Chapter 10

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after his arrival there a sickness seized him, and on the 15th of November this great and distinguished monarch died.
       With the passing of Haakon the political domination of Norway over western Scotland was at an end. For Magnus, his youthful heir, had neither the inclination nor the power to enforce upon Scandinavia the colonial policy of his grandfather. And Alexander knew that at last his opportunity had come, so speedily collecting his armies and a fleet he prepared to attack the Isle of Man; there was no hope now of succour from outside for the little island thus threatened by a Scottish force of overwhelming strength, so that King Magnus of the Isles had no other choice than to sue for peace. He was compelled to surrender all the islands over which he ruled, except Man itself; and this he held henceforth only as vassal of the king of Scotland whom he undertook to supply with ten ships of war as often as they should be required of him. But this considerable triumph did not satisfy Alexander; in the same year he forced all the western islands one by one to submit to him (though he could not capture nor crush King Dugald), and finally he reestablished Scottish supremacy over the unhappy people of Caithness. In Norway it was soon realized that the easiest way of ridding the state of the embarrassment of colonies that could no longer be defended and were fast slipping from her hold was to sell them, so it came about that in July of 1266 a treaty was made whereby Magnus ceded to Alexander his now worthless overlordship of the Isle of Man and all the Sudreys in return for a payment of 4,000 marks (to be delivered in four yearly instalments) and of 100 marks annually thereafter, a bargain that brought to an end a period of more than four hundred years of Norse dominion in western Scotland. Yet still, in the north, the Orkneys and Shetlands remained faithful to the Norwegian crown.
       And long did they remain faithful to their Scandinavian overlord. For though Caithness, now Scottish territory, was sometimes ruled by the Orkney earl as vassal of the king of Scotland, yet over the islands themselves the Scottish monarch exercised no practical authority. The male line of Harald Maddadhsson had ended with the death of his son Earl Jon in 1231, and the new earl, also governor of Caithness, was a Scot, son of the earl of Angus who had married, it may be, a daughter of Harald. This Angus dynasty was in turn succeeded by that of the Scottish Stratherne family, and late in the fourteenth century the earldom passed         




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into the keeping of the St. Clairs. Of this family, William, invested in 1434 by King Eric of Pomerania, sovereign of the united kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, was the last ruler of Orkney under Scandinavian suzerainty.
       But the severing of the bond was a money bargain of remote statesmen, an inconclusive and embarrassing diplomatic exchange that in no wise was prompted by, nor reflected, the personal inclinations of the almost Norse folk of the islands. For the Scots had defaulted over a period of many years in their payment of the annual dues for their holding of the Sudreys, and when King Christian I of the united kingdoms was angrily insisting upon payment, it seemed the best way out of a difficult position that the heir to the Scottish crown should wed the Danish king's daughter. But though first proposed in 1457, it was not until 1468 that the treaty was signed, and the prince, now James III, took Margaret of Denmark to wife, and by the terms of this treaty as pledge for a part of the bride's enormous dowry Christian handed over the Orkneys to Scotland. And then, as still he could not conveniently pay up the remainder of the dowry, he pledged the Shetlands too. So it came about that in 1472 the islands were formally annexed by the crown of Scotland, though the right to redeem them, whether fanciful of real, was jealously guarded by the Scandinavian throne, even until the seventeenth century.
It was by treaty, then, here as in the western islands, that the Norse overlordship was ended. But the politics and bargains of the mainland did little to alter the hearts of the islanders, their loyalties, their customs, or their speech. Norse in spirit they remained and little-loving of the Scots, even though Scottish clerics had done much to soften them in the fifteenth century, when the Norse tongue began to die out in Orkney. Indeed it was not until the days of James I of England and Scotland that these mettlesome and unruly folk of the Nordreys and of the Sudreys submitted finally to Scottish authority.