7 Brie (ed.): The Brut, i, 222. Phillips, op. cit., 224–25.
8 Mallore read: ‘… and offered you mercy if you surrendered, you did despise his offer, and were outlawed in his court as a thief and a felon according to the law of England and Scotland …’
9 Chap. 7, above.
10 The indictment is printed in Stubbs (ed.): Chronicles, i, pp. 139–42.
11 Blind Harry, sixth book, for the traditional story. Kightly, op. cit., chap. 6, summarizes the various accounts. Reese, op. cit., 43–44, likewise offered some variants.
12 See on this Bellamy and Keen. Also Keen: The Laws of War in the Later Middle Ages, 105 et seq.
13 Prestwich: Edward I, 202.
14 Ibid., 51.
15 Ibid., 223.
16 Watson, op. cit., 213, calls him ‘bloodthirsty’ and refers to ‘a degree of vindictiveness which does Edward no credit’. Barrow: Robert Bruce, 137, says that Edward, ‘the greatest of the Plantagenets … appears small and mean. He is measured against one of the great spirits of history and found wanting.’ For Prestwich’s commend on Edward’s attitude to his enemies, see note 13 above. But see his mitigation of Edward on p. 503.
17 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 162; Prestwich: Edward I, 109 and 508–09.
18 Prestwich, op. cit., 265–65
19 Ibid., 203
20 Mathew of Westminster: Flores Historium, iii, 123–24
21 Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 29 September 1305.
22 Eleventh book, 1406.
23 Eleventh book, 1397–98.
24 Barrow, Robert Bruce, 429–30.
25 Barron: The Scottish War of Independence, chap. 15.
26 The documents found on Wallace at the time of his capture, had they survived, might have answered the question.
27 The ingrained belief that Bruce drew on Wallace for inspiration, found in Bower, for example, surfaced in the film Braveheart in 1995.
28 Chap. 9.
29 Barrow, op. cit., 448.
30 Wyntoun: Oriyginale Cronykil of Scotland.
Conclusion
A Man for All Times?
Alone among his contemporaries, William Wallace has made the transition from one millennium to another in a positive manner, with his reputation intact, even enhanced. His are attributes which defy the passing of the years to remain inspirational today. In the eyes of some, he is worthy of canonisation on the model of Joan of Arc.
Wallace has thus left behind in their own time the major figures of the war of 1296, whether Scots or English. John Balliol, for example, we know only as a feeble incompetent, forever ‘Toom Tabard’, stripped of his title and his dignity. John Comyn, likewise, has all but disappeared from our ken, a victim of Bruce violence and pro-Bruce propaganda, the aspirations of his line extinguished with the death of his son on the English side at Bannockburn and that of his grandson two years later. Comyn deserves more of us, but his reputation went with his murder in 1306.
Taller by far than either Balliol or Comyn looms Edward I. Crusader, lawmaker, builder, arbiter in European affairs, he crushed the Welsh and might have done the same to the Scots had not his body betrayed him. But it is not merely his treatment of Wallace which alienates us from this feared and fearsome monarch; his adherence to a code of chivalry at once romantic and brutal anchors him firmly in a remote past. Robert Bruce has fared somewhat better. The courageous survivor of years of suffering for himself and his family, the victor of Bannockburn and beneficiary of an influential life by John Barbour, Bruce is assured of respect and affection, but, as in his own day, he cannot be exonerated of expediency. In this sense, he is still yesterday’s man because, unlike Wallace, to us his motives are suspect, his loyalties questionable. Even the greatest of Scottish kings is somehow diminished when judged alongside Wallace.
The Wallace of today is an exceptional, unique man. But we would do well to consider that the Wallace of today is not, and cannot be the Wallace of 1305. No contemporary would be wholly at ease with our version of his life. There would be agreement, of course, on certain of his qualities, courage – constancy, strategic and tactical ability, leadership – among them. Two aspects of his life, however, would preclude reconciliation of the Wallace of 1305 and the Wallace of today. Both are challenging but reflect the contemporary view of Wallace and cannot be discounted if we are to see him as he was. We must, therefore, strive to strip away the accretions of the centuries.
