William Wallace

by Andrew Fisher

  At this remove also, we tend to shirk one other possibility: that in Scotland itself there may have been a wide acceptance, not limited to the leadership, of the validity of Edward’s judgement on Wallace. Wallace the outlaw of the St Andrews parliament would not alienate the Scots. Quite the contrary; there was, and of course still is, something romantic about the outlaw. The anti-English and anti-establishment hero – that too the Scots would accept. But treason was another matter altogether. Wallace, ‘a Scot born in Scotland’, had, of course, been tried, judged, and executed under English law. But Scots and English law alike reflected an abhorrence of treason, of sin and sinner. There is no shortage of evidence to illustrate this. Robert I acted with the utmost severity against those implicated in the Soules conspiracy of 1320.15 Sir Robert Graham and the other assassins of James I perished horribly; in the words of one writer, ‘the fiendishness of the punishment inflicted upon them … on this unique occasion even surpassed English practice’.16 The royal birth of Walter, earl of Atholl did not spare him as accomplice of Graham in regicide and treason. Graham’s confident assertion that he would be remembered for the ‘great good’ he had done for Scotland was not borne out by events, so heinous was the crime thought to be.17

  There was, in effect, no limit in either England or Scotland to what might be done to a traitor in an age of instant and savage retribution. A work from the reign of Edward I offers the standard view: ‘the judgement for lese majesty against the earthly king is executed by torment according to the ordinance and will of the king and by death.’18 Inevitably, there were excesses. The vengeance exacted by Edward II in 1322 against the supporters of Thomas of Lancaster provoked outrage.19 In the reign of Edward IV, the activities of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester and constable of England, gained him a reputation for cruelty.20 The trials of James Hamilton of Finnart and Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, were not untainted, and the burning of the latter aroused horror.21 Such public reactions were, however, unusual.

  The principles behind the various elements in the English punishment for treason were understood in Scotland. Drawing and hanging were imposed on some of the Soules conspirators by the ‘Black Parliament’ of 1320 to emphasise that as well as traitors, they were common criminals; like Wallace to the English, they were ‘unworthy’. The nature of Wallace’s own death was not lost on Scots. In a revealing passage, Bower tells us that Edward ‘thought to destroy the fame of the noble William for ever, since in the eyes of the foolish his life seemed to be ended with such a contemptible death’. Bower’s use of the adjective ‘contemptible’ here is instructive. The word itself is open to interpretation but the context in which it appears points us in the direction of Bower’s own meaning. Writing a century and a half after the events he is relating, he goes right to the core of Wallace’s punishment, to present it as Edward is envisaging it.

  Was Bower unique in this stance? We do not know. Elsewhere, he is fulsome in his praise of Wallace. In a biblical allusion, Wallace is a ‘second Mattathias’, the Jewish priest who led a revolt against the Syrians in the second century bc. As the ‘hammer of the English’, Wallace is a ‘mighty arm’ and ‘a salvation in time of trouble’. His activities are a ‘celestial gift’. We are nearer here to the Wallace of today, our Wallace. Present also in Bower are other themes which we have inherited – the perfidy of the Comyns on the field of Falkirk, the envy with which Wallace was met in sections of the Scottish people, and, most seductive of all perhaps, the liberating effect of Wallace on Bruce, on opposite sides at Falkirk. ‘Like one awakening from a deep sleep,’ Bower informs us, ‘Bruce henceforth became every day braver than he had been.’ Notwithstanding the use of ‘contemptible’ in his reflection on Wallace’s death, Bower assures us that Edward misjudged the impact of the execution, for ‘the sudden death of a just man after a good life does not lessen his merits if he dies thus’.22

  This theme, that Wallace’s reputation was not destroyed in 1305, is yet another embraced today. Bower was not writing in a vacuum; he could draw on a hundred and fifty years, if he so desired, of oral tradition, and with it its concomitant invention. But in Bower’s case we are still concerned, primarily, with history.23 He and Fordun and Wyntoun, both of whom preceded him, are the Scottish counter-balance to the English verdicts on Wallace. All three were written after their English counterparts. Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum is the nearest in time to Wallace, dating from the 1370s. Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland was completed fifty years later. Some twenty years separate Bower’s work from that of Wyntoun, but the link between the three is strong. Their view of history has been challenged with some force in recent years.24 Their Wallace may be a man of exceptional powers, but does not our certain knowledge of him lead us to that same conclusion? We need not rehearse his achievements to see that this is the case.

