CHAPTER THREE


THE HAMMERS OF THE SCOTS


‘They realized that to be in power you didn’t need guns, or money or even numbers, you just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.’

Verbal Kint, The Usual Suspects




One king’s name after another: an endless procession that blurs before the eyes. It is easy to forget they were ever real people, let alone that the most successful of them were soaked in the blood of innocents. It is tempting to imagine a king - especially a king from the distant past - being somehow removed from everyday concerns, maybe better than the men around him. This is a mistake, even a disservice to the sort of men who were capable of building nations.


This chapter is the story of two ruthless men: Alexander II, who forged a kingdom in blood and violence, and William Wallace, whose resistance to the nation-breaking King of England hammered national consciousness into the Scots. The events they shaped - and that shaped them - would scarcely work as fiction. Their lives and deaths seem too much to be believed. This is why historical fact is better than any fiction - because beneath it all, behind it all, is the hard truth. These were remarkable men, but they were men nonetheless.


Alexander II was the latest of the Canmores. He was descended from Malcolm - the same who had defeated and killed Macbeth and Lulach and sat upon the throne in 1058. When Malcolm died, in 1093, his younger brother Donald replaced him. Donald III was challenged - and briefly replaced on the throne - by Duncan, Malcolm’s son by his first wife.


Luckless Duncan II. He had been hostage of the English for years after the Abernethy Submission. Eventually sent north as a puppet of the English, he barely had time to warm the throne before he was murdered, and Donald III resumed his place. Duncan’s bad luck survived him - and passed down through the blood of his descendants like a faulty gene. One branch of Duncan’s line produced the MacWilliams of Moray, and they duly inherited the grievance and the bad luck. They grumbled to their kinsmen and neighbours, and among the peoples of the north they found many who had reason to support rival claims to the throne.


Kings of Scots like Alexander II did not control the landmass we would recognise as ‘Scotland’. For one thing, although the Vikings had had to face up to the limitations of their power, they still held a vast territory to the north and west. From Orkney in the north and reaching at times as far south as the Isle of Man, was a territory ruled not by the King of Scots but by men of Viking descent.


In 1098 King Edgar had reached a settlement with King Magnus ‘Barelegs’ of Norway that limited the Vikings to the islands, but this was no insignificant territory. During the twelfth century it gave rise to a line of powerful men like Somerled, who would trouble the kings of Scots for years to come: Ri Innse Gall, ‘Lords - kings even - of the Isles’.


The advent into the south and west of the Scottish mainland of families like the Bruces and the Stewarts had long ago caused upset among those sea lords. If they answered to any king at all - and that was usually debatable - then it was the King of Norway. Out of sight as well as out of mind, he was the perfect choice of master for a people with a taste for independence.


The new foreign friends and allies of the kings of Scots had their own dreams - notably to extend their personal territories. Faced with such threats to their lands and power - to their independence - the Isles men were often happy to back anyone who might cause trouble for the neighbouring crown. Others on the fringes of royal rule, those in the far north, were of a similar mind - loyal to powerful local families rather than to any distant king.


Alexander II was in the fourteenth year of his reign when the MacWilliams found the will and the support for one final uprising, in 1228. Once he had crushed them, Alexander needed to show those men of will what will really was. On a mid-winter market day in 1230, in the settlement of Forfar, one of the king’s men marched out into the centre of the town square to a position beside the market cross. In his arms he held the recently born daughter of the leader of the MacWilliams, taken from her mother’s arms.


Alexander himself watched from nearby as the infant was held up to the people. Content that he had the attention of the assembled crowd, the henchman took hold of the baby by her ankles and swung her with all his might. Her head smashed like an egg against the column of the cross, her blood and brains stained the stones and splattered into the onlookers’ faces. In the words of the Lanercost Chronicle: ‘The daughter, who had not long left her mother’s womb, innocent as she was, was put to death in the view of the market place. Her head was struck against the column and her brains dashed out.’ This was the stuff of which kings were made: the will to do what others would not.


Alexander II had been made King of Scots in a ceremony at Scone on 5 December 1214, when he was sixteen years old. His father had died just the day before, but there had been no time for mourning. In the chill of the dawn he and his entourage had been ferried across the River Tay. They had made their way then to the same grass-covered mound of earth from which King Constantine and Bishop Cellach had pledged their allegiance to the land and to each other 308 years before. The place was known by then as Moot Hill, or the Hill of Belief, and on it had been placed the Stone of Destiny, the rock with the power to make kings.


Alexander took his place, seated upon the stone, and listened while a bard recited his Gaelic patronymic, name by name. Like the baby girl he would one day send to an ugly death, he too was Mac Uilliem, after a fashion. He was the son of William - William the Lion. But unlike his distant, luckless relative, daughter of a disinherited line, he could count himself son of all the kings, all the way back to the first Scot himself, Iber Scot.


Such a ceremony could only have fanned the flames of self-belief that burned within the boy-king. He was red-haired like all the men of his family and he had the temperament to match. From boyhood he had been groomed for the kingship. William had seen to it that he featured prominently in treaties with England and that he was involved in the business of government. The men of his family had fought for generations to preserve their bloodline, and Alexander was determined to do the same.


In order to make his heirs secure, he had first to set about securing his realm. Just as it had his father, it rankled with Alexander that his Alba - his Scotland - rubbed shoulders in the north and west with a patchwork of other peoples and languages: Caithness and Sutherland in the far north, independent in practice if not in theory; to the west the kingdom of the Isles and to the south another fiercely independent lordship, that of Galloway.


England, though, was bigger, richer and stronger by far than any other of Alexander’s neighbours. To make matters worse, for the best part of two centuries the English kings had claimed Scotland as their own. It was all a game, in which what you said you owned mattered every bit as much as what you actually held. The first of the Canmores had played the game and recognised English superiority, but subservience was not Alexander’s style. As far as he was concerned, he was every bit the equal of an English king. Maybe it was brash, maybe it was arrogant but Alexander II was on a mission to free his kingdom from English overlordship once and for all.


Along with his red hair, Alexander had inherited his father’s sense of humiliation at the hands of King John of England. He it was who had denied William the Lion what many Scots regarded as their ancient right to the territories of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland. William had fought all his days to press his rights in the south. He had spilled blood and spent huge sums of money - even offered up two of his daughters in pursuit of his claim. But to no avail. Now Alexander vowed he would give no less, and that he would win more. This was not just about territorial gain; it was about reclaiming what was rightfully his. It was about birthright.


The King of Scots was not alone in his grudge against John of England; there was a long line of English barons with similar grievances. In particular they resented being bled dry by their king’s incessant demands for funds to finance his wars in France. In the end, they wrote it all down in what was to become the most famous legal document in English history. Originally called ‘The Charter of Liberties’, it is known the world over as ‘Magna Carta’, the great charter. Alexander’s claim to the disputed northern territories was added to the bottom of the list, in clause 59. It was a promise ‘To do right by Alexander the King of the Scots’. Here was a move of considerable subtlety by Alexander. A majority of the rebellious barons came from the north of England - the very territories he was determined to reclaim - and these were the men with whom he threw in his lot.


