1
Edward J. Cowan
At Wallace name what Scottish blood
But boils up in a spring-tide flood!
Oft have our fearless fathers strode
By Wallace’ side,
Still pressed onward, red-wat shod [ankle deep in blood],
Or glorious dy’d.
Robert Burns
For 700 years William Wallace has been revered as the consummate, incomparable Scottish hero yet, remarkably for such a paragon, almost all that is known about him contemporaneously derives from enemy sources.1 In English accounts he was public enemy or thief, ‘a bloody man who was chief of brigands in Scotland’,2 but this was a man who was to initiate resistance against foreign occupation and who would lead the Scottish army to astonishing victory against the odds at Stirling Bridge. Following the battle, the supposed outlaw demonstrated his commercial acumen by informing German cities in the Hanseatic League that Scotland was once again open for business. As Guardian of the kingdom, he exhibited his not inconsiderable abilities in governance. It cannot be denied that bloodlust and hatred shaped his achievements as a warrior, but he was also a multilingual diplomat who was sent on embassies to France and Rome. In the anguish and painful hell of his brutal execution at Smithfield on 23 August 1305 he met his epiphany. Having lived, struggled and died, he entered the ranks of the immortals to become the stuff of legend and the greatest hero in all Scottish history.
The earliest Scottish narrative to cover the period of Wallace’s career was Gesta Annalia,3 incorporated in John of Fordun’s Latin Chronicle compiled around 1370. Therein William rose from his ‘den’ to slay the English sheriff of Lanark; although the nobility regarded him as lowborn his father rejoiced in a knighthood. The hero won the great battle at Stirling Bridge, occupied the north of England and returned to defeat at Falkirk.4 That disastrous outcome was allegedly attributable to none other than Robert Bruce, who attacked the Scots in the rear. ‘It is remarkable that we seldom read of the Scots being overcome by the English, unless through the envy of lords, or the treachery and defeat of the natives.’ It is also noteworthy that Fordun, who lived through the reign of Bruce’s son, David II, should have incorporated such a claim, which lost nothing through repetition from generation to generation, and which would become absolutely central to the entire Wallace debate. William chose to resign as Guardian, preferring ‘rather to serve with the crowd, than to be set over them to their ruin, and the grievous wasting of the people’. All Scotland, except Wallace, eventually submitted to Edward I.5 Surrendered, or as many insist, ‘betrayed’, by Sir John Menteith, he was taken south to be torn limb from limb. It has recently been perceptively and convincingly suggested that part of the motivation for Edward’s unseemly haste in the vicious despatch of Wallace was occasioned by the date, for 23 August was the eve of St Bartholomew’s Fair at Smithfield to which, in 1305, his execution was a spectacular, and doubtless welcome, curtain-raiser,6 made more poignant by the likelihood that St Bartholomew’s Church was probably the last thing he saw on this earth.
The first vernacular account of the hero’s exploits was presented in Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle of Scotland composed about 1420, in often tedious rhyming couplets. A run-in with the English led to the sheriff of Lanark killing Wallace’s ‘lemman’, or mistress, whose death was duly avenged by her lover who swiftly became leader of the resistance. As in Fordun’s account, he lost Falkirk through the treachery of Bruce and the Comyn faction. Supported by the leal commons of Scotland he had to live simply as an outlaw before his tragic end. According to Wyntoun, Wallace was worthy of a great book, a task for which he himself had neither the wit nor the leisure.7
The full-blown legend first appears in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, written in the 1440s, which describes him as a tall man with the body of a giant, pleasing in appearance but with a wild look, broad in the hips, with strong arms and legs, a most spirited fighting man. ‘God had distinguished him and his changing features with a certain good humour, had so blessed his words and deeds with a certain heavenly gift, that by his appearance alone he won over to himself the grace and favour of the hearts of all loyal Scots. And this is not surprising, for he was most liberal in his gifts, very fair in his judgments, most compassionate in comforting the sad, a most skilful counsellor, very patient when suffering, a distinguished speaker, who above all hunted down falsehood and deceit and detested treachery.’8 He was, in short, a man successful in everything.
