Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 56

According to the annals of the time, William Wallace sprang on to the stage of history, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully-grown and fully-armed:

In [1297] the famous William Wallace, the hammer of the English, the son of the noble knight [Malcolm Wallace], raised his head … When Wallace was a young knight, he killed the sheriff of Lanark, an Englishman who was dexterous and powerful in the use of arms, in the town of Lanark. From that time therefore there gathered to his side [like a swarm of bees] all those who were bitter in their outlook and oppressed by the burden of servitude under the intolerable rule of English domination, and he was made their leader.

SCOTICHRONICON, BOOK 11, CHAPTER 28

William Wallace, in fact, belonged to one of the minor knightly families which made up the feudal following of the powerful Stewart family which had been granted the lands of modern Renfrewshire by King David I. The Wallaces seem to have come to Scotland with the Stewarts; the name ‘Wallace’ may be a corruption of ‘le Waleys’, suggesting that they could have come from the Welsh Marshes.

Little is known about William Wallace’s early life – even the date of his birth is uncertain. Most scholars now accept a date of around 1272, which would put him in his mid-twenties when he first ‘raised his head’ in 1297. The rest comes mainly from Blind Harry. According to him, William was the second son of a small landowner, Sir Malcolm Wallace ‘of Ellerslie’, but even that place-name is the subject of fierce debate: it could be the town of Elderslie near Paisley in Renfrewshire, or the obscure estate of Ellerslie/Elderslie near Kilmarnock in Ayrshire. Both lay claim to be the birthplace of Wallace, and there are numerous traditions and plaques and trees (both past and present) which purport to back them up.

Wallace seems to have fallen foul of the English regime early, according to Blind Harry. In Dundee he is said to have killed, in a street confrontation, a young man named Selby, the ‘overbearing’ son of the English constable of the castle there. He managed to make his escape from Dundee, but from then on he was an outlaw, a notorious fugitive with a reputation for lethal brawling. Later, when he was fishing on Irvine Water, he is said to have killed a couple of English soldiers who demanded that he give them his catch.

Blind Harry had many such tales to tell, of violent exploits and brutal encounters, of merciless killings and miraculous escapes. Many are commemorated in the names of woods and caves and other hideouts all across the south and west of Scotland.

To the English, Wallace was merely a brigand; but his brigandage appealed to a deep-seated Scottish resentment of English domination and of the obeisance of Scotland’s leaders to King Edward of England. Legends began to accrete around Wallace’s name, and his activities became synonymous with patriotism (not that the word ‘patriotism’ existed then). What was believed to drive him was a fierce love of liberty for his suffering country, an absolute dedication to the idea of independence for the Scottish nation. It was said that in his boyhood he had learned from his uncle, a priest in Dunipace, a Latin precept which inspired all his achievements: Dico tibi verum, libertas optima rerum (I tell you truly, liberty is the best of things).

Wallace was now a fully-fledged guerrilla (or terrorist, depending on your point of view), implacably dedicated to the destruction of the English troops who garrisoned Scotland’s towns and castles, with a formidable band of disciplined, battle-hardened followers at his back. He ranged the countryside with his men, murdering Englishmen at every opportunity, attacking and capturing castles apparently at will. He seems to have had all the attributes of a born leader: charisma, bravery, nerve, decisiveness, imagination, the ability to inspire men to follow him and a formidable physical presence. All the Scottish sources – including the immense dimensions of his reputed sword – attest to his exceptional strength and size. The Scotichronicon described him thus:

He was a tall man with the body of a giant, cheerful in appearance with agreeable features, broad-shouldered and big-boned, with belly in proportion and lengthy flanks, pleasing in appearance but with a wild look, broad in the hips, with strong arms and legs, a most spirited fighting-man, with all his limbs very strong and firm.

According to Blind Harry’s The Wallace he was all of seven feet tall (nine quarters of the Scots ell of thirty-seven inches):

IX quartaris large he was in length indeid.

Thryd part that length in schuldrys [shoulders] braid [broad]

was he.