The barons had captured London in May 1215, within six months of Alexander ascending to his throne. The document they presented to King John, in a meadow beside the River Thames at Runnymede, had been in preparation since the winter of the year before. It was to a document called the ‘Articles of the Barons’ - which outlined the concessions to be made by the king - that the King’s Great Seal was actually attached (John did not sign Magna Carta; in fact there is no evidence he could even write). ‘The Charter of Liberties’ or ‘Magna Carta’ was a document composed later and based on what had been accepted by the king at Runnymede. It was written on vellum - calf’s skin - using a liquid called gall, collected and prepared from the lumps that form on oak trees when gall wasps impregnate the bark with their eggs. Once the scribes had done their work of writing out the sixty-three clauses - sometimes called chapters - the gall was dusted either with soot or iron salts. It was this treatment that gave the words the soft golden colour that survives in the four copies known to exist.


For all the high regard in which the words of ‘Magna Carta’ are held today (‘the cornerstone of liberty in the English-speaking world’, as it was described in a speech by Lord Woolf in 2005), King John treated it with no such reverence. No sooner had his seal been added to it than he was loudly dismissing it, to anyone who would listen, as ‘mere foolishness’. Enough was enough and the barons quickly decided to rid themselves of their troublesome king once and for all.


England plunged into civil war and Alexander seized his moment. With King John preoccupied elsewhere, a Scottish army invaded northern England and laid siege to Norham Castle, in October 1215. Alexander ordered Newcastle to be burned to the ground and took Carlisle as well, for good measure. He was, anyway, no stranger to the battlefield. Despite his tender years he had begun serving his military apprenticeship aged only fourteen when he led his father’s army against another MacWilliam - Guthred - in fierce fighting in Moray and Ross. After crushing rebels in his father’s lands, he earned the respect of his men; now he would earn that of the English barons by going to war against their king.


By November 1215 English royal forces had retaken the strategically vital castle of Rochester. It had looked likely then that John would turn his attentions towards London, but instead he moved north, towards the heartlands of his rebellious barons. North of the River Humber no less than twenty-five English castles were defying King John. He marched his army into the thick of it and made bloody inroads on the rebellion as he went, taking castles (including Carlisle and Richmond) and forcing many of the barons to flee towards Scotland.


On 11 January the following year the northern barons gathered in Melrose Abbey to swear fealty to the king for their lands. That king was the King of Scots (it was also almost a family affair for Alexander, since the two leaders of the northern barons - Robert de Ros and Eustace de Vescy - were married to two of his father’s illegitimate daughters). As far as Alexander was concerned, now that the barons had sworn allegiance to him the disputed borderlands were his. Riled beyond endurance at the audacity of the King of Scots, John vowed to hunt down the ‘fox-cub’. He captured the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed and laid waste to Lothian. But like foxes do, the redhead made good his escape.


With John out of London, the barons then did the unthinkable, the unforgivable: they sent messengers to France to offer the throne of England to Prince Louis. Louis duly accepted and at once set sail for the south-east coast. John had received warning of the coming invasion but the fleet he assembled for the necessary naval engagement was scattered by a storm. Louis landed with his men at Sandwich, in May, and the barons and their armies rallied to his side.


With so much at stake - so much to gain - Alexander headed south once more, quickly retaking Carlisle. The scent of victory had blown far to the north and the young King of Scots did what no other Scottish monarch had done before or since: he marched an army all the way to Dover. His plan was to cut a deal with the French, annex the northern territories and rule them as King of Scots.


All of it seemed within his grasp. He swept south in pursuit of the English army, gaining momentum all the way. As he had hoped, he joined up with the French forces and together they laid siege to Dover Castle, the key to England itself. In all the wars with England no other Scottish king ever came so far. His head must have swelled with every day that passed. There he was, just seventeen and on the brink of fulfilling his family’s longest-held ambition. Half of Britain was nearly his.


Only fate could stop him now and stop him it did. With Louis poised to march in triumph towards London, word reached the rebels of a development none of them could have foreseen. King John was dead, of dysentery. The death of the English monarch might have been good news for Alexander; but in fact the opposite was true. With John out of the way, the justification for the barons’ war evaporated. The king was dead, long live the king - and that meant rallying around John’s nine-year-old son Henry III.


Far from fighting on with Louis, the barons - their rebelliousness replaced with opportunistic patriotism - now turned on the would-be usurper. The French prince and his countrymen were soundly defeated at London and at Sandwich. As the French disappeared over the horizon, so too did Alexander’s dream of ruling the north of England. While they were fighting their king, the barons had regarded the young Alexander as a vital ally; now that they had rediscovered their love of the crown, he was an alien threat. Those northern barons who had so recently sworn allegiance to him now turned against him.


There was no longer any talk of a deal for Alexander; all of his ambitions fizzled out. In time, Henry III reissued ‘Magna Carta’, with all references to the King of Scots carefully omitted. To make matters worse, even the Pope had entered the fray on England’s side. Despite John’s death, Alexander had initially been keen to fight on; and in a demonstration of his continuing will had invaded Northumberland during the spring and summer of 1217. But then, word reached him that he and his leading churchmen were being excommunicated by Honorius III. The ‘fox-cub’, his tail between his legs, had to surrender Carlisle in return for absolution. In the final indignity he presented himself at Northampton in December, where he paid homage to the child-king Henry III of England.


In the depths of his humiliation and disappointment, Alexander journeyed to Arbroath Abbey, to contemplate the grave of his father. Like the Lion, the ‘fox-cub’ had tried and failed to make northern England a part of Scotland. Perhaps it was in some or other moment of quiet thought in the abbey grounds that Alexander began to understand the lessons that would shape the rest of his reign. At heart - when there was a stark choice between the child Henry and the French prince - the English barons had known instinctively who their king was. But Alexander must have wondered then … could the same be said for the nobles of Scotland?


Beyond the reach and limits of Alexander’s demesne, other peoples lived other lives. But there was a fundamental split within his kingdom as well. In the south the land was dominated by the families of French descent that had been invited into Scotland by the early Canmore kings. Kings like Edgar and David I had grown up in England, witnessing at first hand how Norman culture had transformed the southern kingdom into one of the most powerful and sophisticated in Europe. When they had opened Scotland’s doors to the incomers, they had hoped to draw north more of the same seeds of success and prosperity.


The immigrants had duly brought with them the European ways so coveted by kings of Scots. They also supported the Canmores in their decision to import the reformed monastic orders - Augustinians, Benedictines, Cistercians, Tironensians and others - and had paid for the building of the great abbeys and monasteries that had changed the face of the land. But in the north and west were the sons and daughters of the old Gaelic families that had been there at the start, helping to lay the very foundations of the young kingdom. Once they had been at its beating heart, but by Alexander’s time the Gaelic elite had been sidelined. Where once they had helped run the kingdom, now they held titles like ‘Divider of the King’s Meat’. The upstart Norman lords, by contrast, were made ‘Chancellor’ and ‘Constable of Scotland’. One chronicler of the time wrote: ‘The modern kings of Scotland count themselves as Frenchmen in race, manners, language and culture; they keep only Frenchmen in their household and following and have reduced the Scots to utter servitude.’


