The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  She smiled and began to stack the platters from which we had eaten earlier. “Of course I like him. Why should I not?”

  I shrugged again. “You didn’t like me when first we met. What is so different about him?”

  She looked at me and laughed quietly, and my breast filled up with the familiar, comfortable warmth of the respect and esteem that I had always had for her. “Jamie Wallace,” she said teasingly, and I heard the fondness in her voice. “If I didna ken ye were a priest, I’d think ye were jealous o’ the man. But why should I no’ like him? My goodman loves him like a brother … and you do, too, forbye. With two such as you on his side, how could I be foolish enough to dislike him?” She tilted her head to one side, looking at me with sudden seriousness through narrowed eyes. “What’s wrong, Jamie? Ye have a strange look about you.”

  I shook my head again, but she was not about to be dismissed that easily. She stepped closer to me and lowered her voice. “Tell me.”

  I squirmed, and she reached out and plucked at my bearded chin, jerking it up so that I had to meet her eye. “Tell me,” she said again.

  “I think he’s here to take Will to war,” I said.

  “No. He’s here to try to tak’ Will to war. I have nae doubt o’ that, but he’ll ha’e nae joy there. Will winna go. He tell’t me that again last night, just afore you two arrived. He’ll play the general, he says, but he’ll no’ fight himsel’. He swore.”

  I found myself unable to look her in the eye, for Andrew Murray had been right: Will had said he would follow a worthwhile leader if Scotland could produce one. I turned and moved away to join the other two again, leaving her to her household tasks.

  From then on I sat and listened closely as Will Wallace and Andrew Murray drew up their dreams and schemes for Scotland’s future. Will’s championship of nameless, faceless folk did not surprise me at all, for he had lived his life among them and was deeply solicitous of their welfare. That he came of a knightly family was true, but he himself had had no training in the ways of chivalry and he had never considered any possibility of being raised to knighthood someday. I found it amazing, though, that Andrew Murray should be voicing such ideas, let alone championing them so enthusiastically, for his makeup contained nothing that anyone could describe as common stock. Nevertheless, he appeared to accept, willingly, that aligning himself at the head of his fellow Scots, in defence of their common interests, must entail the forfeiture of his vast English holdings and the revenues that flowed from them, and he dismissed the loss as insignificant.

  He stayed with us for three days, and I spent every moment I could find listening to their conversations. I was fascinated by the way their minds worked in concert. Every idea advanced by one or the other of them—and they appeared to feed off each other voraciously—generated a cascade of others, the way a smith’s hammer scatters sparks from a glowing iron bar. I listened admiringly as they discussed strategy and tactics in grand, sweeping terms, comparing possibilities of attack and manoeuvre in order to wring every advantage possible from the land itself in fighting and beating the English forces whose own disciplined formations might be—and would be, had these two anything to do with it—hampered and disadvantaged on mountainous or boggy Scots terrain.

  I listened open mouthed as my cousin expounded on current political and philosophical theories that I had not even known he knew about and with which I would never have guessed he might be familiar; yet there he was, stating strongly held and obviously long considered opinions on free will and the morality of restitution and atonement, citing Edward of England’s lack of contrition for his deliberate intent to usurp the throne of Scotland after undermining and destroying its rightful occupant. I sat awestruck as he demonstrated, using flawless logic, that the King of England’s behaviour was unconscionable and indefensible and that he was therefore morally unfit to function as a truly Christian king. I knew whence those ideas had come, for I had often heard them voiced by William Lamberton, who had absorbed them in his turn from John Duns during his visits with the scholar in Paris, but I had never suspected that Lamberton and Will had been spending the amount of time together that Will’s grasp of his subject indicated.

  Then, late one night, I listened to the two of them debate the propriety of the hit-and-run battle techniques advocated by Murray as opposed to the “honourable” and time-honoured system of chivalric warfare championed by Will. That confrontation, mild though it was, provided me with further cause to shake my head over the incongruities and contradictions of their alliance. Andrew, born to the nobility and to the strictures and traditions of chivalry and the feudal ways, and trained for years in the customs and the lore of the chivalric code, should have been the champion of the status quo in warfare, calling for things to be done as they had always been done and looking for ways to bring the Scots forces as close as might be feasible to parity with the English. Instead, he declared that to be impossible and committed himself to the idea of training his fighting men to use every possible advantage they could find in the terrain and the topography of the countryside to outwit, outmanoeuvre, and ultimately outfight and destroy the armies brought against them. He refused even to pay lip service to the old, “honourable” style of warfare, calling it suicidal and immoral. A man forced to fight, he said, should fight as though his life depended upon winning, because it did. Winning, he said—victory and survival—was the only measure of success in war. Everything else was failure since, even if it did not result in death, it involved defeat and the loss of liberty, which he maintained was worse than death.

