Question: Who prepared for an invasion by a king who had Earl Skule Bårdsson as a rival?

Findlater Castle is the old seat of the Earls of Findlater and Seafield, sitting on a 50 ft -high cliff overlooking the Moray Firth on the coast of Banff and Buchan, Aberdeenshire, Scotland.  It lies about 15 km west of Banff, near the village of Sandend, between Cullen and Portsoy.  King Alexander III of Scotland repaired this castle in the 1260s in preparation for an invasion by King Haakon IV of Norway.  The cliffs here contain quartz; the name "Findlater" is derived not from Norse as earlier stated here, but from the Scots Gaelic words "fionn" ("white") and "leitir" ("cliff or steep slope").  The first historical reference to the castle is from 1246.  The Vikings took and held the castle for some time.  The castle remains that are still there are from the 14th-century rebuilding, when the castle was redesigned based on the Roslyn Castle model. <SEP> The civil war era in Norway (Norwegian: "borgerkrigstiden") is the history of Norway between 1130 and 1240.  During this time a series of civil wars were fought between rival kings and pretenders to the throne.  The reasons for the war was the weak succession of King Sigurd the Crusader, leaving the country between his bastard son Magnus and his alleged (but uncertain) brother, Harald Gillekrist, who were on bad terms long before King Sigurd died.  The goal of the warring parties was always to put their man on the throne, starting with the death of King Sigurd the Crusader in 1130, a supposedly adored monarch.  In the first decades of the civil wars, alliances shifted and centered on the person of a king or pretender, but eventually, towards the end of the 12th century, two rival parties emerged, known as the Birkebeiner and the Bagler.  After these two parties were reconciled in 1217, a more ordered system of government centered on the king was gradually able to bring an end to the frequent risings.  The failed rising of duke Skule Bårdsson in 1240 was the final event of the civil war era. <SEP>  His reign lasted for 46 years, longer than any Norwegian king since Harald I.  Haakon was born into the troubled civil war era in Norway, but his reign eventually managed to put an end to the internal conflicts.  At the start of his reign, during his minority, his later rival Earl Skule Bårdsson served as regent. Haakon Haakonsson (c. March/April 1204 – 16 December 1263) (Old Norse: "Hákon Hákonarson"; Norwegian: "Håkon Håkonsson"), sometimes called Haakon the Old in contrast to his son with the same name, and known in modern regnal lists as Haakon IV, was the King of Norway from 1217 to 1263.  As a king of the birkebeiner faction, Haakon defeated the uprising of the final bagler royal pretender, Sigurd Ribbung, in 1227.  He put a definitive end to the civil war era when he had Skule Bårdsson killed in 1240, a year after he had himself proclaimed king in opposition to Haakon.  Haakon thereafter formally appointed his own son as his co-regent. <SEP> A planned invasion of Great Britain was to be undertaken by France in 1744 shortly after the declaration of war between them as part of the War of the Austrian Succession.  A large invasion force was prepared and put to sea from Dunkirk in February 1744, only to be partly wrecked and driven back into harbour by violent storms.  Deciding that circumstances were not favourable to an invasion, the French government suspended the attempt, and deployed their forces elsewhere.