So it was that the Gaelic nobles had long since taken their leave of the court of the Canmores, preferring to create their own realms beyond the reach of the kings. It was in these semi-independent territories - Galloway in the south; Argyll, Ross, Sutherland and Caithness in the north - that rebellious thoughts and dreams like those of the MacWilliams, and their kinsmen the MacHeths, had taken root. Beyond, in the Hebrides and the Northern Isles, were those who looked to Norway for their overlord.


Alexander surveyed his kingdom and found it too messy for his liking. It was time for a new approach, a new deal. Rather than backing one side over the other, as his predecessors had done, he struck a balance between Norman innovation and Gaelic tradition. In Alexander’s Scotland, both worlds would be allowed to flourish. The Gaelic warlords and their families were duly invited back in from the cold. In return for a share of the top jobs and titles, they would fight the king’s battles. With their help he would bring all of Scotland to heel, territory by territory.


Alexander married Henry III’s sister Joan in 1221. This was the most prestigious match secured by any King of Scots in a hundred years and demonstrated to observers abroad - and perhaps as importantly, to those at home - that here was a ruler who registered in the consciousness of the wider world. In the same year he asked to be anointed and crowned by the Pope’s representative. This was a watershed moment as well. The inauguration of Scottish kings had always been an event of the secular, rather than the spiritual world. Everything about the ceremony was earthy - a marriage to the rock itself. Now Alexander was asking that God himself bless his hold on the crown, a privilege already enjoyed by kings of England and France. His request was turned down - due in no small part to English objections - but it was a matter he would never let drop.


Within weeks of his wedding he was in Inverness, crushing a rebellion. Later the same year he was at similar work in Argyll.


In 1222, opponents of royal authority murdered Bishop Adam of Caithness by roasting him to death. The men who set the fire, henchmen of the Earl of Orkney, claimed Adam had brought it upon himself with his heavy-handed attempts to bring the local Church into line with practices further south. But Alexander, receiving the news while preparing to go on pilgrimage to Canterbury, saw it differently. Adam of Caithness had been put in post by the king’s father and the grisly murder was therefore an act of rebellion against the crown. Alexander set aside his plans for peaceful contemplation and headed north instead, gathering an avenging army as he went. The perpetrators were rounded up and savagely dealt with.


The Western Isles, too, received Alexander’s violent attentions. After a period when Norwegian influence there had been on the wane, the energetic and forceful King Haakon IV had ascended to the throne of Norway in 1217. He was determined to keep a tight rein on the islands and actively encouraged his subjects there to resist any and all attempts at assimilation by the King of Scots. Undeterred, indeed emboldened by his successes elsewhere, Alexander attacked the sea lords of the Isles - the start of a campaign for conquest that would continue for the rest of his reign, and beyond.


It was while Alexander was in this mood - unwilling to brook any challenge, any threat to his plans for outright domination - that the MacWilliams clashed for the last time with their nemesis. The murder of the baby girl in the market square in Forfar was a shocking act even by the brutal standards of the day. It was also politically pointless: the MacWilliam hopes of a return to the throne were dead before she was born. But this King of Scots was nothing if not thorough. The snuffing-out of her life, specifically the way in which he had chosen to do it, was remembered for generations, just as Alexander had hoped it would be.


True to his word, he rewarded those warlords who fought for him and helped him extend the reach of royal will. Farquhar MacTaggart, a Gaelic leader in Ross, had been knighted and granted an earldom by Alexander for his bloody suppression of an earlier MacWilliam rising in 1215. Elsewhere the king’s own hand-picked men, scions of the old Gaelic elite among them, were eventually made earls of Sutherland, and of Caithness; lords of Badenoch and Lochaber. Galloway, too, was brought under direct royal control. Of the thirteen earldoms that existed in Scotland in 1286, eight of them were in the hands of sons of the old Gaelic elite.


Gaelic leaders were encouraged to adopt Anglo-Norman ways, but without shedding too much of their old distinctiveness. They became knights, built castles, married into prominent Anglo-Norman families. In time, many of them would hold lands in England as well. Unlike in England, where the Norman takeover had been aggressive - and complete - in Scotland the Anglo-Norman culture was something that could be dipped into, acquired as it suited.


More effectively than his father, perhaps more effectively than any King of Scots before him, Alexander II forged Scotland into something like the geographical entity we know today. But his most lasting achievements were more profound, affecting the way Scots regarded themselves.


He had sought the blessing of the Pope, of God, for his crown. Having had his first request for holy oil turned down in 1221, he asked again in 1233 - only to be refused once more. He may well have made more requests but his failure in the end is not important. What mattered was his contention - his certainty - that the kingdom of Scotland should be put on the same footing as those of England and France. Then in 1237 he scored his greatest success. By the Treaty of York he secured a permanent and lasting border between Scotland and England for the very first time. To get it he had to surrender for ever all claims on the northern territories but now England recognised a fixed line between the River Tweed and the River Solway. Implicit in that recognition was acceptance by the King of England that the kingdom of Scotland actually existed as a free and independent country. It would be fought over time and again in years to come - but it was there and it remains essentially unchanged to the present day.


One kingdom. Scotland. Everyone north of the Border was subject to one king and that made them one people - Scots. Now and for ever they could say: ‘This over here is Scotland - that over there is England. And we are different.’ This was the legacy of Alexander II.


He was fighting to extend royal control right up until the moment of his death. Although he secured a southern border in 1237, he never gave up plans to shape the western limits of his kingdom to his liking as well. Argyll was finally brought to heel in 1249. In the same year he had turned his attention once more to the Western Isles. He was with his huge fleet and army at Oban, ready to do battle with the forces of Haakon IV of Norway, when he was taken ill. He died on the little island of Kerrera, in Oban Bay, on 8 July. He had been King of Scots for thirty-five years.


There would be no attack on sea lords that year. The Scots forces drifted homewards and the body of the king was taken to Melrose Abbey where, in accordance with his wishes, he was buried near the high altar.


He was succeeded by his only son, the seven-year-old Alexander III. Joan of England, daughter of Henry III , had produced no children by the time she died in 1238. Her replacement had been found not in the English house, as Henry might have wished, but in France. No doubt the English king was not a little alarmed to find his ambitious neighbour had wed Marie de Courcy, daughter of the man who had commanded Prince Louis’ forces against his father in England in 1216-17.


The production of male heirs was the single most important job of medieval kings and in 1241 Marie gave birth to Alexander. When trouble brewed between Scotland and England once again in 1244, the infant prince became part of the solution. The peace negotiations that avoided any actual conflict between the kingdoms that year included his betrothal to Henry’s daughter Margaret.


