The disastrous intelligence of the battle reached Margaret after her health had been long impaired, less by age, for she was scarcely past the prime of life, than by a painful disorder brought on by the austerities of the fasts, and penances, dictated by her fervent though mistaken piety. The departure of the king with her elder sons, upon their last unfortunate expedition, had already oppressed her mind with a gloomy foreshadowing of the future; and when, on the third day after the catastrophe, her son Edgar stood by her couch, in his expressive silence she divined her loss, and bowed in submission to the blow. But the shock was too great for her enfeebled frame, and sinking at once under the intelligence, upon the same day on which the fatal tidings arrived, she calmly and peacefully breathed her last, and death released her from her sorrows.[181] Six sons and two daughters were the offspring of the marriage between Malcolm and Margaret. Edward, the eldest, perished with his father, and Ethelred, created Abbot of Dunkeld and Earl of Fife, appears to have survived his parents for a very short time: Edmund died in an English cloister, a penitent and mysterious recluse; Edgar, Alexander, and David, lived to wear, in succession, the crown of Scotland. Of the two daughters, Editha was destined by Malcolm to be the wife of Alan, Count of Bretagne, but she eventually became the queen of Henry of England, who had long been attached to the Scottish princess, and claimed her as his bride immediately upon his accession to the throne. Many blamed Archbishop Anselm for countenancing the marriage, as they believed that Editha had taken the vows of a nun; but she convinced the archbishop of their mistake, and her words throw a curious light on the severe discipline to which she was subjected under the rule of her mother’s sister, the stern abbess of Romsey, as well as on the perils to which even a lady of her exalted rank was exposed, in these stormy times, from the licence of the Norman conquerors.[182] “I never took the veil,” said the princess, “but when I was quite a young girl, trembling under the rod of my aunt Christina, whom you must recollect, she used to place a little black hood on my head, to protect me from the lawless insolence of the Normans; and when I tore it off she would beat me cruelly, scolding me during the punishment in the harshest language. So in her presence I wore the black hood in tears and trembling; but when my father saw it he would pluck it from my head in a rage, imprecating the wrath of Heaven on the hand that placed it there, and adding that he intended me for Count Alan’s bride, and not for a sisterhood of nuns.”[183] She changed her name to Matilda in compliment to her husband’s mother, and her memory was long venerated amongst the English people, who fondly remembered her as “good Queen Maud.”[184] Mary, the younger daughter, after the marriage of her sister with Henry, was