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A large oak-tree in the adjoining forest was long shown as marking the spot where Wallace slept before the battle, or, as others said, in which he hid himself after the defeat. Nearly forty years ago Grandpapa [i.e. Scott himself] saw some of its roots; but the body of the tree was even then entirely decayed, and there is not now, and has not been for many years, the least vestige of it to be seen.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VII

Oak wood has long been revered in Scotland as a potent symbol of strength, hardness and durability. Until two centuries ago there was a vast oak tree known as ‘Wallace’s Oak’ in the Torwood, a couple of miles north-west of Falkirk. In 1723 it was described as having a girth of thirty-six feet, still bearing leaves and acorns, and ‘ever excepted from cutting when the wood is sold’. Fifty years later its girth was measured as twenty-two feet at four feet above the ground by a John Walker, who observed that ‘whatever may be its age, it certainly has in its ruins the appearance of greater antiquity than what I have observed in any tree in Scotland … it has been immemorially held in veneration and is still viewed in that light.’ But, as Sir Walter Scott and others reported, by the end of the eighteenth century no trace of it remained, and efforts to pinpoint the exact site of the tree have been somewhat conjectural.

Tangible relics of ‘Wallace’s Oak’ remain, however. The great tree was ultimately, and literally, loved to death by souvenir hunters. In the 1790s a piece of it was made into a box by the goldsmiths of Edinburgh and presented to George Washington, first President of the United States, as ‘the Wallace of America’; this relic does not survive, alas – it was stolen in a stage-coach raid in the 1820s and never seen again. The last of the roots of the tree was excavated to make a snuff box which was presented to King George IV on the occasion of his celebrated Royal Visit to Edinburgh in 1822 (see Chapter 29). Numerous other presentation artefacts (such as mounted quaichs¹ and boxes) were made from the tree, including the frame around the portrait of the eleventh Earl of Buchan, the eccentric Scottish nobleman who erected a huge statue of Wallace on his land near Dryburgh in 1814 (see below). Like the acorns of Torwood, the legend of Wallace had taken root and was flourishing more strongly than ever five centuries after his death.

Unfortunately, there is a tantalising lack of hard evidence – contemporary sources, artefacts, even ‘relics’ – to match the legend, one way or another, and historians of the Wallace period usually have to fall back on a modicum of opinion, however well-informed, and conjecture.

The defeat at Falkirk presaged the end of Wallace’s brief period as the acknowledged leader of the Community of the Realm and the Scottish army; soon afterwards he resigned his position as Guardian of Scotland, and disappeared from all but a very few of the official records which have survived. No one can now be sure of the circumstances of his resignation. Did he jump, or was he pushed? Did he feel that he had lost the authority which only military success could bestow? Could he no longer stomach the jealous politicking of his noble rivals? For whatever reason, whether voluntarily or otherwise, within a few weeks of the battle Wallace had stepped down from his front-line position and dropped out of sight into comparative obscurity.

But it would be wrong to think that the man himself was now a spent force. Occasional written references, bolstered by persistent legend and folklore, suggest that, in the aftermath of defeat, Wallace still ranged the country with a hard core of surviving troops, inflicting whatever damage he could on the English garrisons left by King Edward to try to enforce his writ. When the king returned to England in October, after distributing among his own followers the estates and titles he deemed had been forfeited by Scottish nobles (including Robert Bruce), he left Scotland nominally under English control; but the control was more apparent than real – the English held and garrisoned the major castles in the southern half of Scotland, but north of the Forth their presence was negligible.

With Wallace gone from the inner circles of power, the leadership of the country was devolved to a series of Guardians working in tandem or troika: John Comyn (the ‘Red Comyn’, who had succeeded his father as Lord of Badenoch), Robert Bruce (the Earl of Carrick), Bishop William Lamberton of St Andrews and Sir Ingram de Umfraville. The resistance fight was carried on in a number of key areas, with considerable success, but none of the combinations of Guardians worked; the deep-seated rivalries between the Balliol/Comyn and the Bruce factions could not be resolved. In May 1301 a new sole Guardian would be appointed: Sir John de Soules, a veteran patriot and experienced diplomat from Liddesdale with a steady and neutral head on his shoulders. By that time William Wallace had embarked on a new phase of his single-minded pursuit of independence for Scotland and the restoration of King John Balliol to his rightful throne – as an ambassador on behalf of his country.

