William, the last of the Orkney earls under Norwegian rule, succeeded to his father Henry, and received investiture on terms nearly similar to those imposed upon his grandfather. Moreover, he was to hold for the king and his successors the castle of Kirkwall, which his grandfather had built without the king’s consent. He had taken the title before he received investiture from King Eirik, for in 1426 he appears as Earl of Orkney on the assize at Stirling, for the trial of Murdoch, Duke of Albany.[109] In 1435, as Lord High Admiral of Scotland, he had command of the fleet that conveyed the Princess Margaret to France. In 1446 he was summoned by the Norwegian Rigsraad to appear at Bergen on next St. John’s Day,[110] to take the oath of allegiance to King Christopher, the successor of Eirik of Pomern. In 1460 the king’s commissioners in Kirkwall certify to King Christian I. that John of Ross, Lord of the Isles, has for a long time most cruelly endeavoured to depopulate the Islands of Orkney and Shetland by burning the dwellings and slaying the inhabitants, and that in these circumstances Lord William St. Clair, the Earl of Orkney and Caithness,[111] had been prevented from coming to the king.[112] On 28th June 1461 Bishop William of Orkney writes to the king from Kirkwall excusing the earl for not having come to take the oath of allegiance, because in the month of June of that year he had been appointed one of the regents of the Kingdom of Scotland on account of the tender years of the prince (King James III.), and therefore was personally resident in Scotland. The bishop also repeats the complaint against John of Ross, Lord of the Isles, and the bands of his Islesmen, Irish, and Scots from the woods, “who came in great multitudes in the month of June, with their ships and fleets in battle array, wasting the lands, plundering the farms, destroying habitations, and putting the inhabitants to the sword, without regard to age or sex.”[113] Tradition still points in several parts of the Islands to “the Lewismen’s graves,” probably those of the invaders who were killed in their plundering expeditions through the Islands.