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The last time we left William Wallace and his merry band, they had just defeated Knight Fenwick at Loudoun Hill, avenging William’s father. They were now a well-armed and horsed band of some 60 men teeming with confidence. Following their unlikely victory, they retired to the Forests of Clyde and spent some 20 days getting drunk and having a raucous good time.
Old Willy Wallace and his companions started off fairly well, but that doesn’t mean it was all going to be plain sailing from this first success at Loudoun Hill to the crushing victory at Stirling Bridge. No, no, no, in fact, it would be very touch and go for Wallace for some time yet and a long time still before he took centre stage as Scotland’s Superstar.
When the English heard about the ambush at Loudoun Hill, to everyone's surprise, they decided it best to call a truce with Wallace and his band. Perhaps they were sick and tired of chasing him around the countryside. Wallace’s long-suffering uncle brought the terms of the truce to his hidey-hole in the woods. Put under enough pressure by the man who had raised him, Wallace begrudgingly accepted.
For the time being, the fight off.
The truce was to last 10 months, and with no English killing on the cards to keep them entertained, Wallace's band split up, and most returned to their homes. Wallace, too, returned home with his uncle and got about the business of doing nothing.
Wallace being Wallace, the idleness chafed at him. Sitting around at his uncle's house all day just simply wasn’t as fun as the usual swashbuckling action he was used to. So, one day, when his uncle had popped out, he snuck out and went into town with 15 of his cronies, all in disguise. I imagine they were all dressed very unconvincingly as enormous, hairy milkmaids.
On this particular day, a passage of arms passed through, where a famed English champion offered fights to anyone who dared face him. Wallace watched him knock a few challengers into the dirt, got the measure of him, offered himself as the next opponent, and, in typical Wallacean style, swiftly slew the Champion.
The watching English soldiers realised rather quickly that the enormous, blood-soaked Scotsman standing before them must be William Wallace.
A brawl then broke out, with lots of swords and hacking and stabbing and all that sort of thing, and before long, Wallace and his chums had violently killed 29 English soldiers. Classic Wallace.
The story goes that even with Wallace's terrible mess, the only consequence was that someone sent a letter to his uncle asking him to keep his troublesome nephew away from the town centre so things like this didn’t occur again.
William, shown the letter by his uncle, once again begrudgingly agreed to behave himself. He would manage to go a whopping 16 days without killing anyone!
In September of 1296, William’s uncle received an invitation to a council in Glasgow. Wallace came along as part of the entourage, perhaps because his uncle didn’t fancy leaving him unattended again.
On their way to Glasgow, William rode ahead of the main party with two companions. They eventually bumped into some English soldiers at the tail end of the baggage train heading to the aforementioned council.
In a fashion that I am sure by now, you are beginning to find tedious, as you will no doubt be able to guess the outcome, the soldiers treated young Master William poorly. They commandeered one of his fresh horses and gave him, in return, an old nag that was well past its prime. William, amazingly, managed to control himself to the point where he didn’t immediately lay into them with his sword. He is growing up, it seems. In a rage, he rode back with the old nag in tow to the main party of his uncle.
He relayed what had happened to his uncle, who tried to calm him down, as Wallace was red in the face with anger, telling him it was better to lose a horse than a nephew or something along those lines. Wallace, however, let his temper get the better of him, turned his horse and charged back off after the English.
When he eventually caught back up with the English, there was no doubt he was there to bring violence. The English turned and charged him and his two companions. Wallace coolly dismounted, drew his enormous blade, and then, with a vicious swing, took the head off the first horseman. He did the same to the second and wounded a third, leaving him to die.
Wallace then made quick work, pilfering all their gear, stealing their pack horses as well as the destriers of the mounted soldiers and a large amount of gold and silver.
It makes you wonder if all of Wallace’s violent incidents stemmed from righteous anger, as he almost invariably seems to get away with large amounts of loot.
Anyway, after this brief but violent interlude, Wallace thought it best to carry on towards the council and stay ahead of the news.
Wallace and his chums legged it to Glasgow, rode right through the middle of town and back out again before the English could say, “Why, that Scotsman has an awfully nice horse!” And made good their escape into the wilds.
Word of William’s exploits arrived quickly in Glasgow. This time, there was to be no wrap on the knuckles and an extension of the truce. The council declared him an outlaw once more, marking him fair game for anyone to kill without consequence.
