rown,
with a "saving of his former rights," this reserve gave no alarm to the
nobility of Scotland, both because these rights, having hitherto been
little heard of had occasioned no disturbance, and because the Scots
had so near a prospect of seeing them entirely absorbed in the rights of
their sovereignty.

{1291.} But this project, so happily formed and so amicably conducted,
failed of success, by the sudden death of the Norwegian princess, who
expired on her passage to Scotland,[*] and left a very dismal prospect
to the kingdom. Though disorders were for the present obviated by the
authority of the regency formerly established, the succession itself of
the crown was now become an object of dispute; and the regents could not
expect that a controversy, which is not usually decided by reason and
argument alone, would be peaceably settled by them, or even by the
states of the kingdom, amidst so many powerful pretenders. The posterity
of William, king of Scotland, the prince taken prisoner by Henry II.,
being all extinct by the death of Margaret of Norway, the right to the
crown devolved on the issue of David, earl of Huntingdon brother to
William, whose male line being also extinct, left the succession open
to the posterity of his daughters. The earl of Huntingdon had three
daughters; Margaret, married to Alan, lord of Galloway, Isabella, wife
of Robert Brus or Bruce lord of Annandale, and Adama, who espoused
Henry, Lord Hastings. Margaret, the eldest of the sisters, left one
daughter, Devergilda, married to John Baliol, by whom she had a son of
the same name, one of the present competitors for the crown: Isabella
II. bore a son, Robert Bruce, who was now alive, and who also insisted
on his claim: Adama III. left a son, John Hastings, who pretended that
the kingdom of Scotland, like many other inheritances, was divisible
among the three daughters of the earl of Huntingdon, and that he, in
right of his mother, had a title to a third of it. Baliol and
Bruce united against Hastings, in maintaining that, the kingdom was
indivisible; but each of them, supported by plausible reasons, asserted
the preference of his own title. Baliol was sprung from the elder
branch: Bruce was one degree nearer the common stock: if the principle
of representation was regarded, the former had the better claim:
if propinquity was considered, the latter was entitled to the
preference.[**]

* Heming. vol. i. p. 30. Trivet, p. 268

** H