{1291.} But this project, so happily formed and so amicably conducted, failed of success, by the sudden death of the Norwegian princess, who expired on her passage to Scotland,[*] and left a very dismal prospect to the kingdom. Though disorders were for the present obviated by the authority of the regency formerly established, the succession itself of the crown was now become an object of dispute; and the regents could not expect that a controversy, which is not usually decided by reason and argument alone, would be peaceably settled by them, or even by the states of the kingdom, amidst so many powerful pretenders. The posterity of William, king of Scotland, the prince taken prisoner by Henry II., being all extinct by the death of Margaret of Norway, the right to the crown devolved on the issue of David, earl of Huntingdon brother to William, whose male line being also extinct, left the succession open to the posterity of his daughters. The earl of Huntingdon had three daughters; Margaret, married to Alan, lord of Galloway, Isabella, wife of Robert Brus or Bruce lord of Annandale, and Adama, who espoused Henry, Lord Hastings. Margaret, the eldest of the sisters, left one daughter, Devergilda, married to John Baliol, by whom she had a son of the same name, one of the present competitors for the crown: Isabella II. bore a son, Robert Bruce, who was now alive, and who also insisted on his claim: Adama III. left a son, John Hastings, who pretended that the kingdom of Scotland, like many other inheritances, was divisible among the three daughters of the earl of Huntingdon, and that he, in right of his mother, had a title to a third of it. Baliol and Bruce united against Hastings, in maintaining that, the kingdom was indivisible; but each of them, supported by plausible reasons, asserted the preference of his own title. Baliol was sprung from the elder branch: Bruce was one degree nearer the common stock: if the principle of representation was regarded, the former had the better claim: if propinquity was considered, the latter was entitled to the preference.[**] * Heming. vol. i. p. 30. Trivet, p. 268 ** Heming. vol. i. p. 36. The sentiments of men were divided: all the nobility had taken part on one side or the other: the people followed implicitly their leaders: the two claimants themselves had great power and numerous retainers in Scotland: and it is no wonder that, among a rude people, more accustomed to arms than inured to laws, a controversy of this nature, which could not be decided by any former precedent among them, and which is capable of exciting commotions in the most legal and best established governments, should threaten the state with the most fatal convulsions.