Wallace stayed ahead of pursuit but with increasing difficulty. If we lack detail, it is obvious nonetheless that the pressure on him was intense. Edward’s servants in 1303 had been futile or, more probably, frustrated by Wallace’s knowledge of the terrain and the network of relatives and sympathisers on whom he could rely. His own experience of the raid and the ambush were to his advantage when they were employed against him. On 15 March 1303, for example, Edward had rewarded with money certain Scots who had been involved in an attempt to ambush him and Fraser.18 In the autumn of that year, another equally unsuccessful attempt was made on the two. Reimbursement was made by Edward on 10 September to the pursuers for two horses killed in the skirmish from which Wallace and Fraser escaped.19 Wallace and Fraser were too wily to be taken easily. But it is evident that they cannot have survived without the help of many unnamed Scots; the temptation to surrender the two outlaws must have been great, but continued to be resisted by the majority.
Edward, with Wallace so elusive, had recourse in 1304 to what has been described as the ‘unattractive notion, of forcing former friends and associates to take part in the search for Wallace.20 If unattractive, it was, for Edward, logical. He believed that he knew the Scots. Indeed he did but, for whatever reason, his blackmail, for such it was, did not result in the capture of Wallace. That at least is to the credit of the Scots; it may be impossible to clear them of accepting Wallace’s death, but at least those on whom Edward tried his blackmail are not proven to have succumbed to it. We have the names of those whom Edward sought to coerce into the betrayal of Wallace. The return of James the Stewart, Sir Ingram de Umfraville, and Sir John Soules to the court and the favour of the king were not to be granted with letters of safe conduct until Wallace was taken.21 Of the three Guardians, Soules never came back to Scotland from France, while the others, each with his own code, do not stand accused of action against Wallace to secure the safe conducts. The lengths to which Edward would go can be more readily seen in another document.22 In this he is more specific in the pressure he brings to bear: ‘Sir Simon Fraser, Sir John Comyn, Sir Alexander Lindsay,23 and Sir David Graham24 are to exert themselves until twenty days after Christmas to capture William Wallace and hand him over to the king. And the king will take careful not of how each conducts himself, so that he may show most favour to the one who takes him with regard to mitigation of his sentence of exile or fine.’25 Not content to exert pressure on the four, Edward was setting one against the other with the promise of a reward in the form of an easement of the penalties under which they had already laboured.
Wallace himself, if on the run, was not entirely on the defensive. He was carrying on the war as best he could. We have seen evidence of his escapes from ambush. A much larger force threatened him in September 1304. This was led by Edward’s trusted and able soldier, Aymer de Valence. In the company of some three hundred archers and with the banner of St George to protect him, Valence met up with Wallace ‘… under Earnside’.26 Wallace had not lost his skill. Although his own force could not equal that of Valence, he inflicted casualties on the mixed Anglo-Scottish troops and their horses and got away.27 The English claimed that he had been put to flight, but that would count for little with the increasingly irate and demanding Edward. Such an encounter as this with Valence tested Wallace, and we have no way of knowing how close on this and other occasions he came to capture. But he was too astute not to leave himself a means of escape, the more so in the face of a large rather than a smaller force. In the circumstances, victory for Wallace was escape. That is not to say that he was inevitably successful in this last year of his life. We do not know. He had been resoundingly defeated on at least one occasion in 1304, at the time of the negotiations for submission to Edward. From his winter quarters at Dunfermline Edward ordered a raid into the forest of Selkirk and areas of Lothian. It was a powerful force which he dispatched under the command of the experienced soldiers, Segrave, Clifford, and Sir William Latimer. With them was Bruce. The intention was to lay hands on the Scottish leaders. In this it was unsuccessful, but there is no question that at Happrew, west of Peebles, on Fraser’s own territory, Wallace and Fraser were defeated. Edward was less impressed by what the raid had achieved than by its failure to capture Wallace.28
There was one respect in which Wallace, as time ran away from him, had not changed. He struck at any with English sympathies or connections. This we can see from a document dated 24 March 1305 from Westminster; it is worthy of being reproduced in its entirety:
