united to Eustace, Count of Boulogne, by whom she left an only child, also named Matilda, the heiress of her father’s earldom, which she brought as her dowry to Stephen of Blois, afterwards king of England. CHAPTER VII. _Donald the Third_ 1093 - 1094. _Duncan the Second_ 1094 ----. _Donald restored_ 1094 - 1097. The lamentable occurrence on the banks of the Alne threw all Scotland into confusion, retarding the progress of the country for the next quarter of a century. Edward had been chosen by his father for his Tanist, or successor, in preference to his elder half-brother Duncan, probably because, as the eldest of the sons of Margaret, he united her claims upon the allegiance of the Anglo-Saxons to his own right to the fealty of the native Scots; but the illegitimacy of Duncan is not necessarily to be inferred from the course pursued by Malcolm, for the ideas of that period about inheritance were not of the fixed and unvarying character which the custom of centuries has established in the present and preceding ages. The race of Alfred occupied the English throne to the exclusion of the children of his elder brother, nor did the descendants of the great king succeed in the lineal order of after-times. The claims of the Atheling were disregarded by the Saxon Harold, as well as by the Norman William; Robert was equally set aside by both his brothers; whilst Henry’s daughter, Matilda, was obliged to support her right to the crown by force of arms against the pretensions of her cousin the heir-male, himself a younger son. This uncertainty about the rightful heir will explain the care with which the kings of that age thought it necessary to secure the recognition of their successors during their own lifetime. The elder Henry assembled the magnates of his dominions to acknowledge the claims of his son William, and at a subsequent period those of his daughter Matilda; whilst his grandson, the first Plantagenet, celebrated in his own lifetime the coronation of his eldest son, a proceeding of which he lived most bitterly to repent. The name of David was associated, as the successor of the reigning monarch, with that of his brother Alexander in the grant to St. Andrews of the _Cursus apri_; that of the Scottish prince, Henry, is to be found in many charters as the heir-elect of his father; whilst the names of William the Lion, and of David of Huntingdon, are of frequent occurrence, under the same circumstances, as late as the commencement of the thirteenth century. In Scotland such a custom was peculiarly desirable, where the early usage, extending the right of election to the crown to every member of the royal family, rendered the nomination of a Tanist during the lifetime of the reigning sovereign a matter of absolute necessity, to prevent anarchy and confusion after his decease.