On 19 June 1250, The Body Of Queen Margaret, Wife Of Malcolm Canmore, was moved from its resting place in Dunfermline Abbey to a new shrine nearer the great altar. After almost five years of petitions to Rome, Margaret had been canonised as Scotland's first (and only) royal saint. Although he did not live to see it, the ceremony was a notable triumph for Alexander II, in whose reign the Scottish Church had reached its mature form. The cleric who had organised the campaign was David Bemham, royal client, confidante and Bishop of St Andrews (1239-53). The inauguration of Alexander's eleven-year-old son five days after his father's death in July 1249, which came close to a formal rite of anointing and coronation, Margaret's canonisation two months later and her investiture in the following year were all testimony to a coming of age not only of the macMalcolm dynasty but also of the Scottish Church and of the relationship between Church and state.

Church and nation

Bemham bore the old title of episcopus Scottorum (Bishop of the Scots), which had been in use since at least the mid-eleventh century and perhaps the mid-tenth. Churchmen had played a role in the inauguration of kings of Scots since Columba had taken part in the ceremonial installation ofAedan mac Gabrain in 574. The notion of a 'Scottish Church' had first been given voice in the reign of Giric (878-89) although the ecclesia Scoticam had been given new status in 1192 when Pope Celestine III (1191-8) in a bull Cum universi declared that all the Scottish sees except Galloway (which was under the jurisdiction of York) should enjoy the status of "special daughter' of Rome, immediately subject to the papacy rather than to Canterbury, Durham or York. Yet popes had been (and would be until the 1320s) consistently reluctant to grant to kings of Scots the full rites of anointing and coronation. They were also unwilling to grant metropolitan status to St Andrews, which by the twelfth century was the acknowledged centre of the Scottish Church, despite petitions in the reigns of David I and Malcolm IV. It was no accident that the reign of William the Lion saw both a revival of the legends of the origins of kings of Scots and a further elaboration of the cult of St Andrew. Visible evidence of the heightened dependence of the macMalcolm dynasty and the Church on each other were the Pictish Chronicle, which was copied during the reign with its tracing of the common origin of Scots, Picts and Britons to Scota, daughter of the Pharaoh, and the beginnings of the building of a new cathedral at St Andrews in the 1160s, at 320 feet in length and 168 feet across its transepts far larger than any other church in the realm. The intertwined identity of King, Church and people - originating in the children of Israel, linked ever since the time of Columba by a royal priesthood, and now given alternative form in a second national saint - was near-complete.