Macbeth

Macbeth (c. 1005-1057), King of Scotland (1040-1057). He secured power following the defeat and death in battle near Forres of Duncan I. Despite the caricature in Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, of a usurper who seized the throne and became a tyrant king, historical reality was very different. Duncan and Macbeth had long been rival claimants; both were descended from Kenneth I MacAlpin. Their rivalry came to a head with the death of Malcolm II (1005-1034). Kingship in this period, however, was usually decided by power rather than pedigree. Macbeth had since the 1030s been described in chronicles as king or mormaer (“great steward”) of Moray, a region which then covered a far greater expanse than the modern shire, extending across northern Scotland from Buchan in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. It was the graveyard of a series of kings of Alba or Scotia. Duncan was the fourth king of the MacAlpin dynasty to be killed trying to impose his will on Moray. Macbeth’s victory probably owed much to the intervention of Thorfinn, the powerful earl of Orkney, who had previously posed the main threat to his power in the north.

Macbeth’s 17-year reign suggests a new stability. He saw off a revolt by Duncan’s father Crínan in 1045. By 1050 he was confident enough to go on pilgrimage to Rome where, it was said, he “scattered money like seed”. The main threat to him increasingly came from his southern frontier: Earl Siward of Northumbria provided a refuge for Duncan’s son, the future Malcolm III. A Northumbrian expedition in 1054 installed Malcolm in power south of the physical barrier of the River Forth, in Strathclyde and Lothian. A further attempt by Malcolm in 1057 ended in defeat at Lumphanan in Mar, but Macbeth was mortally wounded in the battle and died a few days later. He was succeeded, not by Malcolm, as Shakespeare recounted, but by his stepson Lulach. Seven months later, Lulach was defeated and killed in battle at Essie in Strathbogie, and Malcolm III became king.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, possibly performed as early as 1606, was first printed in the 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s works known as the First Folio. His principal source was Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577) by the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed. He, in turn, was highly dependent on Hector Boece’s often fanciful History of Scotland (1527). The play was clearly written with an agenda pleasing to England’s new king, James I, who had succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603. The Gowrie conspiracy of 1600, seen by James as an attempt on his life, may have been one backcloth for Macbeth, and an exemplar for the evil Lady Macbeth might been found in the Countess of Arran, the leading female figure at the Scottish court in the last years of James’s minority (as James VI of Scotland). Shakespeare's tragedy also provided the basis for the libretto of the opera Macbeth (1847) by Giuseppe Verdi, though historical fact largely eluded it also.