After Stirling Bridge he brought the English to heel, mounting devastating raids on Northumbria. ‘Intoxicated by a stream of envy’, however, the great ones of the kingdom plotted against Wallace’s cause and the freedom of the country, although he retained the support of ‘the ordinary folk and populace’ and those nobles devoted to the public interest. Bower was emphatic that Wallace did not insinuate himself into a position of authority; rather (in a striking phrase) ‘by the choice of the estates, he was raised up to be ruler,eleccione statuum erigitur ad rectorem, after the previously nominated guardians had been removed’. Bower was of course guilty of anachronism in this passage since the idea of the Three Estates, which comprised the Scottish parliament, was familiar to the fifteenth century but unknown to the thirteenth, yet what he was suggesting was that Wallace was the only man who was acceptable across a broad range of the social spectrum. For those who did not support Wallace, Bower had nothing but contempt tinged with regret. ‘Why is covetous envy so much in control in Scotland?’ asked the chronicler. ‘How sad that it is natural for Scots to detest not only the happiness of other people, but also the happiness of their own countrymen.’9 Complicity between Bruce and the Comyns led to Scottish defeat at Falkirk, after which Wallace abdicated as Guardian, choosing to throw in his lot with the common people. He stood for the liberty of his kingdom and would obey none but the king of Scots or his lieutenant. Indeed, he always consistently claimed to be acting in the name of the deposed King John (Balliol 1292–95), ‘by God’s grace illustrious king of Scotland, by the consent of the community of the realm’. Wallace was a committed monarchist; radical although he undoubtedly was, by no stretch of the imagination could he be described as a democrat or a republican. It is, however, remarkable, as well as diagnostic, that Bower, who strove to produce the ‘page written in a firm fashion and unadorned, not bound with the knots of flowery eloquence’, should have abandoned his own rules and objectives when confronted by the towering figure of Wallace. The latter’s legend was as much a product of the chroniclers as it was of the poets. Three of the contributors to this volume explore the sources for Wallace’s career in great detail. Fiona Watson, who has studied this period in considerable depth, lays out what historically is actually known about the hero. Archie Duncan, who has pondered these matters much longer than anyone else in the volume, presents an important analysis of the few surviving documents with which Wallace had a personal connection. Alexander Grant minutely and revealingly explores Wallace’s career in a medieval context, while Michael Prestwich sagely examines Wallace’s greatest victory from an English perspective.
The Wallace story acquired as much obfuscation as it did elaboration with the appearance, around 1478, of Hary’s Wallace, pronounced by a recent editor ‘the greatest single work of imagination in early Scots poetry’.10 ‘Imagination’ is the key word here. Wallace as we now think of him is largely the creation of the writer popularly known as Blind Hary who, to judge from his colourful poetic descriptions, certainly did not suffer from lifelong blindness and whose first name may not even have been Hary. Furthermore, he purported to base his effusion upon a Latin work by Master Blair, a supposed contemporary of, and chaplain to, the hero, although in all probability neither Blair nor his book ever existed. Stirling Bridge does not occur until Book 7 of the twelve books that comprise the poem, the first six being occupied with various fights and battles with the English, climaxing in the slaughter of Wallace’s wife, said to have been a daughter of Hew Braidfute of Lamington in Lanarkshire. In general, Wallace’s activities were greatly elaborated by Hary, who also inserted additional battles (such as that at Biggar) for his hero to win, or English atrocities (such as the Barns of Ayr episode) for Wallace to revenge. Neither Hary nor any of the other medieval commentators made any bones about the fact that Wallace was utterly ruthless in his treatment of the English and recalcitrant Scots. No one pretended that he was other than a man of blood and, indeed, they were rather impressed by that side of his character. Felicity Riddy considers the poem in the context of, and as part of, late fifteenth-century Scottish medieval literary production, which manifests something of a renaissance, but she also asks why Hary’s work remained so central to the Scottish popular tradition for so long. A book about Wallace may not be the obvious place to expect a contribution on philosophy, but Alexander Broadie, with characteristic learning, explores the search for independence which tantalisingly, if tenuously, links the careers of Duns Scotus and Wallace.
The later fifteenth century was apparently a period when the search for heroes was widespread. In England William Caxton published Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485), a prose work that, notably in the extended passages about warfare, recalls The Wallace. Malory’s Blaise resembles Hary’s Blair. It is possible that Wallace was conceived, at least in part, as a sort of Scottish answer to Arthur. It is also of interest that the legend of William Tell was being concocted during the same decade in which Hary wrote. Scotland in the 1470s clearly needed a hero in common with other places in Europe. Hary obliged, placing not only his contemporaries, but posterity, in his debt. Many critics and pundits over the centuries have desperately, but erroneously, wanted to believe thatThe Wallacepreserves historically verifiable material. While he undoubtedly drew on traditional materials such as ballads and folk tales, Hary’s achievement was to create an unhistorical character who has survived intact into the twenty-first century as a man of destiny.