Ted Cowan says:

Wallace always claimed that he was fighting for King John Balliol, the man whom Edward I had selected to be king. He was absolutely unwavering in that. He never wanted to be king himself – that would have been completely unthinkable. In the summer of 1299 he was despatched to the Continent, to France, on a diplomatic embassy to try to persuade Philippe the Fair to honour the 1295 ‘Auld Alliance’ treaty and provide military support for the Scots against England. He was not very successful in that, but in the autumn of 1300 he was given a letter of introduction from Philippe to the Pope himself [Boniface VII], to try to persuade him to lean on the English to lay off the Scots. The future was now looking better for John Balliol. Edward had just released Balliol from captivity in England and handed him over to papal custody on the Continent, and there seems to have been a move by the papacy, at the turn of the century, to reinstate John Balliol as King of Scots. The restoration for which Wallace was working did not come about; but this, I believe, is when Robert Bruce said to himself, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this is where I should be making my own bid for the throne. We start now to plan an alternative strategy.’

That ‘alternative strategy’ was soon to become apparent. The ‘Scottish War’, as the English called it, was at a stalemate, despite sporadic attempts by King Edward to force the Scots into subjection. Furthermore, in the autumn of 1301 John Balliol was released from papal custody and returned to his ancestral estates in Picardy, in France. The return of Balliol to the throne now seemed much more than just a pipe-dream.

This must have looked deeply ominous to Robert Bruce: the restoration of Balliol (whom he had never recognised as King of Scots) would have meant a restoration of Comyn power in the land and the end of his own hopes to achieve the throne. In January 1302 he suddenly defected and went over to the English side. His submission was well received by King Edward, who was equally concerned about a possible return by John Balliol, and Bruce seems to have been given a promise – implicit, at least – that Edward would support him in his claim to the crown if Balliol were restored to the throne.

This was the start of the rot, one might say – the decay of Scotland’s resistance. It was largely due to the withdrawal of French and papal support for the Scottish cause. In July 1302, Philippe the Fair was shocked when his mighty army, the flower of French chivalry, was massacred at Courtrai, in Belgium, by a Flemish army of burghers who deployed their infantry in schiltrons, as Wallace had done at Falkirk, but with much greater success. From now on, Philippe was to have no time to spare for Scotland, and no stomach for supporting it: in May 1303 he signed a peace treaty with England from which, contrary to all his previous promises, Scotland was excluded. At the same time the Pope, who was now at loggerheads with France, was making friendly overtures to England, and in August 1302 sent a strongly-worded letter to the Scottish bishops, admonishing them and commanding them to make peace with King Edward. Scotland now stood alone, and Edward prepared carefully for an invasion in 1303 which would crush the Scots forever.

William Wallace was now back in Scotland, having returned from his abortive diplomatic missions abroad. There is no evidence that he mustered an army of any strength, although it appears that he took part in some engagements against the English – particularly, it is thought, a successful foray against an expeditionary English force at Roslin in February 1303. But when Edward himself arrived with the main army in May there was to be no respite for the Scots, no famous victories to halt the unstoppable advance of the English military machine. Castles and strongholds fell to Edward all over Scotland – apart from the pivotal fortress of Stirling Castle, which he bypassed on his inexorable way north by using three huge prefabricated pontoon bridges which had been brought to the Forth by an English fleet: he was keeping Stirling, that place of ill-omen for English arms, for a showpiece end to his conquest of Scotland.

Edward pushed northwards past Perth to Brechin, whose castle fell after a severe pounding, then on to Aberdeen and Banff on the Moray coast. At Kinloss Abbey he paused while his forces took Urquhart Castle and tightened the English grip on the north.

Resistance continued in the south, sporadically. The Red Comyn, who had conducted the defence against the invasion in his capacity as Guardian of Scotland (again), still had a small army in the field, and Wallace, it seems, exhorted and supported by the patriotic Bishop William Lamberton of St Andrews, was prominent in several unavailing guerrilla actions. But the Scottish cause was becoming more and more hopeless.

At the end of the summer campaigning, Edward did not return to England, but stayed for the winter at Dunfermline; he was determined to keep up the pressure on the Scots to submit to his authority. For the Scots, the idea of peace (or at least ‘returning to the king’s peace’, as Edward put it) was beginning to look a tempting option after the long and wearisome years of perpetual warfare. After much preliminary parleying and negotiation, the end came on 3 February 1304, when the Red Comyn surrendered on behalf of the Community of Scotland – but not unconditionally. The terms agreed by Edward showed unexpected forbearance: the leading magnates were allowed to retain their lands and positions in Scotland, with one or two token sentences of temporary exile, and some were even appointed sheriffs. Edward clearly felt that he needed the active support of the Scottish nobility in order to ensure acceptance of his government.

