Scotland

Scotland has a small but consequential role in the tale of Alessandro: first as the destination of a marriage the English king intends for his daughter, and later as the kingdom that Alessandro is said to have conquered. It is not a setting for the narrated action; instead, it marks the distance between the princess’s arranged future and the extraordinary political future attributed to her husband.

The Marriage the Princess Flees

The princess tells the Pope that she left her father’s court in disguise, taking much of the English king’s treasure, because he intended to marry her to the King of Scotland, described as very old while she was young. She presents the danger not as a simple dislike of the proposed match: she feared that marriage might lead her, through the frailty of youth, to act against divine law and her father’s royal honor. Scotland thus enters the story through a dynastic arrangement she refuses before it can define her life.

Scotland and the Choice of a Husband

After meeting Alessandro, the princess chooses him as her husband. In Rome she asks the Pope to bless the marriage they have already promised each other, explaining that her original purpose in coming to him has been displaced by this choice. Her father had promised that she could marry the husband she requested, with the exception of his sons and members of the royal house; Alessandro is the man she names. The contrast is sharp: the proposed Scottish marriage comes from paternal arrangement, whereas her union with Alessandro follows her own declared preference, though she still seeks public religious recognition for it.

The Later Claim of Conquest

After the couple returns to England and the king receives his daughter and son-in-law, Alessandro is made a knight and given the Earldom of Cornwall. The tale says that he reconciles the king with his son, bringing good to the island, and that he wins the people’s love and favor. It then adds, with explicit qualification, that some claim he later conquered Scotland and was crowned its king. The report transforms the country from the site of a marriage the princess escaped into the setting for Alessandro’s supposed rise, but its wording leaves the conquest as an attributed account rather than an unqualified event.