William's temper had once again gotten him into hot water. But I am sure he thought the temperature suited him fine.
He still had many friends in Scotland, outlaw or not, so Wallace had no real trouble finding sanctuary. He was not one to lie low, however, and quickly got about raising a band of some sixty men. They were cutthroats and murderers, the lot, but like Wallace, they were all desperados, willing to do whatever it took to bring violence to the English.
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Open defiance against the English and his first campaign
I mentioned earlier that it wouldn't be all plain sailing for William. The wind will pick up soon, and the waters will start to get choppy.
That being said, things started out fairly well for Willy and his new compadres.
Their first target, a tower in a place called Gargunnock, fell without much fanfare. They managed to sneak in in the middle of the night, as the muppets who manned the tower had left the drawbridge down. Finding the door barred, Wallace, putting on a show of his freakish strength, ripped the door off its hinges. They were in.
Wallace and co then got about their bloody business and murdered everyone inside. They did and would pretty much always spare the women and children, however.
A good start, right? One English stronghold down, hundreds to go. On to the next one
Wallace and his gang next decided to attack a chap called Sir James Butler, seemingly only because he crossed William’s path. That, and there was a good chance of some serious loot at Butler’s castle, Kinclaven.
Wallace and co made their way to Kinclaven and parked up in a woody hollow nearby to stake out the joint. Before long, outriders rode past Wallace’s ambush spot ahead of Butler’s main party, who had conveniently left the castle on some sort of Knightly business.
When the main force was in sight, it all went very much like the ambush at Loudoun Hill that we covered in the last episode. Wallace springs his trap, and they charge in, make lots of scary Scottish war cries, and stab at the horses with spears; Wallace cleaves off the head of the leader, Bob’s your uncle, and the Scots win the battle.
Wallace, then being the indomitable man of action, charged off and broke into the castle, which once again had its drawbridge down. When will these Englishmen learn? The usual murdering of all besides the women, children and priests followed.
Wallace then made a rather chivalrous mistake of letting Lady Butler, wife of the now late Sir James, go. She rather too quickly made her way to Perth, a nearby town, and raised the alarm. Before Wallace had barely had a chance to burn the castle down, 1000 armoured horsemen were heading his way.
This is where things would start to go very wrong for old Bill Wallace.
Swiftly retreating into the woods where they’d lain low earlier, Wallace tried to make himself scarce. It wasn’t long, however, before the 1000 or so horsemen had the place good and surrounded.
Wallace had bitten off more than he could chew, and was quickly fighting for his survival. He fought a desperate rearguard as he tried to draw his men back further into the woods. During the battle, he even took a glancing blow from an arrow to the neck. His men were putting up a good show, but the English numbers were telling.
Somehow, in the confusion of the battle in the woods, Wallace managed to slip free, leaving some 10 or 15 of his men dead from the day's work. It was a lucky escape.
Things would continue going wrong. After licking his wounds, Wallace almost met his end when he was betrayed by a woman he was having an affair with. The affair was discovered by the English, and under duress, the Woman gave away the details of her next meeting with Willy.
Wallace, who wore a dress far more often than Braveheart lets on, got wind of the English trap and managed to sneak out of town in a dress once again before he could be captured. He made it to the gates, where the six-foot-seven “woman” was questioned by the guards.
Wallace knew the jig was up, so he did what he did best and lay about himself with his sword, leaving the guards dead. He then legged it back to his hiding place. Unfortunately for William, this time, the English had a bloodhound.
Before long, William and his men were surrounded once again. Another desperate fight in the woods ensued, and again, William was forced to flee, leaving behind many dead comrades. One of which, William even supposedly slew himself as the guy had a wobble and said he couldn’t keep up all this running and would hand himself in. Wallace lost his temper and cut the guy down in front of the rest of his gang.
Perhaps he was beginning to feel the pressure, or a new, harder man was beginning to replace the wild youth that Wallace had once been. Either way, it is tough to justify the killing of his old comrade out of hand.
Wallace ran all night and barely escaped from this encounter with his life. He was eventually found by a few local boys, half dead in a bramble bush. Recognizing that they had stumbled across the famous William Wallace, they brought him to an uncle of his who lived nearby to recover.
