The Forest Laird (60 page)

3

I
was an invalid for more than a month and a half, although I was improving visibly after three weeks, despite a drastic loss of weight and muscle tone caused by a liquid diet and a complete lack of exercise. By the end of the fifth week, the bindings around my rib cage were less tight and I no longer had to be restrained while I slept, so I could breathe more deeply, though it still pained me to do so, and the thought of laughing or coughing chilled me. I was permitted to leave my bed in the seventh week, but it took me four full days to build up the strength to walk for fifty paces. After that, though, I grew stronger daily, and Brother Benedict soon removed the iron wiring from my jaw. Two days after that I could eat normally again.

A week later I was back in Glasgow, having made the journey by wagon and accompanied by Father Jacobus. Bishop Wishart made us both welcome and we found the entire cathedral community agog with the news of armed rebellion in the north and in the south.

Only then, after an interval of almost three full months, did I learn what had been taking place during my time recovering.

Wishart had heard the news of Miriam Braidfoot’s arrest from her parish priest, who was outraged by the arrest and confinement of one of his most devout and influential parishioners. When he then heard of her subsequent death in custody, he launched an official diocesan inquiry, in the course of which the investigators learned that Mistress Braidfoot’s daughter Mirren, or Marian, had somehow contrived to have herself killed by what was officially described as misadventure in precisely the same prison and on the same day as her mother. Sir Lionel Redvers, who had been responsible for the arrests of the women, was arraigned by the cathedral chapter, but he laughed at the summons and refused to attend the hearing. A week later he was ambushed and murdered one evening outside Lanark. He was accompanied by a round dozen mounted troopers, all of whom died with him, their weapons unbloodied and their bodies riddled with hard-shot arrows. Redvers himself had been dragged from his horse and decapitated. His body bore no other wounds. His head was never found.

The arrows, of course, indicated clearly that the outlaws of Selkirk Forest were responsible, and William Hazelrig assembled all his forces for a pre-emptive strike into the greenwood, calling for them to assemble on a given morning near the village of Lamington, and apparently seeing no irony in that choice of rallying points. Among the forces that assembled were a half-score of veteran archers whom none of the others knew. The newcomers were freshly arrived from Wales, they said, dispatched north as part of a new intake of Welsh bowmen recruited for the wars in Scotland.

The sheriff’s expedition reached the forest outskirts and searched the woods diligently for three days, finding nothing and no one, but during that last night, in the middle watch, the darkest part of the night, the outlying sentries died in silence, while the newly arrived archers set aside their bows and used daggers and stealth to surprise and kill the guards on duty inside the camp. The man guarding the entrance to the sheriff’s tent likely neither saw nor heard the arrow that killed him and threw him backward into the tent, and before Sheriff Hazelrig knew what was happening, he was clubbed senseless and abducted. Once free of the sleeping encampment, the archers were joined by the others who had approached in the darkness and who had spent the previous hour disposing of the outlying guards and preparing pitch-dipped fire arrows. When the word was given, a hailstorm of flaming missiles swept the English camp, setting fire to tents and sleeping men, and the ensuing slaughter was merciless. Very few of the English sheriff’s punitive expedition escaped alive.

William Hazelrig, King Edward’s sheriff of Lanark, was found dead the following day. His hands had been severed and his throat cut, and a parchment scroll was fastened to his chest with a deepdriven dagger. The scroll said simply:

In Memoriam

Marian Wallace

Requiescat in pace

The news of Wallace’s vengeance sent shock waves rippling across the whole south of Scotland, and for two weeks no English force of any description moved anywhere, least of all into Selkirk Forest.

By the end of that second week, Robert Wishart himself was in Selkirk Forest, haranguing Will. Andrew Murray had raised all of Scotland north of the Forth in rebellion, and the English up there were in total disarray. Wishart reminded Will, forcibly, that Murray, too, came of a knightly family but that his opinion of the magnates and their divided, self-centred, and ever-fluctuating loyalties was precisely the same as Will’s. Murray’s army was an army of the common folk, the Scots people who provided the solid backing underlying the community of the realm. Now was the time, Wishart said, for Will to join Murray, to throw in his lot with the northerner and march with his own people from the south to unite the whole of Scotland under their joint leadership. They knew each other. They admired and respected each other. And they were friends, sharing a detestation of all that kept Scotland from being what it should be, a strong, free land.

Wishart was an eloquent persuader, a fact that I knew well. He was also a bishop and a lord of the Church who ought not to have been fomenting rebellion. But above and beyond all else, Robert Wishart was a patriot who believed in his heart of hearts that Scotland had a destiny that could be fulfilled only if it rid itself of English occupation, certainly, but also of the English loyalties and English obligations evinced by its most powerful lords in their tenacious adherence to feudal allegiances that had lost all relevance. I now believe that Bishop Wishart was a man born before his time in that respect, a man of keen insight who foresaw the inevitable death of the feudal system that once governed all of Christendom but has fallen into ruin these past two hundred years.

My main belief about Robert Wishart, though, is that through his patriotism and his enthusiasm, his manipulative ways and his iron, stubborn, single-minded wilfulness, he brought about the end of the cousin I had known and loved. Perhaps I am being too harsh, too judgmental, but that is what I now believe. When Robert Wishart left to return to Glasgow on that occasion, he left a different man behind him than the William Wallace I had known.