Meanwhile, historians continued to discover Wallace, his exploits inspiring even the least inspired of them to heights of rhetoric of which perhaps they did not suspect themselves to be capable. John Mair was a great admirer but because of his innate Latinate superiority and snobbery he was less enthusiastic about Henry the (blind) minstrel who, he claimed, ‘used to recite his tales in the households of nobles, and thereby got the food and clothing he deserved’. However, he regarded Wallace as wise, prudent and possessed of a loftiness of aim that allowed him to win over some of the nobility and gained the ‘universal acclamation of the common people’.11 George Buchanan, another great humanist, regarded Wallace as one who could be compared to the greatest leaders of antiquity. ‘In love of his country he was inferior to none of the most eminent ancient patriots, amid the general slavery he stood alone unsubdued and free, and neither could rewards induce, nor terrors force him to desert the public cause.’12 Writing his introduction to a version of The Wallace in 1594, Henrie Charteris denied that the story would simply stir up remembrance of ancient hostilities, protesting that he intended only to inspire all men ‘to the defence of their native realme and common welth’. He was impressed that God, in his wisdom, chose ‘ane man of simple blude’ rather than a prince or a nobleman for the task. He also attempted to turn Wallace into a protestant and Blair into a minister!13 In general there was in post-Reformation Scotland, at least of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a certain lack of interest in medieval Scotland because of its association with the papacy. Nor did Enlightenment historians detect much of value in the Middle Ages although William Robertson, Scotland’s greatest eighteenth-century historian, was somewhat smitten by Wallace, asserting that while his valour, integrity and wisdom were such as not to require ‘the heightenings of fiction’, yet the admiration of his countrymen ascribed many tales of his prowess.14 David Hume considered that his deeds had been much exaggerated but nonetheless conceded that with intrepidity and perseverance Wallace had defended the liberties of his native country against an oppressive enemy.15 In the view of John Hill Burton, Wallace was quite simply ‘a man of vast political and military genius’ but so profuse were the claims and descriptions of earlier romancers that ‘part of their eulogy has stuck to history’; like so many nineteenth-century writers, he set himself the task of separating fact from fable,16a pathway that several would follow in successive years, including A. F. Murison (1898) and James Fergusson (1938).
Hary’s poem was one of the first books, issued by Chepman and Myller, Scotland’s first printers, between 1508 and 1510. There were 23 editions of the poem before 1707 with a further 47 being produced in the period down to 1913 although that number could now be extended. The democratic predilections of the Scots are perhaps reflected in the fact that, during the period 1508–1800, there were 37 printings of Wallace compared with 12 of John Barbour’s The Bruce; twelve Wallaces appeared between 1700 and 1750, compared with one Bruce.17 It truly was the book, next to the Bible, most frequently found in Scottish households,18 reprinted at many of the major crisis points in Scottish history, such as the Reformation in 1560, the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the Covenanting Revolution in 1638, the Restoration in 1660, the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1689, the Union of 1707 and the Jacobite Rising in 1745. Wallace, the man and the book, was a crutch for which folk reached in times of uncertainty and strife. Copies sold far outnumbered those of The Bruce, upon which The Wallace was clearly in part modelled.
James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, first encountered The Wallace when he was eighteen although he regretted that it was not in prose, that everybody might have understood it.19 In fact, the problem of Hary’s language had been addressed by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, who produced at Glasgow in 1722 The Life and Heroic Actions of Sir William Wallace, a poetic modernisation of the text, ‘wherein the Old obsolete Words are rendered more Intelligible; and adapted to the understanding of such who have not leisure to study the Meaning and Import of such Phrases without the help of a Glossary’. This was the version that, famously and self-confessedly, ‘poured a Scottish prejudice’ into the veins of Robert Burns, which would ‘boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest’, sentiments expressed in the letter that contained the first version of ‘Scots Wha Hae’. Virtually every literate Scot was familiar with Blind Hary or a version of his work.
Many readers must have discovered Wallace through the medium of chapbooks, which sold in their hundreds of thousands, for the folk at large a source of information all too often ignored by scholars, who seem fixated upon manuscripts or expensive printed texts to which the public was hardly ever permitted access. It is instructive, in attempting to discern the flavour and tone of such chaps, to consider just one example from the extensive collection in Glasgow University Library, History of Sir William Wallace the Renowned Scottish Champion, printed in Glasgow (although undated) probably c. 1830; like the great majority of chapbooks, it attributes neither author nor publisher. This prose version is suitably patriotic in tone and makes no bones about English cruelty and oppression. So deeply inculcated was the feeling of national resentment generated by the invaders that it overcame the hero’s ‘scruples of a temper which was naturally humane’, a convenient way of excusing Wallace’s notorious, anglophobic bloodlust. As in some earlier accounts, the chap is almost two-thirds done before Wallace triumphs at Stirling Bridge.
The language does not exactly pander to the readership, for the text is liberally sprinkled with polysyllabic words that it is difficult to believe were in everyday use – insolence, contemptuous, facilitating, apprehension, sanguinary, and, ‘dastardly and perfidious barons’. Hary includes a fictional incident at the magnificently situated Dunnottar Castle, high above the sea, in which the defeated are described as follows:
Sum hang on craggis rycht dulfully to de,
Sum lap, sum fell, sum floteryt in the se,20
rendered by Hamilton:
Some hung on craigs, and loath were to die.
Some lap, some fell, some flutter’d in the sea.21
The Glasgow chapbook relates that some ‘threw themselves from the precipice into the sea, and swam along to the cliffs, where they hung like sea-fowl, screaming in vain for mercy and assistance’. The latter passage, which is borrowed from none other than Walter Scott,22 is certainly an improvement on the original, but whoever composed the chapbook was not wholly dependent upon ‘The Wizard of the North’.
An episode that Scott characteristically and completely ignored was the vexed question of how Wallace the great victor at Stirling Bridge could have been so overwhelmingly defeated at Falkirk. In describing the aftermath of the latter battle the chapbook is firmly in the medieval tradition:
The rout was now becoming universal, when Wallace, collecting the shattered remains of his forces, commenced a retreat across the Carron,—a movement which, by his precaution caused little loss.—Among those who most eagerly pressed on their rear was Bruce, who on this occasion had again leagued himself with the English. Exasperated at the sight of this selfish traitor, Wallace suddenly darted forward, and with his two-handed sword dealt him a blow, which, though it missed Bruce’s head, was yet aimed with such prodigious strength as to cleave his horse to the ground. With Sir Brian le Jay, a knight-templar of high military renown, the Scottish hero was more successful. With a single blow of his battleaxe he laid him dead in the midst of his followers.
Wallace now retreated across the Forth. But previous to this movement, and while wandering on the banks of the Carron, Wallace was recognised by the misguided Bruce, who descried him from the opposite bank, and, with the view perhaps of justifying his own dastardly conduct, ascribed to him ambitious motives, in his opposition to the English. ‘No’, said Wallace, ‘my thoughts never soared so high; I only mean to deliver my country from oppression and slavery, and to support a cause which you and others have abandoned. If you have but the heart, you may yet win a crown with glory, and wear it with justice. I can do neither: but will—live and die a free born subject’.23
In the nineteenth century the purchase of a chapbook containing such sentiments could be seen as a patriotic act, not to mention a reinforcement of political prejudice.
Walter Scott deplored the treatment of Wallace in Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810) – ‘It is not safe meddling with the hero of a country and of all others I cannot endure to see the character of Wallace frittered away to that of a fine gentleman’.24 It is a matter of mystery and regret that Scott almost totally neglected the whole period of the Wars of Independence in the vast corpus of his literary production. He deplored the mighty statue of Wallace erected in 1814 at Dryburgh by the eccentric eleventh Earl of Buchan and designed by a local self-taught sculptor, John Smith. Since Buchan was a great admirer of both the American and the French revolutions it is perhaps no coincidence that Wallace’s garb is somewhat reminiscent of that of old Gaul, thus further cementing the hero’s reputation as a pioneer of freedom. The impressive monument still stands, twenty-one and a half feet high, mounted on top of a hill above the Tweed and ‘frowning towards England’. The quotation on the plinth from James Thomson’sSeasons is the same as that which came into Burns’ mind when referring to Wallace in a letter to Anna Dunlop of 1786 – ‘Great Patriot hero! ill-requited Chief’.25 As James Coleman demonstrates in his stimulating contribution to this volume, the nineteenth century was to become the great age of monuments, that to Wallace being erected on Abbey Craig at Stirling between 1861 and 1869 on a site that, it was anticipated, would become a metaphor for Scotland itself, ‘a centre of Scottish nationality’.26 The monument movement also inspired a considerable amount of publication on Wallace, some of it helpful and much of it dire.
Lord Rosebery, statesman, imperialist, briefly Liberal Prime Minister (1894–95) and noted patriot, had a habit of publishing his after-dinner speeches and addresses. He once perceptively referred to ‘the class of minute archaeological historians who would find a savage, an almost devilish delight in winnowing the true from the false in the legends that surround Sir William Wallace, and in distinguishing all that is legendary from the few golden facts which remain’.27 In point of fact, much nineteenth-century writing on Wallace sought to prove the authenticity of Blind Hary; furthermore, a great deal of such biographical production was produced by people who would be best described as amateur historians, who sought to recover the ‘true’ history of Wallace’s career and who were severely critical of those writers who depended almost exclusively upon sources in Latin (as opposed to the vernacular of Hary), and who, even more deplorably, favoured evidence drawn mainly from the enemy.
John Donald Carrick was the first to produce a serious and extensive biography of Wallace. Born in Glasgow, Carrick (1787–1837) was himself a writer of broadsides who later became editor of the popular and much loved Whistle-binkie collections of Scottish songs and poetry.28 This self-appointed reclaimer of the folk-history of William Wallace, thus, at one level at least, had excellent credentials for the task: ‘we do not see that a great falsehood, told in the classical language of ancient Rome, should be entitled to a larger portion of public faith than a lesser one set forth in the more modern patois of Scotland’.29 In post-Ossianic Scotland there was a considerable body of opinion that had little doubt that the nation’s history was preserved intact by the vernacular voice. Carrick disapprovingly quotes Lord Hailes for describing Hary as ‘an author whom every historian copies, yet no historian but Sir Robert Sibbald will venture to quote’, a reference to Sibbald’s Relationes quaedam Arnaldi Blair, Monachi de Dunfermeleni, et Cappellani, D. Wiillelmi Wallas Militis (Edinburgh 1705), which consists largely of quotations from Fordun. Although Hailes, who has some claim to be regarded as Scotland’s first true medievalist, loftily dismisses Hary as ‘an author who either knew not history or who meant to falsify it’, he was nevertheless hugely impressed by Wallace. There is genuine pathos in his concluding statement on the Champion’s career:
Thus perished Wallace, whom Edward could never subdue. In his last moments, he asserted that independency which a whole nation had renounced. It is singular that Edward should have pardoned, favoured, and even trusted, the persons who had often made, and as often violated, their oaths of obedience; while the man who never acknowledged his sovereignty fell, the single victim of his resentment.30
Hailes’ insistence upon sound historical method did not blind him to patriotic heroism.
Several writers were to follow Carrick, whose book remained phenomenally popular throughout the century, in largely rehashing Hary. One such was James Paterson who in 1858 produced Wallace and His Times, later issued in a third edition as Wallace The Hero of Scotland (1881). Although critical of Carrick, Paterson shared the former’s contempt for supposed scholarly disparagement of the vulgar. Because Hary ‘became the instructor of the people in all that related to their much-venerated martyr to freedom, the learned must forsooth doubt the facts so patent to the unlettered’. Paterson was completely convinced of Hary’s accuracy, modestly suggesting that his own efforts might be regarded ‘somewhat in the light of a national service’, as he, ‘with fearless hand’, attempted to ‘transfuse the poetical narrative of the Minstrel into prose’.31
Also in 1858, Thomas Smith Hutcheson anonymously published his Life of Sir William Wallace or, Scotland Five Hundred Years Ago at Glasgow, a work inspired by the National Monument movement but which opens with a eulogy of the Barnweill Monument in Craigie parish, Ayr, built in 1855. The book was intended as ‘a faithful narrative, compiled from the highest authorities, and adapted for universal appreciation, being free from the many antiquarian references which encumber the greater portion of former biographies, [tending] greatly to distract the general reader’s attention’. Hutcheson was convinced that if all existing accounts of the hero were destroyed it may be said ‘of Wallace as of Burns that . . . a biography as complete as any extant could easily be written from the memories of his countrymen’. In his view Wallace was, quite simply and incontrovertibly, ‘the most perfect model of the Patriot Hero the world has ever beheld’.32 Hutcheson helpfully appended a Bibliotheca Wallasiana, which clearly demonstrates that between 1799 and 1858 the majority of Wallace items appeared as poetry, plays or fiction, suggesting perhaps that the Guardian was more of a literary than an historical phenomenon.
One other publication often overlooked or underrated was William Burns’ enjoyable, monument-inspired study of the Scottish War of Independence, which discussed Bruce as well as Wallace. He was motivated by comments on either side of the debate, ranging from those who thought no monument was necessary because Wallace already had, and would always have, ‘a monument in every Scottish heart, an altar at every Scottish hearth’; others regarded Wallace as ‘a mythical personage, not susceptible of identification’, like Arthur, Merlin or Odin, ‘of whom so much old romance, and modern nonsense had been uttered, that cautious people were apt to shun his name in history’.33 Burns was interested in how national distinctions evolved and in such questions as whether certain places were possessed of an historical atmosphere. For example, he wonders if there was some atmospheric connection in the west of Scotland between Wallace and the Covenanters. What made him hilariously apoplectic were the remarks on Scottish history by biased (and ignorant) English commentators. Almost worse were Scotland’s own historians with whom he engaged in almost equal measures of polemic to those lavished on wrong-headed English writers. Burns did not pretend to original research but did achieve a reasonably even-handed treatment of material available in print, at least until his rather overblown final chapter on the effects of the wars.