What a day for a couple of twelve-year-olds. Can you imagine going back and telling your mates you’d found William Wallace, covered in blood, asleep in a bush?
Wallace was now at the bottom of a pit of despair. His forces scattered, two stinging defeats in a row by his hated enemy and wracked with guilt over the killing of his old friend, whether or not he felt betrayed by him. This was to be his lowest ebb.
Once he recovered, Wallace met with two of his companions and made good his escape from the area. His first campaign had been reckless and had ended in disaster. They headed south, and took stock and shelter near the town of Lanark.
Domestic Bliss
Now, William seemed to take the town of Lanark. He is described as heading into town frequently ‘for sport’ by Blind Harry, his somewhat unreliable biographer. That could mean one of two things, in my opinion. Firstly, he began to stalk the alleys of Lanark, putting back on the character of a wandering serial killer character. Filling the alleys with murdered English soldiers who were unfortunate enough to be alone when he came across them. That’s one option.
The other reason could be that it was in the very town of Lanark where William was to meet his wife, Marion Braidfute. Marion was a likely lass of 18, the daughter of a local noble, and Wallace was smitten with her. She returned his affections, and they were soon married. William, the wild womaniser, had finally been tamed.
He was no man to let domestic bliss get in the way of his desire to kill as many Englishmen as he could. It wasn’t long before he had raised a new force of some 60 men and was causing trouble again in the local region.
Wallace and his gang spent a happy winter fighting skirmishes with English cavalry, storming castles and then running back into town to spend the evenings with his new wife. All was well in the world of William Wallace at this time.
It wasn’t to last, unfortunately. By the spring of 1297, William had spent so much time in Lanark that he had gotten a little too comfortable. The local English soldiery was now well aware of who he was, but as he was usually surrounded by 10 or 20 of his favourite thoughts, they had thus far left him alone.
Wallace let his guard down, and one day, when he was leaving church, unarmored for once, a group of English soldiers surrounded him and his companions. They threw insults at William, claimed they had all had his wife, and demanded he hand over his dagger. This, as it so often would be, was a mistake the English would soon live to regret, but not for very long.
Wallace lashed out with his customary whirlwind of violence, and before long, he and his companions had left 50 dead English soldiers on the streets of Lanark. They were still terribly outnumbered, though, with the Garrison numbering some 200 men. Wallace and his companions fled back to Marion’s house.
They barred the door and tried to escape out the back. The local Sheriff, a famously unpleasant chap called Heselrig, with hundreds of men, surrounded the front. Marion did her best to slow them down while Wallace and his men did their best to escape, but it was too late.
Heselrig smashed down the door of Marion's home and immediately killed her out of hand for standing in his way. Wallace, seeing his wife’s callus murder, was maddened with rage and had to be dragged away by his men.
He would not wait long to exact his revenge.
That very same night, Wallace, with some reinforcements who had joined him out of outrage at the killing of his wife, snuck back into town one man at a time. Presumably, the English didn’t expect the bandits they had fought earlier to return so quickly.
Once inside, they reformed and made for the Sheriff's residence. Wallace burst into Heselrig’s home and cleaved his skull from his shoulders whilst he was still in bed. With that done, Wallace unleashed his force on the garrison of Lanark. In a rampage that lasted all night, Wallace’s band slew some 240 men. The Garrison of Lanark was utterly annihilated.
This act, though it may have been motivated by a desire for revenge, would start something much bigger than William Wallace alone. News of Wallace’s success spread quickly, and the Scots now knew the English could be beaten, and rebellion swept through the Realm. The First Scottish War of Independence had begun.
The Rise of a Leader
Things began to move quickly now. Wallace seized the opportunity given him by his actions at Lanark, and raised the flag of rebellion. By midsummer, Wallace rode at the head of 3000 armed men, and the whole southwest of Scotland was ablaze.
Taking inspiration from Wallace, other isolated rebellions flared up across the country. Most notably, one in the far north was led by a young chap named Sir Andrew de Moray.
Moray was from a powerful Celtic family. In the spring of 1297, he raised his banner at Ormonde Castle and began to drive the English out of his lands. He led an army of common men the English described as' a very large body of rogues’. These rogues made life very difficult for the occupiers.
Wallace, meanwhile, led a daring raid on Scone, the site of the recently removed Stone of Destiny, the stone upon which Scottish kings are crowned, and captured it with large quantities of booty—a blow designed to strike at the heart of the English regime in Scotland.