Like his father before him, Alexander III was crowned at Scone, sitting upon the Stone of Destiny. That he had come into his kingship while still so young might have been a problem - especially following hard on the heels of a monarch who had achieved so much by the very force of his own personality. But the Scottish nobility and Church rallied protectively around the boy. Within a year his great-great-great-grandmother Margaret was made a saint - Scotland’s only royal saint. It seemed a good omen.


In 1251 the ten-year-old king travelled in some splendour to York for double celebrations. First he was knighted by Henry and then married to little Margaret, herself just eleven years old. A marriage between the King of Scots and the daughter of the King of England; to onlookers it must have seemed to usher in hopes of a new time of peace between the old enemies - even the prospect of a union of the crowns.


The period of Alexander’s minority ended on his eighteenth birthday in 1259. He had been guided by those nobles closest to the throne, notably the Comyn family, who held lands from the crown in Badenoch and Lochaber as well as in the south-west. But from the moment he came fully into his kingship he showed no lack of self-confidence, or direction. By 1261 he had focused his attention on the territory his father had been eyeing at the moment of his death. Royal envoys were sent to Norway to put pressure on Haakon to come to terms over control over the Western Isles, but when their efforts failed Alexander took the initiative.


Word reached Norway the following summer that a Scots force had attacked Skye. By 1263 Haakon had mustered his fleet and was on his way south to settle the matter. There was a show of strength and intent by the Norwegians, followed by attempts at diplomacy and a peaceful settlement. The eventual, seemingly inevitable battle - at Largs on 2 October - was a damp squib, if truth be known. The job of disabling the Norwegian fleet had been accomplished, not by the Scots but by a great storm off the coast of the town the previous week. By the time the survivors got down to confronting the Scots army gathered to greet them, they had little appetite left for the fight.


If there was a victor, then it was the Scots; but the battle had been inconclusive. Haakon and the remnants of his fleet turned their backs on the Western Isles and withdrew to Orkney, where he became ill at the end of October. He took to his bed in the Bishop’s Palace in Kirkwall, and died. The Battle of Largs had decided nothing by itself. But the death of Haakon put a new complexion on things. The fire went out of any lingering desire to retain territories that were, anyway, so far from the homeland. In 1266 the Norwegians agreed the sale of the Western Isles to the Scottish crown, on condition that the kings of Scotland would respect Norway’s hold on Orkney and Shetland.


It has been argued by some that Scotland entered a golden age in the second half of the thirteenth century. There was certainly prosperity. Economies across Europe enjoyed a boom period - one as inexplicable as that which came to an end in 2008 - and Scotland shared in the good times. By then the country had a population of perhaps 500,000. Although the majority of people still lived in the countryside, the burghs that had been established by David I had come on apace. Towns on the east coast, like Aberdeen, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Dundee, Edinburgh, Elgin, Inverness and Perth, thrived within a commercial network that took in all the countries encircling the North Sea. To the west, the urbanised populations of towns like Ayr, Dumfries, Glasgow, Irvine and Renfrew traded with Ireland and the towns of western England. Wool was a major commodity, much of it collected from the huge flocks maintained on the Southern Uplands by the great Cistercian houses. Fish, timber and animal hides were also profitable and exported in considerable quantities. Scotland was beginning to thrive.


The wedding of Alexander and Margaret had been a dazzling, golden affair - the Scots had made sure of that. Their intention had been clear: to pitch Scotland as an equal partner, an equal kingdom. Among the honoured guests had been one prince who would cast a long-legged shadow across the whole of Britain. He was Margaret’s brother - now Alexander’s brother-in-law - Prince Edward.


Heir to the throne of England, he possessed a potent mix of qualities. He had all the overweening sense of superiority that had directed his father and grandfather - but coupled with rare intelligence and military skill. If all of that did not make him dangerous enough, he was shot through with cold-blooded cruelty and a taste for messy violence. The English historian Matthew Paris, perhaps the finest chronicler of the thirteenth century, recorded a telling incident from Edward’s youth. Angered by a slight, the prince had sent a henchman to attack a man, cut off his ear and gouge out an eye. With a palpable sense of gloom and foreboding Paris wrote: ‘If he does these things when the wood is green, what can be hoped for when it is seasoned?’


What indeed. Edward channelled his violence into warfare and grew into a skilled practitioner of the art. In 1266 he went on crusade alongside King Louis IX of France. His bravery in the fight for the city of Acre - and the glamour of a near-fatal wounding at the hands of a Muslim assassin - added greatly to his prestige. It was on his journey home to recover his health that he learned of his father’s death, and by the time he was back in England to claim his throne he was being hailed by some as a new Richard the Lionheart. But if Edward’s life had all the glow of a ‘Boy’s Own’ story, his Scottish brother-in-law was soon in the midst of a Greek tragedy. Alexander’s wife, Margaret of England, died in 1275. By then she had given Alexander three children - two sons and a daughter, and the succession seemed secure. In the spring of 1281 it was announced that their daughter Margaret was to marry King Erik II of Norway, a move designed to bring the two countries closer together. But before the nuptials could take place, Alexander’s eight-year-old younger son, David, took ill and died. It was a body blow and a cause of great lamenting; but, for all the sadness, at least the future of the throne remained safe in the hands of the elder brother, Alexander, Prince of Scotland.


The wedding of Margaret and Erik took place in August and little over a year later the royal couple were expecting their first child. But on 9 April 1283 came the news that Margaret had died giving birth to a daughter. The infant, a sickly child, was named Margaret after her mother. Back in Scotland, the House of Canmore went into mourning once again. All of this was surely bad enough - a family bereft, its two survivors wondering at the course of events that had taken away mother, son and daughter. Then Prince Alexander took ill as well. He was newly married and there must have been hopes at first that a son and heir would soon follow, a return to good fortune. It was not to be. On 17 January 1284, the Prince of Scotland died.


King Edward was moved to write declaring his shock and sadness at all that had befallen his brother-in-law. Alexander’s reply suggests a genuine fondness between the two men: ‘You have offered much solace for our grief by [saying] that although death has … borne away your kindred in these parts, we are united together perpetually, God willing, by the tie of indissoluble affection.’ For any man, the loss of all of his children is too much to be borne. But a king cannot be like other men - not when the future of his crown and country is at stake - and Alexander had to set about the business of starting again. In the short term, his granddaughter Margaret - called the ‘Maid of Norway’ - was accepted as heir to the Scottish throne. An act of pragmatism on the part of the rulers of Scotland, it nonetheless caused much unease. Scotland had never had a female monarch and among the magnates were men who wondered what the future might hold if the crown were to be handed to a woman. Furthermore, several of them believed they had better claims on the throne themselves.


