For nearly forty years Harald remained in the contented enjoyment of his two earldoms, acknowledging a nominal dependence upon the crowns of Scotland and Norway, but in all other respects as untrammelled as the most independent of his maternal ancestors. He was married to a sister of Duncan, Earl of Fife, and this connection with one of the firmest partizans of the reigning family may have kept him steady in his allegiance. At length, at the mature age of sixty and upwards, he transferred his affections to a daughter of Mac Heth, and he married the object of his elderly love after divorcing his former wife by one of those summary processes which lingered latest, with other barbarisms, in the extreme north. The union was inauspicious, as might have been expected; a daughter of Mac Heth could not fail to remind her husband of her hereditary claims upon Moray, and, yielding too readily to the suggestions of ambition, ere long Harald seized upon the province.[474] [Sidenote: A. D. 1196] It was the intelligence of these proceedings on the part of the earl that now brought William in haste from the south; for he had already suffered too much from such a cause to think lightly of a rebellion in the northern Highlands. Meeting Harald’s son, Thorfin, in the neighbourhood of Inverness, he defeated him with ease, killing Roderic, a partizan, apparently, of the family of Mac Heth;[475] whilst Harald retreated as the king advanced, until at length, despairing of success, he fled to his ships in the hope of escaping to the Orkneys. But the earl was doomed to misfortune; an adverse gale detained him in port, and he was compelled to become a reluctant eyewitness of the destruction of his castle at Thurso, and of the unwonted spectacle of a royal army ravaging the extremity of Caithness. Submission was now the only course left open, and he was fain to purchase the withdrawal of the hostile army by promising to surrender the enemies of the king, to place his son Thorfin as a hostage in the hands of William for his own fidelity, and to resign half the earldom of Caithness to Harald Ericson.[476]