William I of Scotland

“ In hopes of French aid, William invaded Northumberland, later laid siege to Carlisle, and on July 13, 1174, was surprised in a morning mist and captured at Alnwick. Scotland was now kingless; Galloway rebelled, and William, taken a captive to Falaise in Normandy, surrendered absolutely the independence of his country, which, for fifteen years, really was a fief of England. When William was allowed to go home, it was to fight the Celts of Galloway, and subdue the pretensions, in Moray, of the MacWilliams, descendants of William, son of Duncan, son of Malcolm Canmore. ”

“ When King William of England wore his cynehelm in church and hall, King Eadgar of Scotland, first of his men in rank and honour, bore the sword of state before his lord. [639] Was that day of pride and pomp merely a day of pride and pomp, or were any of the great affairs of William’s kingdom and empire dealt with in the joint presence of the Monarch of Britain and his kingly vassal? One thing only we know; one act alone of that gathering is recorded. But that act is one which has no small fitness as the one act which we know that the Red King did in his new building. ”

“ A natural feeling of anxiety oppressed the mind of William as he recalled the events of his early manhood, and remembered the consequences of his former war with England. His kingdom was still unsettled, his health was beginning to fail, whilst his heir was still a mere child, and Scotland had hardly yet recovered from the disastrous state of anarchy into which she had been plunged by the capture of her king at Alnwick. ”

“ Some allowance may be made for his anxiety to carry out the policy of his grandfather, and re-annex to the Scottish crown the appanage of his early years, which his brother had resigned at Chester; but from the comparative ease with which his successor crushed [435] every rebellion within a few years of his accession, firmly established the royal authority over the whole mainland of Scotland, and vindicated on every occasion the liberties of his crown and kingdom, it is very evident that William carried his caution too far ”

“ The marches of Scotland were restored as they had been before William's capture. (4) Richard restored to William the earldom of Huntingdon, and all other feus to which he had right in England; and (5) delivered up all evidences he had of homage paid to Henry by the barons and clergy of Scotland. The raising of the ten thousand merks treated as the ransom of William was effected by aid of the prelates and barons in an assembly at Edinburgh in 1190, which is one of the steps in the history of the rise of the Scottish parliament. ”

“ And thrice he wept full sore;
Then laid his cheek to her cold grave,
And word spake never more. William, king of Scotland, introduced by Sir W. Scott in The Talisman (1825) .
William of Cloudesley (3 syl.) , a north country outlaw, associated with Adam Bell and Clym of the Clough (Clement of the Cliff) . He lived in Englewood Forest, near Carlisle. Adam Bell and Clym of the Clough were single men, but William had a wife named Alyce, and “children three,” living at Carlisle. The three outlaws went to London to ask pardon of the king, and the king, at the queen’s intercession, granted it. ”

“ This gallant Knight was not one of the King's gentlemen, but the son of a Scottish earl, who had been sent to Windsor with a message from the King of Scotland.
Lord William, for that was his name, was so tall, and strong, and brave, and manly, it was no wonder that little Lady Katherine fell in love with him, and preferred him to all the young English lords who were longing to lay their hearts at her feet. ”

“ The legal relations between the crowns of England and Scotland had been doubtful ever since the days of William the Conqueror and Malcolm Canmore, if not since the days of Eadward the Elder and Constantine; henceforth they were to be doubtful no longer. William the Lion became the liegeman of the English king and of his son for Scotland and for all his other lands, and agreed that their heirs should be entitled to a like homage and fealty from all future kings of Scots. ”

“ William was a quaint Scotsman, shrewd and caustic in his remarks, like many of his nation. He was reputed rich, and somewhat addicted to making more than a proper display of his riches; in other words, he was "purse-proud." He was, however, a most loyal subject of the queen, whom he held to be a paragon of beauty. His daughter bore the same name; and it was even whispered that he had sought to trace a likeness between Mary Glenday and Mary Queen of Scots. What will the partiality of a father's love not accomplish? ”