To the helper, captain and justice of the water from the water of Forth to Orkeneye, or to him who supplies his place. The abbot of Redyng has besought the king to restore to him his island of May and the manner of Pednewen in that bailiwick, which were conferred upon the church of Redyng by former kings of Scotland and were delivered to the abbot as a cell of his church by the rebellion of John de Balliol, late king there, and which the abbot held peacefully as a cell of his church from the time of that delivery until William le Waleys and his accomplices, lately insurgents against the king in those parts, ejected the abbot and his men from the said island and manor; the king orders them to cause the abbot to have such seisin of the island and manor as he had before the commencement of the late war, and not to permit him to be disturbed by any one as to his seisin, so that after he has had seisin he may answer to everybody as he ought.29
It is not merely in the reference to Wallace that the interest of the document lies. It is to be found more in the assumptions which are behind it and which find expression there. Scotland is Edward’s; the war is over; Wallace has no army, only accomplices; he and they are insurgents. With none of this, of course, could Wallace agree. If technically the war could be said to be over with the submission of the Scots in February 1304, Wallace continued to set his face against any such acceptance. In his own mind, since he was Balliol’s man and since Balliol alone was king of Scotland, there could be no question of insurgency, of rebellion. But it was not Wallace who wrote the documents or the law, and it was the law that he was an outlaw, to be hunted down, and, in Edward’s view, a traitor. It mattered little now what Wallace thought, except that he was able to give brief expression to it at Westminster in August 1305. It mattered more what he did, and of that we have insufficient knowledge. We can only guess. The picture is one of desperate evasion, of emerging from one bolt-hole only to be driven into another by relentless English pressure, of hunger always and starvation sometimes, of unrecorded brushes with English and Scottish enemies, of the solace to be found in and with a few devoted friends careless of their own lives, of the comfort of religion, above all of that spirit peculiar to him which, somehow, sustained him to the end. We can visualise the increasing desperation with which Wallace fought on, perhaps even in that desperation seeking a clean, swift death, sword in hand. That he was not to have.
It would be gratifying to be able to think that Wallace’s continued defiance of Edward, even in the sordid circumstances in which he existed, stirred his people to further rebellion against Edward. But there was no such outcome. As he flitted from one hiding-place to another, Wallace, we may be sure, would speak to those he met with that same fierce commitment to the Scottish cause he had always had. Perhaps he gained adherents. But he could never again raise a force large enough to represent a genuine threat to the English. There is no dignity in suffering, and the Wallace who sought succour from the people from whom he had sprung must have been far from the man he once was. His words would carry conviction, but now, in the last months of his life, he needed the nobles as he had not in 1297. They, if they had not forgotten him or found him an embarrassment as they made themselves amenable to Edward, had different values and priorities. These last months of Wallace’s life have to be set against the background of Scottish indifference to the English occupation, if not of active collaboration. With Wallace reduced to a fugitive and therefore, in practical terms, impotent, where was the leadership to come from? Comyn and Bruce, in an alliance of whom most
hope of a national revival lay, could not work together. It is true that when Wallace was captured, Bruce was no more than six months away from the murder of Comyn and the subsequent seizure of the throne of Scotland. At the time of the execution, no one could possibly foresee such a sequence of events. The ‘band’ into which Bruce had entered with Lamberton on 11 July 1304 has been interpreted as evidence that the security in which Edward believed he held Scotland was deceptive.30 But if this was so, more than a year after the band, at the time of Wallace’ death, Bruce had risked nothing and, like Comyn, of whose motives and intentions we know even less, had not been inspired by Wallace’s resistance to the point of emulating him. No doubt there were whispers of abhorrence for Edward and his policies; these would be the staple of Scottish conversation. No doubt some among the Scots leaders, as they prepared for Edward’s parliament of September 1305, were genuinely shocked by the horror of Edward’s treatment of Wallace. But there was no more than that. Neither his last resistance nor his execution roused his countrymen.
