On this day, 13 July 1249, a rather hurried coronation took place in Scotland. The new king was a seven year old boy, who had been pushed in to the limelight after his father's sudden death on the Isle of Kerrera. Since he was only a child, King Alexander III would face an uphill struggle to gain his throne through his adolesence.

Alexander was born on 4th September 1241 in the castle of Roxburgh, south east of Edinburgh. His mother was Marie de Coucy, the second wife of King Alexander II of Scotland. As he was so young when his father died, a regency would need to be formed. Marie de Coucy recognised the danger this posed to her son, and so arranged the coronation to take place five days after her husband's death.

The situation wasn't too different from what the king of England had gone through. Henry III had been crowned so quickly after the death of his father, King John, that there hadn't even been time to make a new crown (his father's had been lost in the distastrous trek across The Wash), he had been crowned using one of his mother's more simple crowns. But unlike Alexander, Henry had had a more reliable regency in the forms of William Marshal and Ranulf de Blondeville, both of whom were loyal to the crown, regardless of whose head it sat on. Henry's mother Isabella of Angouleme had quickly been marginalised, and soon left England for France, where she remarried.

Marie de Coucy was similiarly pushed to one side. Although she had been the one to organise the coronation, ensuring that power was handed over to her son before an older relative could claim it, she was not allowed to exercise the powers of a regent. Instead she too left her son in favour of her home country, returning to Picardy when Alexander was ten. Like Isabella of Angouleme she took a second husband, but unlike Isabella she had no children with her second husband, sparing Alexander the kind of political envy that Henry's half-siblings caused years later.

Instead Alexander had to deal with a divided regency council, with different sides determined to seize power from their rivals. Sensing a chance to take advantage of Scotland's weakness, Henry III married his daughter Margaret to Alexander, and then demanded that the King of Scotland do homage for his kingdom, which would indicate that he held the throne purely because England agreed to it. Alexander refused, although the King of England would continue to be a problem in the following years. At one point Alexander's new wife Margaret, wrote to her parents complaining that she was being ill-treated. Henry and his wife, Eleanor of Provence, promptly moved north with an army, determined to assist their daughter in any way possible.

Despite the inauspicious start to his reign, Alexander was a successful King. He managed to persuade the Norwegians to cede the Isle of Man and the Outer Hebrides to Scotland, and kept peace with England. Unfortunately he predeceased his children by Margaret, and his second wife Yolande de Dreux had one stillborn child. Alexander's death led to a succession crisis, and pathed the way for Edward I of England to make his move.