The man who followed him out from the greenwood shortly afterwards, emerging, as some Englishman has written, like a bear from his forest den, was the William Wallace all men know today, Edward Plantagenet’s scowling, giant, merciless nemesis, and all England, along with much of Scotland, would regret his awakening. The laughing archer I had known was gone forever, obliterated in the destruction of his beloved Mirren and their children. The implacable avenger who came out of Selkirk Forest finally had set aside his long yew bow forever and taken up the massive sword his friend Shoomy had brought him in earlier, better days. I found it strange, thereafter, that the enormous sword, elaborately beautiful and lethal and taller than an ordinary man, should so completely usurp the place held for so long in Will’s life by his great yew bow, but as he himself pointed out afterwards, the bow lacked the close immediacy of a hand-held blade, and the sword he swung with his enormous archer’s muscles enabled him to smile more closely, face to face with every enemy he met.

As Will Wallace, he had promised his wife he would not fight against England and would look to his family’s safety first and above all. But he had failed her, he believed, losing her through his own carelessness and despite his knowledge of the dangers of being anywhere near the English. Now, he swore, he would not fail her memory, and his revenge would be without precedent and without equal; nor would he rest until all Scotland was scoured clean of the reek of English occupation. And so he marched to meet his destiny, and all the folk of Scotland flocked to follow him, to Stirling Bridge.

He never spoke Mirren’s name again.

GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
here is an astoundingly wonderful seafood restaurant called Keracher’s in Perth, Scotland, and whenever I think of my most recent trip there, in September 2008, I do so with reverential awe of the excellent cuisine—there is nothing better than Scottish cooking at its finest—and with gratitude for the hospitality tendered to me by the owners, Peter and Pam Keracher and their family. I spent a number of delightful evenings there in well-fed contentment during the latter weeks of my stay in Perth, just down the road from the Palace of Scone, contemplating the life of Sir William Wallace and the yet-unformed book I was to write, and wondering what I could ever find to say about him that would be as fresh and different as the extraordinary food I was enjoying.

By the time the
Braveheart
epic was released in 1995, serious Scottish historians and academics had been assiduously ignoring William Wallace for almost a hundred years, because, understandably enough, they had come to believe that it was impossible to differentiate between the man and the myth that had grown up around him in almost seven centuries. Emerging nationalism and romantic, wishful thinking had combined, over that time, to turn him into a chimera, an entity that has an existence of its own but was neither human nor supernatural. But with
Braveheart
came a renaissance of scholarly scrutiny of Sir William Wallace.

Professor Edward J. (Ted) Cowan is professor emeritus, formerly professor of Scottish history, at Glasgow University, and a couple of decades ago I had the pleasure of working with him a few times when he was professor of history and chair of Scottish studies at the University of Guelph, Ontario. In those days, we delivered a number of joint presentations (I believe the most accurate description would be
entertainments
) on the history of the Scots influence in Canada—Ted supplied the academic, historical realities, sweeping the gaping crowds up into his grasp in a way I have seldom seen equalled, and I illustrated his invocations with appropriate songs and poems to hammer home his various points. It was great fun and worked remarkably well, so Ted’s name was the first that sprang to mind when I began contemplating a research trip to Scotland in the autumn of 2008.

During one short visit that year, when I found him at Glasgow University’s Crichton Campus in Dumfries, Ted presented me with a treasure trove of stimuli in the form of an anthology called
The Wallace Book
, edited by him and published in 2007 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd. of Edinburgh. It’s a collection of twelve essays by leading historians and critics from Scotland and England, and the work is described on the cover as examining “what is known of [Wallace’s] career from contemporary sources, most of which, unusually for a national hero, were created by his enemies.”

I got lost in those essays, pragmatic and clinical as they are, because as I read them I found myself swimming in a flood of strikingly fresh ideas that swept me away into new realms of speculation and conjecture, which is food and drink to any historical novelist. And so I am greatly indebted to a number of very brilliant people, all of whom had me salivating for months over new possibilities, but none of whom should be held accountable for my perhaps egregious misinterpretation of what they wrote. For all those nudges towards novel interpretations, I am beholden to Fiona Watson, research fellow in history at the University of Dundee, for her incisive piece “Sir William Wallace: What We Do—And Don’t—Know”; Michael Prestwich, professor of medieval history at the University of Durham, for his English perspective on the Battle of Stirling Bridge;

A.A.M. Duncan, emeritus professor of Scottish history, University of Glasgow, for his biographical insights in “William, Son of Alan Wallace”; Elspeth King, director of the Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, for her observations on the material culture of William Wallace; Alexander Broadie, professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of Glasgow, for his fascinating thoughts on John Duns Scotus and the idea of independence; Alexander Grant, reader in medieval history at the University of Lancaster, for his essay “Bravehearts and Coronets: Images of William Wallace and the Scottish Nobility”; and, of course, to Professor Cowan himself, for his perspective on Wallace in “The Choice of the Estates.”

Those essays, and the imaginative flights they gave rise to, were delightful episodes in preparing the new book, but I should also pay tribute and offer thanks to several other sources of fundamental understanding and general appreciation of the history and the complexities of Scotland at the time I was writing about. Ted Cowan figures there again, with a book called
For Freedom Alone
, which examines the origins of the astonishing 1320 Declaration of Arbroath and the ideas from which it grew. G.W.S. Barrow’s book
Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland
has been invaluable to me, too, as has Peter Traquair’s panoramic study of the Scottish Wars of Independence,
Freedom’s Sword
. As the man said in
1066 and All That
, “History is what you can remember.” Tongue in cheek as that is, it is nonetheless true, and I found all of the sources named above to have been both memorable and enjoyable.

There is, however, one more source of a lifetime of enjoyment and inspiration that I must acknowledge. Is there a literate Scot anywhere who has not been touched and influenced at one time or another by the writings of Nigel Tranter? It is one of the great regrets of my life that I never had the chance to meet the man and thank him for the uncountable hours of pleasure I have derived from his writings. I remember that when I first read his novel
The Wallace
many years ago, I was awestruck by the potency of his voice, and I truly think that has been a contributory factor in my decision to call this book
A Tale of William Wallace.