  Yet these achievements have not been enough. The generations which followed on Wallace have looked for, and found, each in its own way, something more in him. It has been argued above that in 1305 Wallace was both failure and traitor. The Wallace of today is far removed from that bleak verdict. When did the transformation, or rehabilitation, of Wallace begin? How did the hero become superhero? There is a temptation to believe that the process was prompt, almost immediate.25 This is not evident if we look at the earliest extant Scottish accounts. The heroic, patriotic, inspirational Wallace of Fordun, Wyntoun, and Bower bears a resemblance to the Wallace of the years 1297 to 1305. What were their sources? Fordun, as the first of the three, had recourse to the English chronicles. Wyntoun admits to other sources, lost to us. He says, ‘of his [Wallace’s] good deeds and manhood, great accounts I heard say are made’. It is possible that Wyntoun had available to him the life of Wallace by John Blair. Bower, as the last of the three, had both the advantage of Fordun’s work and the opportunity to consider the value of the oral tradition which had been building.

  It is in their treatment of that oral tradition, and its concomitant, invention, that we can distinguish Fordun, Wyntoun and Bower from the most celebrated and influential of Wallace’s biographers. We may dispute their interpretation of events, however influential it has been.26 With Blind Harry we move irrevocably from interpretation to creativity. No other life of Wallace can match the enduring appeal of Harry’s work; the film Braveheart is Harry’s account transferred to the screen. Harry is as little known to us as Wallace and the subject, perhaps, of as much investigation.27 Even the question of his blindness has received attention. John Major, a contemporary, is forthright about Harry’s blindness and about his work:

  There was one Harry, blind from the time of his birth, who, in the time of my childhood, fabricated a whole book about William Wallace, and therein he wrote down in the native tongue, of which he was a master, the deeds commonly ascribed to Wallace – however, I give only partial credence to such writings. By recitation of his work in the presence of men of the highest rank, he obtained food and clothing, which he well deserved.

  This passage, with its influence on academic evaluation of Harry’s reliability, is interesting in more than one respect. On the matter of Harry’s blindness, the subject of considerable debate,28 Major is emphatic: Harry was born blind. Of more consequence is the period Major assigns to Harry’s biography of Wallace. Major was born perhaps as early as 1467 or as late as 1470. His reference to his childhood at the time at which Harry was composing his biography therefore bears out McDiarmid’s conclusion on the date of Harry’s ‘Wallace’.29 This is more important than the question of Harry’s blindness. A Scottish Homer or not, Harry flourished at a time of renewed anti-English sentiment.30 The perceived pro-English policy of James III was arousing opposition in Scotland, For some no doubt the proposal of a marriage between James’ son, Prince James, and Cecilia, daughter of Edward IV, evoked memories of a similar proposal of a marriage between Margaret of Norway and Edward of Carnarvon, when Scotland’s future hung in the balance.

  We have evidence in payments made to him by the Lord High Tr
easure that Harry was known at court, but it was among those hostile to the king that he found his patrons. Two such were Sir James Liddale of Halkerston and Sir William Wallace of Craigie. These were powerful men, and Harry may have had access to one more powerful through the former. Liddale was steward to Alexander Stewart, duke of Albany, brother of the king. Relations between James and Albany and his other brother, John, earl of Mar, were difficult.31 Disagreement manifested itself publicly in the case of Albany over the king’s policy towards England. Albany, it became clear, had pretensions to the throne. Imprisoned, he escaped and fled to France, whence he returned in due course, with the support of Edward IV, as a potential Alexander IV. It has been suggested that Albany, seemingly a more regal figure than his brother as a fine horseman and the possessor of ‘a very awful countenance’, made use of Harry’s ‘Wallace’ as propaganda in his disagreements with the king.32 One authority on the period has demonstrated that opposition to James III’s pro-English stance was almost entirely based in the south of Scotland.33 Wallace of Craigie and Liddale were both southern knights. Among the southern nobility, Albany was the most prominent. The prospects of an Anglo-Scottish rapprochement, towards which James III was moving, would not have appealed to such as Archibald Douglas, earl of Angus, notorious as ‘Bell-the-Cat’.34 Angus was not alone in profiting from the disturbed conditions in the Border, something which James III’s plans threatened.