It is noteworthy that there was something of a flurry of activity in the production of literary Wallasiana around 1810. In that year Miss Holford’s Wallace; or, the Fight of Falkirk: a Metrical Romance went into a second edition. She may have had her English audience in mind in fixing upon one of the most dismal episodes in Wallace’s career, which was neither poetic nor romantic since, from their perspective, a victory over a warrior believed to be invincible was truly a triumph. The author at least displays the virtue of realising that Falkirk was not all down to Wallace as she provides pen portraits of other combatants on the Scottish side where, once again, aristocratic envy, particularly on the part of the dastardly John Comyn, contributes to the defeat. Wallace is introduced as being as patriotic as he is stoic, and we know that his unique qualities will enable him to survive the disaster at Falkirk just as they will strengthen him during the final horror at Smithfield, conveniently foreseen courtesy of the muse:
Oh, Wallace! Thy bold unruffled brow
Speaks the calm of a noble mind;
Thou hast drunk of the wave at the ebb and flow,
Thou stand’st like an oak, while tempests blow,
Unbent by the wavering wind!
’Mid the bursting flame, or the midnight flood,
’Mid horror’s wildest scene,
When the brooks of thy country are swollen with blood,
Unshaken, thy soul still holds her mood,
And thy brow is still serene!
In the heat of destruction’s fatal day
Thy cheek it wax’d not pale,
Though the soul of a friend still flitted away
On every passing gale;
Nor on their heads, how dear soe’er,
Dropp’d from thine eye one funeral tear,
Nor heav’d thy heart one farewell sigh,
As the soldier met his destiny;
Nor private joy nor grief he knows,
Whose bosom is fill’d with his country’s woes!34
1810 was also, of course, the year in which Jane Porter’s pioneering The Scottish Chiefs was published, an important contribution to the developing genre of the historical novel and four years ahead of Scott’s Waverley. That same year Lachlan Macquarie was settling in as Governor of New South Wales. On a visit to Tasmania in 1811, he dubbed a ‘wild romantic’ spot on the North Esk River, ‘Corri-Linn Cascade, so named by me in honor of the Patriot Chief of Scotland’.35 It may be thought that to invoke the freedom-loving Wallace in Van Diemen’s Land, the mainly white population of which consisted of convicts, was somewhat rash on the part of a crown servant. Corra Linn was where Wallace was hiding when he learned of the death of his wife in Chapter 4 ofThe Scottish Chiefs. Macquarie, however, was probably indebted to William Wordsworth rather than Jane Porter or Henry the Minstrel, specifically by his ‘Lines Composed at Cora Linn in Sight of Wallace’s Tower’, inspired by his visit to the Falls of Clyde with his sister Dorothy in 1803. Australia did not forget Wallace whose statue, endowed by Scottish miner James Russell Thomson of Airdrie who died in 1886, was erected in Ballarat Botanic Gardens. The statue, unveiled in 1889, was modelled on the physique of Donald Dinnie, ‘Scotland’s Greatest Athlete’, from Deeside, Aberdeenshire, who happened to be resident in Melbourne at that time.36 The inscription by Francis Lauderdale Adams:
O Wallace, peerless lover of thy land
We need thee still, thy moulding brain and hand.
For us, thy poor, again proud tyrants spurn,
The robber rich, a yet more hateful band37
represents grim verse that nonetheless has a particular resonance in view of the revolt at the Eureka Stockade in 1854, an iconic moment on the road to the Australian self-image of egalitarianism and an event that was ironically caused in part by the un-Wallace-like naked opportunism and greed of another Scot, David Armstrong.38
Wallace continued, and continues, to be much celebrated in verse. As well as Burns, Robert Southey, Robert Tannahill, John Jamieson and the indefatigable William McGonagall were moved by the muse, while modern poets still find Wallace an attractive theme. Perhaps inspired by Thomas Campbell’s ‘the sword that seemed fit for archangel to wield, / Was light in his terrible hand’, William Freeland produced the rather questionable The Sword of Wallace:
Great was the day that my maker dipped my steel in sacred fire,
And forged me with hammer and anvil that rang like a freeman’s lyre;
When my future chief stood o’er me and saw me tempered well
To the music of the Minstrel who gave me the battle-spell.
Ah! then I leapt into being in my glorious master’s hand,
And he whirled me aloft and kissed me and called me his holy brand.
Yea, holy I was, like Wallace, whose lofty and godlike mind
Dreamed ever with me of Freedom and the weal of kith and kind.
We loved each other like lovers, and living side by side,
He fondled me like a husband, I thrilled to him like a bride;
And often in secret he grasped me, and swore by the Holy Rood
To strike, not for England’s evil, but only for Scotland’s good.39
Freeland was the instigator and main inspiration behind the campaign that would result in the creation of the Chair of Scottish History and Literature at the University of Glasgow.40
Elspeth King has made extensive studies of the entire Wallace phenomenon, turning the Smith Gallery at Stirling into a moving shrine to the hero in the process.41 Here, she comprehensively surveys the material culture of Wallace, the majority of which she has been personally responsible for unearthing. That there was also an English cult of Wallace may surprise some, but Colin Kidd magisterially demonstrates its existence and the impact thereof upon the matter of nineteenth-century Britain. David Caldwell courageously scrutinises the Wallace Sword in search of imprinting by the hero to reach a judicious conclusion that is far from negative. Richard Finlay, the leading historian of twentieth-century Scotland, investigates the creation of a nationalist icon. Lizanne Henderson appends a select bibliography of Wallasiana, somewhat reduced for reasons of space. She gratefully acknowledges, as does the editor, the financial assistance of the University of Glasgow’s History department in the preparation of this bibliography.
