The great nobles of both parties made a last effort at resistance.  In the north the Count of Aumale ruled almost as king.  He was of the House of Champagne, son of that Count Stephen who had once been set up as claimant to the English throne, and near kinsman both of Henry and of Stephen.  He now refused to give up Scarborough Castle; behind him lay the armies of the Scot king, and if Aumale’s rebellion were successful the whole north must be lost.  A rising on the Welsh border marked the revival of the old danger of which Henry himself had had experience in the castle of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, when the Empress and Robert, with his Welsh connections and alliances, had dominated the whole of the south-west.  Hugh Mortimer, lord of Wigmore, Cleobury, and Bridgenorth, the most powerful lord on the Welsh border, and Roger, Earl of Hereford and lord of Gloucester, and connected by his mother with the royal house of Wales, prepared for war.  Immediately after his crowning Henry hurried to the north, accompanied by Theobald, and forced Aumale to submission.  The fear of him fell on the barons.  Roger of Hereford submitted, and the earldom of Hereford and city of Gloucester were placed in Henry’s hands.  The whole force of the kingdom was called out against Hugh Mortimer, and Bridgenorth, fortified fifty years before by Robert of Belesme, was reduced in July.  The next year William of Warenne, the son of Stephen, gave up all his castles in England and Normandy, and the power of the House of Blois in the realm was finally extinguished.  Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, was deprived of his fortresses, and the eastern counties were thus secured as those of the north and west had been.

The borders of the kingdom were now safe; its worst elements of disorder were suppressed; and the bishops and barons had taken an oath of allegiance to his son William, and in case of William’s death to the infant Henry, born in February 1155.  When Henry was called abroad in January 1156, he could safely leave the kingdom for a year in the charge of Queen Eleanor and of the justiciars.  His return was marked by a new triumph.  The death of David and the succession of his grandson Malcolm, a boy of twelve years old, gave opportunity for asserting his suzerainty over Scotland, and freeing himself from his oath made in 1149 at Carlisle to grant the land beyond the Tyne to David and his heirs for ever.  Malcolm was brought to do homage to him at Chester in June 1157, and Northumberland and Cumberland passed into Henry’s hands.  Malcolm and his successor William followed him in his wars and attended at his courts, and whatever Henry’s actual authority might be, in the eyes of his English subjects at least he ruled to the farthest borders of Scotland.  He next turned to the settlement of Wales.  The civil war had violently interrupted the peaceful processes by which Henry I. sought to bring the Welsh under English law.  The princes of Wales had practically regained their independence, while the Norman lords