The end for Wallace came suddenly. He was captured in or near Glasgow on 3 August. A monument at Robroyston marks the place at which, traditionally, he was seized. His capture fell to Sir John Menteith. As a subject of Edward, Mentieth had no reason to think of Wallace as other than an enemy and his capture as an honour. From an early date, however, the belief grew that Wallace had been taken by treachery, and it is upon Menteith that the odium has fallen. Blind Harry did not spare him,31 and Menteith’s reputation never recovered from the criticism. Not satisfied with making Menteith an English sympathiser, in itself crime enough, Harry has him betray the closest of friends in Wallace, godfather to his children. To treachery therefore was added betrayal of a friend for money. Recent commentators, however, while they can never hope to rehabilitate Menteith in the popular mind, have sought to excuse him if not to exonerate him. As will be argued,32 contemporary opinion may very well have understood Menteith’s conduct. Originally a firm supporter of the Scottish cause, Menteith, son of that Walter Stewart who had held the earldom of Menteith by right of his wife,33 had come into Edward’s peace at an unknown date. It may have been between September 1303 and March 1304.34 Like so many Scots, Bruce and Comyn not excepted, Menteith had no apparent difficulty in changing from one side to the other. His was the fervour of the convert. He was rewarded for his defection to the English cause by Edward, who made him sheriff of Dumbarton and keeper of its castle. It was natural that having given his oath to Edward, he should, again like others among his countrymen, see no shame in participation in the pursuit and capture of Wallace. If Menteith was guilty of treachery, it is impossible to believe that, given the opportunity which fell to him, others would not have acted in the same manner.
What Wallace was doing in Glasgow we do not know. He was, apparently, alone, although one English chronicler would have us believe otherwise. It is Peter of Langtoft who regales us with this story: ‘We have heard news among companions of William Wallace, the master of the thieves; Sir John de Menteith followed him close at his heels; and took him in bed beside his strumpet.’35 When taken, alone or not, he had in his possession documents, since lost, which might have explained his presence there. The possibility that they implicated certain Scots with him may be doubted. Their seizure, as far as we can tell, led to no arrests. Edward, although he had good reason to think the Scottish question settled, was suspicious by now of all about him. He would not have hesitated to act if the papers in Wallace’s possession had given him cause.
It is conceivable that Wallace was in Glasgow in the hope of taking ship; if so, he can hardly be blamed for seeking a respite from the intolerable strain of the pursuit by the agents of the English king. One question, among many, is why Wallace, as far as we can tell, had not already attempted to escape from Scotland. That even in the direst straits escape from Edward was possible would be illustrated by Bruce after his rebellion.36 Wallace himself had accomplished his return from the Continent, although almost certainly knowledge of his whereabouts had been relayed to Edward. By 1305 the position had, of course, changed; Wallace would have been conscious that the hands of Scots as well as English were turned against him. Bruce, Comyn, Wishart, all of whom had played their part in the resistance to Edward, were now his men. Fraser had countered the outlawry imposed at the 1304 St Andrews parliament with surrender to Edward four months later. Fraser had been forgiven, if not forgotten, by Edward. Wallace was isolated; Edward was implacable, colleagues had become enemies. Flight abroad was an option, and not an impossible one. Yet Wallace did not exercise it. Perhaps he had accepted his inevitable fate and was in Glasgow, bent on finding allies for yet another strike at the English. Whatever his reasons, they have not come down to us.
