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Alexander . Following his father's example, he first tried negotiations, but Haco detained the Scottish envoys, instead of listening favourably to their mission, and in the late summer of 1263 equipped a great fleet to overawe his island vassals and ravage the Scottish coast. A storm on 1 Oct. destroyed a considerable part of this earlier armada, and the defeat on the following day at Largs of those who landed there, though exaggerated by the Scottish historians, contributed to the discomfiture of Haco, who retired to the Orkneys, where he died at Kirkwall on 15 Dec. The adhesion of Ewen of Argyle to his fealty to the Scottish king aided in this repulse, and early in 1264 Magnus Olafson, king of Man, did homage to Alexander at Dumfries. The Earls of Buchan and Mar and Alan Durward were sent by Alexander in the same year to reduce the island chiefs who had sided with Haco. Two years later the negotiations which Magnus, Haco's son, had commenced immediately on his accession were concluded by the treaty of Perth, by which Man and the Sudreys were surrendered to Alexander for a payment of four thousand marks and an annual rent of a hundred, but the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the see of Drontheim was reserved. Man was a precarious possession, but the whole mainland and islands of Scotland, with the exception of the Orkneys and Shetland, were now for the first time united under one sceptre. In the contest between Henry and his barons Alexander aided his father-in-law, and the troops he sent shared in the defeat of Lewis (14 May 1264), where their leaders, John Comyn and Robert Bruce, were taken prisoners. In the course of the next three years Alexander proved that he had inherited in another direction his father's policy by asserting the independence of the Scottish church. He refused entrance to the kingdom of the legate Ottoboen, and would not allow Henry to collect a grant for the crusades which the pope had guaranteed to him out of the Scottish benefices; and in 1269 a provincial council was held at Perth, which declared, under the authority of the bull of Honorius, the right to hold such assemblies annually, over which the bishops were to preside in rotation with the title of Conservator. In 1272 Henry III died, and on the return of Edward I from the Holy Land Alexander attended his coronation, where his retinue and the splendour of his gifts surpassed that of all others. Early in the following year he lost his wife, who left three children, Alexander, David, and Margaret. In 1275 Boiamund de Vesci, canon of Asti,made a new valuation of the ecclesiastical benefices in Scotland, for the purpose of levying the tenth decreed by the council of Lyons in aid of a crusade. This valuation, unsuccessfully resisted and at first ill paid, was vulgarly called Bagamund's roll, and continued to regulate ecclesiastical taxes until the Reformation. The copies preserved are not quite complete, but they afford an authentic record of the wealth of the Scottish church, fostered with almost too much care by Malcolm and Margaret, and their descendants. At the time of Edward's coronation no claim for homage seems to have been made; but in 1278 Alexander was recalled under a safe conduct, and at Westminster on 28 Oct. tendered his homage for all the lands which he held in England for which homage was due, saving always his own kingdom. The Bishop of Norwich havings interposed, ‘And saving also the right of my lord King Edward to homage for your kingdom,’ Alexander declared ‘to that none has a right save God alone, for of Him only do I hold my crown.’ The events were now hastening which were to enable Edward to dispute this claim, and even the driest chroniclers appear to have felt the tragic character of the closing years of Alexander. In 1280 his youngest son, David, died. In 1283 there followed the death of his daughter Margaret, married two years before to Eric, king of Norway, leaving an only child, Margaret, the Maiden of Norway; and his eldest son, Alexander, who had married Margaret, daughter of the Earl of Flanders, died in the same year. The estates at Scone, on 5 Feb. 1284, bound themselves to acknowledge the Maiden of Norway as heir, failing any children Alexander might have. On 1 Nov. 1284–5, in the hope of securing a male heir, he married Joleta, daughter of the Count de Dreux, at Jedburgh, when, according to the tale of one of the later chroniclers, amidst the figures of a masque in honour of the marriage, suddenly one appeared which could not be distinguished whether it was man or ghost. It was deemed a presage of death, and on 16 March 1285 Alexander was killed by falling over a cliff while riding in the dark between Burntisland and Kinghorn.

The chroniclers differ according to their mood or bias in estimating the character of Alexander, but no difference seems to have existed amongst his subjects, who preserved his memory in some of the earliest verses of the Scottish dialect which have come down to us:— Quhen Alysander oure king was dede That Scotland led in luwe and le, Away was sons off ale and brede, Off wyne and wax, off gamyn and gle;