Braveheart

by Wallace, Randall

  To the English generals, who sat upon their fine horses at the head of their polished army and looked across at the shattered remnants of William Wallace’s forces, the ceremony hardly seemed worth the wait. The Scots looked ragged and defeated. Even the Bruce did, sitting slouched in his saddle. The English commander turned to the general beside him and said, “I should have washed my ass this morning. It’s never been kissed by a king before.”

  Upon on the hill, Robert the Bruce looked down at the English generals, at their banners, their fine army.

  He looked back at the ranks of his own. He saw Hamish. Stephen. Old MacClannough—though he did not know him. He looked at the faces there in the line.

  Craig, among the other Scottish nobles mounted beside the Bruce, grew impatient. “Come,” he said, “let’s get it over with.”

  But the Bruce held something. Uncurling his fist, he looked at the thistle handkerchief that belonged to William Wallace.

  The other nobles reined their horses and started toward the English, but Robert looked up from the handkerchief to Hamish and Stephen, who had brought it to him, and were looking at him from the Scottish line even now, their eyes pleading for him to do what Wallace would have done.

  “Stop,” Robert said.

  He tucked the handkerchief safely behind his breastplate and turned to the Highlanders who lined the hilltop with him. He took a long deep breath and shouted, “You have bled with Wallace!” He slid his broadsword from its scabbard. “Now bled with me!”

  A cry rose from the Highlanders as from a tomb: “Wal-lace! Wal-lace! Wal-lace!” Louder, louder . . . “Wal-lace! WAL-LACE!”

  The chant built to a frenzy; it shook the ground. The Scottish nobles could scarcely believe it; the English were shocked even more.

  And Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland, spurred his horse into full gallop toward the English, and the Highlanders hurled their bodies down the hill, ready to run through hell itself . . .

  In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland, starving and outnumbered, charged the fields of Bannockburn. They fought like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom.

  Epilogue

  Edward the Longshanks died not long after the execution of William Wallace. He was buried as an exalted king within Westminster Abbey; he lies within a marble tomb behind iron gates to the left of the chancel.

  Edward II had a brief and sad reign. He was blamed by noble and commoner alike for the loss of Scotland and for other reverses of the kingdom’s fortunes. His wife opposed him in open rebellion; she escaped to France, recruited an army there in her homeland, and returned to England where she deposed her husband and had her son crowned in his stead. Edward II was privately executed by a method of torture that is unspeakable; his screams of agony, it is said, were heard for miles.

  Isabella, queen of England, had a son. The boy, who became Edward III, was nothing at all like the man who is listed in the royal registry as his father.

  And so we come to the end of my telling of the story of William Wallace. Whether I have told of him as he was or only as I wish him to have been, I cannot say.

  But as I write these final lines, I think back to the last time I visited the place of his execution. The section of the Tower of London where he was imprisoned is known to this day as the Wallace Tower, and a visitor can stand in Westminster Hall and look up at the same windows he stared at when they condemned him, but it is at Smithfield, a place of slaughterhouses even now, where I have felt most reminded of how he lived and how he died; and it was the last time I was there when I felt it the most.

  I had been there several times, always with others, but the last time, I went alone. I walked around the spot; a plaque hanging on an outer wall of Saint Bart’s Hospital marks the area and commemorates Wallace’s life as well as his death. There, too, is a small, ancient church, some of which was standing when William Wallace was put to death. On our first visit Smithfield, my wife and I, thinking of Wallace would likely have seen this church with his own eyes from the platform of his execution, entered the sanctuary; we found a beautiful, serene place, and there we stood in a majestic, beautiful, and tragic silence. On the day I last returned, I wanted to visit that sanctuary again to find a private place away from the crowded street, where people passed neither knowing or caring about the long-dead Scot remembered upon the plaque or the American who stopped before it, gazing up at it with tears in his eyes.

  The church was closed that day. So I stood in the arched shelter of its entryway, beside its graveyard. I had meant to pray inside the church, but where I now found myself seemed no less fine a place for prayer. So I thanked God for my family and friends and for my calling as a storyteller. And I thanked God for William Wallace.

  I wondered if William Wallace was just as grateful that I had come upon his story.

  And then something strange happened. I can’t say that I saw him; it may be an overstatement even to say that I felt his presence. But I felt . . . that I could talk to him there. And so I thanked him personally. I told him I had no idea if we were related by blood, but I had come to feel a kinship with him and felt that somehow I was meant to be there, seven hundred years after he was, to tell his story. I told him there were few promises that I could make him as to what would become of this telling of his tale, but I could make him the same one I had made to God and to myself: I would do my best to convey the truth as I saw it to those around me.

  Maybe all that happened that day was that I talked to myself. Maybe the gift of any great person is the power to make us converse with our own hearts. And maybe as I stood there, I stood there all alone.

  But when I walked away, I glanced one last time at the plaque. Someone had left flowers at its base. They were buttercups, and they were beautiful.