1298.]

BATTLE OF FALKIRK.

421

north bank perished by the sword or in the stream. The treasurer of Edward, Cressingham, was one of the slain. The chief loss on the side of the Scotch was Sir Andrew Moray. Warenne retreated rapidly into England. Every place of strength was abandoned; and Wallace, with the son of Moray, at the head of the army, which they proclaimed to be that of John, king of Scotland, crossed the Tweed, and, for several weeks, made fearful ravages upon Northumberland and Cumberland. It was at this moment that the English barons obtained the Confirmation of the Charters. The Scottish army penetrated as far south as Newcastle. At Hexham, on the 7th of November, a protection of the prior and convent of that place was granted by Andrew Moray and William Wallace, commanders-in-chief of the army of Scotland, in the name of king John, and by consent of the community of the said kingdom. John Balliol was then in the Tower of London. This Andrew Moray was a worthy successor of the friend of Wallace, who fell at the battle of Stirling-bridge. Just before this invasion of England, a letter was addressed in the names of Moray and Wallace to the authorities of Lubeck and Hamburg, stating that their merchants should now have free access to all the ports of the kingdom of Scotland, seeing that the kingdom, by the favour of God, had been recovered from the power of the English. After his return from the invasion of England, we find that, in 1298, as appears in a charter, dated on the 29th of March," William Walleys, miles," is styled "Custos regni Scotia," he is guardian of the kingdom in the name of king John.

The elevation which Wallace had now attained was not of long endurance. The nobles said, "We will not have this man to rule over us." When Edward, having hurried from France, was once again in Scotland, which he entered in the June of 1298, the attachment of the humbler classes of the people was not powerful enough to sustain the great popular leader in his triumphant course. The nobles kept aloof. He had a numerous army of enthusiastic followers; but these partisans were chiefly on foot. The knightly horsemen were hiding from the wrath of the English king. Edward came on with his mailed chivalry and his terrible bowmen. At Falkirk, the unequal forces met. The king, now in his sixtieth year, had lost nothing of his youthful energy, or of that personal courage which especially marked the great leader in the times when it was the business of a commander to possess the sturdy arm as well as the directing head. Advancing to this field of Falkirk, Edward was thrown from his horse, and broke two of his ribs. Regardless of the injury, he led his cavalry forward to meet the whole Scottish army, standing in close array. Wallace knew that the only safety was in the most desperate resistance; and he said to his men, "I have brought you to the ring, now let me see how you can dance." Matthew of Westminster, who is full of fury against the Scottish leader-which appears to have been excited by the atrocities which his followers committed in the north of England-tells this anecdote, adding" and so fled himself from the battle, leaving his people to be slain by the sword." Wallace was not a man

to fly. He fought in that field of Falkirk, in which his spearmen long stood up against the English knights, till his friends, Stewart and Graham, and thousands who have left no name, had fallen. All was finished. Wallace, according to tradition, hid himself in an oak in the adjoining forest, of which Sir Walter Scott saw the roots when he was a boy. There is another

422

WARFARE PROLONGED BY WALLACE.

[1298. Wallace Oak near Paisley, which is connected with the early life of the hero, whose adventures are still associated with many a glen and woody covert. For seven years after the fatal battle of Falkirk, we hear little of Sir William Wallace. He was deprived of his office of guardian of the kingdom. The war was continued; but Bruce, and Comyn, and the bishop of St. Andrews, were joint guardians, in the name of Balliol. Wallace carried on his former system of desultory warfare, which had first roused a general resistance to Edward. Legendary history tells of his mighty deeds; and, though the poetical spirit may exaggerate his physical prowess and his loftiness of heart, Wallace was still animating his countrymen to a resistance, of which he did not witness the triumph, but of which his example set forth the first great sustaining principle. That the career of Wallace was one of patriotism, in the loftiest sense of the word, may be doubted; nor was it upheld by those high social considerations by which the opposition to injustice becomes a great moral effort, as in the instance of Washington. It was probably excited originally by the hatred that belongs to race. Wallace was a native of the old kingdom of Strath-Clyde, where the British language and British traditions lingered through many generations; and the spirit that inspired "the land of Wales," and which all the changes of modern civilisation cannot wholly eradicate, was probably the source of much of Wallace's resistance to the Anglo-Norman rule. To dress him up in the fanciful garb of pure heroism, as romance, and even history, have attempted to do, is to falsify the character of his age. He was cruel, as all men of that time were cruel. He shrunk not from private slaughter, or general massacre, as few did in the days when ferocity appeared to be an ingredient of courage. The great vindicator of Scottish independence who came after him commenced his career with a murder. Edward the king, though politically lenient and merciful, coolly ordered many butcheries in open warfare, and sanctioned many atrocious revenges upon those who resisted his domination. We must judge all such men with impartiality. We must not exalt them into patterns of virtue, or degrade them into monsters of brutality. The system under which they were born and lived made their actions a perpetual struggle for ill-defined power. Their contemporaries were not in a condition to view these actions through a just medium. In the eyes of the monk of Westminster, William Wallace was "a robber, a sacrilegious man, an incendiary, and a homicide." Posterity has set aside all this prejudice. But the opinion of modern times has not surrendered itself to the belief that the spirit which animated king Edward and his English in their dealings with Wales and Scotland was that of unmitigated tyranny and mere hatred of freedom. There was sound statesmanship in those days, which knew that a small country, physically united as Britain is, could not be safe or prosperous under a divided government. The mistake of that policy was the usual one of endeavouring to anticipate the natural processes of union, by the disturbing influences of conquest.