  My cousin, on the other hand, argued strongly in favour of formal battle between ranked armies as the most legitimate and generally accepted means of resolving conflict. He ignored Murray’s immediate heaping of scorn on that notion, holding his peace as the other denounced the rampant folly of sending hundreds or even thousands of poorly trained and equipped men to die needlessly against superior formations when far more success could be achieved, at far less cost, by using much more versatile methods of isolating, stranding, and then defeating depleted enemy battalions. When his opponent fell silent, Will merely nodded and acknowledged that the other might be right, in fact, but from the viewpoint of political reality, he believed that was ultimately unimportant. His primary concern lay, he maintained, with legitimacy and the appearance of propriety. I blinked when I heard that, and for the first time in many hours of discussion I interjected.

  “Are you serious, Will? The appearance of propriety? What bearing does that have on throwing the English out of Scotland? Forgive me, but that strikes me as being the most mindless thing I have heard.”

  I thought he was going to give me the rough edge of his tongue, but then he twitched his shoulders in the beginnings of a shrug. “Mindless,” he said. “You think speaking of propriety is mindless? No, Jamie. Let me tell you what mindlessness is about. Mindlessness is the ability to accept things without thought simply because they are familiar. Mindlessness is the condition of going through life without ever questioning the right or wrong of general custom. It is seeing things that frequently are wrong in the moral sense and ignoring the wrongness purely because it has become so familiar that we are no longer aware of it—or because, were we to notice it and pay attention, we would be forced to do something to change it. That is mindlessness, Cousin.” He sucked at something caught in his teeth.

  “And then there is another kind of mindlessness,” he continued, “comparable perhaps, but different. The mindlessness of seeing something happen and being able to deny that it is happening—and not only that, but going ahead then and basing a set of expectations on that denial of what you actually saw.” He nodded in the direction of Andrew. “If our friend here will forgive me, I will point out to you that the group to which he belongs subscribes to that. A knight is not required to be literate or educated, except in the ways of war. The knightly code requires only adherence to the laws of chivalry. It makes no demands otherwise. It ignores logic, by and large,
and it expects no moral judgments. And yet judgments are made all the time, based on the expectations it engenders, irrespective of logic. Do you have any idea what I am talking about?”

  I shook my head, and he shook his in return, his mouth twisting downwards. “Aye. Well … What I am saying is that every ignorant, thick-skulled, witless bully capable of carrying a sword or swinging a club, be he knight, pikeman, or man-at-arms, will condemn us as brigands and barbarians for not fighting in accordance with their rules of combat.” He saw my lips quirk. “Don’t laugh! There is nothing even mildly amusing in what I am saying.” He paused, looking from Andrew to me and back to Andrew. “No matter how hard we fight in this struggle, no matter how many men we mobilize against them, no matter how long we fight against them or how many of them we kill, these people will afford us no legitimacy until we meet them face to face on the field of battle and defeat them according to the rules of chivalry.”

  “Thereby committing suicide,” Andrew added. “That is obscene, Will. We’ve been over this before. No army that Scotland can field would be equipped to defeat the English host in battle. We might as well lay down our weapons and surrender ourselves to them right now.”

  And so the argument began again.

  There is no defining military word for what Will was, or for what his methods were. In those days when he and Andrew Murray first took up the sword against the English, there was only one accepted way of waging war, and that was the way of chivalry, the way wars had been fought between Christian armies for hundreds of years. There were conventions to be observed therein and rules to be followed, and a battle—any battle—was as likely to be decided by negotiation and bargaining between leaders as it was by physical combat. All of which appeared highly civilized and carefully structured to avoid unnecessary killing, until the observer took note that the only people who ever benefited from these negotiations were the leaders from each side. The remainder of the people involved, probably ninety-nine out of every hundred people in the field, were unimportant and insignificant. There at the behest of their leaders and under pain of forfeiture and punishment should they refuse, they were expected to die happily should their leaders not be able to arrive at a satisfactory settlement of their troubles.

  Will and Andrew changed all that, although the doing of it all was far less simple than that plainly written statement suggests. For the first time, though, between the pair of them they raised an army of the common Scots folk led by men whose sole qualification for leadership was their ability as warriors and leaders. None of these new commanders were high born or titled or otherwise privileged, and none had anything to influence their conduct other than a will to defeat the English invaders. That, in turn, resulted in their having an unprecedented awareness of, and a dedication to, the welfare of the men who followed them and shared their dreams of victory.

  I know people today, less than thirty years later, who would dispute that loudly, pointing as evidence to the large number of magnates and high-born lords present at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. But that was later, and their support had materialized with painful slowness during the first long months of the “rebellious” activities of Wallace and Murray. Only when it had become undeniable that the entire populace of Scotland had come out in support of the two rebel leaders, and that no one could hope to stand against them, did the situation change, and then it changed radically, with a sudden and total shift of support among the nobility. In the beginning, though, in the months after I sat there and listened to them talk, there were only Wallace and Murray, two disdained and widely disparaged voices crying, like the Baptist, in the wilderness.

  The two men had not yet settled their differences by the time Andrew Murray left to return to the north, but they had arrived at an agreement. Will himself would not appear as a leader in the fighting. His oath to remain with his family precluded that. But otherwise he warranted that he would commit his full support, using his name, his influence, and his outlawed followers to raise the standard of resistance and rebellion in the south, should Andrew Murray ask it of him in the months ahead.

