The influence of Rome on the heart of the Scottish nation, began with the marriage of Malcolm with the English Roman Catholic Princess Margaret. This Saxon queen completed the outward perversion of Scotland to Rome. She pretended to reform, but only managed to enthral the native Church, whose clergy she summoned to a Council in 1074. The Gaelic language was the only language the clergy could speak—they had a professional knowledge of Latin—so King Malcolm, her husband, acted as her interpreter. They refused to recognise the absolute supremacy of the great Roman father; they were unable to speak English; and the queen set herself piously to rectify these abuses and shortcomings. The Roman Catholic influence of the Norman went on increasing until the Court, as the Celtic Professor at Oxford says, “in the time of David, who began to reign in 1124, after being educated in England in all the ways of the Normans, was filled with his Anglican and Norman vassals. He is accordingly, regarded as the first wholly feudal King of Scotland, and the growth of feudalism went on at the expense of the power and influence of the Celtic princes, who saw themselves snubbed and crowded out to make room for the king’s barons, who had grants made to them of land here and there, wherever it was worth having. The outcome was a deep seated discontent, which every now and then burst into a flame of open revolt on the part of the rightful owners of the soil.” The Celtic Church died away with the decay of the power of the Celtic princes. At the same time the Roman religion was warmly supported in the persons of Englishmen, Flemings and Normans, who received every encouragement to settle in Scotland. The predominance of the Celtic element seems to have passed away in the eleventh century. “At the time, however, of the War of Independence, Gaelic appears to have still reached down to Stirling and Perth, to the Ochil and Sidlaw Hill, while north of the Tay it had as yet yielded to English or Broad Scotch, only a very narrow strip along the coast.” The bulk of Bruce’s army at Bannockburn was composed of the Ivernian and Celtic descendants of the ancient Free Church of Scotland. The true Christian devotion of the Fathers had not altogether disappeared: like the Puritan soldiers of Cromwell these grand old Scots began the grim work of battle for national freedom, with a fervent prayer to the God of battles,—a species of homage which surprised the more Catholic English.