by Jack Whyte
The Forest Laird
Also by Jack Whyte
A DREAM OF EAGLES
The Skystone
The Singing Sword
The Eagles’ Brood
The Saxon Shore
The Sorcerer, Volume I: The Fort at River’s Bend
The Sorcerer, Volume II: Metamorphosis
Uther
THE GOLDEN EAGLE
Clothar the Frank
The Eagle
THE TEMPLAR TRILOGY
Knights of the Black and White
Standard of Honor
Order in Chaos
JACK WHYTE
The Forest Laird
A TALE OF WILLIAM WALLACE
VIKING CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2010
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)
Copyright © Jack Whyte, 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Whyte, Jack, 1940–
The forest laird : a tale of William Wallace / Jack Whyte.
(The guardians trilogy ; bk. 1)
ISBN 978-0-670-06846-3
I. Title. II. Series: Whyte, Jack, 1940- . Guardians
trilogy ; bk. 1.
PS8595.H947F56 2010 C813’.54 C2010-903458-9
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This book is dedicated, like all the others, to my wife,
Beverley, because I couldn’t have found a better or more
suitable companion on this journey…
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The prospect of writing about Sir William Wallace, post-Braveheart, was a disconcerting one from the outset because the screenplay reflected, to a very solid extent, what I had been taught about the great man during my childhood and school days. Arguably, there were inaccuracies and omissions in screenwriter Randall Wallace’s treatment of his subject, but by and large it was remarkably faithful to the essence of its source, which was the epic poem “The Wallace,” written by Blind Hary more than a hundred years after the events with which it dealt. That hundred-odd years’ gap poses serious problems for anyone looking to make, let alone prove, assertions about the hero’s life. Add to that the fact that we can’t even be sure if the poet was blind or if his name really was Hary, and the “iffiness” of making any authoritative declaration about Wallace becomes even more pronounced. All we can say with certainty today is that Sir William Wallace definitely lived, he was one of the most important and influential men of his time, and that his influence is still a potent force in Scotland.
I was born in a town called Johnstone, in Renfrewshire, near the city of Paisley and a few minutes’ walk from the Wallace Monument in the neighbouring village of Elderslie—the communities were separated by an imaginary line across the main street. The monument was a common but significant presence in my boyhood, as was an awareness of Wallace himself. Now, after more than four decades living in North America, with everything from historical perspectives to social realities changing radically and rapidly in form and texture from month to month, it seems strange to look back and remember how genuinely and ungrudgingly we revered him as boys. In a time when our fathers and uncles were still returning home from World War II and when the only electronic medium in general use was the vacuum-tube radio, Wallace was a real and almost living presence in our lives.
Embarking on the task of writing a novel about William Wallace, then, especially after Braveheart, was a daunting prospect, if for no other reason than running the risk of being accused of cribbing from the movie. In approaching this book and considering what I would need and how I might go about acquiring it, I was forced to accept, very reluctantly, that after forty-odd years of living in Canada, I had forgotten (or at least had difficulty remembering) much of the authenticity of the land in which I had grown up. Once I acknowledged that, however, I had no difficulty at all in accepting the inevitable corollary, which was that I was long overdue for a factfinding mission to Wallace’s Scotland. The question I then had to answer was Where is Wallace’s Scotland, and how does one find it? I didn’t know the answer at the time, but I thought I knew, so I planned my itinerary carefully, estimating that I would need five weeks to do everything and see all the places I wanted to see. And that last consideration is where the entire structure of my plan began to fall apart.
The plain truth is that the Scotland Wallace knew no longer exists, except in the loneliest, most inaccessible spots, places where the Guardian himself seldom ventured. Seven hundred years of increasing population, with spreading settlement and agriculture, deforestation, road building, and democratic civilization have transformed the country beyond recognition. There are towns, cities, villages, and hamlets everywhere, all linked by a sophisticated, intricate network of roads. Where there is any semblance of open country remaining, it is dotted with farms and cottages and divided by stone walls and fences. And there is no such thing as silence. No matter where you go in Scotland today, even in the most remote spots such as Glencoe or the Moor of Rannoch, you will hear human presence in the roar of a jet overhead, the whistle of a distant train, or the in the sound of traffic on a nearby road.
Wallace would not recognize his own country. No trace at all remains of the original wooden bridge at Stirling, the site of his major victory over the English. The area known as the Carse of Stirling, along with the treacherous bogs that lined it on both sides and made crossing the River Forth so hazardous for invading armies throughout Scotland’s history, has been tamed for hundreds of years, broken to the plough and cultivated into rich farmland, criss-crossed with good roads and sturdy bridges. The enormous forest that once covered almost the entire southeastern and southern quadrants of Scotland, known variously as Ettrick Forest and Selkirk Forest, has vanished almost completely, with only tiny r
emnants remaining, carefully planted and ordered, nurtured, and meticulously tended under the auspices of the Scottish Forestry Department. Even the few major historic buildings that Wallace would have known are skeletal today—St. Andrews Cathedral and Sweetheart Abbey are beautiful and imposing, often breathtaking in certain light and circumstances, but they are ancient ruins with no vitality, and it is almost impossible for modern people to imagine them full of bustling life.
Places such as Stirling Castle and Edinburgh Castle appear to us to be timeless and unchanging, but the truth is that the fortified and wooden palisaded “castles” shown in Braveheart give a far more accurate idea of what they would have been like seven centuries ago because the great, imposing stone edifices we see today had not yet been built when Wallace was alive. Paisley Abbey was there in the early fourteenth century, but even it has changed beyond recognition. Edward of England burned it down in 1306–7, two years after Wallace’s death, and left only two arches standing, and when the abbey was rebuilt, those arches were incorporated into a new, very different building. They are still easily visible today, if you know where to look, but the building itself is a relatively modern edifice.
This book, then, is my attempt to accommodate and interpret some of the new ideas that have recently emerged regarding William Wallace, and it incorporates several intriguing ideas and suggestions proposed by people far more qualified to judge them than I am. In one very narrow and particular respect, and with no disrespect in mind, his life can be compared to that of Jesus, in that both emerged from obscurity at a late age—between twenty-seven and thirty—and each had a short, brilliant, meteoric public career that ended in execution. No one really knows what either man did in the years before he stepped into public scrutiny, and this tale speculates what might have been in the case of Scotland’s greatest Guardian.
Jack Whyte
Kelowna, British Columbia
July 2010
PROLOGUE
It pains me to hear people say nowadays that William Wallace died defiant, a heroic patriot, with a shout of “Freedom!” on his lips, because it is a lie. William Wallace died slowly and brutally in silence, to my sure knowledge, for I was there in London’s Smithfield Square that morning of August 24th in 1305, and all I heard of defiance was the final, demented scream of a broken, tortured man driven beyond endurance long before he died.
I was the last of our race to see him alive and to speak with him, the sole Scot among the crowd that watched his end and the only one there to mark and mourn his passing. I did not really see him die, though, because my eyes were screwed shut against the tears that blinded me. When I was able to breathe again and wiped my eyes to look, they were already quartering his corpse, the chief executioner proclaiming his death and holding aloft the severed head of the Scotch Ogre who had terrified all England.
Sir William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland, my friend, my blood cousin, and my lifelong nemesis, would never terrify another soul.
But, by the living God, he had terrified enough within his lifetime for his name to live on, in Scotland at least, long after his death, a grim reminder of the punishment for disloyalty, treachery, and disobedience.
As I watched the executioners dismember his remains, I accepted the reality of his death as I had accepted its inevitability two weeks earlier, when word reached me that he had been taken by Sir John Menteith and handed over to the justice of the English King. I had known that was coming—not that Menteith would arrest him, but that someone would, and soon, for William Wallace’s time had passed and he had fallen from grace in the eyes of the people he had led and inspired just a few years earlier. He had become an embarrassment; a source of discomfort to all of them; a thorny, disapproving, uncompromising reminder of all that they had fought for and then abandoned. For they had come to terms, nobles, clerics, and commoners, with England’s Edward Plantagenet, and the English King was being regally lenient, exercising forbearance towards all Scots rebels who would join his Peace, save only the outlawed traitor, Wallace. The price of that forbearance was the surrender of the brigand Wallace to Edward’s justice. Every noble, sheriff, and justiciar in the realm of Scotland was charged with the duty of apprehending the former Guardian on sight and dispatching him to London as a common criminal.
I was in England when I heard the news, bearing documents from my superior, Walter the Abbot of Paisley, to the Bishop of York and the Bishop of London. I had stopped to rest at the Priory of Reading, and there found the sole topic of conversation among the brethren to be the recent capture of Wallace. Everyone knew he would be tried summarily and executed out of hand, but the manner of his death was a matter for debate and conjecture among the jaded monks, who seldom had open cause to speculate upon such worldly things. I listened to their prattling, and thought about how different was the man I knew from the monster they were all decrying.
