by Jack Whyte
The man who followed him out from the greenwood shortly afterwards, emerging, as some Englishman has written, like a bear from his forest den, was the William Wallace all men know today, Edward Plantagenet’s scowling, giant, merciless nemesis, and all England, along with much of Scotland, would regret his awakening. The laughing archer I had known was gone forever, obliterated in the destruction of his beloved Mirren and their children. The implacable avenger who came out of Selkirk Forest finally had set aside his long yew bow forever and taken up the massive sword his friend Shoomy had brought him in earlier, better days. I found it strange, thereafter, that the enormous sword, elaborately beautiful and lethal and taller than an ordinary man, should so completely usurp the place held for so long in Will’s life by his great yew bow, but as he himself pointed out afterwards, the bow lacked the close immediacy of a hand-held blade, and the sword he swung with his enormous archer’s muscles enabled him to smile more closely, face to face with every enemy he met.
As Will Wallace, he had promised his wife he would not fight against England and would look to his family’s safety first and above all. But he had failed her, he believed, losing her through his own carelessness and despite his knowledge of the dangers of being anywhere near the English. Now, he swore, he would not fail her memory, and his revenge would be without precedent and without equal; nor would he rest until all Scotland was scoured clean of the reek of English occupation. And so he marched to meet his destiny, and all the folk of Scotland flocked to follow him, to Stirling Bridge.
He never spoke Mirren’s name again.
GLOSSARY
aboon
above; over
aey
always; invariably
bairns
children
braw
fine, pretty, admirable
chiel
child, fellow
cowpin’
falling, tumbling
dae
do
’gin
if
girnin’
grimacing, weeping
jaloused
guessed, deduced
lintie
a linnet (songbird)
skelped
slapped
stirk
bullock, steer
Tearlaigh
Gaelic for Charles; pronounced “Chairly”
tha’e
those
tulzie
scrap, tussle, skirmish
wha
who
wheen
number; a few
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There is an astoundingly wonderful seafood restaurant called Keracher’s in Perth, Scotland, and whenever I think of my most recent trip there, in September 2008, I do so with reverential awe of the excellent cuisine—there is nothing better than Scottish cooking at its finest—and with gratitude for the hospitality tendered to me by the owners, Peter and Pam Keracher and their family. I spent a number of delightful evenings there in well-fed contentment during the latter weeks of my stay in Perth, just down the road from the Palace of Scone, contemplating the life of Sir William Wallace and the yet-unformed book I was to write, and wondering what I could ever find to say about him that would be as fresh and different as the extraordinary food I was enjoying.
By the time the Braveheart epic was released in 1995, serious Scottish historians and academics had been assiduously ignoring William Wallace for almost a hundred years, because, understandably enough, they had come to believe that it was impossible to differentiate between the man and the myth that had grown up around him in almost seven centuries. Emerging nationalism and romantic, wishful thinking had combined, over that time, to turn him into a chimera, an entity that has an existence of its own but was neither human nor supernatural. But with Braveheart came a renaissance of scholarly scrutiny of Sir William Wallace.
Professor Edward J. (Ted) Cowan is professor emeritus, formerly professor of Scottish history, at Glasgow University, and a couple of decades ago I had the pleasure of working with him a few times when he was professor of history and chair of Scottish studies at the University of Guelph, Ontario. In those days, we delivered a number of joint presentations (I believe the most accurate description would be entertainments) on the history of the Scots influence in Canada—Ted supplied the academic, historical realities, sweeping the gaping crowds up into his grasp in a way I have seldom seen equalled, and I illustrated his invocations with appropriate songs and poems to hammer home his various points. It was great fun and worked remarkably well, so Ted’s name was the first that sprang to mind when I began contemplating a research trip to Scotland in the autumn of 2008.
During one short visit that year, when I found him at Glasgow University’s Crichton Campus in Dumfries, Ted presented me with a treasure trove of stimuli in the form of an anthology called The Wallace Book, edited by him and published in 2007 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd. of Edinburgh. It’s a collection of twelve essays by leading historians and critics from Scotland and England, and the work is described on the cover as examining “what is known of [Wallace’s] career from contemporary sources, most of which, unusually for a national hero, were created by his enemies.”
I got lost in those essays, pragmatic and clinical as they are, because as I read them I found myself swimming in a flood of strikingly fresh ideas that swept me away into new realms of speculation and conjecture, which is food and drink to any historical novelist. And so I am greatly indebted to a number of very brilliant people, all of whom had me salivating for months over new possibilities, but none of whom should be held accountable for my perhaps egregious misinterpretation of what they wrote. For all those nudges towards novel interpretations, I am beholden to Fiona Watson, research fellow in history at the University of Dundee, for her incisive piece “Sir William Wallace: What We Do—And Don’t—Know”; Michael Prestwich, professor of medieval history at the University of Durham, for his English perspective on the Battle of Stirling Bridge;
A.A.M. Duncan, emeritus professor of Scottish history, University of Glasgow, for his biographical insights in “William, Son of Alan Wallace”; Elspeth King, director of the Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, for her observations on the material culture of William Wallace; Alexander Broadie, professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of Glasgow, for his fascinating thoughts on John Duns Scotus and the idea of independence; Alexander Grant, reader in medieval history at the University of Lancaster, for his essay “Bravehearts and Coronets: Images of William Wallace and the Scottish Nobility”; and, of course, to Professor Cowan himself, for his perspective on Wallace in “The Choice of the Estates.”
Those essays, and the imaginative flights they gave rise to, were delightful episodes in preparing the new book, but I should also pay tribute and offer thanks to several other sources of fundamental understanding and general appreciation of the history and the complexities of Scotland at the time I was writing about. Ted Cowan figures there again, with a book called For Freedom Alone, which examines the origins of the astonishing 1320 Declaration of Arbroath and the ideas from which it grew. G.W.S. Barrow’s book Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland has been invaluable to me, too, as has Peter Traquair’s panoramic study of the Scottish Wars of Independence, Freedom’s Sword. As the man said in 1066 and All That, “History is what you can remember.” Tongue in cheek as that is, it is nonetheless true, and I found all of the sources named above to have been both memorable and enjoyable.
There is, however, one more source of a lifetime of enjoyment and inspiration that I must acknowledge. Is there a literate Scot anywhere who has not been touched and influenced at one time or another by the writings of Nigel Tranter? It is one of the great regrets of my life that I never had the chance to meet the man and thank him for the uncountable hours of pleasure I have derived from his writings. I remember that when I first read his novel The Wallace many years ago, I was awestruck by the potency of his voice, an
d I truly think that has been a contributory factor in my decision to call this book A Tale of William Wallace.