Wallace died a failure and a traitor in 1305. To rid his country of the English and to see it sovereign, with its own king, these were the twin ambitions of Wallace’s life after Lanark. He achieved neither. At the time of Wallace’s death, Edward I was master of Scotland and about to promulgate, in the forthcoming parliament at Westminster, an ordinance whereby Scotland, no longer allowed the status of a ‘realm’ but now merely described as a ‘land’, was to be governed. John Balliol, for whom Wallace had fought to the death, had not been restored to the throne which he had lost, perhaps to his own relief, nine years previously. His expected return to Scotland, which prompted English fears and Scottish hopes in 13021 and which lay behind Bruce’s defection to Edward,2 had not come about. Scotland had reverted in 1305 to its condition in 1296, before Wallace’s first recorded appearance in the war with England. It was an occupied and defeated country, its people repressed, its affairs in the hands of a foreign monarch. When, many years after Wallace’s death, Scotland was finally free and with its own king, that was the work of a man with whom his relationship had been at best an uncertain one. It is too readily forgotten that had Wallace survived Edward I and lived to witness an independent Scotland, it would have been as an opponent of Bruce; Balliol’s man, Wallace would not have changed his allegiance.
The fact that Wallace died alone is too readily forgotten. He was butchered as a punishment and as a spectacle for the populace of London and for those Scots present in the capital in anticipation of the parliament. To them and to the English sympathisers still in Scotland, he was a rebel and a traitor. They had condemned him as such at the St Andrews parliament in March of the preceding year. There is no evidence to suggest that they had changed their minds about him in the period leading up to his capture and trial. We need not charge Bruce, Comyn, Lamberton and the others with complicity in Wallace’s end. They viewed it with apparent indifference, the indifference of the collaborator. It is an ugly and emotive word, but unavoidable. Wallace had become an embarrassment to them. He represented the old, stern Scotland, that of resistance. Edward had offered them a new Scotland, that of collaboration, and they had accepted it. Bruce, Comyn, and Lamberton, all three like Wallace Guardians, were nominated to occupy important positions in the government which Edward had established for Scotland. They were not the only Scots for whom he found a place. It is idle to speculate about the thoughts of these men, whether they whispered against the sentence on Wallace, whether they planned rebellion or not at some stage in the future. We can only judge them by their actions. They collaborated with Edward in the dispositions he was making for Scotland. Wallace’s execution, for them as for Edward, was a symbolic prelude. It marked a beginning.
Wallace thus went alone to his death; there would be no slaughter of his adherents, as happened in the aftermath of Robert Bruce’s uprising in the following year. It could hardly have been otherwise. Well before his capture by Menteith, Wallace had already become something of an anachronism in the landscape of Scottish politics. He who for a brief but momentous period had represented all, at the end stood only for those who now had no voice, the impotent majority unable to influence events. For long enough, there had been no place for him as of right in the councils of the Scottish leadership. Other concerns, other ambitions, pre-dating those to which he had given expression, once again dominated.
When exactly he had been marginalized by the leadership must be a matter of interpretation. He had been with them in the struggle against Edward but arguably, even when knighted and Guardian of Scotland, not of them. We read of the two bishops Lam
berton and Wishart in association with Wallace but that relationship did not stand the test of time; Lamberton, for one, had turned to Bruce in 1304.3 William Douglas ‘le Hardi’, not a natural ally, rode with Wallace in the raid on Scone in 1297 but that connection was soon broken by Douglas’ return to the political environment in which he was most comfortable. Robert Bruce was in rebellion in 1297, at the same time as Wallace, but distinct from him. Malcolm Wallace was with the Bruce faction in the confrontation at Peebles in 12994 and thus opposed to John Comyn. It is difficult to judge what conclusion to draw from this alignment because Malcolm’s relationship with his brother was not straightforward. The confident and aggressive manner in which Sir David Graham sought to obtain William Wallace’s possessions at Peebles on that occasion suggests that the awe of Wallace, so crucial in his attempt to unite the Scots in Balliol’s cause, had faded. As Graham was in the Comyn camp at this time and indeed, as has been noted,5 was at odds with Wallace’s brother, Malcolm, we may suppose that Wallace and Comyn were no longer acting in concert on Balliol’s behalf. The roots of this estrangement perhaps lie in an event two years previously, when Wallace, as the victor of Stirling Bridge, was acting as de facto leader of the Scottish resistance to Edward. It has been argued that his nomination of Lamberton to St Andrews was one cause of the rupture, breaking as it did the Comyn hold on the see.6 If this is so, then Wallace could rely neither on the Bruce nor the Comyn faction, each with its own agenda but both resentful of Wallace’s anti-establishment stance.
