William Wallace

by Andrew Fisher

  We do not know whether Wallace was truly an outlaw before the murder of Heselrig. That same younger, landless son who might have become a soldier might, equally, have turned to a life of crime. The two indeed are not exclusive. The military catastrophe of 1296 must have forced many Scots into crime. If Wallace was an outlaw, his deeds may well have been far from heroic. There exists one tantalising piece of evidence from the year 1296. The records of the time tell us that on 8 August: ‘Matthew of York, accused by Cristiana of St John, of robbery, viz on Thursday next before St Botulph’s Day, he came to her house at Perth in company of a thief, one William le Waleys, and there by force took her goods and chattels viz beer, to the value of 3s, replies that he is a clerk and not bound to answer. The jury finds the charge proved, and he is adjudged to penitence.’50 At the time of this entry, Balliol had already been deposed and Scotland was an occupied country. Perhaps the William Wallace who robbed the unfortunate Cristiana in Perth, a favourite stamping-ground of the Guardian, had fought under Balliol and was now living as best he could. He was, at least, clever enough not to be caught, unlike his colleague, Matthew.

  The outlaw depends for his survival not merely upon his wits and his skill but upon the sympathy and protection of those among whom he lives. Such sympathy and the protection it brings have to be earned, and it is common therefore to find the outlaw the friend and defender of the poor. The William Wallace of history has no such pedigree. His cause was a different one. Yet he could not have stayed out of the hands of the English without the goodwill of many. His murder of Heselrig made him an outlaw, whether or not he had been one under the law of Scotland. That murder was accomplished, as we shall see, with a band of followers. Where had he gathered this force? His personal magnetism would no doubt attract men to him, as it did to the end of his life. Deeds of which we are ignorant would add to his admirers. The disaffected, the disenchanted, those already feeling the weight of English oppression, would swell the ranks of those about him.

  There was, however, another source on which Wallace could draw both before and during 1297: the Wallace family itself. The extent of the Wallace holdings before the death of Walter II Stewart has been shown by Barrow.51 These, far from being limited to the west of Scotland, where Richard settled and where Wallace was born, stretched across the centre of the country, into the east and north into Moray.52 They breach the barriers, that is, of region, language and culture. They guaranteed an inheritance of relationships and connections to the descendants of Richard Wallace. When Wallace came to his great endeavour, did he call upon that inheritance? Did he later, hunted by the English and their Scottish collaborators, use that inheritance in another and no less critical situation? Was he hidden from pursuers in the employ of the English king as once, perhaps, he had been helped while an outlaw before the war? It is evident that he could not have survived in the earlier as in the later part of his career had there not been an immense sympathy for him wherever he went. If, after 1297, he benefited from his exploits against the hated English, it is not unreasonable to argue that he could already rely upon the members of his own widely scattered family. His brother John, executed in London, his older brother Malcolm – they alone cannot represent the true contribution of the Wallace family to Wallace’s work.53

  The theory of Wallace the outlaw, however attractive, fails in one significant area to answer our question. It is not the way of the outlaw to fight pitched battles, least of all on the scale of Stirling and Falkirk. The outlaw is adept at the ambush, at the tactic of hit and run. Wallace, like Murray, began in this style and returned to it after Falkirk. By that time he had already demonstrated an ability to organise and use large armies for which the life of an outlaw is neither explanation nor preparation. We know of no one in his company either before or at the time of the murder of Heselrig from whom he could have learned the necessary skills. The Scottish leaders with whom he associated after the murder, even if we put aside their suspicion and distrust of him, had no record of proven success in the field and were, on the contrary, wholly discredited.

