Jump to content

Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/213

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

very profitable result, though she had been very popular in the Australian colonies and in New Zealand. In 1867 she went to the United States, where she made her appearance on 18 Feb. at the New York Theatre in Peggy Green and the burlesque of ‘Kenilworth,’ and on the close of the season returned to her native country. She was for a short period lessee of the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, and assisted at the opening of the Gaiety Theatre, Edinburgh (Era, 26 Sept. 1875, p. 11). Latterly she was in reduced circumstances and was obliged to appear as a vocalist in music halls. She died at Edinburgh 20 Sept. 1875.

[Gent. Mag. June 1862, p. 780; Ireland's New York Stage, ii. 574; Era, 18 May 1862, pp. 6, 11; Foster's Baronetage, 1883, p. 186.]

DONALD IV, Breac (the Speckled or Freckled) (d. 643), a Celtic king of Scottish Dalriada, the fifty-third according to the fictitious list followed by Buchanan, but, according to the rectified chronology of Father Innes and Mr. Skene, the tenth or eleventh king counting from Fergus Mor Mac Eare, the real founder of the Dalriad monarchy, was son of Eochadh Buidhe (the Yellow), who was son of Aidan, son of Gabhran, the king ordained by St. Columba.

On the death of Kenneth Kerr, an elder son of Eochadh Buidhe, in 629 he was succeeded by his brother, Donald Breac (though some of the lists of kings interpolate a king, Fearchan, and Buchanan two kings, Eugenius IV and Fearchar II, between the two brothers). In 634 (?) Donald was defeated at Calathros (Callendar?) by the Angles of Bernicia, whose rule then extended to the Firth and whose kings were attempting to push their boundaries further north. In 637 he took part in the battle, called by Adamnan Rath (Mag Rath = Moira in Ireland), having taken the side of Congall Claen, king of the Cruthnigh (Picts) of Dalriada, against Donald, son of Aed of the Hy Nial, king of Ireland, contrary to the convention of Drumceat, by which the Scottish Dalriads were to support the king of Ireland in his expeditions. In 638 another battle was fought against the Angles at Glenmairison (Glenmuiriston), near the Pentlands, in which the men of Donald Breac were again defeated and Etin (Edinburgh? or Carriden near Boness) was besieged. Four years later (642) Donald Breac was himself slain in a battle in Strathcarron in West Lothian, by Owen (Hoan), king of the Strathclyde Britons. Adamnan (Life of Columba III, ch. 5) attributes this defeat to Donald having taken part in the Irish war against his kin the Scots in favour of the Picts, and, seeing in the defeat the fulfilment of a prophecy of Columba, adds ‘from that day to this (690–700) they (i.e. the Scottish Dalriads) have been trodden down by strangers,’ meaning probably the Strathclyde Britons. Such is the account of this king by Skene (Celtic Scotland, i. 247–50), which substantially agrees with Pinkerton (Enquiry into the History of Scotland prior to Malcolm III, ii. 118–20), and Reeves (Notes to Adamnan's Life of Columba), but it is to a large extent conjectural. In these writers the older authorities will be found.

It seems reasonably certain, however, that this king was contemporary with Edwin (617–33) and Oswald of Northumbria (633–642), in whose reign Aidan, a monk of Iona, became bishop of Lindisfarne, having been called thither by Oswald, who had spent his youth in exile at Iona during the reign of Edwin. Donald Breac must have been a powerful monarch to have pushed the arms of Dalriada so far east as the Lothians and engaged also in Irish wars in the middle of the seventh century.

[Chronicles of the Picts and Scots; Skene's Celtic Scotland, vol. i.; Reeves's Adamnan; see note on Origines Dalriadicae.]

DONALD V, Macalpin (d. 864), was king of Alban, the united kingdom of the Scots and Picts, whose centre was Scone, near Perth. His brother, Kenneth Macalpin, united the Scottish Dalriad monarchy of Argyll and the Isles, whose chief fort was Dunstaffnage, near Oban, or Dunadd on the Crinan moors, with the Pictish monarchy of northern and central Scotland, and Scone became the chief fort of this kingdom in the middle of the ninth century (844). Kenneth is called in Scottish chronicles a Scot, but in the Irish annals king of the Picts, as are also several of his successors. Alpin is supposed to have been a Pictish king who married a Scottish princess, and his maternal descent may account (as the old Pictish law deemed descent by the mother the test of legitimacy) for his successors tracing their lineage from the Scots and not from the Picts. The Picts are said to have been ‘almost extirpated by Kenneth,’ but the succession may have been more peaceful than the expression would indicate. Certain it is that the Pictish dialect did not radically differ from the Scottish. Still its supersession by the latter and the almost complete disappearance of Pictish names in subsequent Scottish history has not been satisfactorily accounted for.

Kenneth, a warlike monarch, had invaded Saxony, i.e. the Lothians, six times, burnt Dunbar, and seized Melrose. He removed