Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
was appointed sheriff of Dumbarton and constable of Dumbarton Castle in March 1304.
Blind Harry, predictably, emphasises the presumed treachery: Menteith was a close personal friend of Wallace; Wallace was godfather to two of his children; Wallace trusted him completely; Wallace had no suspicions when another of Menteith’s nephews attached himself to Wallace’s dwindling band; Wallace was lured to Glasgow by the false promise of a meeting with Robert Bruce; and so on.
What is incontrovertible is that a payment of forty Scots merks was made to ‘a servant who spied out William Wallace’ (un vallet qui espia Will. le Waleys), along with a further payment of sixty merks ‘to be given to the others … who were at the taking of the said William, to be shared by them’. The ‘taking of William Wallace’ happened late on the evening of 3 August. Wallace was lurking in what is now Robroyston when he was surprised by Menteith’s men in an isolated building in the forest there. He was overpowered and taken to Dumbarton Castle in fetters. From Dumbarton he was conveyed under heavy escort, secretly and by night, south to Carlisle, where he was handed into the custody of Sir John de Segrave, a professional soldier who had recently been appointed Warden of Scotland south of the Forth.
From Carlisle Wallace was taken on a triumphal seventeen-day journey, his hands bound behind his back and his feet roped beneath his horse’s belly. In every town and village the local people turned out to stare and jeer at the shackled ogre who had plagued their king for so many years. The contemporary English Lanercost Chronicle was exultant:
The vilest doom is fittest for thys crimes,
Justice demands that thou shouldst die three times.
Thou pillager of many a sacred shrine,
Butcher of thousands, threefold death be thine!
So shall the English from thee gain relief,
Scotland! Be wise and choose a nobler chief.
When the procession reached London the throng was so great, apparently, that it could not reach the Tower, and Wallace was lodged overnight in the house of an alderman in Fenchurch Street. Next morning, 23 August, he was taken to Westminster Hall accompanied by a host of civic dignitaries and soldiers.
Westminster Hall is much the oldest surviving part of the Houses of Parliament, a vast, cavernous chamber which was the largest medieval hall in Europe when it was completed in 1099. In the early days it was used for state feasts and other great events – and for state trials. Sir Thomas More was tried and condemned here in 1535, Guy Fawkes in 1606 and, most famously of all, King Charles I in January 1649: a plaque set into the last step of the second flight of stone stairs at the south end of the hall commemorates that dramatic occasion, and draws the attention of every one of the thousands of visitors who flock into the Hall when Parliament is in recess.
Another plaque, made of brass, is set into the floor of the upper landing and commemorates the ‘trial’ of William Wallace. It was installed at the instigation of the Labour MP for Bothwell, John Robertson, and unveiled on 31 October 1924 (the idea came from some schoolchildren in his constituency whom he had been showing round Westminster). The inscription is now very worn and difficult to read, and most visitors to the Hall walk right over it or past it without noticing what it says:
Near this spot, at the Kings Bench at the South end of the Hall, took place the trial of Sir William Wallace the Scottish Patriot on Monday 23rd August 1305.
Today Westminster Hall has the feel of a mausoleum, a gigantic echoing cenotaph of memories; but when William Wallace appeared before the Court of King’s Bench, mockingly crowned with laurel leaves, the place would have been like a bear-pit. The judges sat at a table on the raised, south-east part of the hall. Below them the floor was crammed with noisy spectators, some of them perhaps seated in specially erected wooden stands. The magnificent hammer-beam roof would not be built for nearly another century, but it would have been an awe-inspiring place nonetheless.
‘Scottish Patriot’ is not a term which Wallace’s judges would have recognised; and ‘trial’ is not a term we would apply to the proceedings today. They consisted of a recital of the charges, immediate conviction and, inevitably, a sentence of death; no copy of the arraignment for the prisoner, no jury, no defence witnesses, no defence counsel even.
The commissioners appointed by King Edward to conduct the trial were Sir John de Segrave, Sir Peter Mallory (the Justiciar of England), Ralph de Sandwich (Constable of the Tower), John de Bacwell (a judge) and Sir John le Blound, or Blunt (Lord Mayor of London).
Mallory read out the long and sonorous indictment: William Wallace, ‘a Scot and of Scottish birth’, was charged with treason, murder, spoliation of property, robbery, arson, sacrilege and atrocities and ‘horrible enormities’ of every kind; he had driven out all the wardens and servants of the Lord King, he had convened Scottish parliaments, he had tried to persuade the Scottish nobles to submit to the lordship of the King of France and to help that king to destroy the realm of England.
The prisoner was not expected to plead. But according to an eyewitness at the trial, although Wallace may have acknowledged most of the crimes with which he was charged (they were public knowledge, after all), he denied that he was guilty of treason, on the irrefutable ground that he had never sworn personal allegiance or done homage to King Edward of England. The court’s argument was that John Balliol’s surrender of the kingdom of Scotland in 1296 had made all Scots automatically vassals of the English king, whether they had sworn personal oaths of fealty or not.
But argument was irrelevant. King Edward was determined to make a public example of Wallace, and to have him suffer the barbarously brutal execution meted out to traitors. Sir John de Segrave was given the honour of reading out the pre-ordained sentence – for Wallace to be hanged, drawn and quartered:
… That the said William, for the manifest sedition that he practised against the Lord King himself, by feloniously contriving and acting with a view to his death and to the abasement and subversion of his crown and royal dignity, by bearing a hostile banner against his liege lord in war to the death, shall be drawn from the Palace of Westminster to the Tower of London, and from the Tower to Aldgate, and so through the midst of the City to the Elms …
‘The Elms’ were at Smithfield, on the northern edge of the city as it was then.
As soon as sentence had been pronounced, Wallace was taken outside and stripped naked, then bound to a hurdle, face up, and thus dragged through the crowded, jeering streets at the tails of two horses. It was a hideous journey, an especially long, circuitous route of more than four miles in order to expose the prisoner to the maximum insult and indignity.
On the façade of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, facing the entrance to Smithfield Meat Market, is a handsome plaque which was unveiled in April 1956:
To the immortal memory of Sir William Wallace
Scottish patriot born at Elderslie Renfrewshire circa 1270 A.D. who from the year 1296 fought dauntlessly in defence of his country’s liberty and independence in the face of fearful odds and great hardship being eventually betrayed and captured brought to London and put to death near this spot on the 23rd August 1305
His example heroism and devotion inspired those who came after him to win victory from defeat and his memory remains for all time a source of pride honour and inspiration to his countrymen
On a railing below the plaque bouquets of flowers are usually to be seen. Here Wallace was led up onto ‘a gallows of unusual height, specially prepared for him’ (according to Matthew of Westminster, an onlooker, in his Flores Historiarium). And now the long-drawn-out execution began – the triple death over which the Lanercost chronicler had exulted.
First, ‘for the robberies, homicides and felonies he committed in the realm of England and in the land of Scotland’, as the death-sentence put it, Wallace was hanged by the neck to the very point of strangulation, before he was cut down,