David’s eldest son, the gallant Prince Henry, who had led the wild charge at Northallerton, predeceased his father in 1152.  He left three sons, of whom the two elder, Malcolm and William, became successively kings of Scotland, while from the youngest, David, Earl of Huntingdon, were descended the claimants at the first Inter-regnum.  It was the fate of Scotland, as so often again, to be governed by a child; and a strong king, Henry II, was now on the throne of England.  As David I had taken advantage of the weakness of Stephen, so now did Henry II benefit by the youth of Malcolm IV.  In spite of the agreement into which Henry had entered with David in 1149, he, in 1157, obtained from Malcolm, then fourteen years of age, the resignation of his claims upon Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland.  In return for this, Malcolm received a confirmation of the earldom of Huntingdon (cf. p. 18).  The abandonment of the northern claims seems to have led to a quarrel, for Henry refused to knight the Scots king; but, in the following year, Malcolm accompanied Henry in his expedition to Toulouse, and received his knighthood at Henry’s hands.  Malcolm’s subsequent troubles were connected with rebellions in Moray and in Galloway against the new regime, and with the ambition of Somerled, the ruler of Argyll, and of the still independent western islands.  The only occasion on which he again entered into relations with England was in 1163, when he met Henry at Woodstock and did homage to his eldest son, who became known as Henry III, although he never actually reigned.  As usual, there is no statement precisely defining the homage; it must not be forgotten that the King of Scots was also Earl of Huntingdon.

Malcolm died in 1165, and was succeeded by his brother, William the Lion, who reigned for nearly fifty years.  Henry was now in the midst of his great struggle with the Church, but William made no attempt to use the opportunity.  He accepted the earldom of Huntingdon from Henry, and in 1170, when the younger Henry was crowned in Becket’s despite, William took the oath of fealty to him as Earl of Huntingdon.  But in 1173-74, when the English king’s ungrateful son organized a baronial revolt, William decided that his chance had come.  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.