  For such as those Harry fashioned an epic violently anti-English from its opening lines.35 Major, as already noted, concedes Harry’s skill in pulling together ‘the deeds commonly ascribed’ to the hero of the work. But he adds a rider; Major does not entirely accept Harry’s version of events. The power of Harry’s epic does not derive, as Major hints, from historical accuracy. Here, accuracy is sacrificed to effect. Harry is, for example, contradictory in the matter of Wallace’s date of birth.36 He has Wallace defeat Edward I in a battle in the vicinity of Biggar in the summer of 1297. The size of Edward’s army, and the number killed, are both ludicrously high. If, as has been argued, Harry muddled Biggar with the later engagement at Roslin,37 his accuracy in matters of detail is further open to question.

  We must assume that this counted for little to the audience for which Harry was performing his epic. The point has earlier been made38 that Braveheart is Harry’s ‘Wallace’ transferred to the screen. There is the same violence, presented with refinements which Harry might have envied, the same rampant xenophobia. Wallace is in both cases a one-man fighting machine, the effects of the blows he inflicts on the English every bit as appalling as those dealt to the infidel by Roland and Charlemagne’s paladins in an earlier epic. Wallace’s love for Marion Braidfute is common to Harry and to Braveheart. The author of the screenplay, Randall Wallace, surely comes close to conjuring up Harry’s own thought with these words:

  Historians agree on only a few facts about Wallace’s life, and yet they cannot dispute that his life was epic. There were times when I tried myself to be a fair historian, but life is not all about balance, it’s about passion, and this story raised my passions. I had to see through the eyes of a poet.39

  Randall Wallace’s debt to Harry is indisputable. But from what, and from whom, did Harry derive his inspiration? We cannot know when the stories about Wallace began to circulate.40 The ‘first’ Wallace, the Wallace of the English and Scottish chronicles of the fourteenth century, still must rank as a historical figure.41 It is possible that stories, as opposed to facts – of which the most certain were Stirling Bridge, Falkirk, and his execution – circulated over the period between his death in 1305 and the end of the century. If so, in their transmission to Harry some would become garbled, as in the way of oral tradition. Wallace would ‘grow’ with the years, from a man of great achievements to a man capable of impossible deeds, possible only if we are prepared to ignore time and distance. Interestingly, in his reflections on Harry, Major talks of his using ‘deeds commonly ascribed to Wallace’; he makes no mention of their origin or of their antiquity.

  From whom did Harry derive his inspiration? The accepted answer for many is John Blair, the Benedictine monk who was Wallace’s personal chaplain. Blair’s Latin life of Wallace is cited by Harry himself as his inspiration. Behind Blair, Harry tells us, was the bishop of Dunkeld, William Sinclair. The very existence of Blair’s book on Wallace has been doubted but Sinclair is a historical figure and a prominent one. His courage in 1317 in repelling an English invasion of Fife earned him praise from Robert I, who referred to him as ‘my bishop’.42 Sinclair’s fierce patriotism at this period as a supporter of Bruce has prompted one writer to postulate that ‘commissioning a biography of Wallace would have been in character’ for the bishop.43 This argument is not without its flaws. John Blair is said to have been Wallace’s friend since childhood, as well as his chaplain. He would be only too aware of Wallace’s unbending commitment to the cause of Balliol. We must ask whether Sinclair would have commissioned a book from one such as Blair, so close for years to the quintessential Balliol defender, when he himself was a supporter of Bruce; Bruce, after all, was a usurper in 1306. Nor is it easy to believe that Sinclair would, as Harry tells us, forward to Rome a book lauding the very man, Wallace, who not many years before had been in Rome arguing with others for Balliol restoration. Sinclair’s own conversion, to the Balliol cause, evidenced by his part in the coronation of Edward Balliol at Scone in September 1332,44 came too late to be relevant to the presumed commissioning of Blair.

