8

The Material Culture of William Wallace

Elspeth King

When the long-anticipated Museum of Scotland opened its doors to the public on St Andrew’s Day 1998, the hero who saved Scotland from annihilation, who secured the great victory for Scotland at the Battle of Stirling Bridge and whose bravery had been an inspiration to generation after generation of patriotic Scots – not to mention those of other nationalities fighting for their own concept of freedom – was noticeably absent. William Wallace was nowhere featured in the displays of the new Museum of Scotland. Public anger was vented in the media, and the subject occupied the news and correspondence columns of Scottish newspapers for weeks on end. For many people, Wallace and Scotland were one and the same. Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham perhaps expressed this best when (in 1920) he wrote:

Wallace made Scotland. He is Scotland; he is the symbol of all that is best and purest and truest and most heroic in our national life. You cannot figure to yourself Scotland without Wallace. So long as grass grows green, or water runs, or whilst the mist curls through the corries of the hills, the name of Wallace will live.¹

In the public mind, Wallace and Scotland were synonymous. This had been strongly reinforced by a number of events in the previous three years. The film Braveheart was launched in 1995 and was an instant success, projecting the story of Wallace and the fight for Scottish independence into cinemas worldwide. It was entertaining, epic, inspirational and got Scottish matters discussed on a global level. At a national level, it reinforced interest in Scottish history and national identity. The Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth, took a particular interest, and on St Andrew’s Day 1996 the Stone of Destiny was returned to Scotland with great ceremony. Five months later, his government was voted out. On 11 September 1997, the 700th anniversary of Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge,² there was a resounding 74 per cent vote in favour of re-establishment of a Scottish parliament. Confidence in things Scottish was heady and high.

The first elections to the Scottish Parliament were planned for 1999, and when the Museum of Scotland opened in November 1998, there was an unarticulated assumption that Wallace, in one form or another, would be represented. In many other ways, the opening of the Museum of Scotland was a coming of age. The new building by Benson and Forsyth was stylish and well designed; it had its own main entrance, instead of being subsumed into that of the Royal Museum as originally planned, and the building made a distinctive but complementary statement in the surrounding cityscape. Fearing the contentious nature of the Wallace story, the curators and director had taken refuge in the Unionist cloak of a professorial triumvirate of historical advisers. Professors Michael Lynch, Christopher Smout and Tom Devine advised that since there were no ‘real’ artefacts associated with Wallace extant from the time of Wallace (c. 1270–1305) there was no need to deal with or even mention Wallace in the displays of the new museum.³

At the same time, the Museum of Scotland curators had created public-relations problems for themselves by abdicating their responsibility to interpret twentieth-century history. They invited various individuals to contribute a twentieth-century artefact that had had an impact on their lives and had significance in social terms. The combination of the absence of Wallace and the presence of a wide variety of twentieth-century consumer goods, many of them not Scottish, was explosive.

Many thought that the shadow had been cast by the contemporary ‘father’ of the Scottish Parliament, Donald Dewar, who had an infamous dislike for ‘nationalist shibboleths’. In the public mind, as expressed in letters to the press, there was a belief that there had been political intervention in the work of the museum. A correspondent in the Courier, one of the first to raise the question of the letter sent by Wallace and Murray to Lübeck in 1297, was displeased at the exclusion of Wallace and the inclusion of Tony Blair’s guitar. ‘There is a stench of politics here, and the naughty school boys responsible should be brought to the front of the class.’⁴ Other naughty boys, like Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, tried to have Wallace included by donating hisBraveheartposter to the museum. There was a gloomy acceptance on the part of some nationalists as to the political agenda at work in Scotland’s cultural affairs.

The learned professorial advisers were technically correct in maintaining that there were no artefacts or personalia of Wallace available for exhibition. Edward I did a very thorough job in 1305 in destroying his body and possessions. It was perhaps disingenuous to exclude him from the Museum of Scotland altogether on those grounds, although, interestingly enough, the entire output of the Scottish Historical Review pre-Braveheart is likewise an almost Wallace-free zone. The interest of the professional historian in Wallace is a relatively recent phenomenon.

An enterprising journalist claimed ‘discovery’ of the 1297 letter of Wallace and Murray to Lübeck and used it to discredit the stand that the Museum of Scotland had taken. As the Keeper of the Records made clear, the Lübeck letter had not been lost.⁵ However, sustained press excitement over the ‘discovery’ forced the museum to borrow the letter from the Lübeck archive for a temporary display, even although the museum director had made clear that objects, rather than archival material, were the museum’s main interest.

If there are no ‘authentic’ artefacts relating to Wallace, is there any point in discussing material culture in relation to him? Should every museum follow the example of the Museum of Scotland and ignore Wallace because there is nothing from his times? Will an exploration of Wallace-related objects serve any purpose amidst academic discourses that focus on the perceived negative effects of the Wallace story? In this chapter I want to look at the dichotomy of material culture and archive-based history and how the latter seeks to invalidate and eliminate the former. I also want to look at the source of material culture in relation to Wallace and the various classes of it – his body, his weapons, furniture, portraits, trees and natural features, the monuments that succeeded them, the domestic ornaments and tourist souvenirs, the artistic interpretations and the groups who continue to commemorate his name in the twenty-first century.

