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Alexander legitimation of his wife Marjory, a natural daughter of Alexander II, which would have made his children heirs to the throne, led Alexander, by the advice of Henry III, to remove him and the chancellor Robert, Abbot of Dunfermline, from their offices; in their place the Earl of Menteith and his brother-in-law the Earl of Mar, and Gamelin, bishop of St. Andrews, became the chief ministers of the young king, who retired with his bride and her household. English counsellors, it was, however, promised at the time, would be shortly sent to advise him. Geoffrey of Langley, keeper of the royal forests, who came in fulfilment of this promise, was expelled by the Scottish barons, and from 1251 to 1255 the chief power in Scotland was in the hands of the Earl of Menteith and the Comyns. A secret mission in 1254 of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, who was to play so great a part in the barons' war, the complaints of Henry's daughter as to her treatment at the Scottish court, and the restoration of Alan Durward to the favour of the English king through his services in the Gascon war, paved the way to a change in the government of Scotland in 1255 at the hands of the English king.

Henry, after a preliminary meeting with Alexander at Werk castle, crossed the border, and they again met at Kelso, where the regency of the Comyns was put an end to. Bishop Gamelin of St. Andrews, Alexander Comyn, earl of Buchan, and William, earl of Mar, were deprived of the offices of chancellor, justiciar, and chamberlain, which were bestowed on the Bishop of Dunkeld, Alan Durward, and David de Lyndsay. John Baliol and Robert de Ros, two other members of the late regency, forfeited their property as traitors. Fifteen new regents were at the same time appointed—the Bishops of Dunkeld and Aberdeen, the Earls of Dunbar, Fife, Strathern, and Carrick, Alexander the Steward, Robert de Bruce, Alan Durward, Walter de Moray, and five other barons. They were to hold office for seven years, when Alexander would attain his majority. The Chronicle of Melrose ascribes this revolution to English influence, and mentions with evident sympathy that the Bishops of Glasgow and St. Andrews and the Earl of Menteith refused to set their seal to an accursed deed in which there were many things contrary to the honour of the king and kingdom. The concurrence of Wyntoun, although Fordun takes a different view, renders it probable that this is a true account, and that the Comyns represented the national Scottish party adverse to foreign intervention. Next year (1256) Alexander and his queen visited London, and the Scottish king received a renewal of the grant of the Honour of Huntingdon. He returned accompanied by John Mansel, a favourite of Henry. But about the same time the Bishop of St. Andrews went to Rome to settle a dispute as to the possession of his see, and was so successful in conciliating the papal favour, that not only was his see restored, but a sentence of excommunication against his enemies, the party of Durward and the English regents, was pronounced in 1257 and published by the Bishop of Dunblane and the Abbots of Melrose and Jedburgh. Emboldened by the success of their chief supporter amongst the bishops and the return to Scotland of the queen mother Mary de Couci and her husband, John de Brienne, the party of the Comyns seized the young king when asleep in Kinross, carried him off to Stirling Castle, and forced Durward to take refuge in England. In 1258 yet another change in this period of sudden alterations in the government of Scotland took place. In a conference held at Jedburgh the Earls of Hereford and Albemarle and John de Baliol, on the part of the English king, arranged with the Comyns and Alexander that there should be a joint regency consisting of the queen mother and John de Brienne and four members of each of the two parties which had since the king's accession divided Scotland. The Earl of Menteith and Alan Durward, their leaders, were both members of this heterogeneous council of state, but the chief power remained with the former, whose partisans filled the great offices. The death of Menteith in the following year may perhaps have facilitated what the approaching manhood of Alexander completed, the close of those continual contests for the supreme power of which an outline only has here been given. In 1260 Alexander and his queen again visited London in response to an invitation sent but declined in the previous year, and the queen, being left behind on Alexander's return home, gave birth at Windsor (February 1261) to a daughter, Margaret, afterwards married to Eric, king of Norway. Prior to his departure Alexander received the assurance of Henry that if he and the queen died the expected infant should be entrusted to the custody of the Scottish nobles. At last, emancipated from the control of his own nobles and no longer afraid of English intervention, for the year 1261 was the commencement of the barons' war caused by Henry's refusal to observe the provisions of the parliament of Oxford, Alexander resumed the project, cut short by his father's death, of uniting the Hebrides to his