Whilst Wallace was carrying on his desultory warfare, the new regents followed up a measure which the previous government had originated, in appealing to the interference of the pope to protect Scotland from the aggressions of the English king. The envoys of Bruce and Comyn demanded this interference upon the ground that Scotland was a realm which belonged of

1801.]

PARLIAMENT OF LINCOLN.

428

right to the see of Rome. In June, 1299, the pope, Boniface, set forward this pretension in a letter addressed to Edward, and demanded that every controversy between England and Scotland should be referred to the decision of the pontiff. The delivery of the letter was delayed for more than a year; and upon its arrival Edward returned for answer that he should submit the matter to his parliament. On the 20th of January, 1301, a parliament was accordingly assembled at Lincoln, The sagacity of the king was never more strikingly exemplified than in this proceeding. In the first burst of his passion he vowed that if he heard more of these inordinate pretensions he would exterminate the Scots from sea to sea. The independence of England was threatened in these papal proceedings; and Edward wisely called together the representatives of the nation to speak the nation's voice. To this parliament of Lincoln there came upwards of three hundred persons-prelates, abbots, barons, knights, and burgesses. The pope received an answer which was worthy of a great representative assembly. He was told that "it is, and by the grace of God shall always be, our common and unanimous resolve, that with respect to the rights of his kingdom of Scotland, or other his temporal rights, our aforesaid lord the king shall not plead before you, nor submit in any manner to your judgment, nor suffer his right to be brought into question by any inquiry, nor send agents or procurators for that purpose to your court." The English representatives, whether or not they thought their king had just claims as regarded Scotland, showed a spirit which would not brook that insolent assumption of temporal power which the popes had so often attempted to exercise. It is impossible not to respect those bishops and abbots who spurned the pretensions of their spiritual head as boldly as knight or baron or sturdy tradesman. We note the burgesses as tradesmen; for in that parliament sat Stephen Stanham, a merchant of Lincoln, who dealt in sugar and figs and herrings and stockfish, in company with two archbishops, eighteen bishops, and eighty-nine knights and barons. The pontiff was not in a condition to visit Edward and his parliament with any ecclesiastical penalties. There arose a controversy, in which the king traced back the superiority of his predecessors over Scotland to the days of Brute, the Trojan; and the Scottish envoy replied that they cared not for Brute or his institutions, for they were sprung from Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh. The quarrel, as far as the pope was concerned, evaporated in these learned researches. Edward, in the meantime, had concluded a truce with Scotland, which lasted for ten months of the year 1302. He had been negotiating a peace with France, but a demand was made that Scotland should be included. To this demand the English assent was refused, and the war was renewed at the beginning of 1303. Stirling Castle was taken by the Scots; and the English army was defeated at Roslin. Edward had now made peace with France, and obtained the restoration of Gascony. He was thus ready to carry his personal vigour to the Scottish war. He soon enforced an unwilling submission; and concluded a treaty with Comyn, and the other leaders, on the 9th of February, 1304. Wallace was not included in the capitulation; but it was said that he might, if he pleased, give himself up to the king's will and grace. He was

* See Article on The Parliaments of Lincoln," in "Proceedings of the Archæological Institute," 1848.