W. Barrymore’s play, Wallace (1817), has the hero’s execution take place off stage while his wife runs around screaming as she supposedly observes him being hanged, drawn and quartered. Professor Robert Buchanan, later in the century, wrote plays that were not intended to be performed. His Wallace is led off to execution while Edward I remains behind, stunned and morally defeated, while the Scottish nobles are appropriately inspired to draw freedom’s sword.42 Another play that might be cited among literally dozens on the theme is Charles Waddie’s Wallace or The Battle of Stirling Bridge, which was written in the 1850s but which had still not found a producer by 1890. Couched in cod-Shakespearean blank verse, the play contrasts Wallace’s pure unselfish struggle for freedom with the self-interest and jealous disaffection of the Scottish aristocracy, one of whom describes the patriot’s campaign as a ‘servile rising’:
Our glorious freedom hath endured so long, –
From Fergus unto Alexander’s death;
That, like the channel of a mighty stream,
The disposition of the land is fixed
And moulded with the current of the wave.
Nor till as many generations pass
Of crouching slaves can nature be subdued.43
One of the most successful Wallace plays ever written was probably that by Sydney Goodsir Smith, first produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960, originating as a radio broadcast the previous year. At the stage production, in the trial scene, the exchange between Edward I and Wallace concerning the Stone of Scone brought a cheering audience to its feet. Wallace predicts that within a year a new king (meaning Bruce) will be inaugurated at Scone, to which Edward retorts that prophecy asserts that whoever sits on the stone shall rule the Scots and since it is now at Westminster that means himself. ‘The Stane ye hae / Is no the richt Stane, as weill ye ken’, cries Wallace; what the prediction actually states is that the Scots will rule where the stone is situated!44 Therefore, Scotland will ultimately triumph in London! The 1985 revival did not generate quite the same enthusiastic response, and the play, which contains some powerfully written passages, has certainly not been performed as often as it deserves. As one of the epigraphs to the text, Smith printed a brief quote from a leading article on the Nuremberg trials and executions that appeared in the Manchester Guardian, 16 October 1946, – ‘Could any Englishman doubt that justice was done, if brutally, when Wallace was executed?’
When Alexander Brunton of Inverkeithing printed a sixteenth-century English version of the Wallace story in 1881, he took the opportunity to include a few appendices designed to refute some of the more idiotic allegations (as he believed) of historians. Like Carrick and Paterson, he deplored the assertion of John Mair that Latin sources were preferable to vernacular accounts; like them, he thought that Hary’s version was superior to any other, challenging even the well-disposed Hutcheson for misrepresenting the poet. He refuted statements in a number of English sources on the grounds that ‘it is injudicious to expect a just and fair account of any man’s character from his enemies’. Brunton wrote as a sort of no-nonsense Scottish commercial man who measured, quantified and tested everything, distrustful of the academic approach of published historians and reliant upon his own common sense in the solution of historical problems. He was of a type that formed the backbone of Victorian Britain; his successors still feed the correspondence columns of The Herald and Scotsman newspapers, and historians, as well as Scotland as a whole, are the richer for their contributions, since Scottish history is much too important to be left to the historians.
Brunton’s approach is best brought out in his discussion of Stirling Bridge. He attempts to calculate how many English troops could have crossed the bridge on the basis of at least one chronicler’s assertion that two horsemen could ride side by side, a space that would permit three infantry to march abreast. He calculates that, marching at three miles an hour, 15,840 troops could have crossed per hour; however, since he believed the bridge to be twice as wide as reported, then he reckoned 31,680 per hour could have crossed and, potentially, even using the more conservative estimate, marching from earliest dawn until 11a.m., 102,960 could have reached the north end of the bridge!
He next tackles the matter of the flaying of Cressingham, an episode that had already caused Lord Hailes some amusement. Brunton points out that all the sources that mention the different variations of this atrocity are English and all disagree as to the articles manufactured out of the epidermis:
One says into ‘saddles’, another into ‘girths for horses’, a third ‘into a sword belt’, a fourth writer says that ‘they cut the skin into small fragments’, while a fifth writer declares that his skin ‘was converted into thongs’. If the skin was made into saddles, it could not be made into the four other articles. If it was cut into small fragments, how could it be converted into saddles and all the other things? If converted into girths for horse, all the rest cannot be true.
