His grandfather, David, had
made him Earl of Northumberland, and the resignation which Henry had
extorted from the weakness of Malcolm IV could scarcely be held as
binding upon William. So William marched into England to aid the rebel
prince, and, after some skirmishes and the usual ravaging, was surprised
while tilting near Alnwick, and made a captive. He was conveyed to the
castle of Falaise in Normandy, and there, on December 8th, 1174, as a
condition of his release, he signed the Treaty of Falaise, which
rendered the kingdom of Scotland, for fifteen years, unquestionably the
vassal of England.[39] The treaty acknowledged Henry II as overlord of
Scotland, and expressly stated the dependence of the Scottish Church
upon that of England. The relations of the churches had been an
additional cause of difficulty since the time of St. Margaret, and the
present arrangement was in no sense final. A papal legate held a council
in Edinburgh in 1177, and ten years afterwards Pope Clement III took the
Scottish Church directly under his own protection.
About the political relationship there could be no such doubt. William
stood, theoretically, if not actually, in much the same position to
Henry II, as John Baliol afterwards occupied to Edward I. It was not
till the accession of Richard I that William recovered his freedom. The
castles in the south of Scotland which had been delivered to the English
were restored, and the independence of Scotland was admitted, on
William's paying Richard the sum of 10,000 marks.
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