“ William marched to the north with a formidable array of mounted chivalry, supported by a numerous fleet, in the full determination of exacting vengeance, both for the open hostility of the Scottish king, and for the support invariably afforded in the same quarter to his disaffected subjects beyond the Humber. If he had expected to find any of the insurgents in Scotland, he was doomed, on this occasion, to disappointment, as they had undoubtedly escaped elsewhere on the first rumours of the magnitude of the expedition. ”

“ In 1071 the rebels held the Isle of Ely, and the revolt, though isolated, became serious. William in person attacked the island with ships and a land force. He reduced it in the course of the year, punished the rebels with mutilation or lifelong imprisonment, fined the monastery of Ely, and caused a castle to be built in its precinct. Early in 1072 he was in Normandy where he held a parliament and addressed an ecclesiastical synod. Returning to England he invaded Scotland, for Malcolm had been ravaging the north, and made his court a refuge for William's enemies. ”

“ Scotland had at this period almost regained the position in which she stood before the fatal capture of her king. Galloway was at length pacified, the north and west were no longer in open rebellion, and Scottish men-at-arms once more garrisoned the castle of Edinburgh; but Henry still retained Roxburgh and Berwick, the keys of the southern frontier, and for the cession of these important fortresses William offered to pay 4000 marks of silver. ”

“ The case of Scotland was very different from that of Wales. The Scottish people were a rising not a declining nation. The Scottish kingdom was a collection of states held by different historical titles, and inhabited by races of different origin, not a nationality struggling for existence. Southern Scotland was far more akin to Northern England than to Northern Scotland; inhabited by people of English blood and English institutions, and feudally held, like great part of England, by Norman barons. ”

“ During the absence of William in Normandy, whilst he was in attendance at the court of Henry upon the subject of his dispute with the papal see, some of the leading nobility of Scotland—probably of Moravia—taking advantage of the distracted state of the kingdom, made overtures to Donald Bane, a son of William Fitz Duncan, inviting him to assert his claim upon the throne of Scotland. ”

“ The bishops of Scotland as vassals also did homage, and as bishops they swore to be subject to the Church of England to the same extent as their predecessors had been and as they ought to be. The treaty of Falaise was again publicly read and confirmed anew by the seals of William and his brother David. There is nothing to show that King William did not enter into this relationship with every intention of being faithful to it, nor did he endeavour to free himself from it so long as Henry lived. The Norman influence in Scotland was strong and might easily increase. ”

“ WILLIAM III (1650–1702) , king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was born on 4 Nov. 1650 at the Hague, in the stadholder's apartments in the old palace of the counts of Holland. William Henry, as he was named in a baptismal service celebrated with inopportune pomp, was the posthumous and only child of William II, Prince of Orange, and his consort Mary [q. v.] , the eldest daughter of King Charles I and princess royal of England. At the time of his birth the prospects of the house of Orange seemed hopelessly darkened by a shadow which was to dominate the whole of his youth. ”

“ Strathclyde had been conquered by Eadmund, and by him had been granted to Malcolm as a fief, on condition of military tenure; while afterwards the Lothians had been granted by Eadgar to the Scotch kings as an English earldom. Thus, on various grounds, all parts of the Kingdom of Scotland acknowledged the English King as their overlord. When England fell into the hands of the Normans, William, professedly assuming the position which his predecessor had held, would naturally expect the same homage to be paid to him. It is equally certain that the Scotch kings would object to pay it. ”

“ His brother David, Earl of Huntingdon, and twenty-one other barons were to remain as hostages till the strongholds were given up, and on their release each was to leave his son or next heir as a warrant of good faith. The homage was performed in the following year, when William met Henry at York; and the King of Scots, with his earls, barons, free-tenants, and clergy, became the liegemen of the King of England in St. Peter's Minster. The clergy swore to lay the kingdom under an interdict, and [Pg 28] the laity to hold by their English over-lord, should William prove unfaithful to him. ”