Museums are the repositories of material culture and, at present, Scottish museums are engaged in a fight for survival on every front – financial, cultural, intellectual. Seriously underfunded, and at a local government level competing within the arts, culture and sports sector for a share of shrinking resources, they are an optional facility. In contrast to the provision of library services, which is mandatory, no local authority is obliged to maintain a museum. A series of cultural commissions and a national audit of museums (2001) have failed to deliver any extra finance or even hope.

The plight of Scotland’s museums is not unconnected to the long-running academic discourses on the ‘manufacture’ of Scottish history, the making of Scottish heritage and the creation of cultural identity. There is no space to review the extensive literature on the subject here,⁶ but the thrust of it is that Scotland is swamped by histories and heritage presentations that are bogus and informed by myths that require to be deconstructed at length and debunked. Some of these discourses are simplistic and include a whole new mythology about Scotland having too many museums.⁷ Added to this is the sneering contempt of academics who characterise the commemoration of Wallace by others as ‘karaoke history’⁸ and parenthesise and belittle the studies of others as ‘Wallaciana’.⁹ The overall impression given is that the only acceptable ‘authentic’ history is written by historians working in universities and published in book form. The history presented in museums is of a lesser variety and not for those who wish to engage with it on a professional level. This is why the Museum of Scotland curators have advisers in academia to tell them that the history of Wallace can be omitted from the museum’s presentation. These advisers are the intellectual successors of Lord Hailes (1726–92), ‘the father of national history’ (according to Sir Walter Scott), who founded the discipline on the study of documents. Two hundred years after his death, his successors, when discussing the future, were still claiming that ‘there was so much myth and ignorance about the Scottish past that careful archive-based empiricism probably had to be the sine qua non of any mature development of the subject’.¹⁰ This was at a time when the Museum of Scotland’s future was by no means assured. Material culture has always been irrelevant to the document-obsessed professional Scottish historian and, in view of the many assertions about the illiteracy of the Scottish people at every level of society over the last millennium, it is interesting to reflect on the reality these document-focused histories claim to portray.

The present-day process of discrediting historical artefacts ‘expertly revealed as inauthentic’ by the modern discipline of history is well illustrated by the sidelining of the Borestone on the National Trust for Scotland’s property at Bannockburn and its replacement by an historical interpretation that ends with the Union of the Crowns. Thus, ‘history prevails over myth’.¹¹ Although Bannockburn was a major battle, with heavy casualties and losses on the English side, virtually no finds are extant. Some pointed stakes, excavated in 1922 from one of the camouflaged pits on the battlefield area¹² and owned by the Stirling Smith Museum, were proved by ‘experts’ to be tree roots and therefore not authentic.¹³ Another myth debunked, and another museum discredited, and all on national television. The debunkers are not new on the scene. Writing in the Stirling Observer in 1887, a commentator urged:

It is high time that we Scots should acquaint ourselves and make our bairns acquainted with all about Bannockburn. All the more so, should we ever fall under the pawky regime of a London Education Board. Nothing is more likely than in the school histories it sanctions, Wallace and Bruce will be turned into rogues or myths, and discreetly left out or thrown into the shade.¹⁴

So prescient a writer should have been aware of the parcel-of-rogues factor in Scottish history and have anticipated that we would one day have many historians and archaeologists working within Scotland and willing to traduce Wallace and Bruce without leaving it to Londoners. After decades of silence on the subject, it now seems that any study of Wallace in particular has to be prefaced with caveats about the lack of authentic source material, condemnation of ‘Braveheart Blunders’ and a thorough discrediting of Blind Hary’s Wallace.

BLIND HARY’S WALLACE

As much of the rich material culture relating to Wallace is inspired by Blind Hary’s work, it is appropriate to briefly summarise the circumstances of its composition and publication, and to assess its value. We owe its survival to a single manuscript copied by John Ramsay in 1488 from an original that its modern editor, Matthew McDiarmid, using internal textual evidence, has dated to 1478. It was one of the first printed books in Scotland and was continuously in print until the eighteenth century. In 1722 it was translated into modern English by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (c. 1665–1751). This translation went through many editions and was a source of inspiration to Burns, Wordsworth, Southey, Thomson and Byron, to name but a few writers. Randall Wallace, who used it as a source for the novel and film Braveheart, thought that if Blind Hary was ‘making it all up, he was a more inventive writer than Shakespeare’, echoing Matthew McDiarmid’s estimation¹⁵ that ‘if we are to look for a parallel to Hary’s dramatic creation we must look forward to the tragic figures of the Elizabethan stage’.

Blind Hary’s great epic poem on Wallace is the longest work in medieval Scots, with 11,877 stanzas divided into twelve books. It is exciting, entertaining, inspirational and touches every aspect of the human condition. It is a great work of literature, geography and history, drawing strongly on very specific local traditions. These localities are so tied to the landscape of Scotland that no fewer than 83 Wallace place names can still be found on modern Ordnance Survey maps. No other Scottish historical figure is embedded in the landscape in the way that William Wallace is. It is my belief that the story of Wallace was kept alive through people associating his deeds with geographical features, trees and woods to compensate for the historical deficit, the absence of Wallace from the official historical record, and that Blind Hary’s work is a reflection of this rather than an invention.¹⁶

For a major work of national literature, Blind Hary’s poem has remained relatively unknown in the past hundred years. The work was not recognised when it appeared in the form of the Braveheart film in 1995; there is still a widespread belief that Braveheart is ‘Hollywood history’ and owes nothing to Hary’s medieval epic. An accessible edition of the medieval text was produced only in 2003,¹⁷ and even in 1997, the anniversary year of the battle of Stirling Bridge, it was thought that there would be no market for such a publication.

