How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name
Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower,
All over his dear Country; left the deeds
Of Wallace, like a family of Ghosts,
To people the steep rocks and river
Banks …49
Throughout the nineteenth century, Wallace continued to engage the attention, and the passions of many. We would not expect Sir Walter Scott to be immune to Wallace. Nor was he; the man who had spent years of his childhood immersing himself in the oral tradition of the south-east of Scotland, where Wallace harassed the English from the great Forest of Selkirk, found Wallace a worthy subject.50 Wallace’s renown was not limited to his own country. The Hungarian revolutionary, Lajos Kossuth, whose claim for independence for his country was thwarted by Russian intervention, admired him. Guiseppe Garibaldi and Guiseppe Mazzini, leading figures in the Italian Risorgimento, shared in that admiration. Indeed, their admiration for Wallace knew no bounds, if Mazzini is to be believed. He described Wallace as ‘one of the high prophets of nationality to us all’ and called upon people to ‘honour him, worship his memory, teach his name and his deeds to your children’.51 In an age when statues to Wallace were being raised throughout Scotland, the Europeans Kossuth, Garibaldi and Mazzini, who understood Wallace’s love in independence for his country, all wrote letters in support of the proposed National Wallace Monument at Stirling. Neither the project nor its eventual manifestation met with universal approval in Scotland, but after much debate, discussion and argument, it was officially opened on 11 September 1869, the anniversary of the great victory over Warenne and Cressingham in 1297.
Both the site of the monument, Abbey Craig, and its scale are appropriate to perceptions of Wallace. Abbey Craig suggests itself as the place where he, with Andrew Murray at his side, watched the English deploy for battle. Here, perhaps, came the realisation that victory was possible over an enemy hitherto invincible. Here, too, we can envisage Wallace the soldier, always with an eye for the moment, restraining his eager troops until he judged that moment had arrived. Here is the Wallace of history. The size of the monument is fitting, and perhaps inevitable, in the case of one who, through the generations, has been portrayed as a giant of a man. The Scottish accounts are obsessed with this aspect of Wallace; in this regard, Bower and Major have an affinity with Harry. Bower stakes that Wallace was ‘a tall man with the body of a giant … with lengthy flanks … broad in the hips, with strong arms and legs … with all his limbs very strong and firm’. Harry’s Wallace reaches seven feet. None of this need necessarily be discounted; the Emperor Charlemagne was said to be seven feet tall. We have evidence to prove that Wallace’s greatest enemy, Edward I, was six feet two inches tall.52 There is no such certainty with Wallace. The English accounts, interestingly, are silent on this matter. If, however, Wallace was the massive figure we have grown accustomed to, would not these same accounts have seized on this as an opportunity for ridicule? Wallace, after all, is presented in Scottish versions not merely as tall but distinguished by exceptionally powerful limbs. It might be argued that such a Wallace suffered from giantism, if not acromegaly. If so, the English would have, surely, depicted him as a freak. They preferred to keep their ridicule for other aspects of Wallace.
The National Wallace Monument may thus be said to epitomise the dichotomy of perceptions of Wallace. On the one hand, Abbey Craig is where we are face to face with the historical Wallace. On the other, the scale of the memorial to him reflects the recurrent need to read into Wallace more than the man, more than the heroic and courageous patriot he was. For Wallace’s achievements, great though they were and proof of surpassing ability and sublime spirit, have never been enough. Generation after generation has sought to define him outside the bounds of history and in some cases to exploit him.
We have seen this most recently in Braveheart and in the campaign to have him canonised. It is debatable which of the two is the more ludicrous or more damaging to the ‘real Wallace’, itself a phrase much in vogue. The success of Braveheart, with its bedaubed hooligans and a simple, one-dimensional Wallace, tells us more about its audience than of the nature of the patriot and his role. For the director and scriptwriter of the film, the concern was not liberty but the taking of liberties. Their Wallace was a noble savage, of the kind found in James Fenimore Cooper. The inaccuracies in the script are to be expected; Hollywood has in the past been free with the stories, among others, of Mary, Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Our knowledge of Wallace, if derived solely from the facts available to us, is more than adequate to provide a film with all the elements Hollywood seeks. An opportunity to portray Wallace as he was and, at the same time, to bring his story, unadulterated, to the audience, was spurned.
The proposal that Wallace be canonised postulates a new Wallace – the saint. Those behind the proposal appear to be unable to distinguish between martyrdom and sainthood. Wallace died a martyr, but not for his religion. There is also, as Graham Greene reminds us, a need for a miracle if the candidate is to be accepted. It is fortunate that the Roman Catholic Church is rigorous in its requirements for a candidate for canonisation. Scotland already has its saints on both sides of the religious divide who, arguably, died for their religion. Wallace was neither a Patrick Hamilton nor a John Ogilvie. Wallace, by contrast, died in his religion, not for it. His religion, we may agree, was a comfort to him in his agonising, despairing, lonely last hours; it did not bring him to the scaffold.
We have no picture of William Wallace. Instead, to his detriment, we have many. He is a man for all times, constantly re-invented. But in a sense, we need no picture of him. He is to be found on the Abbey Craig, looking down on the English, whose attempt at a settlement he had dismissed in his own, memorable words, and in Westminster Hall, where, no less powerfully, he rejected the charge of treason against him. A leading authority on the period has averred that the tragedy of Wallace is in the anti-climax which his career became.53 The tragedy of Wallace, however, is the inability of generations past and present to recognise that the essence of the man lies in his words and deeds. With Wallace, the words are the man, the deeds his assurance of immortality. The real Wallace is the Wallace of history.