Furthermore, Brunton questions how many Scots would have been involved in flaying the victim since three or four persons could not work on the body at once. Why on earth would they wish to use such material when there were plenty of others, such as the hides of slaughtered horses, to hand? If they were busily pursuing the vanquished how could they stop to indulge in such a practice? How could fleeing Englishmen look behind them to see the atrocity in progress? The tanning and fitting of skin for manufacture is such a lengthy process that all Englishmen must have quit Scotland before it was completed. In short, the episode never happened.45 Brunton has plenty more to say but, most importantly, he provides English translations of a number of documents. He represents the type of Scot who, having supported and paid for the building of the National Monument, now demanded some ownership of Wallace’s history as well and who further democratised Scottish historiography in the process. In their story, the singer was almost as important as the song. Hary seemed as much one of themselves as Robert Burns, and what both poets offered was identity, recognition and pride in their own self-worth.
There is still some support for the view that Hary must preserve some genuine historical material, as indeed he probably does, but one person’s wheat is another’s chaff and separation is always extremely difficult where any source that was once in oral circulation is concerned. The ballads could be cited as a parallel. That said, it is surprising that hardly any ballads about the hero have survived, Gude Wallace being a rare example. Is it possible that Hary subverted the need for ballads by incorporating most of those that existed in his own day into his text? Many current historians (even one or two in this volume!) are reluctant to completely abandon Hary. The populist tradition survives in Braveheart, the movie the script of which Randall Wallace derived from Hary, via Hamilton of Gilbertfield. Hary is also the inspiration for most of the ‘historical’ material in James Mackay’s opportunistic William Wallace Braveheart (1995), which unconsciously demonstrates the worthlessness of such an approach. The modern folklore spawned by the movie is adequately, if inadvertently, indicated in Lin Anderson’s hopelessly overstated essay.46
What is striking is that for 700 years Scots have been discussing the Wallace phenomenon and the nature of commoners and kings, of virtue and nobility, of patriotism and commitment. It is a remarkable fact that almost every single commentator from the fourteenth century to the end of the nineteenth discusses a fictional meeting between Wallace and Bruce on opposite banks of the Carron following the defeat at Falkirk. Bruce supposedly asks Wallace why he defied the might of Edward I while rejecting the advice of the Scottish nobility, to be told:
When I saw my countrymen, through your inactivity, destitute of leaders, subjected by a barbarous enemy, not to slavery only, but to butchery, I pitied their situation, and undertook the cause you had deserted; and their liberty, fortune, and safety I will never forsake, till life leave me. You, to whom ignominious slavery with security is dearer than honourable liberty with danger, embrace the fortune you so much admire. I, in the country which I have so often defended, shall live free, or freely die; nor shall my affection leave me, but with my last breath.47
Each time this passage, or a version thereof, was scrutinised, in generation after generation, readers were privy to a confrontation between a kind of patriotic folk worth: honour and sacrifice on the one hand and, on the other, the quisling opportunism of the blood royal. Although the event was in no sense historical, it lingered in Scottish minds as one of the great legacies of the Wallace era, through time conveying assumptions that became virtually innate.
Yet it was probably all so different in Wallace’s own time when the Scottish nobility were no doubt just as suspicious of the hero as were the English. As I have previously suggested, readers of Sallust’s Jugurthine War might have recognised in the life and career of William Wallace certain echoes of the acts and deeds of Gaius Marius, the ‘man of the people’ of commoner birth, who mercilessly attacked the sloth, arrogance and love of luxury displayed by the Roman nobility. ‘Indomitable on the battlefield, he was frugal in his private life, proof against the temptation of passion and riches, and covetous only of glory.’ His aristocratic opponents distrusted and condemned him for his lack of pedigree and breeding, and thus he was judged by the very people who could comfortably rely on the protection of lineage, patronage and family if they made mistakes in the execution of office. Marius, however, depended on his own abilities rather than those of his ancestors, on experience rather than book-learning, convinced as he was that virtue, ‘the only thing that no man can give to another or receive from another’, was the only true nobility. He rose to the rank of consul before, as was inevitable, power utterly corrupted him.48 It is quite likely that Wallace was also a victim of similar prejudices which dictated that, according to the values and assumptions of his contemporaries, there was no way that the hero could ever have truly overcome his supposed humble birth and have been allowed to succeed; that far from being a hero he was an embarrassment, possibly even one that had to be removed before Robert Bruce could make his bid for the throne. In a world that believed in the Great Chain of Being, where everything had its natural place, Wallace’s actions threatened the very fabric of the cosmos. In another era he would have been accused of turning the world upside down. Too dangerous for his own time, he became the Scottish hero of all time, the humble Scot who would teach kings and nobles where their duty lay, while he himself would live free or freely die for the liberty of his nation.