Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 60

In Sir Walter Scott’s house at Abbotsford, crammed with antiquarian memorabilia, there is a rather special chair. It was made from the wood of the rafters of a barn in Robroyston, a district at the northern rim of Glasgow, and presented to Scott in 1822. This barn, long since demolished, is said to have been the place where William Wallace was captured on 3 August 1305. A tall monument in the shape of a Celtic cross with a great sword embossed on the front was unveiled to mark the spot in 1900; it was restored in 1986, when new housing estates were extending the urban boundaries of Glasgow. It now stands islanded in oak trees beside a quiet stretch of the B812 from Robroyston to Lenzie.

What had Wallace been doing in the months before his capture? Documentary references to him at this time are scanty, but we can safely surmise that he lived an ever more desperate life on the run, perhaps with a handful of fellow-outlaws, a fugitive hiding in caves and forest fastnesses as the net closed in on him. Any resistance to English subjection was now over, and Wallace cannot have found many sympathisers who were willing to risk their lives to help him, however much they had admired his exploits in the past.

In the end, inevitably, he was captured; and, just as inevitably, his capture was effected not by a military action but by a fellow-Scot. Sir John Menteith has come down in history as an arch-traitor, the man who betrayed and delivered into his enemies’ hands the great war-hero who had led the Scots in their struggle for freedom and the restoration of their rightful king.

The circumstances of Wallace’s capture, like so much else, have been the subject of much embroidery, by folklore and by Blind Harry. Sir John Menteith was a member of the Stewart family, and uncle of the gallant Sir John Stewart who had died with his archers at the Battle of Falkirk. Like so many other Scottish knights he had fought for the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar in 1296 and been imprisoned for his pains, then earned his release by fighting for King Edward on the expedition to France in 1297. When he returned he had joined the Scottish cause, and by October 1301 he was described in English documents as ‘the king’s enemy’. Again, like so many other knights, he submitted to Edward in the surrender of February 1304, and as part of the king’s pardon he was appointed sheriff of Dumbarton and constable of Dumbarton Castle in March 1304.

Blind Harry, predictably, emphasises the presumed treachery: Menteith was a close personal friend of Wallace; Wallace was godfather to two of his children; Wallace trusted him completely; Wallace had no suspicions when another of Menteith’s nephews attached himself to Wallace’s dwindling band; Wallace was lured to Glasgow by the false promise of a meeting with Robert Bruce; and so on.

What is incontrovertible is that a payment of forty Scots merks was made to ‘a servant who spied out William Wallace’ (un vallet qui espia Will. le Waleys), along with a further payment of sixty merks ‘to be given to the others … who were at the taking of the said William, to be shared by them’. The ‘taking of William Wallace’ happened late on the evening of 3 August. Wallace was lurking in what is now Robroyston when he was surprised by Menteith’s men in an isolated building in the forest there. He was overpowered and taken to Dumbarton Castle in fetters. From Dumbarton he was conveyed under heavy escort, secretly and by night, south to Carlisle, where he was handed into the custody of Sir John de Segrave, a professional soldier who had recently been appointed Warden of Scotland south of the Forth.

From Carlisle Wallace was taken on a triumphal seventeen-day journey, his hands bound behind his back and his feet roped beneath his horse’s belly. In every town and village the local people turned out to stare and jeer at the shackled ogre who had plagued their king for so many years. The contemporary English Lanercost Chronicle was exultant:

The vilest doom is fittest for thys crimes,

Justice demands that thou shouldst die three times.

Thou pillager of many a sacred shrine,

Butcher of thousands, threefold death be thine!

So shall the English from thee gain relief,

Scotland! Be wise and choose a nobler chief.

When the procession reached London the throng was so great, apparently, that it could not reach the Tower, and Wallace was lodged overnight in the house of an alderman in Fenchurch Street. Next morning, 23 August, he was taken to Westminster Hall accompanied by a host of civic dignitaries and soldiers.

Westminster Hall is much the oldest surviving part of the Houses of Parliament, a vast, cavernous chamber which was the largest medieval hall in Europe when it was completed in 1099. In the early days it was used for state feasts and other great events – and for state trials. Sir Thomas More was tried and condemned here in 1535, Guy Fawkes in 1606 and, most famously of all, King Charles I in January 1649: a plaque set into the last step of the second flight of stone stairs at the south end of the hall commemorates that dramatic occasion, and draws the attention of every one of the thousands of visitors who flock into the Hall when Parliament is in recess.

Another plaque, made of brass, is set into the floor of the upper landing and commemorates the ‘trial’ of William Wallace. It was installed at the instigation of the Labour MP for Bothwell, John Robertson, and unveiled on 31 October 1924 (the idea came from some schoolchildren in his constituency whom he had been showing round Westminster). The inscription is now very worn and difficult to read, and most visitors to the Hall walk right over it or past it without noticing what it says:

Near this spot, at the Kings Bench at the South end of the Hall, took place the trial of Sir William Wallace the Scottish Patriot on Monday 23rd August 1305.