They were consoled by the knowledge that Alexander was still in the prime of life: plenty of time for him to find a new wife and to father more sons. Broken-hearted or not, the king duly set his stall out at the international marriage market, and within two years had found and married a new young wife. She was French, Yolande of Dreux, and to her now fell the duty of producing a boy child to make safe the Canmore line. Alexander was understandably keen to be with his bride as much as possible. So it was that on the night of 18 March 1286 he set out from Edinburgh Castle into the teeth of a howling gale. He had spent the day with the lords of his council and as the business drew to a close they urged him to wait for morning and, hopefully, better weather.


But Alexander had more to think about than rain and wind. Twenty-three-year-old Yolande was waiting for him in the royal manor of Kinghorn, on the other side of the Firth of Forth, and he had other duties to perform. At Dalmeny the ferryman tried to turn the king away, saying the 2-mile crossing to Inverkeithing was too dangerous. Alexander teased the man, asking him if he was scared. ‘By no means,’ the ferryman answered: ‘it would be a great honour to share the fate of your father’s son.’ At Inverkeithing he was met by one of the town bailies and offered lodgings for the night. But by now Alexander was too close to his goal to think about stopping. Shrugging aside the offer, the king mounted a horse and set out into the storm accompanied only by two ‘bondmen’.


Whatever actually happened on that journey has been lost to history. All that is known for certain is that, somewhere along the treacherous cliff-top path leading to Kinghorn, Alexander became separated from the other riders. He never reached the royal manor. Next morning, 19 March 1286, the last of the Canmore kings was found dead on the beach beneath a high point known today as the ‘King’s Crag’, his neck broken. Scotland was without a king and her future lay in the feeble grasp of a three-year-old girl.


The following month there gathered at Scone a parliament of all the most senior churchmen and most powerful nobles in the land. They at once swore allegiance to little Margaret of Norway and vowed, under pain of excommunication, to keep Scotland safe and peaceful for her. A provisional government was established and six ‘Guardians of the Community of the Realm’ put in place. They were two bishops - Robert Wishart of Glasgow and William Fraser of St Andrews, two earls - Alexander Comyn of Buchan and Duncan MacDuff of Fife and two barons - John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch and James the Steward.


It was also decided by the parliament that Edward of England should be invited to offer his help and advice in maintaining the peace and security of Scotland. It made sense: the Maid of Norway was the granddaughter of Edward’s sister, making her his grand-niece. For him, the future of Scotland was a family affair. At first the English king’s involvement was a welcome presence in a time of need. Soon after Alexander’s death, those nobles with the strongest claims on the throne had been sabre-rattling in a way that might have pushed the country into the abyss of civil war. Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale and grandfather of the future Robert I, was noisily declaring his rights and it was the presence of Edward I on the sidelines, as much as any efforts by the Guardians, that stabilised the situation.


Negotiations got under way then to arrange a future marriage for the Maid of Norway and Edward’s son and heir, Edward of Caernarvon. The protracted talks culminated in the Treaty of Birgham, of 1290. Hopes were high that a child born of such a marriage would assume the crowns of both kingdoms - it was a glimmer of optimism for a country that had lived through four years of darkness. The future seemed certain once more. The terms of Birgham even made it clear that the kingdom of Scotland should be ‘separate, apart and free in itself, without subjection to the English kingdom’. King Edward viewed the matter differently. A master of the law, he well understood what his dynasty stood to gain from such a marriage. Medieval women, after all, were property. In the eyes of the law, what a woman owned belonged to her husband. Once she married Prince Edward, the Maid’s Scotland would belong to England.


Untimely death, however, still stalked the blood of the Canmores. Little Margaret, six years old by then, was on her way to Scotland in October 1290 when she was struck down by illness - probably seasickness. Her ship docked at Orkney to give her a chance to recover, but she died there. Her body was returned to Bergen for burial while the shattering news of her death travelled south.


Edward may have been irked by the development at first, after all those drawn-out negotiations to arrange marriage, but he quickly saw it as an act of divine providence. With the death of Princess Margaret, the clear line of succession to the throne was broken and rival claimants were free to contest the matter. Robert Bruce of Annandale had staked his claim soon after Alexander’s death - but there was a second, equally strong contender in the form of John Balliol of Barnard Castle.


It says a great deal for the wisdom of the Scone parliament that neither of these men had been chosen as a Guardian. Both had enough military clout at their disposal to enable them to back their claims on the field of battle, and it fell to the Guardians to act quickly enough and decisively enough to prevent the country tearing itself apart. With this in mind they sought out a man they felt had the relevant mastery of the law to enable him to offer sage advice; a man who commanded international respect, whose word would be listened to; a man who was, anyway, almost family. They asked Edward.


The English king called for a parliament to be held on 6 May 1291, to settle the future of the Scottish crown. The location he chose for the gathering was Norham Castle, on the English side of the River Tweed and the Scots immediately smelled a rat. The Treaty of Birgham had made it clear that no parliament to discuss Scottish affairs would be held outside Scotland. Now Edward proposed to decide the very future of the kingdom in England. As far as the Guardians were concerned, it was not right. While they stalled on the Scottish side of the river, Edward raised the stakes. Not only did he continue to insist the parliament be in Norham, the heavily fortified home of Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, but also he said the proceedings would not start until the Guardians and the claimants to the throne had acknowledged his position as superior overlord of Scotland. It was a stunning move and the Guardians reeled back from the blow.


Bishop Wishart of Glasgow was the first to regain his balance. To Edward’s face he stated the independence of Scotland: ‘The Scottish kingdom is not held in tribute or homage to anyone save God alone,’ he said. These were brave and defiant words from a brave and defiant man, but Edward shrugged them off. Then he raised the stakes once more: in addition to Bruce and Balliol, he had found eleven other likely claimants for the throne. Robert Bruce was the first to crack under the pressure, driven no doubt by his desperation to gain the throne, but in the end all twelve claimants submitted to Edward. Balliol was the last to do so. On 12 June, Bishop Wishart himself, along with the rest of the Guardians, swore fealty to the English king as well.


So began what has become known as ‘The Great Cause’ - the bid to decide the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, with Edward as judge. In hindsight it was always a foregone conclusion. Sheer devilment had inspired the English king to round up the eleven newest claimants, but only two men had credible cases to make: Bruce and Balliol. In years to come the Bruce family would rewrite history to justify their actions, but the fact remains that in 1291 John Balliol had the superior claim. Ancestors of both men had married into the royal line when they wed daughters of David, Earl of Huntingdon, youngest son of King Malcolm IV. Robert Bruce (later known as the Competitor) was the grandson of Isabella, David’s youngest girl. John Balliol was the great-grandson of Margaret, his eldest daughter.


With considerable effrontery, Bruce tried to argue that his claim was stronger because he was a whole generation closer to David. But he and everybody else gathered around the table in Norham Castle knew that in thirteenth-century Scotland it was all about primogeniture - being descended from the elder branch of the family. Since Balliol was great-grandson of the eldest daughter, the throne was his. Despite this simple fact, there followed seventeen months of talking, arguing and adjournments before he was officially named as the successor on 6 November 1292.


