Neither notion now seems to have much foundation. Apart from the years 1257-8, the minority was marked more by a deliberate closing of ranks amongst the greater nobility than a self-interested struggle for power. The pre-eminent position of the Comyns amongst the nobility and baronage was widely accepted. If there was a disruptive interest at work during the minority, it was not of an overmighty family, like the Comyns, but of a lesser family bent on selfadvancement, the Durwards, who sought English support to make good the influence it lacked amongst the Scottish nobility. The infamous 'kidnapping' of the king by the Comyns at Kinross in 1257 was not a pre-emptive strike for power but a rather cack-handed attempt to redress a novel imbalance of power which threatened the cohesion of the aristocratic establishment. By 1258, the Durwards had agreed, like the rest of the nobility, to a compromise in which their own interests were subservient to those of the King who was fast approaching his age of majority.

The stability of the majority of Alexander III was not an antidote to the factionalism of the minority; it was a product of the consensus built up during it. There was no royalist counter-revolution after 1260 and no need for one. The Comyns, as they had been in the last years of Alexander 11's reign and during most of the 1250s, remained the most important noble family in the kingdom, an essential instrument of royal power in both the north and the south-west. The Stewarts, for more than a century the crown's chief agents in the west, continued to combine ruthless self-interest and loyal service in pastures new, in Cowal and Kintyre. Far from taming the magnates, Alexander III relied on them to a greater extent than any king of Scots before him.