I resolved then and there to see him, somehow, while I was in London. I had powerful friends there among the clergy, and I promised myself that I would use them to find him wherever he was being held and, if it were possible, to visit him and offer whatever small comfort I could in his final, friendless hours among an alien people who loathed and feared him.
In the event, I had no trouble finding where he was imprisoned, for the whole city of London was agog with the news, and with the help of a trusted friend, Father Antony Latreque, Sub-abbot of Westminster, I was admitted to the prisoner’s cell on his last night, to hear his last confession.
The tears I would later shed in Smithfield Square, blinding me to his final moments, would have nothing to do with the barbarity that I was witnessing that bright, late-August morning. They would surge instead from a sudden memory of Wallace’s own tears earlier, long before dawn and before they came to lead him out to death. The sight of those tears had shaken me, for I had never seen Will Wallace weep since the day our childhood ended, and the anguish in his eyes there in his darkened cell had been as keen and unbearable as the pain he and I had endured together on that long-ago, far-off day.
He did not recognize me when I entered, for it had been four full years since he and I had last seen each other. He saw only a cowled priest accompanying a portly, mitred Abbot. The jailer had seen the same thing, ignoring the priest while he whined to the Abbot about his orders to permit the prisoner no visitors.
“We are not visitors,” Abbot Antony replied disdainfully. “We are of Holy Mother Church and our presence marks a last attempt to make this felon repent the error of his ways and confess himself before God. Now provide us with some light and open up this door.”
The fellow slouched away to bring each of us a freshly lit torch, then unlocked the heavy door, set his shoulder to it, and pushed it open. My first glance showed me a broad, flagstoned floor, dimly lit by one flickering flambeau in an iron sconce on the left wall. I saw no sign of the prisoner, but he spoke before we had crossed the threshold, his words accompanied by a single brief clash of chains.
“I need none of your English mouthings, Priest, so get you gone and take your acolyte with you.” He spoke in Latin, and the Abbot turned to me, brows raised in surprise. I merely gestured with a cupped hand, bidding him continue as we had rehearsed. The Latin was no surprise to me, although I had not thought to speak of it to my companion earlier. Wallace and I had learned the tongue together as students at the same Paisley Abbey that was now my home.
Abbot Antony spoke to the prisoner as we had agreed, but now in Latin.
“I have heard of your hatred for all things English, William Wallace, but although I deplore both that and your wilful intransigence, I find myself constrained, through simple Christian charity, to offer you the benefit of God’s sacraments in the hope that, in the end, His clemency will absolve you of your many sins.”
“Seek your own people, then, Priest, beginning with your King, and absolve them, for their sins are greater than mine have ever been.” The voice was flinty with scorn. “Shrive you the slaughterers who slew my family and f
riends. Pray with the drunken animals who raped me and savaged my people. Mumble a Mass with your grasping earls and barons, who despoiled my home and sought to rip it asunder to sate their own lusts for land and power. But leave me to my God. He knows my sins and what drove me to commit them. I need no English translator to poison my words before they reach God’s ears.”
They were not the exact words I had expected, but I had estimated precisely the tone and content. Abbot Antony was mortified, and it showed clearly on his face. To hear such venom in a single voice, directed not merely at him but at his entire Church and his people, left the poor man speechless, but not addled. I had warned him that he might hear appalling things when he confronted this prisoner, and so he pulled himself together quickly and returned to the script we had prepared against the risk that others might hear us.
“I had heard,” Antony said, “that you were obdurate in your hatred of my kind, but it is my Christian obligation as a man of God to do all in my power to help you towards salvation. And so …” He hesitated. “And so I have taken pains to bring you an intermediary, twixt you and God, to whom you may speak in your own tongue. Father James is of your folk. I will leave him to commune with you and hear your confession.”
Now the prisoner turned his eyes towards me for the first time, and though he was merely a shape stirring among blackness, I could tell that he was squinting to see me better.
“What is a Scots priest doing here?”
“His duty,” Antony answered, “comforting the afflicted. Will you speak with him? If so, I will leave the two of you alone.”
Wallace shrugged, the movement easily visible now that my eyes were adjusting to the darkness. “I’ll talk with him, if only to hear my own tongue. Who are you, Priest? Where are you from?”
“Thank you, Father Abbott,” I said quietly, and Antony turned away towards the still-open door. I heard him speak to the jailer outside, and then the man hauled at the massive door until it scraped shut, leaving me alone with the prisoner. “Where am I from? I am from Paisley, from the Abbey. Do you not know me, Will?”