In spite of the public’s neglect of Blind Hary’s Wallace, its text has been the subject of forensic scrutiny and has been found wanting by the majority of Scottish historians, past and present. There is a veritable Greek chorus of condemnation of every aspect of the work: it is unreliable, full of error and exaggeration, anti-English, and so worthless in historical terms that it is pointless to even investigate the identity of the author. To this has been added the anachronistic charge of plagiarism and the oft-repeated suggestion that it was written for the political purposes of the Duke of Albany, brother of James III, to create an anti-English climate and undermine royal policy.¹⁸ How this was to be achieved in a pre-printing-press era and with a less than literate population has yet to be answered.

To dismiss the work wholesale is both to misunderstand its nature as a gathering-in of Wallace stories that are place-specific and to overlook the truths that it contains. Blind Hary claims that his work is based on a Latin book commissioned by Bishop William Sinclair to send to the Pope to appraise him of the truth.¹⁹ Most critics have identified the Latin book as a literary device, but in a country where major manuscripts have survived by chance rather than design, it is premature to dismiss it as fiction. William Sinclair (died 1337) is certainly very real. His defaced tomb effigy survives in Dunkeld Cathedral. Elected to the bishopric of Dunkeld in 1309, he had a three-year fight for his see at the papal court against an English incumbent.²⁰ He personally took up arms to repel an English invasion of the coast of Fife in 1317 and was referred to by Robert Bruce as ‘my bishop’,²¹ such was his patriotism and loyalty. Commissioning a piece on Wallace as part of the war of words that was being waged between Scotland and England at the papal court would have been in keeping. The cause in which it might have been done is not hard to find. Bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow (c.1240–1316), captured by the English in 1306, had been the first to challenge Edward I, face to face, in 1291. Wyntoun has him address Edward in these terms:

‘Excellent prince,’ he said, ‘and king,

Ye ask ws ane vnlefull thing

That is superiorite;

We ken rycht noucht quhat that suld be,

That is to say, of our kinrik,

The quhilk is in all fredome like

Till ony realme that is mast fre

In till all the Cristianite,

Wnder the sone is na kingdome,

Than is Scotland, of mare fredome.

Off Scotland our king held ever his stait

Off God him self immediat

And of nane other meyne personne.

Thare is nane erdly king with crovne,

That ourelard till oure king suld be

In till superiorite.’²²

The English were in no doubt that Wishart, who had given full support to Wallace, was the source of the trouble in Scotland. The case was stated boldly in a letter of rebuke from Pope Boniface VIII in 1302:

I have heard with astonishment that you, as a rock of offence and a stone of stumbling, have been the prime instigator and promoter of the fatal disputes which prevail between the Scottish nation and Edward, King of England, my dearly beloved son in Christ, to the displeasing of the divine majesty and to the hazard of your own honour and salvation . . . It befits you to repent . . . to strive to obtain forgiveness.²³

Wishart was a pragmatic patriot who broke no fewer than six oaths of fealty to Edward I. After his capture, he was transferred as far south as possible, to Porchester Castle, and Edward II wrote in strong terms to Pope Clement V ‘concerning the horrible crimes of the Bishop of Glasgow’.²⁴

Only fragments of the special pleading that went on between Scotland and England have survived, but bearing in mind the demonisation of Wallace by the English, it is not unlikely that a cleric like Sinclair might have commissioned a defence of Wallace by way of supporting the cause of a fellow bishop. Wishart, Glasgow’s longest-serving bishop, Guardian of the Realm, defender of the rights of the Scots, the man who absolved Bruce for murder and aided his coronation, is one of the great patriots of Scotland. After Bannockburn, his release was secured in exchange for the Earl of Hereford. His damaged tomb effigy lies in anonymity in Glasgow Cathedral,²⁵ and its contents were desecrated by the youthful Archibald McLellan (1795–1854) who grew up to demolish the western towers of the Cathedral by way of ‘improvement’ and to bequeath an art collection that was the foundation of the Glasgow Art Galleries.²⁶

According to Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.’ Similarly, people can also elect to choose their cultural heritage, as in the case of Glasgow, trampling upon and destroying the past to embrace and sustain a purchased culture of European art. Yet when an attempt is made to investigate and creatively interpret that past, it is regarded as dishonest fabrication. Even the Victorian interpretation of it is untouchable. The large painting on leather by Thomas Dudgeon, illustrating Wallace’s battle of the Bell o’ the Brae, which hung above the doorway of Provand’s Lordship, c. 1840–1900,²⁷ to remind Glaswegians of the Wallace connection, has remained untreated and in museum storage throughout the twentieth century.

There is likewise an Establishment agreement to discredit or ignore Blind Hary’s work. This is why the sculptor Alexander Stoddart elected to create a portrait of Hary,²⁸ throwing the challenge ‘Quham “thowis” thow, Scot?’ (‘Who is it that you are speaking of in the familiar, Scot?’) to his countrymen, demanding that we study and respect his work. It seems that this will never come easily.

PERSONAL OBJECTS RELATING TO WILLIAM WALLACE

Tombs and burial sites were the focal points for the development of the cults of saints and associated pilgrimages in the Middle Ages. As part of the desire to discredit, destroy and eliminate the memory of Wallace, the English took care to dishonour and destroy his body, using the parts by way of example to terrorise any like-minded people. A couple of generations later, they burned Joan of Arc, for the same reason. Local stories in Aberdeen persist about one of Wallace’s arms being buried there.²⁹ A cross on the perimeter wall of St Machar’s Cathedral is said to memorialise this, while the congregation of St Fittick’s Church at Torry claim to have rescued the arm from the Justice Port of Aberdeen and buried it in the southeast corner of the churchyard.³⁰

In 1998, many people were keen to point out that Wallace and Murray would not have written the letters sent to Lübeck and Hamburg themselves. Military historian Ashby McGowan wanted to investigate further and checked the facsimile of the Lübeck letter made during the 1911 Scottish Exhibition,³¹ which was deposited in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. He found something that had escaped previous notice. There was a distinctive seal attached, showing on one side the royal arms and, on the other, a hand holding a bow and arrow. From this, and using the evidence from Blind Hary, he concluded that Wallace was, by training, an archer and that was his seal.³² His findings show the benefits of always looking beyond the written word to the object.

The Wallace Sword, housed in the National Wallace Monument, Stirling, since 1888, is well known but its authenticity is as much questioned as any episode in Blind Hary. It was kept at Dumbarton Castle, ostensibly since the imprisonment of Wallace there in 1305, and was refurbished on the order of James IV in 1505. Why such a weapon should be mistaken after a period of only 200 years is open to question. The pikes and halberds taken from the participants of the Radical Rising in 1820 were still in Stirling Castle in the 1950s and were probably discarded only after the army left in 1964. Weapons are always taken as evidence and as a symbol of triumph of the victorious party of whatever cause to be kept as trophies. The Wallace Sword was one of five swords connected with the War of Independence that were exhibited at the laying of the foundation stone of the National Wallace Monument in 1861. Over the years, it has been a focal point for political discontent. Its case was smashed by suffragette Ethel Moorehead in 1912,³³ and it was stolen in 1936 and 1972 by nationalists.³⁴

Another object that has claims to be associated (albeit briefly) with Wallace is the knocking stane from Longforgan in the collection of the McManus Galleries, Dundee. Hollow with a stone cover, it is like any other knocking stane and could serve both for grinding barley and as a seat. In the 1840s it was still in the possession of the descendants of the family who had sheltered Wallace:

A respectable family of the name of Smith in the village of Longforgan is in possession of a stone which is looked upon with great veneration. . . . The circumstances that make it valuable and venerable in the eyes of its possessors and visitors is the universally believed fact, that it is the stone upon which the youthful hero rested himself in his flight from Dundee to the castle of Kilspindie, in the carse, the seat of his maternal uncle. There is also a universally received tradition, that the good woman of the house, to whom the stone belonged, refreshed the exhausted Wallace with a meal of bread and milk, and that the stone has been handed down from father to son, as an heirloom, during a period of five centuries and a half.³⁵

There are also some pieces of furniture associated with Wallace from Lamington Tower, near Biggar, by tradition the home of Marion Braidfoot, Wallace’s wife. One now owned by Biggar Museum Trust is seventeenth century in date.³⁶ Thanks to a family and property amalgamation, the oldest surviving ‘Wallace’s chair’, a structure made of pine and covered in deerskin, is at Balnagowan Castle, Ross-shire, together with a portrait of Wallace. It has been there since 1833. During the Second World War, the Ross family removed the chair temporarily to America for safekeeping.³⁷

Blind Hary places a lot of events in Biggar, including the massive battle of Biggar, re-enacted for the townspeople by the famous equestrian Thomas Ord in an amphitheatre built there in 1844.³⁸ The local lore concerning Wallace is well known by those who live there, and Biggar was virtually the last place in Scotland where children performed the ancient Scottish Galatians or Seguiser’s Play, featuring William Wallace.³⁹ This ritual was probably the last manifestation of the oral tradition, reaching back to the time of Wallace himself. When the poet Hugh MacDiarmid opened Biggar’s first museum on 25 May 1968, the platform was adorned by an original Reform Bill banner proclaiming Lamington, the Land of Wallace. The Battle’s done. The Day is Won. 16 July 1832. The ability of people to see the story of Wallace as a positive, unbroken force, a continuum of Scottish history that enhances and enriches, was manifest on that occasion.⁴⁰ In many other places in Scotland, the same connections are made when the story of Wallace is remembered, and the thought that Wallace underpins the history of Scotland is strong and undiminished.

PORTRAITS OF WALLACE

Sir James Fergusson likened the writing of Wallace’s biography to the act of restoring a very old family portrait that several painters have tried to improve but which has been very much overpainted, embellished and distorted.⁴⁰ The story of the portraiture of Wallace is much the same. It is more a guide to the social and political aspirations of those who commissioned and owned them rather than any likeness of Wallace. It is no less significant for that.

The pencil-sketch portrait of Wallace in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery by David Steuart Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan, was reputedly based on a medieval original. Buchan did more than anyone else in his time to draw together the historical portraits of Scotland. It was he who funded John Pinkerton’s Iconographia Scotica. Buchan, himself a student of three Scottish universities, also drew and made engravings at the Foulis Academy in Glasgow in the 1750s. He founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780⁴¹ and was its benefactor for many years. It was his idea of a Caledonian Temple of Fame that was the begetter of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. If there were any early images of Wallace, Buchan would have known them.

Buchan’s portrait of Wallace takes the form of a bearded warrior with a dragon on top of his helmet, perhaps an iconographic reference to the name ‘Wallace’, also meaning ‘Of Wales’. This image was used to represent Wallace throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was engraved as the frontispiece of Morison of Perth’s 1790 edition of Blind Hary (also funded by Buchan), used for the features of the colossal Wallace statue sponsored by Buchan at Dryburgh in 1814 and is well established by the time the mid-nineteenth-century portrait of Wallace in the Smith collection in Stirling was painted. It is also similar in content to the portrait of Wallace painted by George Jamesone in 1633 for the coronation celebrations of Charles I in Edinburgh. The dragon helmet, beard, cloak and brooch are common to all four images. Various unknown artists adopted this particular image, ranging from the medal engraver who produced a Wallace token for Colonel William Fullerton in 1797 to the Montrose stonemason of the 1840s who carved a Wallace image on a 770-millimetre piece of sandstone in high relief, backed with an oriental-looking Scottish lion and embellished with thistles.

There are several Wallace portraits painted in the seventeenth century or earlier, and it is regrettable that so few are in public collections. The Balnagowan Castle portrait is of some antiquity but is not accessible. The Wallace portrait in Torosay Castle, Isle of Mull, is probably of the same time (seventeenth century) and originated at Guthrie Castle, seven miles north of Arbroath in Angus. The label affixed to the frame gives its background:

In the year 1299 the Northern Lords of Scotland sent Squire Guthrie to France to desire the return to Scotland of Sir William Wallace. Guthrie embarked at Arbroath and landed at Sluys from where he conveyed Wallace back to Montrose.

‘Squier Guthre’ and his journey are in Book IX of Blind Hary,⁴² but as Matthew McDiarmid points out, the Guthries are contemporaries of Blind Hary rather than Wallace.⁴³

A seventeenth-century portrait that can be documented and dated is one from the house of the Wauchopes of Niddrie Marischal, Edinburgh, purchased in 2004 for the Smith collection in Stirling. The central oval shape dates to 1661 and was part of a decorative scheme commissioned by Sir John Wauchope in 1661 in honour of the restoration of Charles II.⁴⁴ In a restructuring of the house in the 1720s, the portrait was set within a surrounding trophy to enlarge it to fit the panel above the fireplace in the new dining room. In 1858, Paterson’s Wallace and His Times (1858) included an engraving of the image, and it became widely known in the nineteenth century.⁴⁵ Photographs show the scheme and the painting in situ before the demolition of Niddrie Marischal in December 1957.⁴⁶

The Jamesone portrait and the Niddrie Marischal portrait were both commissioned for coronations, albeit twenty-seven years apart. It was not uncommon for aristocratic families to commission portraits of Wallace or Bruce for their collections. A good eighteenth-century example is the ovalshaped portrait of Wallace in the Smith collection in Stirling by the artist William Robertson, dating to the 1740s.⁴⁷ Robertson visited several houses (mainly those of Jacobite sympathisers) in Stirlingshire and Perthshire, painting portraits to order. This is the kind of portrait subject that would have appealled to a disaffected Jacobite laird.

The portrait of Wallace engraved by John Kay of Edinburgh in 1819 was likewise a portrait for its time and political constituency. Kay shows him as ‘General and Governor of Scotland’. Wallace was the firm hero of the radical movement; he appeared on a radical banner slaying a beast of tyranny.⁴⁸ When the Paisley magistrates jailed an entire band for playing ‘Scots Wha Hae Wi Wallace Bled’ in 1819, the tune became almost a national anthem within weeks as people took to singing and whistling it in defiance.

The spirit of Wallace continues to inspire present-day artists. Some, like Andrew Hillhouse, spend much of their creative time imagining their own way into the past, and recreating episodes and battle scenes. Others think symbolically, often in terms of regeneration. Alan Reid’s Wallace (1996, Caithness stone, Pictish symbols and chains) shows a headless Wallace rising to step over a Stone of Destiny writhing with treacherous snakes, the rusty chains of his captivity turning to the silver chain of governance. Richard Price’s large ceramic piece (1996, ‘Rise and be a Nation Again’) shows a thorn-crowned Wallace emerging from the earth, carrying the head of Edward I on his back and about to redress his brutal execution by drawing his sword in Scotland’s cause.

Wallace has been given many faces over the centuries, from elaborate paintings in oils to crude sketches for chapbooks. An interesting image of Wallace, purporting to be from the sixteenth century, is conjured up by the chapman Dougal Graham in The Witty and Entertaining Exploits of George Buchanan (Stirling, 1799). Graham lived long enough in Stirling to pick up the local lore and legends concerning Buchanan, who was tutor to King James VI, and tells the following tale:

A young nobleman fell a jocking of George, in saying, he would be as famous a champion for Scotland as Sir William Wallace was. Ay ay says George, William Wallace was a brave man in his time. True indeed says the other, but when he came to London, we did him all manner of justice, and for the honour of the Scots, we have his effigy in the shite-houses to this very day. And do you know the reason of that says George? No I don’t, says he. Well, I’ll tell you, says George, he was such a terror to the Englishmen when he was alive, that the sight of him yet makes them to beshite themselves. The English took this as a great affront, and forth with caused Wallace’s picture to be taken out of that place.⁴⁹

WALLACE IN THE LANDSCAPE

In many places in Scotland, people remembered Wallace by associating his name and deeds with particular trees or landscape features, so rather than one place of remembrance, there are dozens of them. William Wordsworth, who had a deep respect for Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s translation of Blind Hary’s Wallace and aspired to compose a similar epic, had it in mind when describing:

How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name

Of ‘Wallace’ to be found, like a wild flower

All over his dear country; left the deeds

Of Wallace, like a family of ghosts

To people the steep rocks and river banks

Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul

Of independence and stern liberty!

Similarly, Burns, who had a copy of the Hamilton translation as his constant companion and subscribed to the 1790 edition produced by Morison’s of Perth for the Earl of Buchan,⁵⁰ was excited by the landscape narrative produced by Hary and wanted to emulate it:

We’ll sing auld Coila’s plains and fells,

Her moors red-brown wi’ heather bells,

Her banks an’ braes, her dens and dells,

Where glorious WALLACE

Aft bure the gree, as story tells

Frae Suthron billies.

At WALLACE’ name, what Scottish blood

But boils up in a spring-tide flood!

Oft have our fearless fathers strode

By Wallace side

Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod,

Or glorious dy’d!

The gory metaphor of our ancestors running through the battlefields of Scotland, their footwear soaked in blood, comes straight from the pages of Blind Hary, reprised by Burns. Again, when Burns’s muse comes to him in the form of young Coila, in his poem ‘The Vision’, her cloak is a shimmering, skinkling moving map of Kyle upon which Wallace – ‘His COUNTRY’S SAVIOUR, mark him well!’ – is prominent. Burns used Blind Hary virtually as a guidebook to Wallace sites. Moreover, Wallace, allegedly derided by his detractors as a mere ‘King of Kyle’, was regarded by the lad who was born in Kyle as a kinsman as well as a hero. Guidebooks were printed to reinforce the connection. George McMichael’s Notes on the way through Ayrshire, the land of Burns, Wallace, Henry the Minstrel and Covenant Martyrs (Ayr, n/d c. 1882) examines every detail.

Other parts of Scotland, courtesy of Blind Hary, were able to make similar claims. Edward I, although destroying Wallace’s body, splashed him over so many places in Scotland as to make him the national hero. Those places associated with Wallace were actively cherished and are the earliest sources of memorabilia. In Stirlingshire, the Torr Wood is mentioned by Hary as a place frequented by Wallace. Until the last of its roots were used in the 1820s, Torwood was well known for its Wallace Oak, the site of which has been located by Colin Forrester, using Roy’s Military Survey.⁵¹ John Harrison, looking at the history of the management of the woodland through the contracts between proprietors and felling contractors, has shown how the oak was specifically protected in agreements of 1687 and 1787, confirming the eighteenth-century assertion that the ‘Wallace tree is ever excepted from cutting when the wood is sold’.⁵² Lindsay Corbett has pulled together the notes of local historians listing all the known artefacts that were made from the dead oak, from a small quaich to a sideboard.⁵³

The importance of the present-day Wallacebank Wood is widely recognised in terms of its local and natural history. It is owned by Glenbervie Golf Club, and there is an agreement with the Scottish Wildlife Trust to manage the wood as a wildlife reserve. Teams of volunteers have cleared the woodland of invasive species, and records are kept of the wildlife and plants.⁵⁴ Thus, the name of Wallace continues to be respected even after 700 years. The various Wallace trees in Scotland are the earliest liberty trees, and their memory and presence have outlasted those of the French Revolutionary period.⁵⁵

The earliest souvenir from the Wallace Oak noted to date is a silver-rimmed quaich of 1689 exhibited at the 1911 Scottish Exhibition and loaned by Lord Lamington.⁵⁶ It has disappeared within living memory. Another quaich of 1795, also exhibited in 1911, was inscribed: ‘This cup is part of the oak tree in the Torwood, which was often an asylum to the immortal Wallace. Drink of this and mark the footsteps of a hero.’⁵⁷ The dead oak was depleted and fashioned into such souvenirs between 1689 and 1822, when a snuffbox was made for presentation to George IV during his visit to Edinburgh. An engraving of a drawing by Alexander Nasmyth (1771) shows two stumps of the trunk of the tree,⁵⁸ reduced to one by the time John Thomson of Duddingston painted his Blasted Oak (now in the Smith collection, Stirling) in the early 1800s.

The Wallace Oak was depleted well before the souvenir woodware of the Mauchline industry was in production. The desire to have such souvenirs is well documented:

In the neighbourhood of the town, Wallace Oak in the Torwood and the Yew Tree at Grahamston, where fell the gallant Graham, have, within the period of human recollection, been victims to the knives of the curious, and the hammers of the same parties have unwarrantably destroyed a large portion of the Bore Stone at Bannockburn, the Gathering Stone at Sherrifmuir and the whole stone on the Wallace Ridge, where the great Scottish Chief witnessed the approach of Edward’s army on the eve of the Battle of Falkirk.⁵⁹

The Wallace Oak of Elderslie on the Spiers Estate in Renfrew furnished an elaborate frame, commissioned by John McAdam in 1867, to contain letters on the hero from contemporary Wallaces (Garibaldi, Mazzini, Kossuth, Blind and Blanc). The aim was to provide a point of attraction in the National Wallace Monument on its inauguration in 1869, the beginning of a Scottish national history collection for the monument and a source of funds through sales of photographs of the piece.⁶⁰ Only a few pieces of this oak were turned into Mauchline-ware souvenirs.⁶¹

MASS-PRODUCTION WALLACE SOUVENIRS

The Mauchline-ware industry, which developed out of snuffbox-making and the Scotch, or hidden, hinge, was geared to production for the masstourism market, and the woods favoured were sycamore or plane, for their light colour. The Smith family of Mauchline, in business from 1810 to 1939, were the major producers. They harvested ‘wood which grew on the Abbey Craig site of the National Wallace Monument’ for several decades, turning it into small articles (card cases, boxes, letter openers, sewing requisites) of souvenir ware with transfer images of the National Wallace Monument. Within this worldwide industry, Wallace-themed pieces are relatively few. Collectors in the field have noted that, as regards Scottish subjects in Mauchline ware, Sir Walter Scott tops the league, followed by Burns.⁶² A census of books in Mauchline-ware boards reveals 98 editions of Scott’s works and 21 editions of Burns’s poems.⁶³ Books on Wallace in Mauchline boards by comparison are relatively rare.⁶⁴

There was an obvious market for mementoes or ornaments of Wallace, probably fuelled by the erection of local and national Wallace monuments throughout the nineteenth century. The Staffordshire potteries produced various cheap flat-backed chimney ornaments of Wallace. Interestingly, although John McAdam, proprietor of the Glasgow Hyde Park Pottery and a main promoter of the National Wallace Monument, manufactured Garibaldi jugs, neither his nor any other of the Scottish potteries seems to have produced Wallace figures. The expensive and well-made Parian ware figures of Wallace and Bruce of the mid-nineteenth century are also Staffordshire productions.⁶⁵ Some are similar in appearance to the silverplated and copper figures of Wallace and Bruce produced by the art studio of Elkington of Birmingham in 1887–88.⁶⁶ All these figures are reminiscent of the design and artwork of Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901) who had a lifelong interest in Wallace, Bruce and the Wars of Independence.

Smaller, cheaper and cruder copies of Wallace and Bruce figures were made both in spelter and in cast iron for the mass market. Typical of these were the spelter figures kept on the living-room mantelpiece of the Scott family, at 57 Wallace Street, Stirling, 1888–1970. The Scotts had a great deal of admiration for Wallace, as relatives who had a farm in Stirling provided the straw that thatched the top of the Wallace Monument when it was lying incomplete in the period 1865–69.⁶⁷

Hundreds of families who had no direct connection felt the same kind of patriotism as the Scotts, and had Wallace and Bruce at either side of their mantelpiece, the heart of the home in the nineteenth century. From their marriage in 1847 onwards, this was the experience of Dr Robert Pairman of Biggar and his wife: ‘There were few ornaments in the apartment, but cast iron figures of Wallace and Bruce, burnished with black lead, adorned each end of the mantelpiece and attested our loyalty to Scotland’s greatest heroes.’⁶⁸ The Carron Iron Company made a larger two-dimensional image of Wallace (c. 1870) that is either found in plaque form or as the back support for an umbrella stand. The company also made Bonnie Prince Charlie in this form. The manufacture of such goods was stimulated by the building of the National Wallace Monument, 1861–69, and there are numerous cast souvenir ornaments of the monument itself, from cast-brass door knockers to German Parian ware.

Wallace was sometimes the subject of longcase clocks. These for much of the nineteenth century were expensive items in any Scottish household and were made to order by local clockmakers. There is no census of subjects for Scottish clocks, but the iconography of extant examples is notable. One by Hendrie Ogg of Dunfermline (1781–1850) has Wallace in the dial arch, the supporting figures in the four corners being Douglas, Bruce, Randolph and Graham.⁶⁹ Another of the same date by David Mackay of Arbroath also has Wallace in the arch, flanked by Lady Liberty, holding a red cap of Liberty on a pole, and by Dame Scotia. In the corners are the more traditional four seasons.⁷⁰ Having Wallace to mark the hours or keep the letters on the mantelpiece must have been a common experience in thousands of family homes in the nineteenth century.

DAVID STEUART ERSKINE, ELEVENTH EARL OF BUCHAN

David Steuart Erskine (1742–1829) did more than any other individual to celebrate and promote the cause of Wallace as the liberator of Scotland. Mention has been made of his foundation of the Society of Antiquaries, the establishment of the iconography of his Wallace portrait, the sponsorship of the 1790 edition of Wallace and the erection of the colossal Wallace statue at Dryburgh in 1814. He was a remarkably talented man, with a deep love of Scotland as well as a great compassion for, and understanding of, his fellow human beings, both women and men. Although a member of one of the oldest aristocratic families, he became a passionate radical who supported the principle of women’s education, the fledgling United States of America, the revolutionary government in France and revolution at home. As he explained to Joseph Priestley (who dedicated a book to him), he had no desire to uphold the prejudices of the class into which he had been born:

I called a General Convention as it were of all my rational powers and deliberated with them in the Senate of my Understanding. I resolved instead of cobbling and patching the Constitution of my Moral Philosophy to dissolve the whole Fabric and erect a new one upon the eternal principles of human reason and Justice.

The promotion of the story of Wallace was part and parcel of that revolutionary outlook. Like Burns, who made the connection in his ‘Ode for General Washington’s Birthday’, he saw Washington, first President of the United States, as the new Wallace and presented to him a box made of the Torwood Wallace Oak, fashioned by the Edinburgh Goldsmiths Company.