  We are thus forced back on the third and most obvious explanation of Wallace’s military genius: that he was born with it. The war with England provided an arena for a man possessed of such enormous talent, and not merely in the profession of arms, as would have guaranteed him success in whatever direction he cared to employ it. If the claim seems extravagant, one need only look at the challenge he faced as Guardian and the manner in which he dealt with it. The soldier became the governor and assumed the latter role with the same exceptional competence as he had the former. But in neither function could he have achieved what he did if he had been the one-dimensional figure with which we are accustomed to deal. If his talent as a soldier was innate, we have, in order to explain what he accomplished, to see him in a new light. In this connection it is instructive to turn to the work of an authority on the subject of war. Clausewitz writes: ‘If we then ask what sort of mind is most likely to display the qualities of military genius, experience and observation will both tell us that it is the inquiring rather than the creative mind, the comprehensive rather than the specialised approach, the calm rather than the excitable head to which in war we would choose to entrust the fate of our brothers and children and the safety and honour of our country’.54 Machiavelli is less ready than Clausewitz to speak of genius. He contents himself with listing general rules of military discipline.55 In them and what follows we find that other characteristic which in Wallace balances the view of Clausewitz. Machiavelli states, firstly, that ‘good commanders never come to an engagement unless they are compelled to by absolute necessity, or occasion calls for it’.56 He then goes on to deal, in closing, with the qualifications which distinguish the general.57 Whatever skill the general has, he will not prosper ‘unless he has abilities to strike out something new of his own occasionally. For no man ever excelled in his profession who could not do that, and if a ready and quick invention is necessary and honourable in any profession, it must certainly be so in the art of war above all others. Thus we see how any invention, new, expedient, trifling though it may be, is celebrated by historians.’

  We cannot be sure that the exploits of Wallace came to the attention of either Clausewitz or Machiavelli. He was perhaps too slight a figure on the scale on which they worked. Yet we cannot ignore the fact that in their writings we read of Wallace if not by name then through the attributes which they seek in the soldier and especially in the commander. Both were protagonists of the professional soldier, and their study of what was for them an art was exhaustive. While we can recognise in Machiavelli’s words that particular feeling for improvisation which was so important in his career, it is in Clausewitz that we come closer to what Wallace was as a soldier. The qualities to which Clausewitz refers are not those with which tradition has endowed Wallace; they are too clinical, too cold even, for that Wallace. We are accustomed to thinking of him as a man of passion, driven forward against the English by his surpassing patriotism, the leader of an undisciplined army swept forward whatever the odds. There is, undeniably, something of that in the Wallace of history. It may have been there at Lanark. If it was, it disappeared in the new and more difficult circumstances in which he found himself. It is then that we see the Wallace who came so near to the ideal of which Clausewitz wrote. We need not dispense with the Wallace of tradition, burning with anger, brutal, unforgiving. He was all of that. But he had, too, a passion for success, for without that his country could not be free. He came to the war with England without the prejudices and preconceptions which his feudal superiors so frequently and wantonly manifested. He had to learn, and to learn he had to enquire. He was not bound by sectional interests, as were those superiors; his was the wider, if simpler, view. He approached battle in a rational, careful way and was not driven to it by the unmanageable bloodlust which had so inflamed Scottish leaders before him that they charged to defeat.

  In William Wallace we are dealing with a man unique in his time and pla
ce. Scotland produced no one comparable in the War of Independence. Those who came before him taught him by default, those after learned from him the vital lessons which won the war. We can only wonder that, without formal training, lacking, as far as we are aware, reputation either inherited or earned, he emerged from obscurity so complete a soldier. It is a chastening thought that without war he would have remained unknown to history. That likelihood disappeared when the death of Alexander III of Scotland set in train the events which brought Wallace so memorably into the consciousness of his countrymen, from which he has never been displaced.

  NOTES

  1. For general reading on the reign of David I, see Ritchie: The Normans in Scotland, 1953; Barrow: The Kingdom of the Scots, 1973; Barrow: The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History, 1980; Barrow: Feudal Britain, the Completion of the Medieval Kingdoms, 1066–1314, 1956; all passim. Dickinson: Scotland from the Earliest Times to 1603, 1962, esp. chaps 9, 11, 13, 15. On particular aspects of the reign, see Burleigh: A Church History of Scotland, 1960: Lawrie (ed.): Early Scottish Charters prior to 1153, 1905; Anderson (coll. & trans.): Early Sources of Scottish History, 500–1286, 1922; Barrow: Scottish Rulers and the religious orders, RHS, 5th series, iii, 1953, 77–100.

