William Wallace

Sir William Wallace was a Scottish knight who led resistance to the English occupation of Scotland in the late 1290s. With Andrew Moray he won the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, governed Scotland for a time as Guardian, and was defeated at Falkirk the following year. Captured in 1305, he was executed in London, and his death turned him into the most famous figure of Scotland's wars of independence, though much of what is popularly believed about him comes from a poem written nearly two centuries later.

Almost nothing certain is known about Wallace's early life. He came from the lesser landholding nobility of south-west Scotland and was probably born around 1270. A seal attached to a letter of 1297 names his father as Alan Wallace, possibly the Ayrshire crown tenant of that name recorded in 1296. The long-standing tradition that he was the son of Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie in Renfrewshire derives from Blind Harry's poem The Wallace, written in the 1470s, and has no contemporary support; Elderslie and Ellerslie in Ayrshire both claim to be his birthplace. The surname itself meant "Welshman" or "foreigner" in Old English, perhaps referring to the old Cumbric-speaking Britons of the Clyde region.

Because he later commanded armies with some skill, historians have suggested he had earlier military experience, perhaps even as a paid soldier in Edward I's wars in Wales. His seal shows a bow, which may hint at service as an archer, but this is guesswork. Later chroniclers described him as a man of enormous size and strength, and Blind Harry made him seven feet tall, which is not to be taken literally.

Wallace grew up in a peaceful Kingdom of Scotland under Alexander III, whose death in a riding accident in 1286 left the throne to his young granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway. Her death in 1290 opened a succession dispute between thirteen claimants, the strongest of them John Balliol and Robert Bruce, grandfather of the later king. The Scottish nobles asked Edward I of England to arbitrate. He agreed on condition that the claimants recognise him as overlord, and in 1292 he chose Balliol.

Edward then treated Scotland as a dependent fief, hearing appeals against Balliol's judgements and demanding Scottish troops for his war with France. In 1295 the Scots made a defensive treaty with the Kingdom of France, the beginning of the "Auld Alliance". Edward responded in 1296 by invading, sacking Berwick and defeating the Scots at Dunbar. Balliol was forced to abdicate, English officials took over the government, and some 1,800 Scottish landholders swore homage to Edward.

The first act firmly attributed to Wallace is the killing of William de Heselrig, the English sheriff of Lanark, in May 1297. The later story that he did so to avenge the murder of his wife comes from Blind Harry and cannot be confirmed. Wallace joined William Douglas in a raid on the English justiciar at Scone, and kept up a guerrilla war after several Scottish nobles submitted to the English at Irvine in July. In the north, Andrew Moray led a separate and successful rising, and by early September the two men had joined forces.

On 11 September 1297 they met an English army under the Earl of Surrey at Stirling, where the road north crossed the River Forth by a narrow wooden bridge. The Scots waited on the high ground until part of the English force had crossed, then attacked it before the rest could follow, cutting the army in two. The English suffered a heavy defeat, and their treasurer in Scotland, Hugh de Cressingham, was among the dead. Moray was badly wounded and died some weeks later.

Wallace and Moray had already styled themselves leaders of the army of Scotland in the name of King John Balliol, and in their joint letter to the merchants of Lübeck and Hamburg they announced that the kingdom had been recovered from the English and was open to trade again. Wallace then led a destructive raid into Northumberland and Cumberland, and on his return was knighted and recognised as sole Guardian of the realm.

Edward I, back from Flanders, invaded Scotland in person in the summer of 1298 with a large army, many of them Welsh infantry. Wallace avoided battle at first, hoping hunger would force the English to withdraw, but on 22 July he was brought to fight near Falkirk. He drew up his spearmen in schiltrons, dense ring-shaped formations bristling with pikes, which resisted the English cavalry until archers and crossbowmen opened gaps in them. The Scottish army was broken and suffered heavy losses.

The defeat cost Wallace his authority. By the end of 1298 he had given up the guardianship, which passed jointly to Robert the Bruce, Earl of Carrick, and John Comyn. Wallace went abroad to seek help for the Scottish cause. A letter of Philip IV of France dated November 1300 asks his envoys at the papal court to support "our beloved William le Waleys", which suggests he planned to go to Rome, though whether he did is not known. By 1304 he was back in Scotland, fighting in minor actions while most of the Scottish leadership made terms with Edward.

Wallace was excluded from the peace that followed and Edward pursued him relentlessly. On 3 or 5 August 1305 (sources differ) he was seized at Robroyston, near Glasgow, by men of Sir John de Menteith, a Scottish lord in Edward's service, and taken south. At Westminster Hall in London he was tried for treason and for atrocities against civilians during his raids into England. He answered that he could not be a traitor because, unlike most Scottish leaders, he had never sworn allegiance to Edward. The verdict was never in doubt.

On 23 August 1305 he was dragged through the streets to Smithfield, hanged, cut down alive, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered. His head was set on London Bridge and the four parts of his body were displayed at Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth as a warning. The effect was the opposite of the one Edward intended. Within months Robert the Bruce had himself crowned king and renewed the war that ended with English recognition of Scottish independence in 1328.

Wallace's reputation was shaped above all by Blind Harry's long verse epic, which turned a capable but short-lived guerrilla leader into a national hero of superhuman strength and added much invented detail, including his wife Marion Braidfute. The poem was widely read in Scotland for centuries. Robert Burns invoked Wallace in "Scots Wha Hae" (1793), and Jane Porter and Walter Scott romanticised him in the nineteenth century. The National Wallace Monument near Stirling opened in 1869.

His fame grew again with the film Braveheart (1995), which brought him worldwide attention but took great liberties with history, placing him in a romance with Edward II's wife (who was a child in France at the time) and making him the father of Edward III. Historians today see him as a figure of real importance in a narrower way: a man of modest rank who kept Scottish resistance alive when the great nobles had submitted, and whose trial is sometimes cited as an early example of a prosecution for crimes against civilians in war. His story is part of the wider history of the United Kingdom and of the long rivalry between Scotland and the Kingdom of England.