The Forest Laird: A Tale of William Wallace

by Jack Whyte

  I seldom saw my cousin smile in the days that followed, and then it was solely for Mirren or little William. Like the rest of us in Scotland at that time, he saw little in the land to smile about. I knew he was chafing at the restraints he had imposed upon himself, but he also knew there was nothing he could have done to influence what was going on beyond the forest. He had sworn publicly that for as long as the English left him alone, he would leave them alone, and during that spring and early summer, no one came to disturb his tranquility. The English had far more important matters to attend to elsewhere in Scotland.

  Three weeks after that talk of ours, on April 27th, Edward’s army, commanded in the King’s name by John de Warenne, the second Earl of Surrey, met and smashed the army of the Scots magnates at Dunbar. John Comyn the Constable was captured and sent to England to be imprisoned there, along with the Earls of Atholl, Menteith, and Ross and, much to the chagrin of Will and me when we heard of it, Sir Andrew Murray of Petty and his son, Andrew Murray the Younger, our greatly admired friend. The day after the battle, Edward himself arrived at the head of his army to demand the surrender of Dunbar Castle, which capitulated without a blow being struck. Three weeks later, Edward arrived in the burgh of Perth, having bypassed Stirling on the landward side on his way north, and while he was there, King John Balliol wrote to him in person, suing for peace.

  Ten days later, in his own royal castle of Kincardine, John Balliol, the King of Scotland, bent the knee to Edward Plantagenet and begged his English cousin’s royal pardon for rebelling against him. Five days after that, at Stracathro in Angus, where he had been taken as a prisoner under escort, John Balliol, a broken man by then, formally and publicly renounced his alliance with King Philip IV of France. The next day, July 8th, 1296, under the merciless eyes of his royal tormentor, he was formally deposed as King, the royal insignia torn from his gold-encrusted tabard by no less a person than Antony Bek, Prince Bishop of Durham.

  Scotland was without a king again; the throne lay vacant and the entire country waited to see who would be first to claim it. In that year of 1296, however, no one did, and the weather grew colder as the months lurched towards winter. To be sure, Edward of England called himself nothing more than the feudal overlord of Scotland, and he made no slightest mention of any claim to the kingship, but in truth he behaved like a despotic monarch, and his behaviour left no one in Scotland in any doubt of how he saw himself. He went to great lengths to subjugate the kingdom and humiliate and stifle its contentious leaders, and in his determination to achieve that he confiscated the Stone of Destiny, upon which every legitimate King of Scots, including King John himself, had been crowned since time immemorial, and shipped it back to England, to his palace in Westminster.

  Edward also summoned a parliament at Berwick, where he demanded, and received, a written oath of allegiance from more than two thousand Scots freeholders: knights, lairds, earls, barons, lords, chieftains, and burgesses. The resulting document, in the form of four huge parchment rolls comprising thirty-five pieces, each of those a list signed and sealed under duress, was known as the Ragman’s Roll, meaning, according to whom you ask, the Witnesses’ Roll, or more popularly, the Devil’s Roll. No matter which it meant, though, no one who signed the roll was glad to have done so. More significantly, few who had signed it felt constrained by having done so, and Edward bought himself no loyalty or wellwishers by forcing the Scots freemen to comply with his arbitrary wishes.

  Will himself put it best of all, I believe, when he said to me later, mere weeks before he flung down the gauntlet in cold fury and set out to destroy England’s presence in our land, “Edward Plantagenet. Can you believe the folly and the hubris of the man? He surpassed the boast of Julius Caesar, for he came, he saw, he conquered, and then he went home again without making sure he had won. He should have stayed here and ground the spurs on his boot heels into our throats when he had us down. He should have crushed us, killed us all then and there, while he yet could. But he went home instead, and left us to recover, and now he’ll rue it.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1

  Edward Plantagenet carried his war into Scotland from the border town of Berwick, which he had ordained should be rebuilt as the administrative centre for his overlordship of Scotland. He populated the town with English burgesses, having created sufficient room for them through the slaughter of fifteen thousand former residents, and brought in English engineers and architects to redesign its defences as he garrisoned the newly fortified burgh with English troops. He then established a special branch of the royal exchequer in the town and appointed a man called Hugh Cressingham to administer it as treasurer of Scotland. Cressingham, a senior royal clerk who had been, before that, an itinerant justice in the northern counties of England, threw himself into his new post with a voracious eagerness that within two years earned him the reputation of being the most hated man in Scotland.