By late June of that year, all of Southern Scotland was up in arms. English troops had all retreated south of the border, been killed, or were holed up in their castles. Scotland's subjugation had been broken.
You might wonder where old Longshanks was during all of this. Edward was preparing for a campaign in Flanders against the French, still smarting from having had his lands taken away from him. It is hard to say exactly how aware he was of the goings-on in Scotland. Myths and rumours abound during this period.
One such rumour was that an enormous battle took place where 60,000 English, led by Longshanks, were utterly destroyed by Wallace and co. This almost certainly never occurred.
Another rumoured event that probably never happened relates to the opening scene of Braveheart. At this time it is said that Edward Longshanks invited 300 or so Scottish nobles to a barn and then had them hung as soon as they stepped inside. The list of dead unfortunates included the uncle that had raised William Wallace. This presumably inspires.
Wallace himself only managed to escape as he was forewarned and fought a dashing Wallacean-style escape with all the usual swinging of his sword and beheading knights and so on.
It's an intriguing tale, yet it appears to have been passed down through hearsay, rumors, and a tendency to portray the English negatively. For instance, William Wallace's uncle was definitively alive after the supposed date of the event. Additionally, there's hardly any documentation of 300 gentlemen, barons, and knights vanishing from the area all at once. Unfortunately, it seems a bit too good to be true.
What almost certainly was true was that by mid-summer 1297, Scotland was in a state of total anarchy. The English oppression of the preceding years had given the Scots, for the first time, a real sense of nationhood. They were drawn together for the first time by a common enemy, the English.
Longshanks, busy with France or not, could tolerate no further delay in sorting out this whole mess. He ordered a chap called Percy to gather an army, head north and deal with the interminable Scots.
With 40,000 men at his back, Percy marched north and met the Scottish Army encamped at a place called Irvine. After all the success of the previous few months' rebellion, the Scots, disappointingly, were once again at each other's throats, making them disorganised and vulnerable.
With Wallace and Moray still in the field causing trouble, the Scottish nobility once again kowtowed to the English. Without a sword being swung, the Scottish army surrendered ignobly within days of the arrival of the English.
The surrender left Wallace deeply disappointed. Once more, he felt betrayed by the nobility. Nevertheless, he and Moray refused to back down and carried on the fight. Unfortunately, Wallace had become the only Scottish general remaining active south of the Forth, putting him in a vulnerable position in his realm.
Wallace and Moray’s coordinated campaign
Wallace didn’t let the disappointing display at Irvine keep him down for long, and quickly set off on an expedition to Argyll, in Western Scotland. Here, he met and defeated a small English army at the Pass of Brander. Then, throughout the rest of the summer, Wallace headed to the highlands and made trouble for the English garrisons in the area.
Meantime, the aforementioned Percy, commander of the English forces, had decided that although they had achieved their objective and defeated the Scottish Army, it was best that they also deal with the ever-present threat of Wallace. They decided to head towards his supposed hideout, an encampment in the great forest of Selkirk, not far from a little place called Stirling.
The clouds of battle began to gather over Stirling as events drew Wallace and the Scots towards the English at this fateful place.
It was around this time that Moray and Wallace's respective rebellions met for the first time. The two supposedly immediately took a liking to each other. They joined forces and knocked off a series of stunning victories.
Perth quickly fell to the Scots, with 2000 English soldiers killed. Following this, Wallace raced to Aberdeen, where he managed to catch the fleet stationed there off guard and destroy it at the harbour. By now, all of Scotland north of the Forth was under Scottish control, besides the fortresses at Dundee and Stirling, which lay under siege.
The English decided it was now or never. Two English armies converged and headed north to relieve the siege of Stirling. When Wallace heard the news, he left the siege of Dundee, sent word to Moray to join him and headed with all haste to Stirling. It was time for a showdown.
Triumph at Stirling Bridge
Stirling Castle was perhaps the most impressive fortress in the British Isles. Perched on a steep crag, it offered a commanding viewing plain and was nearly impossible to conquer. The River Forth flowed gently through the plain of the surround.
For centuries, Stirling and the bridge that crossed the river forth had been the key to defending the lowlands of Scotland from the wild-men of the Highlands. The solitary bridge was wooden and only wide enough to allow two horsemen to cross abreast.
