Page:Robert the Bruce and the struggle for Scottish independence - 1909.djvu/63



perform to us whatever his brother Malcolm, King of Scotland, of right performed, or ought of right to have performed, to our predecessors."

King Richard, by the same instrument, re-established the Marches of the two kingdoms as they had been before William's captivity. He also delivered up such of the evidences of the homage done to King Henry II. by the Scottish clergy and barons as were in his possession, and declared that all such evidences, whether delivered up or not, should be held as cancelled. Nothing could be more complete, or intended to be more complete, than the restoration of her independence to Scotland as she then was.

It was not, however, until the reign of Alexander III. that the Scottish kingdom as we know it, with the exception of Orkney and Shetland and the addition of the Isle of Man, was completed by the overthrow, in 1263, of Haco, King of Norway, at the battle of Largs. The Western Isles were then first made subject to the Scottish Crown.

Thus it will be observed that, towards the close of the thirteenth century, the kingdom of Scotland was a territory very different from any that had borne that name in the past. Newborn Scotland had at last become something more than what Metternich once called Italy—"a geographical expression."

But it was not only by extending the bounds of his dominion that this wise and strong monarch succeeded in welding into one nation the different and