“ William married Maude de Saint Wallery, and succeeded to the great estate of his father and mother, which he kept in peaceable possession during the reigns of king Henry II. and king Richard I. In order to avoid the persecutions of king John, he retired with his family to Ireland; and from thence returned into Wales; on hearing of the king’s arrival in Ireland, his wife Maude fled with her sons into Scotland, where she was taken prisoner, and in the year 1210 committed, with William, her son and heir, to Corf castle, and there miserably starved to death, by order of king John ”

“ Not a papal legate was allowed to enter Scotland who had not first sworn to do nothing detrimental to the interests of the English king, with an additional [376] promise to return through England—a proviso that precluded the possibility of evasion—whilst a similar pledge was exacted from all the Scottish clergy who attended the eleventh Council at the Lateran. William was continually summoned to attend, as a vassal, at the Court of his English lord; and he brought his earls and barons, when required, to assist at the councils of their common superior. ”

“ As there are plenty of Scotch lords and gentlemen, as well as English, in the parliament, they are always ready to take care of their own country, which is right.
Although Queen Anne and her ministers were busy about this union of Scotland with England, they were obliged to attend to what the French, under their ambitious king, Louis the Fourteenth, were about. They had begun to attack the Protestants again, in so many ways, before King William died, that there was likely to be a war ”

“ William now called together such Scottish noblemen and gentlemen as were in London, who adopted a resolution requesting him to call a Convention of the Estates of Scotland, to meet on the 14th of March, and in the meantime to take on himself the same executive authority as in England. William was, therefore, the elected ruler of the whole kingdom for the time. This power he proceeded to exercise with a prudence and wisdom which were in striking contrast to the antagonism of James. All parties and religions were protected as subjects ”

“ King William's kindness is not to be forgotten, who not only relieved us from tyranny, but had such a sympathy for Scotland when in distress of famine, that he offered all who would transport victual to Scotland that they might do it custom free, and have twenty-pence for each boll. ”

“ William, the second baron, who acquired Belvoir Castle in right of his mother, first appears as a member of the king's suite in his expedition to Wales in 1277 (Deputy-Keeper of Publ. Rec. 46th Rep. p. 268) . In June 1291 he was in Scotland on the king's service (Cal. of Patent Rolls, Edward I, p. 433) , and also appeared among the claimants to the Scottish crown on account of the marriage of his great-grandfather, Robert de Ros, called Furfan, with Isabella, daughter of William the Lion (Rymer, new edit. ii. 75; Rishanger, p. 125) . ”

“ The sale was of course a political fiction, founded on the assumed forfeiture of the Scottish branch of the earl’s family, through which their hereditary office was supposed to have reverted to their English connections. The real king and the pseudo-king united in the joint exercise of an act of shadowy sovereignty—a joint protest of their claims as vassal king and overlord of Scotland—the sole substantial gain, the purchase-money, falling to the earl ”

“ The Scottish nobles were dissatisfied with his conduct, and, anxious to take advantage of the embarrassment of England, opened negotiations with Philip of France. When Edward heard of this he demanded that the border fortresses of Scotland should be placed in his hands until his war with France was concluded. This was refused, and in March 1296 an army led by seven Scottish earls ravaged Cumberland, and made an unsuccessful attack on Carlisle (Chron. Lanercost) . ”

“ At all events he did nothing which tended to reduce Scotland to the same condition as Wales, for he took steps towards providing her with a king by summoning the lords of the kingdom to meet him at Norham on 10 May 1291, while certain of his own military tenants were also ordered to be there at the beginning of June. On opening the proceedings the chief justice demanded whether the Scottish barons would recognise Edward as their superior lord, and various passages were read from ancient chronicles showing how the Scottish kings had in time past done homage to the kings of England. ”