William, however, in his anxiety to avoid an encounter with John, appears to have deeply offended many of his own powerful subjects, to several of whom the English connection had all along been distasteful. All the advantages of the English fiefs belonged solely to the royal family; and as it was of little or no importance to many of the Scots that the brother of their king should enjoy the earldom of Huntingdon, or that their sovereign should be received with certain ceremonies whenever he absented himself from his own dominions to attend the English Court, they looked with jealousy and discontent at the concessions extorted from William, through his double anxiety to prevent hostilities, and to avoid the forfeiture of his English fiefs and privileges. The treaty concluded at Northampton had been in direct contradiction to the wishes of the nation, and ere long William discovered that, in his solicitude to avert the evils of a foreign war, he had re-kindled the embers of civil discord at home. The discontent must have been widely disseminated which first threatened to explode in the south. Thomas de Colvill, a powerful baron in constant attendance at the court of Scotland, was accused of conspiring against his liege lord, and detained in Edinburgh Castle until he was permitted to redeem his treason by the payment of a fine, and was subsequently dispatched, in a species of honourable captivity, as a hostage to the king of England.[497] The storm which had thus threatened the southern, or feudalized, division of the kingdom was shortly destined to burst in all its fury upon the distant north and west, where a Mac William still existed in the person of Godfrey, one of the sons of Donald Bane. Ireland, as usual, had been his home when he was not amongst the western isles of Scotland, where he had never ceased to assert the claims of his family; and either Godfrey, or some of his partizans, had probably been amongst those “enemies of the king” whom the Earl of Caithness had suffered to escape at Lochloy. No time could have been more favourable for the revival of his pretensions than a period of general discontent, and his partizans in Ross, with all the disaffected clans of the neighbouring provinces, invited him to cross from Ireland, with promises of their warmest support.[498]