And in other places, many other holy martyrs, confessors and virgins.
Thanks be to God.