424

SIEGE OF STIRLING.

[1304.

afterwards summoned to appear before a parliament of nobles of the two nations; but he continued contumacious, and was pronounced an outlaw. The reduction of Scotland was completed in the summer of that year, by the surrender of Stirling. Edward himself conducted the memorable siege of this important castle. Sir John Oliphant defended the fortress for three months, with a garrison of only a hundred and forty men. The king in the first month had exhausted his stores of warlike missiles, and had to command his English sheriffs to buy up and send him fresh supplies of cross-bows and quarrels. Famine at last compelled a capitulation. There were women in that devoted castle who shared the sufferings of their husbands and brothers. At length the gates were opened, and a sad procession of Oliphant and

twenty-five of his men was moving down the hill of Stirling, each barefoot and with a halter round his neck, to kneel before the king. Edward, say some, turned aside to wipe the tears from his eyes, and granted their lives.

Wallace, the most constant of the leaders who had fought in this great war of independence, was at length taken prisoner near Glasgow. He was conducted to Dunbarton Castle; and as the noble outlaw mounted the rocky stair which led to his dungeon, he must have felt that nothing was left for him but to die bravely as he had lived. His two-handed sword was hung up

1305.]

WALLACE-CAPTURE AND EXECUTION.

425

in the keep of Dunbarton, never again to be drawn against tyrannous AngloNorman or treacherous Scot. The tradition that he was betrayed by Sir John Menteith, who was governor of Dunbarton under Edward, has been attempted to be disproved; but a document has been discovered by which it appears that various large sums were given to persons who had watched Wallace and assisted in his capture, and that land to the value of one hundred pounds was assigned to Menteith.* Strongly fettered, he was hurried on the road to the south on the 5th of August, 1305. On the 22nd he arrived in London, and was lodged in the house of a citizen, William de Leyse, in Fenchurchstreet. On the next day he was conducted on horseback to Westminster Hall, surrounded by the mayor, sheriffs, and aldermen. The undaunted man, crowned with a garland of oak, as a king of outlaws, was arraigned as a traitor to the English crown. "Traitor I could never be, for I was not a subject of king Edward," was his reply. His execution was determined on before this mock-trial. Sentence of death was pronounced against him. He was dragged at the tails of horses through the streets to a gallows standing at the Elms at Smithfield. The horrible barbarities of an execution for treason having been gone through, his head was struck off, and placed upon a pole on London-bridge. His body was divided into four quarters. William Wallace, thus betrayed and outraged, was never so dangerous to the power of King Edward as when his mutilated arms and legs were exhibited to the Scottish people on the public places of Newcastle, Berwick, Perth, and Aberdeen. Sir Simon Fraser, one of the brave adherents of Wallace, was also executed in the same year, and his head was placed on London-bridge beside that of his great leader. There was exultation in London over the fate of these brave men. There was wailing in Scotland; but the lament was smothered in a passionate desire for revenge. In four months Robert Bruce was in arms. John Balliol, the king John of Scotland, was dead. His son was in captivity in London; and the name of Balliol was held in scorn. Robert Bruce, the grandson of the competitor for the crown, was now twenty-three years of age. He had vacillated between submission to Edward and adherence to the cause of independence. Scotland had been apparently settled by the pacific policy of Edward; and young Bruce appeared to be in his confidence. John Comyn, the son of Balliol's sister, was an object of jealousy to the King of England, for he in some degree represented the rights of the Balliol family, with a boldness which might have been dangerous. Bruce came to Scotland. In the choir of the church of the Minorites, in Dumfries, Bruce and Comyu met in private conference. According to Fordun, the ancient feud between the two families was the cause of the fatal result which ensued from this meeting. Bruce plunged his dagger into the breast of Comyn, and hurried out of the church. The attendants of Bruce completed the murder. The guilt of blood was upon Bruce; and the old Scottish historians have surrounded the mysterious transaction with alleged circumstances of treachery on the part of Comyn, calculated to remove some portion of the odium from the memory of their great patriot. It was an age when human life was held at a cheap rate; and the violation of a sacred place by murder was considered a greater crime than the murder itself. But the deed, whether rash or premeditated, admitted of no hesitating policy. Bruce immediately assumed the title of "Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland." Palgrave.

VOL. I.

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