  Edward also used the months following the battle at Dunbar to seed the entire realm of Scotland with his own personnel, placing trusted functionaries of his own to fill positions left vacant by those imprisoned rebels—Edward’s own word—who had dared to oppose his invasion of their land. Then, for the last five months of that year, he and his armies trampled Scotland under their heavily mailed feet. They confiscated the realm’s crown jewels and insignia and they despoiled the countryside and its populace everywhere they went. Few could withstand them. Among those few, however, William Wallace, and the outlaws of Selkirk Forest whom he led, ranked first and foremost.

  Every army lives at the mercy of its lines of supply, and Edward, as aware of that as any good general must be, had taken steps to ship supplies into northern Scotland by sea, using the port of Leith on the Firth of Forth. However, most of the supplies that fed and sustained the garrisons of western and central Scotland were channelled directly through the new administrative centre of Berwick on the east coast, because the northern route from there into Scotland was the only viable route for large numbers of personnel and heavy trains of wagons entering from England. The sole western route, north from Carlisle across the sea sands of the Solway Firth into Galloway and Annandale, was little better than a track, ill maintained at the best of times, dependent upon tides and weather, and vulnerable to attack all the way north from Carlisle. For that reason, every supply train, every reinforcing troop body, every important communication that came north from England by way of Berwick passed through Selkirk Forest, either on the high road itself or through the greenwood byways, and for the last half of 1296 and the first half of the year that followed, all of them were at hazard from the threat of attack and plunder by the Selkirk outlaws.

  Cressingham, whose jurisdiction covered all things fiscal in Scotland, felt himself constantly under attack, and he took every threat of interference as a personal insult. He resorted to reprisals soon after his appointment as treasurer, taking hostages from among the populace and hanging scores of them out of hand as punishment for attacks against the King’s property and personnel. Others he executed by public beheading, irrespective of age or sex. The more people he killed, though, the greater the resistance and aggression he provoked, and by the end of the year, less than three months after his appointment, he was offering a reward to anyone who would bring him the head of any forest outlaw, and a premium in gold to any who would bring him the killer, William Wallace.

  A chant of “William Wallace, Laird o’ the Forest” was popular that autumn, when some wag suggested that as de facto lord of his own woodland domain, Wallace demanded a toll of everyone who set foot upon his property. The toll for a Scot was a pledge of loyalty and silence; for an Englishman, it was forfeiture of everything he possessed; for English clergymen, it was forfeiture of everything they professed not to have at all; and for Hugh Cressingham, it was everything that bore the stink of his presence. And as the faceless forest bandit became the Forest Laird, and the fame of William Wallace spread, yet still he maintained the role of planner and supervisor and,
true to his promise, did not fight in person.

  I stayed in the forest with him and Mirren throughout that time, until September, when a messenger arrived to summon me back to Glasgow, where Bishop Wishart apparently had need of me, and during that time we often spoke of the imprisoned Scots leaders from Dunbar, and in particular about the calamitous effect Andrew Murray’s imprisonment in England would have on his northern people. The magnates had proved themselves to be as overconfident and ineffectual as Will had feared they might be, and he wasted no time mourning their absence now. Andrew Murray’s removal, though, was another matter altogether, for Murray was one of the few competent military leaders in all of Scotland. Edward Plantagenet was known to be whimsical when it came to forgiving rebellion and disobedience among his people, and it was generally conceded by those who knew him that he was not normally vindictive towards his own nobles. In this instance of the Scottish Rebellion, though, he was being obdurate, and when he refused his royal pardon to Sir Andrew Murray of Petty, one of the richest and most influential lords of Scotland, it boded ill for the probability of any leniency being offered to his rebellious and high-minded son. We regretted the loss of Murray, as we knew Bishop Wishart must be regretting it, but there was nothing we could do to change things.