  Blair’s work, if it ever existed, has disappeared and with its disappearance any realistic hope of ascertaining the degree to which Harry would be indebted to Blair. Would the missing life of Wallace have had any pretensions to historical accuracy? Would Blair’s proximity to Wallace over a number of years have permitted of a ‘warts and all’ portrait of the hero? That same proximity, one might suppose, would be conducive to the kind of accuracy so absent in Harry; Blair, after all, would have been writing soon after Wallace’s death, while memory had not yet gained the ability to deceive. If this is so, what, then, happened between Blair’s supposed biography and Harry’s day to explain the latter’s version of Wallace’s life? The obvious answer is the growth of oral tradition which was inevitable over the time between Wallace’s death and Harry’s day.

  But it may not be the only answer. Harry may have had another source of inspiration, the audience for which he wrote and for which he performed across the south of Scotland. His was an audience composed of the more influential elements in society, among them men opposed to the policies of James III. As Major points out he earned his living from those of ‘the highest rank’. We are not speaking here of the common people, usually seen as the repository of the oral tradition. It is of course indisputable that as he travelled across the country he would make contact with, and no doubt, absorb material from the common people. But to make a living, Harry, like any writer, had to understand his market. That was clearly the ruling class, the ‘great and good’, the ‘image makers’, in the terminology of today. We are accustomed to perceiving Harry as the educator, leading his audience to knowledge. Would it be incorrect to see the position as reversed? Harry would in this scenario be writing, less from conviction than to order, fed material and directed by men of ‘the highest rank’. Blair’s work on Wallace, if it had existed, would have been created near enough to the life of its subject to bear the burden of historical connection. Harry, by contrast, was remote from the hero’s lifetime. He was thus free of the burden imposed on Blair but not free of the wishes of his audience. Was Harry persuaded to disregard Blair, and corrupted into producing a life of Wallace with little relation to reality?

  We can trace the decline in the historical Wallace quite easily. There are three stages in perceptions of Wallace in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first we find in English accounts. Here the English are victorious over the Scots, and Wallace, the villainous, barbaric Wallace, meets the end he deserved. The second is the Scottish counter-charge. After much t
ravail, Scotland has its own king – not a Balliol as Wallace would have hoped, but a Bruce, then a Stewart. The perception here of Wallace has, naturally, changed; his attributes are heroic, his physique splendid. He is a giant in Bower, as indeed he is in Harry. He is also a victim of the aristocracy in these accounts which precede Harry. This is a matter of interpretation, although widely believed, by Major, for one.45

  Today, we are most familiar with the third stage in the various perceptions of Wallace, his third ‘life’ as we may term it. We derive it from Harry and its popularity, we may claim with confidence, is the result of Braveheart, which dates from 1995. Without the film, Harry would be as much neglected by the general public as, for example, Lanercost of the English accounts and Bower of the Scottish. Like them, Harry would have been the concern of the academic. But Harry was rescued from that fate by Hollywood. This was not the first occasion on which the poet had been rescued from virtual anonymity. By the beginning of the eighteenth century his language had become a barrier to the understanding of the text. In 1728, William Hamilton of Gilbertfield undertook the task of translating and abridging the text. A modern writer questions Hamilton’s pre-eminence in the modernisation and accessibility of the work but does not deny its impact.46 Hamilton’s version ranked second in many Scottish households only to the Bible.

  Most notably it affected Robert Burns. His letters reflect his emotions. In 1786 he wrote that the books he first read were biographies of Hannibal and William Wallace.47 A year later, he was telling a correspondent how ‘the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest’.48 He described himself as a pilgrim on a walk in search of Wallace: ‘I explored every den and dell where I could suppose my heroic Countryman to have sheltered … my heart glowed with a wish to be able to make a song on him equal to his merits.’ Burns’ English contemporary, William Wordsworth, also took up Wallace. We come across Wallace in Book 1 of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’, published in 1799. Like Burns, Wordsworth reacted with enthusiasm to the ideals of the French Revolution and like Burns, he found inspiration in the Scot, as he found it in others. Wordsworth writes of ‘how, in tyrannic times, some high-souled man … suffered in silence for Truth’s sake’, before moving on to Wallace, to relate: