Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Margaret (1457?-1486)
MARGARET of Denmark (1457?–1486), queen of James III of Scotland, was the eldest daughter of Christian I of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, by Dorothea, princess of Brandenburg, and widow of Christof III. The marriage contract was signed 8 Sept. 1468, her father granting her a dowry of sixty thousand florins Rhenish; ten thousand florins were to be paid before the princess left Copenhagen, and the islands of Orkney, which then belonged to Denmark, were to be pledged for the remainder. James III by the same contract undertook to secure his consort the palace of Linlithgow and the castle of Doune as jointure lands,and to settle on her a third of the royal revenues in case of her survival. As the king of Denmark was only able to raise two thousand of the stipulated ten thousand florins before she left Copenhagen, he had to pledge the Shetlands for the remainder; and being also unable to advance any more of the stipulated dowry, both the Orkney and Shetland groups ultimately became the possession of the Scottish crown. The marriage took place in July 1469, the princess being then only about thirteen years of age (Record of her Maundy Alms, A.D. 1474, when she was in her seventeenth year, in Acounts of the Lord High Treasurer, p. 71). In the summer of the following year she journeyed with the king as far north as Inverness. After the birth of an heir to the throne in 1472, she made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Ninian at Witherne in Galloway (ib. pp. 29, 44; Exchequer Rolls, viii. 213, 239). She died at Stirling on 14 July 1486 (Observance of day of obit, Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, pp. 89, 345), and was buried in Cambuskenneth Abbey. In 1487 Pope Innocent VIII appointed a commission to inquire into her virtues and miracles, with a view to her canonisation.
[Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, vols. vii. and viii.; Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer; Histories of Leslie, Lindsay, and Buchanan: see art. James III of Scotland.]