For Edward the result was a detail and of little real interest; he had already secured oaths of fealty from everyone in the room. On 17 November, Balliol accepted Edward as his overlord once more. Shortly afterwards, Balliol travelled to Scone and there, on 30 November, seated upon the Stone of Destiny, was inaugurated as King of Scotland. In fact, it was from Balliol’s time onwards that the stone took on its most famous name. If it was called anything up until that point it was more likely ‘The Stone of Scone’. Balliol was the last King of Scotland to be crowned upon that lump of sandstone.


With the stone beneath him and Edward above as overlord, Balliol was literally between a rock and a hard place. Edward I was one of the most powerful kings in Europe. He was also supremely smart, a master tactician of both politics and war. For the duration of his reign, that unluckiest of Scotland’s kings was bullied and humiliated by his liege lord at every opportunity. If subservience to the English king was not bad enough, Balliol also had to endure the ill-will of the Bruce family and all their supporters. By any standards, the new king was in a hopeless situation. For a while the maltreatment was mundane - Edward as back-seat driver, taking day-today decisions out of Balliol’s hands. But in 1294 Edward demanded the service of the king and the entire Scots army to help prosecute the English war in Gascony.


For Bishop Wishart and the rest of the Scottish leaders this was the last straw - the Scottish King to do military service for the King of England? Unthinkable. They assembled in secret in Stirling and agreed upon the formation of the so-called Council of Twelve, comprising four bishops, four earls and four lords. It was also agreed that this new team of Guardians would not be answerable to Balliol; he would be a figurehead, nothing more. The real power would lie with the most powerful members of the Council, namely the Comyns of Badenoch.


The Council understood from the start that they needed help from outside. In July 1295 a secret delegation was sent to win backing from Philippe IV of France, Edward’s enemy. The result was a commitment to mutual support between the two kingdoms called the Treaty of Paris, but known fondly by Scots to this day as the ‘Auld Alliance’. In the end it never really generated much in the way of help from France, but in principle it guaranteed that if England were to attack either kingdom, then the other would rise to its defence. Word of the Treaty - the treachery - reached Edward later the same year. He was furious. The kingdom he had so recently subjugated without spilling a drop of blood was now signing secret deals with his sworn enemy!


In Scotland there was a sense of excitement. With the prospect of military back-up from across the Channel, Balliol gave the order for the Scots host to assemble north of Selkirk on 11 March 1296. The Bruces, first among the contenders to submit to Edward at Norham, were conspicuous by their absence. Balliol immediately ordered that their lands in Annandale be made over to John Comyn, his own fatherin-law and the Bruces’ arch-rival.


As soon as Edward sent his troops into France, a Scottish force crossed the Border and attacked the English garrison at Carlisle. It was a show of commitment to the Treaty of Paris, but it had sown the wind. The people of Berwick reaped the whirlwind. Edward crossed the Tweed at Coldstream with a force estimated at 30,000 men and cavalry, far and away the largest army that had ever been sent north. Berwick was Scotland’s wealthiest burgh and an obvious target. Easter celebrations were drawing to a close when nervous sentries keeping watch on the flimsy timber fortifications spotted the outriders of the English force. Word had reached them weeks before that English soldiers had been mobilised in the northern territories, and now here they were.


Since there was no purposeful defence to be offered in the face of such a host, the garrison surrendered at once. Edward and his men swiftly took possession. What followed was one of the worst atrocities in the history of medieval Britain. A chronicler recorded how ‘for two days streams of blood flowed from the bodies of the slain, for in his tyrannous rage he ordered 7,500 souls of both sexes to be massacred … mills could be turned round by the flow of their blood’. Edward had wanted nothing less than wholesale slaughter. The orgy of killing only came to an end when the frantic pleading of local clergymen moved Edward to show some semblance of pity for those traumatised men, women and children still alive. Out of an original population of almost 13,000, fewer than 5,000 were still breathing when Edward’s men put their swords away.


As things turned out, the rape of Berwick was just a warm-up. With a reputation for massive violence preceding him, Edward made a gruesome advance through the heartland of Scotland. A Scots force had taken Dunbar Castle from its English garrison and by the end of April John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey had arrived to put the place under siege. The main body of the Scots army advanced to try and drive them off on 27 April, only to be cut to pieces by better-trained English heavy horse and infantry. Whether the rout was as bloody as the English chroniclers said - they claimed as many as 10,000 Scots dead - it was the end of the war.


The Scottish resistance collapsed like wet sand. During the course of the next few weeks the castles of Edinburgh, Perth, Roxburgh and Stirling opened their doors to English troops. Balliol wandered all the while seemingly unsure what to do. At the beginning of July he sent Edward a grovelling letter in which he admitted his fault: ‘we have by evil and false council, and our own folly, grievously offended our lord Edward … we … have surrendered to him the land of Scotland and all its people’. Next he formally renounced the Treaty of Paris, before finally handing himself over to Edward like a guilty child. It was hardly surprising that he had tried to hold out against the inevitable. He had a lot of explaining to do. Under the terms of his sworn oaths of fealty, he was Edward’s man - and yet he had conspired with the French and attacked English soil. In Edward’s eyes he was nothing more than a defaulting vassal who would have to be punished.


Unfortunately for the Scots king - or rather the former king, as Edward had been calling him ever since the Scots army had mustered north of the Border the previous month - Edward would not be content with mere surrender. What he wanted was a show. It was therefore with all possible theatricality that King John of Scotland was literally stripped of every vestige of his rank. First paraded before Edward as a penitent, he then had the royal insignia ripped from his vestments, earning him the nickname that has trailed behind him ever since: ‘Toom Tabard’ - empty suit, King Nobody. Broken and humiliated, he was sent first to the Tower of London and ultimately to exile in France.


Edward behaved as though racking his brains for every way to humiliate and eviscerate the land he had newly conquered. He took the regalia - the crown jewels - from Edinburgh Castle. He took the Black Rood of St Margaret, holiest of all of Scotland’s relics. So that the Scots might never again make a king of their own he took the Stone of Scone - the Stone of Destiny - and sent it to be a centrepiece of the shrine of Edward the Confessor, in Westminster Abbey. A bureaucrat to the tips of his fingers, he had the royal records - the paperwork detailing his new acquisition - inventoried, boxed up and put aboard a ship bound for England. They never made it; the ship sank and a priceless collection of irreplaceable documents was lost. Senior nobles were rounded up and sent into imprisonment south of the Border. The most prominent of those who had fought for Balliol - and for the independence of the kingdom - now shared the fate of the monarch. Scotland was not just without a king, it had been comprehensively stripped of all those who might foment further rebellion.


For several weeks in the summer of 1296 Edward toured the land, making sure to be seen in every burgh and every royal castle as far north as Elgin. While he was making his presence felt, his administrators were at work putting together a document that would go down as the most notorious and shameful in Scottish history. Edward wanted every significant landowner to pay him homage, to accept him as liege lord, and so it was that around 1,900 of them put their seals to what has become known as the ‘Ragman Roll’.