  2. Of this period William of Malmesbury wrote: ‘He [David] had rubbed off all tarnish of Scottish barbarity through being polished from his boyhood by intercourse and friendship with us.’ (q. Cowan: ‘Myth and Identity in Early Medieval Scotland’, SHR lxiii, 2, no. 176, October 1984, 131)

  3. Of these he gained through his marriage to Matilda, the daughter and heiress of Waltheof, executed for treason under William I, the earldom of Northampton and the Honour of Huntingdon, which proved fertile recruiting grounds for him.

  4. Barrow: Anglo-Norman Era, and Ritchie: The Normans in Scotland, passim; Brown: ‘The Origin of the House of Stewart’, SHR, xxiv, 1927. J.G. Wilson: ‘Walter Fitzalan, first hereditary high Steward of Scotland’, Scot General., XXIIX, 1982, 84–85.

  5. Barrow: Anglo-Norman Era, 14.

  6. Barrow: Anglo-Norman Era, 13.

  7. Brown: Origin, 265–279; Barrow: Kingdom, chap. 12.

  8. Kightly: Folk Heroes of Britain, 1982, 157; Barrow: Anglo-Norman Era, 66.

  9. Black: The Surnames of Scotland, 1993, 799.

  10. Barrow: Kingdom, 347–49; Duncan: Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom, 1989, 139–40.

  11. Chap. 3 below; Barrow: Robert Bruce, 81–82; Young: Robert the Bruce’s Enemies, 1997, 165–66

  12. Young, ibid., 18.

  13. Ibid., 49, for the inability of the Comyns to ensure Bruce support in their problems with Alan Durward.

  14. i.e., from the Welsh borderlands, and not necessarily of Welsh extraction. See, for views on this subject, Black, 799; Kightly: Folk Heroes of Britain, 1982, 153.

  15. As, for example, in Kightly, 157

  16. The article in DNB gives some idea of the problems posed by Blind Harry in this regard.

  17. McNair Scott: Robert the Bruce King of Scots, 1982, chap. 8; Barrow: Robert Bruce and the Community of the Reader of Scotland, 1976, chaps 9 and 10. An interesting commentary on the view of Wallace found in Barrow can be seen in A.A.M. Duncan’s review of the book in SHR vol. XLV, 2, Oct. 1966, 184–193. In particular Duncan states (193) that Barrow is ‘extraordinary reluctant to see him [Wallace] as a free agent’. See also Barron: The Scottish War of Independence, 1934, chaps 21–24.

  18. Barron: chaps 7 and 8 contains what is perhaps the most famous assessment of that relationship.

  19. See Barron: chaps 7 and 8 for the weighting in favour of Murray. It reflects no doubt the need for a balance to the traditional view of Wallace but errs in the direction of according to Murray a pre-eminence which, in the light of his early death, cannot adequately be tested against events.

  20. The Reginald Crawford who perished was William Wallace’s uncle. See pp. 17–18, above.

  21. See conclusion on Blair and Harry.

  22. I have been fortunate enough here to draw on a paper by Dr Fiona Watson, A Report into the Association of Sir William Wallace with Ayrshire for East Ayrshire Council, 1999, 3–5. I have been equally fortunate in having the advantage of comments in correspondence on the subject from Professor Geoffrey Barrow. Interest in Wallace’s birthplace is not, of course, limited to academics.

  23. Fiona Watson, A Report, 3–5.

  24. Chap. 5.

  25. The document, thought to have been destroyed during the Second World War, survived, and in 1999 was brought on loan from Germany to the Museum of Scotland. See the Herald (Glasgow) article, 26 February 1999.

  26. Morton: William Wallace, Man and Myth, 2001, 32.

  27. Morton is careful to emphasise Wallace’s ‘status as Scotland’s patriot since the fifteenth century’. See Conclusion, below, for a discussion on the ‘modern’ Wallace as opposed to the Wallace of 1305. Blind Harry, of course, dates from the fifteenth century.

  28. For the Ragman Roll, Barrow: Robert Bruce, 76–78; Nicholson: Scotland the Later Middle Ages, 1978, 51–52; Powicke: The Thirteenth Century 1216–1307, 1953, 615–16.

  29. This view does not settle the question of Wallace’s birthplace but places him in an Ayrshire ‘context’.

  30. The Chronicle of Lanercost has Stewart and the bishop of Glasgow, Robert Wishart, causing Wallace to rebel. The argument against such prompting is put below, chap. 4.

