Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
and he was ‘drawn’, like a chicken: his intestines were pulled from his belly, then his lungs and liver and finally his heart, when the long agony would come to an end. His innards were then ceremonially burned by the executioner. That was the second death, ‘for the measureless turpitude of his deeds towards God and Holy Church’. Only then was his lifeless body decapitated, for his outlawry – the third death.
What remained of his body was now quartered – butchered into four parts – and the quarters were distributed to different parts of the country for exposure on gibbets in Newcastle upon Tyne, Berwick, Stirling and Perth ‘as a warning and a deterrent to all that pass by and behold them’. His head was placed on a spike and hoisted above London Bridge.
Through the very public humiliation of a traitor’s death, King Edward must have believed that he would not only exterminate his enemy but extirpate his very existence. He was to be disappointed, for in the event he achieved the very opposite – he created a martyr. Elspeth King says:
Edward was determined not to create a martyr, and that was why Wallace’s body had to be destroyed and dispersed; in order to destroy Wallace’s memory totally, Edward had to destroy Wallace’s body totally, to desecrate it and be utterly rid of it. There’s an exact parallel between that and the treatment of Joan of Arc a couple of centuries later, when she was literally destroyed by the English: her body was burned and the ashes cast away so that no trace of her might remain.
But because of the very savagery of the treatment which Edward meted out to Wallace, the people of Scotland wanted desperately to remember him. Officially, Wallace ceased to exist; he was completely written out of Scottish history by John Barbour in The Brus, his epic poem about Bruce which was commissioned by the Bruce dynasty in the 1370s [see Chapter 11]. It was not until Blind Harry in the 1470s, a century later, that the stories of Wallace were collected and written down as a quasi-historical epic.
These stories were part of what we can call a ‘people story’, because the people wanted to cling on to his memory, and the way of doing that was through personal, local remembrance in the areas in which Wallace had operated. That is why there are so many Wallace stones in Scotland, so many Wallace trees, so many Wallace wells – there is even a Wallace thumbprint on a rock on Bizzyberry Hill, near Biggar in Lanarkshire. The Irish have a word for this concept – dinnshenchas, the telling and constant retelling of stories around places, and the stories reinforce the identification of these geographical features. These stories grew in the telling; greater and greater deeds were ascribed to Wallace, as they are to heroic warriors all over the world.
Wallace the hero became the darling of nineteenth-century Scotland. In 1814 the eccentric Earl of Buchan erected a colossal pink-stone statue of him in the grounds of his home at Bemersyde, near Dryburgh.1 The pinnacle of Wallace-worship was the erection in the 1860s of the Wallace Monument on the Abbey Craig by Stirling. There had been plans to build it on Glasgow Green, and Edinburgh had also expressed interest, but Stirling was selected as the most suitable ‘neutral’ ground between the two cities for this ‘material remembrance of Scotland’s independence and individuality’.1
Today, more than ever, Wallace is popularly revered as the national hero of Scotland, the one man (unlike Robert Bruce) who never compromised with English tyranny. It is noteworthy that a 1996 film, The Bruce, made nothing like the impact of the earlier Braveheart: it was Braveheart, not The Bruce, which not only reflected but may well have influenced the growing popular movement for a separate Scottish Parliament. It can hardly be a coincidence that when the referendum which would ratify a new Scottish Parliament was held in 1997, the date chosen for the vote was 11 September – seven hundred years to the day since Wallace’s spectacular victory over the English army at Stirling Bridge on 11 September 1297.
1 Little is known about the bard ‘Blind Harry’, or ‘Harry the Minstrel’: his name may not have been Harry, and he may not even have been blind. He wrote for the court, and must have been a familiar figure to his audience; the historian John Major (or Mair), writing in 1518, said, ‘By recitation of [his works] in the presence of men of the highest rank, he procured, as he indeed deserved, food and raiment.’ He seems to have lived from around 1440 to about 1495; he was noted among the great Scottish ‘makars’ (poets) of the past by William Dunbar in his Lament for the Makars in 1505. The Wallace seems to have been composed in the late 1470s.
1 Hamilton’s version ‘poured a Scottish prejudice’ into the veins of Robert Burns and inspired his celebrated ‘Scots Wha Hae’ (Scots Who Have), subtitled ‘Robert Bruce’s address to his army before the Battle of Bannockburn’ – the Scottish equivalent of America’s ‘Battle-Hymn of the Republic’:
Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has often led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie …
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Let us do or die!
1 Shallow, bowl-shaped drinking cups with two projections, or lugs, for handles.
1 There is little left today of Cambuskenneth Abbey, which lies a kilometre or so east of Stirling. It was an important Augustinian foundation, and Robert Bruce would use it as the venue for the parliament of 1326 which acknowledged his son (David II) as his heir; it also became the burial place, in the fifteenth century, of James III and his queen, Margrethe of Denmark. Today the only substantial survivor of the building is the thirteenth-century free-standing bell-tower, although the foundations of the abbey church can still be seen.
1 Bishop Lamberton would assist at Bruce’s coronation in 1306.
1 It stands, seven metres high on a bluff above the Tweed, frowning fiercely; on the plinth are carved the words ‘Great Patriot hero. Ill requited Chief. Sir Walter Scott utterly loathed this statue, and told James Hogg (the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’): ‘If I live to see the day when the men of Scotland, like the children of Israel, shall every day do that which is right in his own eyes (which I am certain either I or my immediate successors will see), I have settled in my mind long ago what I shall do first. I will go down and blow up the statue of Wallace with gunpowder. Yes, I will blow it up in such style that there will not be a fragment of it left: the horrible monster’ (James Hogg, Anecdotes of Sir W. Scott).
1 The Wallace Monument project in Stirling was inaugurated on a tidal wave of public enthusiasm at a gathering of thirteen thousand people in King’s Park, Stirling, in June 1856. The laying of the foundation stone five years later attracted a crowd of eighty thousand from all over Scotland. The building works led to prolonged acrimony and bickering, however, and the monument was eventually opened at a distinctly low-key ceremony in September 1869.
Chapter 11 ROBERT BRUCE (r.1306–29)
Now, this Robert the Bruce was a remarkably brave and strong man: there was no