King of Scots for forty-nine years, captured at Alnwick in 1174 and made Henry II's liegeman by the Treaty of Falaise, who bought his kingdom's independence back from Richard I for 10,000 merks in 1189.
William the Lion ruled Scotland from 1165 to 1214, the longest reign of any Scottish king before the union of the crowns. One badly judged morning outside Alnwick in July 1174 defined the first half of it: taken prisoner in a skirmish he had provoked, he bought his freedom with the Treaty of Falaise, which made him Henry II of England's liegeman for Scotland, put five royal castles under English garrisons paid for by Scotland, and subjected the Scottish church to the English one.
He spent the second half undoing it. In December 1189 Richard the Lionheart, raising money for crusade, sold the whole arrangement back for 10,000 merks; three years later a papal bull placed the Scottish church directly under Rome. William pushed royal authority into Galloway, Moray and Caithness, founded Arbroath Abbey for the murdered Thomas Becket, and left his son Alexander II a kingdom whose borders and institutions had hardened into the shape they would keep.
He was born about 1142, the second son of Henry, Earl of Northumberland, and Ada de Warenne, and a grandson of David I. His father died in 1152 and his grandfather a year later, so the crown passed to William's elder brother Malcolm IV at twelve while William took Northumbria, the earldom his father had held. It was the richest thing he would ever possess and he held it for four years.
In 1157 Henry II of England, secure at last after the English civil war, required Malcolm IV to give back the northern counties his family had taken from Stephen. Malcolm submitted and William lost Northumbria, receiving the earldom of Huntingdon as compensation for a patrimony worth many times more. Everything he did on the border for the next twenty years followed from that exchange, and contemporaries said so: he wanted Northumbria, and he never stopped wanting it.
The chroniclers who watched him are English and unflattering about his judgement rather than his person. Jordan Fantosme, who wrote a verse account of the 1173-1174 war within a few years of it, gives a king impatient with counsel, unable to hold an army together once it began to plunder, and reckless enough to charge four hundred knights with sixty companions; the recklessness is not a literary flourish, since it is exactly what the record of the capture describes. William of Newburgh, writing a generation later, treats the whole Scottish invasion as vanity punished, which is the moral a Yorkshire canon would draw.
Scottish tradition saw what came afterwards instead. John of Fordun, writing in the later fourteenth century, called him the Lion of Justice and made the byname stick - and the epithet is genuinely later, not contemporary: nobody in his lifetime called him the Lion. What the record of his own government shows is a man with an unusually long memory and unusual patience, who spent twenty years pressing a claim to Northumbria, fifteen years under a treaty he had signed at Falaise, and then bought his way out of it the moment a crusading English king needed cash.
Both readings can be true at once, and the reign argues that they are. The same king who lost his kingdom's independence in a morning recovered it by outliving the man who took it, kept his church out of York's hands by patient litigation at Rome rather than by arms, and pursued the Mac Williams and the earls of Orkney with a persistence that looks nothing like impulsiveness. He was a bad soldier and a formidably durable politician, and the second mattered more over forty-nine years.
Malcolm IV died at Jedburgh on 9 December 1165 and William was inaugurated at Scone on Christmas Eve. His first years were spent in the ordinary business of a twelfth-century Scottish king: confirming the sheriffdoms and burghs his grandfather David I had planted, endowing religious houses, and pressing the claim to the northern English counties by diplomacy rather than war. In 1168 he negotiated with Louis VII of France, an early sign of the standing arrangement between Scotland and France that later centuries would call the Auld Alliance.
The claim went nowhere while Henry II was strong. William's opening came in 1173, when Henry's eldest son rebelled against him with the backing of his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, his brothers, the king of France and a large part of the Angevin baronage. The Young King offered William Northumbria for his support. William took the offer.
He invaded in 1173 and again in 1174, and the campaigns exposed what he could not do. His army could burn Northumberland but not take its castles: he failed before Wark, Carlisle and Prudhoe in turn, and his unpaid host worked by spreading out to plunder rather than by concentrating. On the morning of 13 July 1174 he was sitting outside Alnwick with a few dozen companions while the bulk of his men were away raiding, and a column of about four hundred knights that had ridden north from Newcastle in the dark came out of the fog in front of him.
What followed was the Battle of Alnwick, and it lasted minutes. William charged, had his horse killed under him, and was taken. He was carried south with his feet tied beneath a horse's belly, shown to Henry II at Northampton, and shipped to Normandy as a prisoner. The revolt in England collapsed within weeks, and the capture of the king of Scots was read on both sides of the border as the judgement of God on the whole enterprise.
The terms were issued at Valognes on 8 December 1174 and sworn again publicly at York on 10 August 1175, in front of William's brother David and a crowd of Scottish magnates. William became Henry's liegeman for Scotland itself, not merely for English lands: for the first time English overlordship of the Scottish kingdom was written down. Five castles - Roxburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Edinburgh and Stirling - passed into English hands, garrisoned at the Scottish king's expense, and hostages were taken, his brother David among them. The Scottish bishops were required to acknowledge the English church.
The church clause proved the hardest to enforce and the most damaging to attempt. Scottish bishops had refused the authority of the archbishop of York for a century, and they went on refusing it; William, meanwhile, fought a long, bitter and unwinnable quarrel with the papacy over his own candidate for the see of St Andrews, which at one point left him excommunicated and his kingdom under interdict. Fifteen years of overlordship cost Scotland money, castles and prestige, and left the church question exactly where it had been.