Erstwhile competitors for the throne - Bruces and Balliols; bishops, senior clergy and the heads of religious houses; great noble families like Comyns and Stewarts; tenants-in-chief; under-tenants; knights great and small - it amounted to nothing less than a collective handover of the independence of Scotland. By the time all the seals had been fastened to the end of the roll, the best part of 2,000 ribbons gave the thing a ragged appearance, hence the name (the Ragman Roll also gave rise to the word ‘rigmarole’, meaning something lengthy and complicated).


Historians - not to mention self-styled patriots and rebels down through the intervening centuries - have made much of the fact that one name in particular does not feature on the Ragman Roll. Until 1296 or so, William Wallace was just an obscure squire, living on land at Elderslie, near Renfrew. His elder brother Malcolm was actually the holder of the land, but still the absence of both men’s names from the list of local notables is surprising. Edward’s men were uncommonly thorough, taking the seals and oaths of lesser men than the pair resident at Elderslie; so it seems unlikely they were considered too lowly for inclusion, and more likely that the Wallaces refused to toe the line - a first small spark of defiance.


In any event, the winter of 1296 was one of the country’s darkest. Edward left Scotland in the charge of two trusted lieutenants - John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey as Governor and Hugh de Cressingham as Treasurer - and set off for home. He had, he thought, bigger fish to fry in France; Scotland was a done deal. As he crossed the Tweed back into England he quipped ‘A man does good business when he rids himself of shit.’


For a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, the Scots reeled from all that had been visited upon them. But, if Edward really thought that an atrocity, a battle, a wagon-load of trophies and a ragged roll of paper was all it took to wring the last ounce of fighting spirit from the northern kingdom, he was terribly wrong. Still befuddled by the speed of events, the Scots paid the first instalment of monies required by Edward for his endless war in France. But by the spring of 1297 they had regained their senses, and their defiant tendencies. Despite his best efforts, Cressingham found the money was drying up. Instead of collecting taxes to pay for the wages of his staff and the occupying forces, he faced the prospect of explaining to his master why England now had to pay for the privilege of its overlordship in Scotland.


The first spark of real resistance was struck in the Gaelic north. It was a small act of defiance, a single standard raised against Edward, but all at once it began to spread. The top layer of society had been decimated by Edward’s judgment upon them - either imprisoned or cowed into submission. But among the ‘middling sort’ - lesser landowners but not short on pride - there grew a concerted objection to paying for English adventures across the Channel. Resistance was unco-ordinated and sporadic at first, but soon there were many fires burning. What would happen if the flames were to be brought together in a firebrand?


Bishop Wishart was still at large and so too was James the Stewart. These two served for a time as a focus for rebellion, and were joined by a third - Robert Bruce, twenty-two-year-old grandson of Robert Bruce, the Competitor. That Bruce the younger should have stepped out into the light as an opponent of King Edward in 1297 is surprising to say the least. When the Bruces had failed to muster for the invasion of England the year before, their lands had been made forfeit. Driven south, they renewed old oaths of allegiance to Edward and only regained their holdings in Annandale as a result of the English conquest. What they had in Scotland now they owed to Edward; and yet here was young Robert declaring an urge to bite the hand that had fed him. Whether it was latent love of the land of his birth, or the very start of a long-term strategy to take the throne, he stepped up to the fight in Scotland’s darkest hour, for a little while at least.


But all of them - Wishart, Stewart, even the Bruce - were shortly to be eclipsed by a brighter light by far. The Stewarts held lands around Renfrewshire and had done since the time of David I. It was from within the Stewart retinue then that William Wallace, the knight from Elderslie, emerged blinking from the darkness of obscurity. Sometime in May he found reason to kill the English sheriff of Lanark, William Hesilrig. According to Blind Harry’s Wallace (or to give his book its full title, The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campion Schir William Wallace), Hesilrig had cruelly murdered Wallace’s wife, and so brought down upon his head the knight’s righteous vengeance. Whatever the motive, Wallace certainly cut the sheriff down - and into pieces - in an act widely seen as the start of his war against the English occupation of Scotland. And it was not just the sheriff. Wallace and his men butchered every Englishman they could lay their hands on.


William Wallace … The Wallace … For many he is the ultimate freedom fighter, for others a terrorist. He is the enigmatic hero who appears from nowhere to liberate his people and to shape history. The Wallace story is one of the defining legends of Scottish identity and the epitome of Scotland’s story. And yet, with all the mythologising, we have lost sight of Wallace the man: a remarkable man, but a man nonetheless.


After making a name for himself at Lanark, Wallace launched a surprise attack at Scone on the court of the English justiciar William Ormsby. He was accompanied on the raid by Sir William Douglas, a maverick former governor of Berwick Castle, and together they so surprised Ormsby he barely escaped with his skin intact. Furthermore, and of greater value, he left behind a great deal of cash. Now Wallace had a fighting fund.


Where he had learned, or honed, his fighting skills is not known. This, the most revered of Scotland’s folk heroes, seems to emerge onto the field of battle ready-made for victory. That it was dangerous to get on his wrong side was beyond question; how he got that way we will likely never know. When it came to the business of war Wishart, Stewart and the Bruce, by contrast, were proving ham-fisted at best and downright craven at worst. After a farcical encounter with an English force near Irvine in July, Wishart and Stewart were taken prisoner. Bruce - willing, like a cockerel on a weathervane, to turn whichever way the wind blew - promptly renewed his vows of allegiance to Edward, yet again.


Wallace, though, was still very much at large and increasingly the popular focus of the rebellion. It may well be that Wishart had actually succeeded in at least one way: by drawing the attention of the English forces towards himself in Ayrshire - and by spinning out the terms of his surrender - he bought time for the Elderslie knight. An English chronicler wrote that the bishop ‘caused a certain bloody man, William Wallace, who had formally been a chief of brigands in Scotland, to revolt against the king, and assemble people in his support’. That is certainly what Wallace did. He was a hit. But the people who flocked to his side - who loved him before the end and died for him and with him - were not of noble blood. Wallace’s army was a mix of ordinary people, humble folk - ‘the middling sort’. They were precisely the sort of people who had had first-hand experience of Edward’s policies of wringing as many taxes and fighting men from Scotland as he could.


Those who rallied to Wallace might have been enthusiastic, and numerous, but for the most part they were unfamiliar with the arts of war. If his army was to stand any kind of chance against Edward’s battle-hardened men-at-arms and heavy horse, he needed to give them the time and the space in which to train. By July he had them within the dappled clearings of the Selkirk Forest, instilling iron discipline and teaching them to fight in schiltrons - hedgehog-like formations made of tightly packed men armed with long spears. Wallace’s men were also imbued with something that cannot be taught, and which is never carried among the weaponry of an invasion force: the determination to fight for the homeland.