The accepted starting-point for the disassociation of the Scottish leadership from Wallace is his defeat at Falkirk. But we cannot be sure that Wallace was forced to relinquish the Guardianship by the weight of magnate opinion. It is as likely, if not more so, that he chose to resign.7 If the act of an honourable man, his resignation was a mistake. It removed him, unnecessarily, from the forefront of affairs. He was never again to be allowed to exercise his undoubted military talents to the full. That was Scotland’s loss. The view of one English chronicle that upon his return from the Continent he became the ‘commander and captain’ of the Scots and the inspiration behind their resistance8 is now discredited. It does, however, indicate the strength of his reputation in English minds as the only Scot to have inflicted a major defeat in the field against the enemy. Wallace was, at best, one of several leaders, as in the raid of June 1303 into Annandale, and he is absent from the list of those involved in the celebrated engagement at Roslin in the previous February.9 Thereafter, Wallace was simply a peripheral figure.
By 1304, Edward was finally in control of the Scottish problem. Comyn’s resistance came to an end in February. Edward understood the motivation of Comyn and those associated with him. The relationship between Edward and the Comyn family was of long standing and of mutual benefit.10 The submission terms imposed by Edward reflected, at least in part, the value to him of that association. The penalties levied on the Scots in 1304 fall short of those inflicted on Welsh rebels and as far short as those inflicted on Wallace. The thinking behind the 1304 terms was not dissimilar to that of Henry III and the Prince Edward, as he then was, at the end of the Barons’ War in 1265, when the maximum penalty inflicted on any supporter of Simon de Montfort was to redeem his lands at seven times their annual value.11 In 1304, even as obdurate an opponent as Wishart was required to pay no more than three times the value of his lands. Ingram de Umfraville, once joint-Guardian and less astute perhaps than Wishart in reading the signs, had to find five times the value of his lands because of his dilatory submission.12
Like his father, Edward appears magnanimous, a king bent on reconciliation with a defeated people. He was even prepared to forgive, if no longer fully to trust, the likes of Fraser and Thomas Boys, who had been in his service.13 It is not, however, by his generosity in 1304 that Edward is remembered but for his treatment of Wallace. It has earned him opprobrium but it had its own logic, and not only in Edward’s eyes. Just as Edward excluded Wallace from the general submission, so Wallace continued in his defiance of a king who, to others, had conducted himself in the negotiations with Comyn in a tolerant and tolerable manner. Things had moved on; Wallace, it must surely have seemed to the Scots themselves, had not, or perversely, would not. 1304 perhaps offered Wallace his best chance, however slim, to enter Edward’s peace; he chose not to take it. Had he submitted, would he have been as leniently treated as Fraser and Boys? It is not impossible; Edward was not wholly incapable of the grand gesture.14 Had Wallace associated himself with Comyn in the general submission of 1304 and not stood apart, he might have survived, despite everything, in an atmosphere conducive to reconciliation.
It did not happen. Wallace had a different vision from those who submitted with Comyn. In modern terminology, he had embraced the cause of independence for Scotland, Comyn, Bruce and their equals a form of devolution. It was this which led them to collaborate with Edward in his plans for Scotland, promulgated in a parliament at Westminster, attended by some of them at least, in the month after Wallace’s execution. They may well have considered that they had no alternative. As a practical proposition, independence had ceased to exist at Falkirk, the last opportunity in Wallace’s lifetime to achieve it. When it was revived, it was not because of the circumstances of Wallace’s death, but as a consequence of the murder of Comyn by Bruce. Wallace, an anachronism at the time of his death, was an irrelevance at Comyn’s.