The English army needed to capture said bridge and form a bridgehead through which it could pour. Once that was achieved, it would make quick work of the rebellion in the highlands. If it couldn’t get through and form a bridgehead, well then, it was in serious trouble.
The stakes were equally high for Wallace and Moray’s army. Lined up on the hills, watching the vastly superior English army approach, the Scot’s knees must have been knocking under their kilts. If enough of the English army made it over the bridge, there was nothing they could do to stop it.
That was the big dilemma on Wallace’s mind the day of Stirling Bridge. How many English should he allow to cross? If he let through too many, then he wouldn’t be able to defeat them. If he let through too few, then he would still have the majority of the English army on the other side of the bridge to deal with.
Wallace had to get this right.
There was also much worry in the English camp. The English commander, the Earl of Surrey, was well aware of the risks facing him. He needed to cross a small bridge and assault the Scots, who were in an almost perfectly unassailable position.
He called a war council, which quickly devolved into bickering about what to do. Some hotheads in the crowd wanted to throw caution to the wind and charge right on in. Cooler heads wanted to find a better crossing point. The Earl of Surrey was stuck in the middle, trying to make himself heard.
It wasn’t until Edward Longshanks’ trusted treasurer, Hugh de Cressingham, a grossly fat clergyman, now looking all the more ridiculous as he had managed to stuff himself into a suit of armour, stood up and shouted them all down.
“This is all costing far too much as it is; let’s get on with it, shall we!” he shouted, or something along those lines. The Earl of Surrey, perhaps sick and tired of the whole thing and stung with embarrassment at the implication that he was wasting the crown’s money, acquiesced and gave the order to cross the Bridge. This was a mistake.
From his vantage point, Wallace watched as his plan came together perfectly. The English started moving across the bridge with painful slowness. Wallace watched and calculated. By 11 o’clock, the time was right.
Wallace put a horn to his lips and blew the signal. As the sound echoed along the Scot’s lines, it was greeted with a roar of battle cries. Like an enormous spear bristling wave, the Scots washed down the valley and crashed into the unexpected English lines.
The right and left flanks enveloped the English, cutting through their lines to meet at the bridge and cut off their retreat. Once this was complete, the main Scottish forces clattered into the English and got about their bloody work.
A stampede occurred on the bridge itself, and many English were crushed underfoot or fell from the bridge to be dragged down to the bottom in their armour. From the southern side, their comrades could only watch in horror as the English forces disappeared inside a ring of blood-soaked scots.
The few English who did manage to break free and cut their way through to the bridge crossed it and ordered it burned to prevent the defeat from turning into a cataclysmic disaster. They did so and left their comrades to their fate.
The slaughter was total. Some 5000 footmen, 300 archers and 100 mounted knights died at Stirling Bridge. The Scots fought all day until the last Englishmen were dead or driven into the river to drown.
Seeing that the day was lost, the Earl of Surrey gave the order to retreat and turned with the remainder of his army and fled without stopping all the way back to Berwick.
When the day was done, the Scot’s losses were inconsequential. The only real blow to the rebellion on that historic day was the mortal wounding of Andrew de Moray. He would succumb to his wounds not long after the battle.
The grossly fat Cressingham, the one who had shamed the Earl of Surrey into crossing the bridge and sealing his army's fate, also fell in the battle. Rumour has it that Wallace killed him himself, but that seems more like poetic licence than fact.
What is known, though, was his posthumous fate. The Scots, upon finding the body of their hated enemy, flayed him and chopped up his skin as grisly souvenirs from the battle.
Stirling Bridge would go down in History. An enormous English army had been driven out of Scotland by William Wallace. He truly was the saviour of Scotland and, in the aftermath of the battle, was appointed the Protector of Scotland in the name of poor old King John Baliol, who at this point was still locked up in the Tower of London.
This was all very nice for William, I am sure, but there was still work to do. And that is where we will pick back up next time.
Conclusion
That’s all for this week, folks. Please join us again next week when we will finalise the tale of William Wallace. In the next and final episode of the series, we’ll explore the Battle of Falkirk, Wallace’s downfall and his grisly death at the hands of the English. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, please subscribe, like the show, and share it with anyone who might be interested. Thanks again, and I’ll see you next time for another instalment of History vs. Hollywood.
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