Today Westminster Hall has the feel of a mausoleum, a gigantic echoing cenotaph of memories; but when William Wallace appeared before the Court of King’s Bench, mockingly crowned with laurel leaves, the place would have been like a bear-pit. The judges sat at a table on the raised, south-east part of the hall. Below them the floor was crammed with noisy spectators, some of them perhaps seated in specially erected wooden stands. The magnificent hammer-beam roof would not be built for nearly another century, but it would have been an awe-inspiring place nonetheless.

‘Scottish Patriot’ is not a term which Wallace’s judges would have recognised; and ‘trial’ is not a term we would apply to the proceedings today. They consisted of a recital of the charges, immediate conviction and, inevitably, a sentence of death; no copy of the arraignment for the prisoner, no jury, no defence witnesses, no defence counsel even.

The commissioners appointed by King Edward to conduct the trial were Sir John de Segrave, Sir Peter Mallory (the Justiciar of England), Ralph de Sandwich (Constable of the Tower), John de Bacwell (a judge) and Sir John le Blound, or Blunt (Lord Mayor of London).

Mallory read out the long and sonorous indictment: William Wallace, ‘a Scot and of Scottish birth’, was charged with treason, murder, spoliation of property, robbery, arson, sacrilege and atrocities and ‘horrible enormities’ of every kind; he had driven out all the wardens and servants of the Lord King, he had convened Scottish parliaments, he had tried to persuade the Scottish nobles to submit to the lordship of the King of France and to help that king to destroy the realm of England.

The prisoner was not expected to plead. But according to an eyewitness at the trial, although Wallace may have acknowledged most of the crimes with which he was charged (they were public knowledge, after all), he denied that he was guilty of treason, on the irrefutable ground that he had never sworn personal allegiance or done homage to King Edward of England. The court’s argument was that John Balliol’s surrender of the kingdom of Scotland in 1296 had made all Scots automatically vassals of the English king, whether they had sworn personal oaths of fealty or not.

But argument was irrelevant. King Edward was determined to make a public example of Wallace, and to have him suffer the barbarously brutal execution meted out to traitors. Sir John de Segrave was given the honour of reading out the pre-ordained sentence – for Wallace to be hanged, drawn and quartered:

… That the said William, for the manifest sedition that he practised against the Lord King himself, by feloniously contriving and acting with a view to his death and to the abasement and subversion of his crown and royal dignity, by bearing a hostile banner against his liege lord in war to the death, shall be drawn from the Palace of Westminster to the Tower of London, and from the Tower to Aldgate, and so through the midst of the City to the Elms …

‘The Elms’ were at Smithfield, on the northern edge of the city as it was then.

As soon as sentence had been pronounced, Wallace was taken outside and stripped naked, then bound to a hurdle, face up, and thus dragged through the crowded, jeering streets at the tails of two horses. It was a hideous journey, an especially long, circuitous route of more than four miles in order to expose the prisoner to the maximum insult and indignity.

On the façade of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, facing the entrance to Smithfield Meat Market, is a handsome plaque which was unveiled in April 1956:

To the immortal memory of Sir William Wallace

Scottish patriot born at Elderslie Renfrewshire circa 1270 A.D. who from the year 1296 fought dauntlessly in defence of his country’s liberty and independence in the face of fearful odds and great hardship being eventually betrayed and captured brought to London and put to death near this spot on the 23rd August 1305

His example heroism and devotion inspired those who came after him to win victory from defeat and his memory remains for all time a source of pride honour and inspiration to his countrymen

On a railing below the plaque bouquets of flowers are usually to be seen. Here Wallace was led up onto ‘a gallows of unusual height, specially prepared for him’ (according to Matthew of Westminster, an onlooker, in his Flores Historiarium). And now the long-drawn-out execution began – the triple death over which the Lanercost chronicler had exulted.

First, ‘for the robberies, homicides and felonies he committed in the realm of England and in the land of Scotland’, as the death-sentence put it, Wallace was hanged by the neck to the very point of strangulation, before he was cut down, half-alive, from the gallows. After he had regained consciousness the torment continued. His genitals were cut off, and he was ‘drawn’, like a chicken: his intestines were pulled from his belly, then his lungs and liver and finally his heart, when the long agony would come to an end. His innards were then ceremonially burned by the executioner. That was the second death, ‘for the measureless turpitude of his deeds towards God and Holy Church’. Only then was his lifeless body decapitated, for his outlawry – the third death.

What remained of his body was now quartered – butchered into four parts – and the quarters were distributed to different parts of the country for exposure on gibbets in Newcastle upon Tyne, Berwick, Stirling and Perth ‘as a warning and a deterrent to all that pass by and behold them’. His head was placed on a spike and hoisted above London Bridge.

Through the very public humiliation of a traitor’s death, King Edward must have believed that he would not only exterminate his enemy but extirpate his very existence. He was to be disappointed, for in the event he achieved the very opposite – he created a martyr. Elspeth King says:

Edward was determined not to create a martyr, and that was why Wallace’s body had to be destroyed and dispersed; in order to destroy Wallace’s memory totally, Edward had to destroy Wallace’s body totally, to desecrate it and be utterly rid of it. There’s an exact parallel between that and the treatment of Joan of Arc a couple of centuries later, when she was literally destroyed by the English: her body was burned and the ashes cast away so that no trace of her might remain.