The turning-point in Wallace’s spectacular career as a guerrilla fighter came, according to Blind Harry, after he had secretly married a beautiful young heiress named Marion Braidfoot, of Lanark. At the time, Lanark Castle was the seat of an English sheriff, Sir William Heselrig. One day in May 1297, when Wallace was paying a visit in disguise to his wife (who had recently given birth to a daughter), his presence in Lanark became known to the soldiery. He and his followers managed to make good their escape after a typically bloody fight, whereupon Heselrig exacted prompt retribution by having Marion seized and cruelly put to death.

In a murderous fury of grief Wallace struck back at once. That very night he and his men infiltrated the town in ones and twos, then formed up for a surprise attack on the sheriff’s residence. They burst into the castle, where Wallace slew Heselrig in his bed; when Heselrig’s son rushed to his father’s assistance Wallace killed him too, then he and his men went on a rampage of slaughter, cutting down every Englishmen in sight. William Wallace had ‘lifted his head’ with a vengeance.

News of the killing of William Heselrig and the massacre of his entire garrison sent shock-waves all the way to London. At Wallace’s arraignment there in 1305, amid all the general charges of murder, arson and sacrilege, the first specific indictment was that he had attacked, wounded and slain the Sheriff of Lanark ‘and, in contempt of the king, had cut the said Sheriff’s body in pieces’. In the English sources, the attack on Lanark Castle seems to have been regarded as the trigger for a general revolt against English domination.

Insurrection was now in the air. The ‘official’ rebellion, known today as the ‘aristocratic’ or ‘noble’ revolt, was being orchestrated by two former Guardians – James Stewart (the Steward) and the Bishop of Glasgow (Robert Wishart). Surprisingly, one of the magnates involved was Robert Bruce, the young Earl of Carrick, whose father’s request to King Edward had been so cuttingly snubbed (see Chapter 9). The ‘aristocratic’ revolt soon fizzled out, however, in humiliating circumstances: an English force led by Sir Henry Percy and Sir Robert Clifford crossed the border early in July and surrounded the confederation of rebellious nobles and their followers encamped at Irvine, on the Ayrshire coast. After lengthy negotiations the Scots surrendered without a fight on 7 July 1297, giving hostages for good behaviour on condition that they would not have to go to fight for Edward in France. Among those who renewed their pledges of loyalty to King Edward was Robert Bruce, the Earl of Carrick.

Much more significant was a rising in the north-east of Scotland. It was led by a young man named Andrew Murray (de Moray), son and heir of a leading baron of the Comyn family. Father and son had been captured at the Battle of Dunbar and imprisoned; Murray junior, however, escaped from Chester Castle and made his way back to his father’s castle at Avoch, in Ross-shire. In the summer of 1297 he was leading a Comyn rebellion in the north-east; one by one he captured the English-held castles in north-east Scotland – Urquhart, Inverness, Elgin and Banff – and soon he was in control of the whole of Moray and Aberdeenshire.

Wallace himself had not been idle. After a foray into the south-west of Scotland he moved north with a hand-picked body of cavalry to Scone, where the English Justiciar of Scotland, William Ormesby, was holding court and outlawing all those who would not take an oath of fealty. Ormesby’s troops melted away at Wallace’s approach; the Justiciar fled precipitately to Edinburgh to raise the alarm and thence to the safety of his estates in Northumberland. Scotland was now in a ferment. Bands of armed rebels roamed the countryside, and the English troops withdrew to their forts and castles in a virtual state of siege.

King Edward, still busy with preparations for his expedition to France, decreed that the rest of Scotland now had to be brought to heel; Wallace and his rebels had to be crushed and extirpated. He instructed his two lieutenants in Scotland, the veteran Earl of Surrey (the victor at Dunbar the previous year) and the Treasurer of Scotland, Hugh Cressingham, to raise an army from the north of England; they were to march north to give support to the key fortress in Scotland – Stirling – and to deal with Wallace, who was by now besieging another major English-held castle, at Dundee. With that, Edward set sail for France.

When news reached Wallace that a huge new English army was on the move north he broke off the siege of Dundee Castle and sent word to Andrew Murray in Inverness to come and join him. The rebel forces met up at Perth and together the two young generals led their troops to Stirling, there to await the inevitable confrontation with the approaching English army.