Henry II, Richard I, and the Scots

On December 8th, 1154, Henry and Eleanor landed in England, having sailed from Barfleur in a wild storm, as I mentioned yesterday. They would be crowned on the 19th. I tried to capture their triumphant, euphoric mood in the last paragraph of Saints:
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“Ranulf glanced back once. Henry and Eleanor were still out in the snow-blanketed bailey. They waved as Ranulf turned, and that was to be the memory he would carry into Wales: the two of them, standing together in the bright winter sunlight, smiling, sure that the world, like the English crown, was theirs for the taking.”
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On December 8th twenty years later, in 1174, King William the Lion of Scotland was forced to accept the humiliating harsh terms of the Treaty of Falaise, in which he and the other Scots lords had to swear fealty to Henry as their liege lord. A very high price for gaining his freedom. Had this held, the Scots would have found themselves in the same subordinate position as the Welsh. But luckily for William, Richard was in dire need of money for his crusade and he never seems to have had dynastic ambitions in Scotland, so he was willing to return the strongholds that William had been forced to surrender to Henry and to acknowledge Scottish independence—for a price, of course. As a result, though, he enjoyed good relations with Scotland for the remainder of his reign. Henry had William brought in chains from Alnwick and then imprisoned him in Falaise Castle. This seems to mirror Richard’s treatment when he was taken prisoner in Germany. But the difference was that William had been invading England at the time and in alliance with Henry’s enemies in a serious attempt to dethrone him, whereas Richard was under the protection of the Church and no state of war had existed between England and Germany.
Also on December 8th, 1542, Mary, Queen of Scots, was born. Hers was a life filled with such improbable drama and really bad decisions that no novelist would have dared to invent any of it.