  The courier who came to fetch me also brought instructions that before I left I should divide my duties equally between my two subordinate priests, Fathers Declan and Jacobus, both of whom had flourished and matured wonderfully since moving out of the cloisters and into the world of ordinary men and women. They were both flattered to be thought worthy of increased responsibility, and I, in turn, felt confident in leaving them to tend to my erstwhile flock, and glad at the same time to be returning to my duties in the cathedral, though I knew I would miss my forest-dwelling kin greatly—most particularly my sturdy, stalwart, year-old godson—in the months ahead.

  I met Cressingham, not at all coincidentally, soon after my return to Glasgow, when he presented himself at the cathedral to announce formally, for the benefit of Scotland’s clergy, his appointment to the post of King Edward’s treasurer for Scotland, and I immediately discovered that the name of Wallace was already anathema, not only to him but to all the Englishmen who accompanied him on that occasion. As senior bishop of the realm at the time, since Fraser of St. Andrews had been in France at King Philip’s court for more than a year by then, Bishop Wishart hosted the gathering at his episcopal seat in Glasgow. The Bishops of Dunkeld, Aberdeen, Moray, and Argyll all attended, hastily summoned, along with half a dozen of the country’s most distinguished abbots upon notice that the King’s party sought audience with Scotland’s senior prelates. The English contingent included several bishops and abbots, too, the most senior among them being Antony Bek, still King Edward’s deputy in Scotland. Besides the new treasurer himself and a few of his senior functionaries, a number of intermediately ranked nobles made up the English lay presence, led by one Robert Fitz Hugh, a baron from the region south of Newcastle. There were also two representatives of the Order of the Temple among the group, and I found that mildly surprising, since I had always believed—albeit without specific reason for so doing—that the Templars owed their allegiance solely to the Pope.

  Hugh Cressingham, the centre of all the activity on that occasion, was a big man—not merely large or stout, but gross in his bigness, corpulent to the point of being grotesque, and crass in the hectoring loudness of his grating voice. He was tall, too, several inches over six feet in height, and the first thought that entered my mind on meeting him was that he dressed voluminously. His clothing was rich, and richly tailored, but it all seemed too much, as though it had been shaped and fashioned to make its wearer look even bigger and more important than he actually was. His face, swarthy and coarse skinned, was framed by lank, blond hair, greasy and lustreless. He barely took the time to acknowledge me when Canon Lamberton made me known to him, for he was far more concerned with speaking to another member of the visiting group, the Templar called Brian le Jay, and so he ignored me beyond a dismissive nod when I was presented to him as Bishop Wishart’s amanuensis.

  All in all, Scotland’s new treasurer was an unprepossessing man, with a personality and a disposition to match, and although it may have been unsacerdotal and uncharitable of me to think so, as a purported man of God, I was never surprised afterwards to hear him widely condemned as the most hated man in Scotland, because it struck me at that first encounter that he possessed an innate gift for alienating everyone around him—including, I noted, the very men who had been dispatched to escort and introduce him.

  Sir Brian le Jay, on the other hand, looked precisely like what he was, a senior commander of the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. Sumptuously dressed and equipped, he exuded confidence, arrogance, and wealth with a complete disregard for any possible restriction caused by his vow of poverty. He had a haughty tilt to his head that spoke of intolerance and little patience, and the hectic colour of his cheeks suggested a fondness for good red wine. I had met him once before, five or six years earlier at Paisley Abbey, during his term as preceptor of the Temple in Scotland, but since then he had been reassigned by his superiors to England as preceptor there, and the Templars’ overall role in Scotland had been downgraded to a mere military presence, commanded by the other Templar in the gathering that night, Sir John de Sautre, Master of Cavalry. Watching le Jay then as he listened, frowning, to something Cressingham was saying to him, it came to me that I would have a hard time, had anyone asked me, deciding which of the two of them I disliked less than the other.

  Among the dozen or so in the English party, though, I did find one man I liked, and I liked him immediately and wholeheartedly. His name was William Hazelrig, and he was another of Edward’s new political appointees, having been named only recently as sheriff of Lanark, with full control of the English garrison there and a mandate to keep the King’s Peace in that jurisdiction. I heard him laughing at some sally made by one of the company, and the warmth and spontaneity of the sound attracted me to the man immediately. He saw me looking, and when our eyes met he winked at me. I nodded and smiled back at him, wondering what he found to laugh about so easily in conversation with the Bishop of Moray, whom I had judged to be a humourless pedant with the conversational skills of a tree trunk.

  It was during dinner, as usual, that I discovered more about, and developed a greater appreciation of, the discussions and the delicate manoeuvring that would continue over the ensuing few days. Nothing had yet been decided upon at that stage, and therefore no one yet felt constrained to speak or behave in any particular way; people were getting to know one another, and at the dinner table, where the wine flowed freely, the atmosphere grew increasingly informal as the evening progressed, and I listened carefully to everything I could overhear. Bishop Wishart had invited me to be there with that in mind, and it was no accident that his finest wines were being served.

  Mathew de Crambeth, the mercurial and outspoken Bishop of Dunkeld, asked the question that set the mood of the gathering for the remainder of that night. Master Crambeth had returned mere days earlier from France, where he had been among the party sent almost two years earlier by King John to negotiate the alliance treaty. On his return, he had received a peremptory summons to present himself before King Edward and explain his atrocious conduct in daring to make alliance with the King of France. Crambeth had mentioned this to Wishart that very afternoon in my hearing and said that he would go and eat his humble pie when he got around to it, but not before he had set his own affairs in Dunkeld in order after his sixteen-month absence. Now, at dinner, he was seated across the table from me, next to the young English sheriff, William Hazelrig, with whom I had seen him talking on their way into the dining hall.

  The seating at Bishop Wishart’s “intimate” table for gatherings such as these was notoriously and deliberately informal, the Bishop believing that people in small gatherings would interact more easily and honestly if they were able to seat themselv
es where they wished. Protocol and formality were therefore ignored more often than not, and although I saw a few raised eyebrows at first among the English guests, the word was quickly passed among them that this informality was one of their host’s episcopal idiosyncrasies, and they accepted the convention without demur.

  During a brief lull in the general conversation, one of those odd moments when everyone falls silent at the same time as though at some unseen signal, Bishop Crambeth leaned forward and spoke across the table to the Templar le Jay, who was sitting a few places to my left.

  “Sir Brian, Brother Brian, how are you finding life in England nowadays, as opposed to Scotland, I mean, seeing that you are, in fact, Scots born? I have not seen you since you were transferred south, what was it, five years ago? And therefore I admit, frankly, to being curious. Is the air more beneficial down there for a man such as yourself?”

  All eyes turned to the dark-faced Templar, who found the grace to smile. “I find it pleasant there, my lord Bishop, and very little different from my former posting here, since the preceptor’s duties remain the same irrespective of where they apply. To those of us in holy orders, as you know yourself, it matters less where we live than how we live.”

  “Well said,” Crambeth replied mildly. “Well said. But on that very topic, I have a question for you, if you would not consider me impertinent to ask it.”

  “Ask away, my lord.”

  “It concerns your support of King Edward … your support, and that of your order, of course. You yourself swore allegiance openly to Edward when you moved south five years ago, did you not?” He waited for le Jay’s nod. “Would you explain to me, then, how that could be so? You are a Temple Knight, and it has always been my understanding that the Knights of the Temple were forbidden to swear fealty to any temporal monarch. They owe their allegiance directly to the Pope alone. Has that changed, then?”