Читать книгу The Three Edwards: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 30

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The Scottish cause seemed hopeless. Their armies had dispersed and their leaders had sworn fealty to the conquering Edward. Their short-reigning and inglorious king had been deposed and was living abroad in exile. The Bruces, who were next in line for the succession, had thrown in with the English and were living on their English estates. Edward had placed his own garrisons in all the strong castles of Scotland and had appointed a group of hard-fisted officials to administer the country: John de Warenne as governor, Walter de Agmondesham as chancellor, William de Ormesby as justiciar, and Hugo de Cressingham as treasurer.

What the prostrate country north of the Tweed needed was a leader. When he came—and fortunately he appeared quickly—he was neither of the aristocracy nor of the people; he was from in between, the second son of a rather humble knight of Elderslie in Renfrew. His name was William Wallace and he was quite young when his rise to fame began; probably in his very early twenties, although there is much conjecture on this score, as there is indeed about almost everything that applies to the life of this remarkable man. He was, of course, a great fighting man and a born leader. The claymore (the dread two-edged broadsword of Scotland) became in his mighty hand a weapon to beat down antagonists and to shear through the strongest armor.

Years after his death an ancient lady, the widow of one of the lords of Erskine, who was living in the castle of Kinnoull, was visited by a later king of Scotland in search of information about Wallace. She had seen both Wallace and Bruce when she was a girl, she told the king. She affirmed without any hesitation that, although Robert the Bruce excelled most men in strength and skill with weapons, he was not to be compared with Wallace in either respect. In wrestling, she asserted, the knight from Elderslie could overcome several such as Bruce.

The answers she may have given to other questions have not been preserved, unfortunately, and so the chance to know Wallace as a man through the eyes of an acquaintance has been lost. Was he tall or short? Dark or fair? Was he handsome of mien? There is not a scrap of reliable evidence on any such points. It is believed, but largely because of his accomplishments, that he had the eye of a great leader; an eye that kindled in the threat of danger, that commanded loyalty, that shone like a beacon in the fury of battle; a cler aspre eyn, lik dyamondis brycht.

William Wallace has been a controversial figure for centuries. At first the long rhymed narrative of Henry the Minstrel, better known as Blind Harry (although now it is not even conceded that he was blind), was the chief source for the Wallace story. Blind Harry lived nearly two hundred years after the events of which he told. He made his living as a wandering minstrel, his stock in trade being a long narrative poem about Wallace, nearly twelve thousand lines in length, which he had written himself and committed to memory. For this epic effort he had drawn on the legends which were still in circulation in the country during his youth. Undoubtedly he had added to them and had depended on imagination whenever he deemed it necessary. The poem fortunately is still in existence, written in the Lothian dialect. Many editions of it have been printed. It has exceeded in sales all other publications in Scotland with the exception of the works of Bobby Burns and Sir Walter Scott. That Blind Harry lived the precarious life of a wandering minstrel is generally accepted, because in his old age he was granted a pension by James IV of eighteen shillings twice a year.

His version of the appearance of Wallace is summed up in one line, Proportionyt lang and favr was his wesage. He becomes rather more detailed as to the “wesage” by declaring, Bowand bron haryt, on browis and brois lycht, which means “wavy brown hair on brows and eyebrows light.”

Historians and antiquarians are disposed to accept little of the old minstrel’s story, knowing that so much of it is spurious; and that leaves them with the barest of bones from which to construct a figure of this heroic man. It is generally assumed that he was born at Elderslie near Ayr, that his father held his land of James the Steward, that his mother was a daughter of Sir Hugh Crawford, sheriff of Ayr. He had two brothers, Malcolm the elder, and John the younger. William is supposed to have gone with his mother at some crisis to find protection in the household of a powerful relative at Kilspindie in the Carse of Gowrie and to have completed his education, such as it was, at the seminary attached to the cathedral of Dundee. Blind Harry’s story that the boy stayed with an uncle in holy orders at Dunipace is not accepted now, which throws doubt on one of the most popular anecdotes: that he had one Latin verse dunned into his head by this uncle which went as follows:

My son, I tell thee soothfastlie,

No gift is like to libertie:

Then never live in slaverie.

There were countless valiant souls in Scotland not content to live in “slaverie” after Edward left the country, convinced that he had stamped out all resistance. They began to manifest themselves in Galloway, Ross, Argyll, and Aberdeenshire. In the spring of the year following Edward’s departure, a stout knight named Andrew de Moray led an outbreak which threatened to weaken the English hold on the north of Scotland.

Had the spirit of Wallace been less resolute, he might have been daunted by the strength with which the English held that part of the Upper Plain where so many hundreds of small streams feed the volume of the Clyde. A discerning eye on Tinto Top might see Dumbarton Castle and the castle at Ayr, swarming with English soldiery, and the town of Lanark, where one William de Heselrig held down all resistance with an iron hand. There was nothing here of the majestic aloofness and strength of the mountains in the Highlands, nothing but sloping plain and moor and a few hills which were rounded and accessible; no country, this, for the only type of warfare open to patriotic Scots, the kind that later would be called “guerrilla.” Nevertheless, Wallace soon became known as the daring leader of a small band of patriots who struck here and there at unexpected times, who appeared and disappeared and led the occupying forces a wild and unprofitable chase. His most spectacular feat was an attack with thirty men on the headquarters of Heselrig in Lanark, in which the English sheriff was killed. It was long believed that in retaliation the English destroyed the home of Wallace and killed his wife, whose maiden name was Marion Broadfute. Blind Henry was the sole authority for this anecdote. Wallace did kill William de Heselrig, but he did not possess a home and he was not married.

That Wallace quickly won a nationwide reputation is proof that he possessed a genius for warfare. He was not as favored as an earlier guerrilla fighter in the first stages of the French invasion of England to unseat the hated John, the colorful Willikin of the Weald. Willikin kept a large part of the French army in continuous alarm; but he had the dark, thick forests of the Weald into which he could disappear and from which he could emerge at the most unexpected times. Wallace was ringed about by the strongly held castles already mentioned and he operated in a country which was better suited to farming than to the strike-and-run-and-strike-again tactics of the guerrillas. As he lacked the thickets, deep gorges, and high wooded hills for concealment, it must have been that his safety was assured by the silent aid of the country folk. Even this would not have sufficed entirely, for the shepherd seldom left his sheep run and the farmer’s feet were chained to his tilled fields. There were many wandering friars in the Lowlands, particularly the Culdees, the Allies of God, who had left the monastic life of their round bare towers for a secular addiction to the care of the sick and the poor. These lowly friars, moving about so quietly, may have supplied the eyes for the irregular troops fighting so successfully under Wallace.

Wallace, for some such reason, seemed to have a charmed life. The alien governors of the country angrily demanded that an end be made to the raids of de Waleys, and word of his activities reached even to the ears of Edward, stalemated in an abortive campaign against the French in Flanders. It followed that when a few of the Scottish nobility decided the time was ripe to organize the forces of revolt, they turned to William Wallace as one of the leaders.