The second aspect of Wallace’s career to which we must turn our attention, and one more contentious even than his inability to achieve his twin aims of freeing his country of a foreign yoke and restoring to it its rightful king, John Balliol, is the charge of treason brought against him at Westminster. His denial of that particular item in the indictment rings down over the centuries, heroic, splendid, clear and authentic. Wallace would have found no shame in admitting to the other crimes laid at his door; on the contrary, he would have taken them as acknowledgement by the English themselves of the blows he had dealt against them in a short space of time, little more than a year. The murder of Heselrig at Lanark, whatever the motives behind it, was a fact. The invasion of the north of England and the destruction it wrought, for this too he was responsible. Under him, assemblies had been convened, proof of his defiance of Edward. Killings, robberies, felonies, these were the inevitable consequence of war; Wallace could not pretend that they had not occurred.
But his reaction to the accusation of treason was quite another matter. His rejection of it was personal. Can we be certain that it was not also a political statement, however brief? For Edward the question was a simple one; Balliol’s submission to him in 1296 encompassed his subjects. It did not count that Wallace had neither given homage nor sworn allegiance to him. Like other Scots, Wallace had had opportunity to do so but did not take it. In 1304 the Scots had once again submitted to Edward, accepting his sovereignty and his law. What that meant was made evident in the month after Wallace’s death when, at the parliament in London, Scotland ceased to be a ‘realm’ and was referred to as a ‘land’. Had Wallace been astute enough, in his last public utterance, to use his trial as a platform to remind his fellow countrymen where their duty lay?
If so, he went unheard. As we have already noted, his death aroused no protest from the Scottish leadership; they accepted it as a preliminary to the settlement drawn up by Edward. Nor was the news of his death in London, and in the wake of that news the gruesome sight of his severed limbs on public display at various places in Scotland, to lead to unrest in the country, let alone violence against the English. No spontaneous demonstrations or uprising in protest at the treatment of Wallace are recorded. Such apparent passivity is intriguing. The English delight at Wallace’s end is to be expected; the accounts we have linger over the details of the execution and reflect the general elation at the just punishment meted out to the Scot described as ‘an unworthy man’. But what of the Scots, a nation which only eight years previously he had energised and to which in its darkest days he had given back its pride? Witho
ut firm evidence, we may nevertheless make some assumptions. In the winter of 1296–1297, within a few months of Edward’s departure from Scotland after his humiliation of Balliol, there were uprisings over a wide area against English rule. They ranged from the north to the south-west. If at first uncoordinated, they had a common purpose. Scotland then was defeated but not cowed. Support for action came from all sections of the population. In 1305, Scotland was, we may suppose, both defeated and cowed, incapable of resistance, even to avenge Wallace, the lost and, we would wish to think mourned, leader. But a long war had taken its toll, there was a general desire for a return to normality, at the price of English occupation. There was to be no second Wallace or Moray in 1305, drive by that same powerful force which had manifested itself in the past.
Does this passivity on the part of the Scots in 1305 mean more than a broken spirit? If so, were they, like their leaders, complicit in the new dispensation for their country and, by extension, in the death of Wallace? He had been the first Scot to suffer under the English law of treason and there must have been many in Scotland who fervently hoped that he would be the last. The casualties of 1296 had been incurred in what was obviously a war. The submission of 1304 had ended the war, and now Edward had taught the Scots, through Wallace’s death, what defiance of him might entail for the perpetrator, if the English king was so inclined. It was a salutary lesson, the more effective because without precedent in the war. With a single act of savagery, as merited to his mind as the sack of Berwick, Edward had effectively and efficiently shattered Scottish illusions as to the nature of the law under which they were henceforth to be governed. Worse would certainly come in response to Bruce’s rebellion, a still greater betrayal for Edward than Wallace’s, but in 1305 the example made of Wallace was more than enough. At this remove, we prefer to believe that the execution, with all its attendant horrors, had failed in its primary purpose. This cannot have been the case. When it was ordained that the laws of Scotland would be examined with a view to ensuring that any element ‘openly contrary to God and reason’ was removed, the Scots could be in no doubt as to what this signified. As with Wallace, Edward would be both prosecutor and judge; his will was the law.
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