On his estate at Kirkhill and Almondell in Midlothian he had stones commemorating Wallace and, believing in liberty for his tenant farmers, granted them leases of nineteen and even thirty-eight years, which was exceptional. In 1786 he acquired the estate of Dryburgh in the Borders, including its ruined abbey where his ancestors had been commendators. He purchased it from the Haliburtons, who were relatives of Sir Walter Scott, and this was undoubtedly the source of Scott’s resentment of and contempt for Buchan in later life, concealed behind the mask of friendship. Scott’s Toryism was also the polar opposite of Buchan’s revolutionary outlook, and this goes some way to explaining why Scott never tackled the subject of Wallace or the War of Independence in any of his historical novels.⁷¹ Scott hated Buchan’s monumental Wallace statue at Dryburgh so much that he recorded in his diary the desire to blow it apart with dynamite so that not one fragment of it would remain.⁷²

With the clampdown on the revolutionary movement in the early 1790s, Buchan was politically isolated and he retired to Dryburgh. State trials saw the sentencing of Thomas Muir, curator of Buchan’s Society of Antiquaries, to transportation to Australia along with Skirving, Gerrard, Margarot and Fyshe-Palmer. Buchan’s status as an earl no doubt shielded him from the political witch-hunt of the times. When, after eighteen years, the political climate eased and with a whole generation of reformers exiled, it was Buchan who again lit the beacon of public freedom by promoting the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of Bannockburn, through the inauguration of his Wallace statue, in 1814.

It is not surprising that the radicals of the 1820 rising invoked the name of Wallace, as did their successors in the struggle for political reform. The Scottish colliers, technically in serfdom until the Act of 1799, did likewise, and their successors, the Sir William Wallace Grand Lodge of Free Colliers of Scotland, continue to march every first Saturday in August to this day.

COMMEMORATING WILLIAM WALLACE TODAY

In the nineteenth century, when it seemed that the old Wallace landmarks were being lost or overlooked, more formal monuments and statues were erected to reinforce the memorialisation process. Thus, in 1810, the Wallacestone Pillar was erected in the village of Wallacestone, Falkirk. The monument is carefully maintained. In 1999, the Provost of Falkirk personally renewed the paintwork. Every year, the Free Colliers bid for the privilege of carrying the banners on the annual ten-mile march, the money going to charity. The march is one of the most colourful spectacles to be seen in Scotland, and its aim is to honour Wallace. Other groups are similarly involved. In Aberdeen, the Wallace 700 group, established in 2002, organises an elaborate annual civic pageant centred on the Wallace statue by D. W. Stevenson. In Lanark, the Wallace 700 group, established in 1996, maintains its own ceremonials. At Avoch, Andrew Murray’s rising in the north is commemorated every year by a group that describes itself as ‘a voluntary sustainable tourism project which aims to promote knowledge about the place of Andrew de Moray and his family in the history of Scotland’s wars of independence’.⁷³ In Dunfermline, Wallace’s mother’s grave is tended by Dunfermline Heritage Trust members, who raised a new Wallace monument nearby in the grounds of Abbot House in 1995. At Robroyston, the betrayal of Wallace is remembered at the Robroyston Wallace monument every year.

The Society of William Wallace, who held a major event in London in 2005, organises its annual Wallace Day commemoration at the Wallace Monument, Elderslie, on the Sunday nearest to 23 August, the day of Wallace’s death. The society has done this ever since the political nationalists found it no longer expedient to remember Wallace in this way. It also organises the Robroyston commemoration every year on the Saturday nearest to 5 August, the day of the betrayal of Wallace. In their convener, David Ross, they have an articulate and charismatic activist who speaks, writes and publishes on Scottish history, and the story of Wallace in particular.

Many people who have had cause to identify with Wallace over the centuries have nurtured or produced objects that are expressions of that inspiration. Museums, misled by false notions of authenticity, have not always paid attention to the rich material culture of the subject. With only three small objects pertaining to Wallace in the Stirling Smith collection in 1995, and a major exhibition to mount in 1997, the gallery hosted a contemporary art exhibition in 1996 to generate some material. The response was strong, many of the 140 artists who exhibited taking their inspiration from the words of Blind Hary or Burns.⁷⁴ Nevertheless, once the subject was flagged up, historical material was also offered from places throughout Scotland, and in the space of three years the Stirling Smith had built up a significant collection.⁷⁵ With interest in Wallace undiminished, the material culture will continue to grow and develop, artists will continue to create representations, and groups will continue to build new memorials.

For those who find it hard to grasp the patriotism that inspires such engagement with the story of Wallace, the words of the journalist William Power (1873–1951), guest speaker at Elderslie in August 1936, may help:

Only a noble conception of Scotland could have inspired the noble sacrifice made by Wallace. It was not for the Scotland of a day that he fought and died, but for the Scotland of all future time. We are Wallace’s betrayers if we lose our national spirit, and waste or renounce our national heritage.

If certain sycophantic historians have belittled Wallace, it was because they perceived that he stood for a Scotland which was real, independent, active, progressive and democratic, a Scotland of the Scottish people. For that he stands immortally . . . [it is up to us to] . . . win for Scotland that place among the free nations that was marked for her by the patriotic martyr who gave mankind the ideal of true nationhood.⁷⁶