As we are ignorant of his reasons for being in Glasgow, the circumstances surrounding his capture are equally uncertain. English accounts stress that he was taken by his own countrymen. We need not be surprised by this; true or not, the belief that they had betrayed him to Edward isolated him still further from what the English claimed was Scottish acceptance of their rule. A particular Scot is named in connection with the capture of Wallace. This is Ralph de Haliburton. He came from a family close to Wallace at the beginning of his adventures in 1297. Ralph de Haliburton himself was a member of the garrison of Stirling Castle under Sir William Oliphant, and upon its fall in July 1304, was sent into imprisonment in England. On 28 February 1305 he was released on condition that he helped to capture Wallace.37 He was released into the custody of a Scottish knight, Sir John Mowbray, who became responsible for him. Mowbray, himself taken a prisoner to England after the battle of Dunbar, was yet another Scot who changed sides. Whatever his precise part in the capture of Wallace, Mowbray, unlike Menteith, has escaped criticism, as indeed has Haliburton for whom he was responsible. What exactly the released Haliburton did to ensure Wallace’s capture or whether he was, as has been suggested, Wallace’s supposed servant, the mysterious Jack Short, we have no means of knowing. It is tempting in the search for an answer to revert to the traditional account, that treachery was indeed how Wallace was taken. Blind Harry has him allowing himself to be bound by Menteith on the incredible excuse that in this way Menteith would be able to smuggle him, supposedly already a prisoner, through the English lines.38 That Wallace, for so long a master of self-preservation, should be so deceived is both ludicrous and insulting to his memory. He was captured either through a well-laid trap – for an escape along the Clyde was a possibility of which the English would not be ignorant – or his presence was reported to Menteith who carried out his duty for which he was rewarded with land by the English king.
Wallace was at once sent south. There is no record of an attempt at rescue, although his capture cannot have gone unremarked. He was transferred into the custody of Sir John Segrave for the crossing into England. His fate was already decided, as he must have known, but it is unlikely that he could have suspected that Edward intended to give him the formality of a trial and even more unlikely that he could have suspected its purpose.
NOTES
1 On the family see Black op. cit., 637; Barrow: Kingdom of the Scots, passim; Duncan: Scotland, the Making of the Kingdom, 1989, passim.
2 It could equally be argued that as deserters from Edward’s army, they might be welcomed by the Scots!
3 For the activities and antics of this knight see Prestwich: Armies and Warfare, 234–35.
4 Ibid.
5 Negotiations were an essential preliminary to a siege. In this case both Oliphant and Edward appear to have outlined their positions in lengthy statements of justification.
6 Perhaps because of Edward’s subsequent treatment of the garrison.
7 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 194.
8 Below, chap. 10.
9 Barbour: The Bruce, ed with trans. by A.A.M. Duncan, 698ff; Barrow: Robert Bruce, 309–10; Nicholson: Scotland, the Later Middle Ages, 1974, 102–03.
10 Prestwich: Edward I, 501.
11 One would like to thi
nk that Scottish leaders present at Stirling would be among those pleading for Oliphant and his men. If so, they were to be less sympathetic to Wallace in the following year.
12 Chap. 10 and Conclusion, below.
13 Lanercost, Maxwell trans., 176.
14 Cal. Docs Scot., ii, 1444–1445 and 1463.
15 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 81.
16 Cal. Docs Scot., ii, 1463.
17 For a different verdict on the relationship between Edward and the Scottish nobles, see Barrow: Robert Bruce, chap. 8. Watson, op. cit., 190, confirms that the parliament ‘marks the transformation, admittedly still incomplete, of the English presence in Scotland from a military regime to a peacetime administration’ and reminds us that the outlawry of Wallace and other was approved by Scots.
18 DNB, 569.
19 Ibid.
20 Kightly, 185.
21 Cal. Docs Scot., ii, 1563.
22 Palgrave, Docs, 276
23 Sir Alexander Lindsay, of Barnweill, near Ayr, rose with Bruce in 1306 and was present at the murder of Comyn.
24 It will be remembered that it was Graham who played a leading role in the fracas at Peebles in August 1299. He it was who laid claim to Wallace’s lands, thus setting in train the quarrel between the Scottish leaders. See chap. 7 above.
25 Whether any of them inclined to carry out Edward’s wishes we do not know for certain. None of them took part in the actual capture; for that reason, if for no other, they must be exonerated.
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