  And the months ahead were active months, since John de Warenne, the English Earl of Surrey whom Edward had appointed military governor of Scotland, seemed determined to pacify the whole country within the first few months of his tenure, sending out large bodies of English troops to patrol the entire land and stamp out any signs of rebellion before they could begin to flourish. Towards that goal, he also set out to reinforce and amplify the English garrisons in various strongholds throughout the land, and Lanark, the jurisdiction of the young sheriff I had met in Glasgow, was one such place. Spurred no doubt by his officious superior, William Hazelrig let it be known that he would not tolerate outlawry, in any sense, in his lands.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1

  At about the same time that Will and Andrew Murray were debating so earnestly with each other in Selkirk Forest, King Edward’s new treasurer for Scotland, Hugh Cressingham, began to assert his noxious presence more and more visibly. He treated Scotland as a conquered fiefdom, levying taxes here, there, and everywhere in order to pay for England’s foreign wars, and fomenting widespread anger and frustration with his highhanded arrogance. Encouraged perhaps by the overt signs of a widespread English military presence that would back him should the need ever arise, and recognizing that the international trade in wool was the economic engine that had made Scotland prosperous over the past hundred years, he imposed crippling taxes on the gathering, processing, and exporting of wool and thereby came nigh to killing the entire industry within his first year in office. Nurturing Scots trade was of no importance to him, but he smiled with satisfaction as he shipped off enormous sums of Scots money to fill his master’s coffers.

  Mirren’s father was one of the Scots merchants most direly affected by these outrageous taxes, because they obliterated his commercial enterprises almost overnight. Hugh Braidfoot had become a prosperous wool trader and broker and a wealthy, respected burgess of Lanark, where his enterprises were headquartered, but his eastern operations, all of them involving the warehousing of wool and its transportation from the eastern Scottish ports to the countries across the North Sea, were vulnerable to Cressingham’s most punitive taxes, and Braidfoot was rendered close to penury within months of the treasurer’s arrival in Scotland.

  However, Braidfoot was neither fool nor craven. He determined to fight what he saw as this Englishman’s fiduciary madness, and he set off for Berwick to confront the treasurer, making no secret of his purpose or of his anger and frustration. His intent was to present his case to Cressingham in person and to sue for some kind of reasonable accommodation, some compromise, that would permit him to remain active in his business affairs while continuing to generate taxable revenue in the years ahead.

  According to Cressingham and his staff, however, Master Braidfoot never arrived in Berwick, and an extensive search of the town and its environs failed to find anyone who had witnessed him entering the town, though many witnesses elsewhere attested to that having been his destination, and swore to have heard him say he had important business with Cressingham. Hugh Braidfoot vanished without trace on that journey, never to be seen or heard from again, and all his holdings became forfeit to the English administration for non-payment of taxes.

  Word of this iniquity was brought to us eventually in Glasgow by a monk from Jedburgh Abbey who had been sent specifically to inform Bishop Wishart of the merchant’s death and the storm of controversy that it had stirred up in and around Berwick. He arrived with his tidings in the middle of March, by which time Braidfoot had been missing for more than a month. The Bishop, not knowing if word of these events would have penetrated Selkirk Forest, dispatched me immediately to take the news to Will and Mirren. I rode my horse hard to get there before either of my friends heard the tidings from any other source, but by the time I arrived the word had flown ahead of me.

  Will saw at once that I was disappointed at having brought the ne
ws too late and tried to put me at my ease, but I could not be at ease until I had seen Mirren, to gauge with my own eyes how great a toll this occurrence had demanded of her, and to offer her any solace and comfort that I could, as former chaplain to her and her people. She had loved her father deeply, I knew, and would be in great need of support and sympathy, for he had earned her love throughout her life, constantly affording her his encouragement in everything she did.

  In the end, it was Mirren who ended up consoling me in my misery over having come so late, offering to pray with me before I ever got around to making the suggestion, and generally making me feel more at ease about her peace of mind.

  Already within months of completing her term, she was blithely certain that this time she was carrying a daughter, describing the child to me as a sweet little pippin who would act as a natural braking force upon her ebullient and irrepressible son, whom she was preparing for bed as we spoke. She had even named the child already, she told me, having dreamed of seeing her as a fully grown young woman, beautiful, elegant, and self-possessed. Her daughter would be called Eleanor, in honour of Mirren’s own heroine, the long-dead but greatly revered Duchess of Aquitaine, and Mirren’s mind was made up on the matter. Eleanor Wallace would be as strong a woman as the one after whom she would be named. I listened to her speaking of the child who would be, and I saw how steadfastly she held her own loss at bay, and my heart swelled up with pride and affection for her. Will truly had chosen a pearl beyond price, as the scriptures described.

  In the meantime, she said, she was preparing to go home to visit her mother in Lamington, but several matters involving Will had to be settled first, so they had not yet been able to set a departure date.