But because of the very savagery of the treatment which Edward meted out to Wallace, the people of Scotland wanted desperately to remember him. Officially, Wallace ceased to exist; he was completely written out of Scottish history by John Barbour in The Brus, his epic poem about Bruce which was commissioned by the Bruce dynasty in the 1370s [see Chapter 11]. It was not until Blind Harry in the 1470s, a century later, that the stories of Wallace were collected and written down as a quasi-historical epic.

These stories were part of what we can call a ‘people story’, because the people wanted to cling on to his memory, and the way of doing that was through personal, local remembrance in the areas in which Wallace had operated. That is why there are so many Wallace stones in Scotland, so many Wallace trees, so many Wallace wells – there is even a Wallace thumbprint on a rock on Bizzyberry Hill, near Biggar in Lanarkshire. The Irish have a word for this concept – dinnshenchas, the telling and constant retelling of stories around places, and the stories reinforce the identification of these geographical features. These stories grew in the telling; greater and greater deeds were ascribed to Wallace, as they are to heroic warriors all over the world.

Wallace the hero became the darling of nineteenth-century Scotland. In 1814 the eccentric Earl of Buchan erected a colossal pink-stone statue of him in the grounds of his home at Bemersyde, near Dryburgh.¹ The pinnacle of Wallace-worship was the erection in the 1860s of the Wallace Monument on the Abbey Craig by Stirling. There had been plans to build it on Glasgow Green, and Edinburgh had also expressed interest, but Stirling was selected as the most suitable ‘neutral’ ground between the two cities for this ‘material remembrance of Scotland’s independence and individuality’.¹

Today, more than ever, Wallace is popularly revered as the national hero of Scotland, the one man (unlike Robert Bruce) who never compromised with English tyranny. It is noteworthy that a 1996 film, The Bruce, made nothing like the impact of the earlier Braveheart: it was Braveheart, not The Bruce, which not only reflected but may well have influenced the growing popular movement for a separate Scottish Parliament. It can hardly be a coincidence that when the referendum which would ratify a new Scottish Parliament was held in 1997, the date chosen for the vote was 11 September – seven hundred years to the day since Wallace’s spectacular victory over the English army at Stirling Bridge on 11 September 1297.

1 Little is known about the bard ‘Blind Harry’, or ‘Harry the Minstrel’: his name may not have been Harry, and he may not even have been blind. He wrote for the court, and must have been a familiar figure to his audience; the historian John Major (or Mair), writing in 1518, said, ‘By recitation of [his works] in the presence of men of the highest rank, he procured, as he indeed deserved, food and raiment.’ He seems to have lived from around 1440 to about 1495; he was noted among the great Scottish ‘makars’ (poets) of the past by William Dunbar in his Lament for the Makars in 1505. The Wallace seems to have been composed in the late 1470s.

1 Hamilton’s version ‘poured a Scottish prejudice’ into the veins of Robert Burns and inspired his celebrated ‘Scots Wha Hae’ (Scots Who Have), subtitled ‘Robert Bruce’s address to his army before the Battle of Bannockburn’ – the Scottish equivalent of America’s ‘Battle-Hymn of the Republic’:

Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has often led,

Welcome to your gory bed,

Or to victorie …

Lay the proud usurpers low!

Tyrants fall in every foe!

Liberty’s in every blow!

Let us do or die!

1 Shallow, bowl-shaped drinking cups with two projections, or lugs, for handles.

1 There is little left today of Cambuskenneth Abbey, which lies a kilometre or so east of Stirling. It was an important Augustinian foundation, and Robert Bruce would use it as the venue for the parliament of 1326 which acknowledged his son (David II) as his heir; it also became the burial place, in the fifteenth century, of James III and his queen, Margrethe of Denmark. Today the only substantial survivor of the building is the thirteenth-century free-standing bell-tower, although the foundations of the abbey church can still be seen.

1 Bishop Lamberton would assist at Bruce’s coronation in 1306.

1 It stands, seven metres high on a bluff above the Tweed, frowning fiercely; on the plinth are carved the words ‘Great Patriot hero. Ill requited Chief. Sir Walter Scott utterly loathed this statue, and told James Hogg (the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’): ‘If I live to see the day when the men of Scotland, like the children of Israel, shall every day do that which is right in his own eyes (which I am certain either I or my immediate successors will see), I have settled in my mind long ago what I shall do first. I will go down and blow up the statue of Wallace with gunpowder. Yes, I will blow it up in such style that there will not be a fragment of it left: the horrible monster’ (James Hogg, Anecdotes of Sir W. Scott).

1 The Wallace Monument project in Stirling was inaugurated on a tidal wave of public enthusiasm at a gathering of thirteen thousand people in King’s Park, Stirling, in June 1856. The laying of the foundation stone five years later attracted a crowd of eighty thousand from all over Scotland. The building works led to prolonged acrimony and bickering, however, and the monument was eventually opened at a distinctly low-key ceremony in September 1869.