NOTES
1 Above, chap. 8.
2 Ibid.
3 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 131; Barron, op. cit., 152ff; Young, op. cit., 196–97.
4 Above, chap. 7.
5 Ibid.
6 Young, op. cit., 168–69. The author provides evidence of continuing tension between Lamberton and the Comyns, 171.
7 Above, chap. 7.
8 Above, chap. 8.
9 Ibid.
10 Young, op. cit., passim, deals with this.
11 Prestwich: Edward I, chap. 2 and Powicke, op. cit., chap. V for the war and settlement.
12 Watson: Under the Hammer, 219.
13 Both again betrayed Edward in 1306 and were executed. On Boys’ fate see Barrow: Robert Bruce, 357, n. 61.
14 As in the case of some Welsh rebels. For a summary of Edward’s character, see Prestwich, 559ff.
15 And was not condemned in so doing by contemporaries, except by Ingram de’Umfraville in the case of David of Brechin.
16 Nicholson, op. cit., 326. The murder and its aftermath is dealt with in Brown: James I, 1994, chaps 8 and 9, and McGladdery: James II, 1990, chap. 1.
17 Brown, op. cit., 198.
18 Bellamy, op. cit., 39.
19 Lancaster himself was venerated as a saint: Office of St Thomas of Lancaster, Wright, op. cit., 268–72; Denholm-Young (ed.), Vita Edwardi Secundi, 1957, 125–27.
20 A scholar and a bibliophile, Tiptoft was much influenced in his interpretation of the law of treason by knowledge gained in Italy: Bellamy, op. cit., 160–62.
21 These trials are treated in Cameron: James V, 1998, chaps 9 and 8 respectively.
22 Book XII.
23 Opinions on Bower can be found, for example, in Morton: William Wallace Man and Myth, 2001, 22�
��24 and passim; Young, op. cit., chap. 1.
24 Young, ibid.
25 Reese, op. cit., 133: ‘It was not long before his countrymen came to realise that, in fact, he had been different, that both his resolution and sense of patriotism exceeded that of others.’ Wyntoun, whom Reese then quotes, wrote, of course, more than a century after Wallace’s death.
26 As in Young, chap. 1.
27 Most recently in Morton, above. Not to be neglected are: McDiarmid: ‘The Date of the Wallace’, SHR, xxxiv (April 1955), 26–31, and Blind Harry, Wallace, 2 vols, 1968–69; McDougall: James III A Political Study, 1982, 117ff and chap. 12.
28 Morton, op. cit., 43–45, summarizes some conclusions.
29 See n. 27 above.
30 McDougall, op. cit., passim.
31 Ibid.
32 Magnusson: Scotland: the Study of A Nation, 2000, 267.
33 McDougall, op. cit., 118ff.
34 For his role in the lynching of James III’s favourites at Lauder, 1582.
35 Magnusson, op. cit., 130 describes the work as ‘violent, gory, nationalistic, and profoundly xenophobic – a sustained and bitter polemic against the English’, words which might reasonably be applied to Braveheart.
36 If, as Harry says at one point, Wallace was forty-five at the time of his arrest, this would place his birth in 1260. Intriguingly, this appears to be the date on which Randall Wallace, author of the screenplay for Braveheart, relies.
37 Reese, op. cit., 111, finds an important role for Wallace at Roslin, although his presence there is no more a certainty than the existence of a battle at Biggar.
38 Above, p. ix.
39 Morton, op. cit., 144.
40 See n. 25, above.
41 That is, our limited knowledge can be checked against fact.
42 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 238, 246, etc; Barbour’s Bruce: 608ff.
43 King: Introducing William Wallace, 1997, 17.
44 Nicholson: Edward III and the Scots, 1965, 94.
45 Major, op. cit., 199.
46 Morton, op. cit., 41.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Wordsworth: Works, 1994, 635.
50 Tales of A Grandfather, chap. VII.
51 Morton, op. cit., 107.
52 Prestwich: Edward I, 567.
53 Barrow: Robert Bruce, 138.
Select Bibliography
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
We lack any contemporary Scottish accounts of the life of William Wallace. By far the best-known life is that by Henry the Minstrel or Blind Harry which, however prejudiced and inaccurate, carries on that adulatory attitude towards the Guardian which first appears in John of Fordun, who died about 1385, eighty years after Wallace’s execution. Fordun cannot wholly be discounted for he is the nearest source we have to Wallace’s own time, and it is not unreasonable to assume, therefore, that he had recourse to material which has since disappeared. Fordun in turn was drawn on by the likes of Andrew of Wyntoun, the author of a chronicle of about 1420, and Walter Bower, whose Scotichronicon was written twenty years after Wyntoun. Both Wyntoun and Bower, whose work was, essentially, an amplification of Fordun, shared the latter’s intention. They were concerned with politics and propaganda, with England the enemy as in Wallace’s own day. Some thirty years after Bower, Blind Harry produced his account, fiercely anti-English and, as shown by Mr M. McDiarmid, unreliable for the serious student of history. The impact of the book on the popular imagination, particularly in the version in modern English by William Hamilton of Gilberton, cannot be ignored and lasts to this day, however. John Major or Mair, who died in 1550, while not entirely free of the tradition to which his predecessors subscribed, looked more to the future than they, and saw the virtue, which they would have scorned, of an eventual union between Scotland and England.
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&nb
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