One member of the Scottish nobility seems to have been active on the English side throughout: Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick. His relations with King Edward, however, were wary at best. Then in March 1304 Brace’s position in life changed significantly: his father, Robert Bruce senior, the Lord of Annandale, died, and now the long-standing Bruce claim to the throne devolved directly on the Earl of Carrick, the new Lord of Annandale. This was to make Robert Brace’s position extraordinarily difficult.

As for William Wallace – King Edward’s mercy to the leaders of the Scots resistance stopped short at forgiving Wallace his past sins. There are some indications that Edward offered him some sort of guarantee that his life would be spared if he surrendered himself unconditionally to the king’s will but, if so, Wallace can only have refused. In March 1304 the king convened a parliament at St Andrews, at which 129 Scottish landowners took Edward as their liege lord, and a declaration of outlawry was passed on Wallace and his close comrade-at-arms Sir Simon Fraser. Two former Guardians – Sir John de Soules and Sir Ingram de Umfraville – were not to be granted letters of safe-conduct until Wallace surrendered (de Soules, unwavering in his patriotism, made no attempt to return from France, where he stayed until his death).

Now only Stirling Castle remained defiant, held by Sir William Oliphant in the name of King John Balliol – a forlorn cause if ever there was one. Edward made his preparations for the siege with meticulous care. He gathered a huge collection of siege engines and an impressive arsenal of lead, iron, crossbows and bolts, and took lodgings in the town from which the ladies of his court were able to watch the fun in safety. The siege began on 22 April 1304 and lasted for three months. Every day the mighty siege engines, led by a monster named Warwolf, battered at the castle walls. Lethal earthenware bombs of ‘Greek fire’ (sulphur and saltpetre, mixed with pitch and charcoal) showered down on the defenders. Despite all this formidable firepower, however, Stirling Castle was only surrendered, on 24 July, when the garrison ran out of food. Its leaders were publicly humiliated, but their lives were spared.

Before the end of the siege, Sir Simon Fraser put discretion before valour and submitted to King Edward; but at the same time, Robert Bruce was making a move in a very different direction. On 11 June, while he was a bystander at the siege, he slipped away to nearby Cambuskenneth Abbey¹ where he had a meeting with Bishop William Lamberton of St Andrews.¹ What they discussed can only be surmised; but at the end they signed a private bond in which they promised

that they should mutually help each other in all their several business and affairs and at all times and against all other persons whatever without any deceit, and that neither of them should undertake any important business without the other of them. They will mutually warn each other against any impending danger and do the best to avert the same from the other.

The document made no specific mention of Bruce’s claim to the throne, but commentators agree that this must have been the motive behind it.

King Edward knew nothing of this private treaty when he left Scotland in triumph in the summer of 1304, and Robert Bruce dutifully took part in Edward’s plans for a new administration for Scotland as a province of England. In September 1305 this would be formalised as an ‘Ordinance for Government of the land of Scotland’ – a new constitution, no less, with an English viceroy (Edward’s nephew, the Earl of Richmond), drawn up in consultation with a commission consisting of twenty English representatives and ten Scots.

One piece of important business had been left outstanding when King Edward left Scotland, however: the matter of William Wallace. On the very day after the showpiece siege of Stirling ended, Edward had ordered the people of Scotland, but especially Sir John Comyn, Sir Simon Fraser and others, ‘to exert themselves until twenty days after Christmas to capture Sir William Wallace and hand him over to the king, who will watch to see how each one conducts himself so that he can do most favour to whoever shall capture Wallace, with regard to exile or legal claims or expiation of past sins’.

Wallace was now clearly marked as Public Enemy Number 1, the object of an intensely personal and vindictive royal vendetta. In addition to the pressure he had put on Comyn and Fraser, King Edward suborned a number of other Scotsmen with tempting bribes. He also put a price of £100 on Wallace’s head. For Edward, Wallace symbolised the spirit of Scotland’s resistance which could only be finally broken if the Scots themselves turned in the already legendary folk-hero to face the king’s punishment.

William Wallace was now on his own, and his capture – and inevitable death – could only be a matter of time.