  31. By his actions after Irvine. See chap. 4.

  32. If the relationship between the Wallace family and Stewart was not feudal, what influence could Stewart bring to bear on Wallace?

  33. Alan Wallace as a crown tenant owed a duty to John Balliol, but, it would seem, chose to interpret it in a different way from William.

  34. Barrow, Robert Bruce, 77–78.

  35. In 1296.

  36. Bellamy: The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages, 1970, 37–38.

  37. Barrow: Robert Bruce, 280–85.

  38. Below, chap. 7.

  39. Bain: Calendar, vol. II, 443.

  40. See Conclusion, below.

  41. Below, chap. 9; Barrow: Robert Bruce, 127; Reese: Wallace, A Biography, 1996, 98.

  42. Watson: Under the Hammer, Edward I and Scotland, 1286–1307, 1998, 58 n. 27

  43. Barrow: Robert Bruce, 325.

  44. Chronicle of Lanercost, 179–80; McNamee: The Wars of the Bruces, 1997, 38; Barrow: Robert Bruce, 179–80.

  45. On Macdouall’s later career, McDonald: The Kingdom of the Isles, 1997, 197.

  46. Perhaps the consequence of seeing Crawford as Wallace’s grandfather.

  47. Robin Hood has never been constrained by time or space. The Robin Hood of ‘A Little Gest of Robin Hood’ (printed in one form in Barbour: Myths and Legends of the British Isles, 1999, p. 50ff) bears a marked resemblance to the Wallace of popular tradition.

  48. Its appeal continues with Braveheart. The film ensures that it will remain a familiar theme.

  49. A modern writer compares the means whereby Wallace escaped after the murder with those used by Bonnie Prince Charlie: Reese, Wallace, 42.

  50. Bain: Calendar, ii, 191.

  51. Barrow: Kingdom of the Scots, chap. 12.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Dictionary of National Biography, 563.

  54. Clausewitz: On War, ed. Howard & Paret, 1984, 112.

  55. Machiavelli: The Art of War, trans. Farneworth, 1965, 202–04.

  56. Ibid., 203–04.

  57. Ibid., 205–06.

  2

  The Time of Defeat, 1296–1297

  ‘Alas for tomorrow, a day of calamity and misery!’

  The medieval mind was much obsessed by the concept of the Day of Judgement. All were agreed that there would come a time when an accounting would be called for; none would escape the consequences of their actions or even of their words for, as St Matthew put it, ‘every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof’. Not surprisingly, prophecies abounded in such an atmosphere. One came from Thomas of Ercildoune
or Earlston, Thomas the Rhymer, a semi-legendary Lowlands laird. In the presence of Patrick, earl of March, Thomas uttered these chilling words:

  alas for tomorrow, a day of calamity and misery! because before the stroke of twelve a strong wind will be heard in Scotland, the like of which has not been known since times long ago. Indeed its blast will dumbfound the nations and render somewhat those who hear it; it will humble what is lofty and raze what is unbounding to the ground.

  Thomas was speaking on the eve of one day set aside in Scotland for what, according to the lives they had led on earth, some feared and others welcomed, 18 March 1286, in the thirty-sixth year of the reign of Alexander III, descendant of David I.1 The earl, apprehensive on hearing Thomas’s prophecy, relaxed somewhat as the hours passed without incident. Thomas, it was felt at the earl’s castle of Dunbar, was a fool. Earl Patrick’s peace of mind was, however, to be shattered, as he sat down to eat a little before noon. News reached him from a stranger, news which, we are told, would ‘reduce the whole realm of Scotland to tears’.

  From the beginning of this remarkable year, the weather, violent in the extreme, had removed any lingering doubt that the people of Alexander’s kingdom were right to anticipate some dread event. Only a foolish or brave man would choose to disregard the omens. Such a man, as would become tragically clear, was Alexander. On the day in question he met with his council in Edinburgh Castle. Among the items which occupied the king and his council was one relating to John Balliol, lord of Galloway, himself to play an important part in the events which followed upon the aftermath of the meeting.2