Alexander II had given the Scots a united kingdom with a border, as well as a sense of who they were. During the course of the single decade that followed the death of Alexander III, all of that had been swept away. The people of Scotland looked south and saw that King Edward of England had already crushed the princes of Wales. Welshmen had been conscripted into his armies, made to fight in foreign lands, and now that king proposed to do exactly the same thing with Scots. It was this prospect, of being swallowed without a trace by an alien land and forced to fight a stranger’s wars, that had tipped the Scots over the edge.


Wallace’s army was not the only Scots force preparing to fight. North of the Mounth a nobleman’s son named Andrew Murray had also been striking blow after blow against the enemy. He was no newcomer to the fight either. Together with his father he had joined the battle against Warenne’s forces at Dunbar. Both of them had been captured, but Murray had made good his escape from imprisonment in Chester Castle and headed north, his blood still up. His fight-back had begun when he led a successful attack of hastily assembled warriors against an English garrison in the mighty stronghold of Castle Urquhart on the shore of Loch Ness. After that triumph his rebels had driven the English from castle after castle in the north-east.


They came together, the knight and the nobleman’s son, towards the end of the summer. By then, Edward’s lieutenants in Scotland had become vaguely aware they might soon have more to deal with than guerrilla raids and rabble-rousing. In fact, word was reaching Warenne and Cressingham that there was at large now in southern Scotland what could only be described as a rebel army - a peasant army led by nobodies, but an army nonetheless.


Edward was busy preparing for more fighting on the other side of the Channel and it seems he could hardly bring himself to raise his head from his maps of France. Over his shoulder, with a dismissive wave of his hand, he said efforts should be made to support the garrison in Stirling Castle. Those two characters Wallace and Murray should be rounded up and put to the sword. Scotland was conquered after all; it should be a trifling matter.


Confident the rebels would offer little more than a training exercise for English heavy horse - standing targets to be mown down like grass - Warenne and Cressingham moved north. They passed through English-held Berwick with its newly built curtain wall down to the river, a bone-white symbol of arrogant dominance. The troublesome Scots were already at Stirling, on the northern side of the River Forth. Warenne was first to arrive at the castle and, keen to get his men into position to settle the matter, made his way to Stirling Bridge to survey the only point at which the otherwise difficult and treacherous river could be crossed dry-shod.


He was met by James the Stewart (a dismal flop at Irvine alongside Bishop Wishart) and Malcolm, Earl of Lennox, another Scot ingratiating himself with Edward. That these serially duplicitous characters - the various Bruces included - avoided having their throats cut by some honest soul on one side or the other, is an enduring mystery to me. Even Edward was exasperated by the grasping self-interest of the Bruces. After Dunbar, the younger Bruce’s father had asked the English king if he might have the Scots throne now. ‘Have we nothing better to do,’ came Edward’s withering reply, ‘but win kingdoms for you?’ Stewart and Lennox said they would try and persuade Wallace and Murray to come to terms but their offer, like their worth as Scotsmen that day, amounted to nothing.


Warenne took himself off to bed and slept so long he missed the first deployment of his own men across the bridge. Since their commander had overslept, they were recalled. Once he had got up and breakfasted they were sent over for a second time, but Lennox and Stewart trotted into sight once more and the English forces were called back yet again. Warenne had thought they might have made good on their promise of a peaceful settlement, but he was to be disappointed.


Wallace and Murray had gathered their forces on the slopes of the rocky eminence known as Abbey Craig - the site nowadays of the Wallace Monument - and must have looked at those English comings and goings with amazement. Then from their high ground they spotted the approach of another party of horsemen. This time it was a pair of Dominican friars sent by Warenne to see if the Scots would come to terms. Wallace told them: ‘Tell your commander that we are not here to make peace but to do battle to defend ourselves and liberate our kingdom. Let them come on, and we shall prove this in their very beards.’


Warenne and Cressingham cared little that a battle now seemed imminent. They had a couple of hundred knights and mounted men-at-arms, backed by several thousand well-armed foot soldiers, many of them Welsh. The Scots force a mile or so away at Abbey Craig had similar numbers, but they were hopelessly outgunned in terms of horse and armaments. The English commanders were advised then of the existence of a ford across the Forth, perhaps a mile upriver. The horses could cross there and move into a position from which the Scots might be outflanked. This was sound tactical advice but the Englishmen were impatient to let their forces in amongst the rebels, and saw no need anyway for such precautions. Warenne ordered his men to begin crossing the bridge.


Up on Abbey Craig, Wallace and Murray could not believe their luck. The old timber bridge (destroyed after the fighting and long since replaced by one of stone) was only wide enough to allow two or maybe three horses to ride across abreast. It was going to take half a day to get the army across. Cressingham, hugely fat and probably recognisable from a mile off, was among the first to trot over, smug arrogance radiating from every fold and roll.


The first sense of unease was not long in coming though. First the horsemen found the ground on the far bank a little on the soft side - too soft for easy deployment of any kind of massed, cohesive charge. Secondly, and even more troubling, they were milling about in a bend of the river. The Forth below Stirling Castle is all lazy meanders and loops and it was into one such watery noose that the English horse and the first of the foot soldiers had willingly slipped their own necks.


To their left lay the only hope of advance: a narrow bottleneck of dry land between two stretches of the Forth. They had their backs to deep, fast-flowing water and there was no other way out except the way they had just come, back across the crowded bridge. If it was a trap, it was one of their own making. The English chronicler Walter Guisborough wrote: ‘There was, indeed, no better place in all the land to deliver the English into the hands of the Scots, and so many into the power of the few.’ Guisborough’s words, with their echoes of Churchill’s, tell it just about right. Perhaps the first flutterings of panic were felt then in the guts of a few of the foot soldiers as well. As the lumbering heavy horses moved around them in mild confusion, snorting and champing at their cruel bits, their riders unable to see what should be done for the best, some of the men could hear the howling approach of the Scots. The horses’ ears had pricked up first, alive to the distant hubbub of many armed men on the move.


Wallace and Murray had waited until perhaps half of the English army was across the river, crowded into the river bend with nowhere to go, and had then given the signal to advance. On had come the Scots at a confident jog - lesser gentry, countrymen, ordinary folk with extraordinary hopes - and the English could only wait upon their arrival. What followed was bloody slaughter.


Cavalry without order and room to deploy are little more than sitting ducks in the face of advancing schiltrons. Foot soldiers without orders will fare no better. Horses screamed as long spears were thrust home. Riders were hauled from saddles and messily dispatched. Cressingham too, unable to escape the mêlée, was pulled to the ground and butchered. The skin was later flayed from his great, bloated corpse. He had tried to tax the very skins off Scots’ backs after all, and now they offered the same service in return. Wallace would have part of it fashioned into a sword belt.


Warenne never crossed the bridge. Together with the lucky half of the force he watched the butchery helplessly, with wide eyes. He was an older man, in his late sixties, and cannot have witnessed many reverses like this one. Accepting there was nothing to be done but flee, he ordered the destruction of the bridge and made first for the castle.


A few of the embattled English and Welsh had got back by swimming clear of the fighting. Among them was a Yorkshire knight with the luxurious and memorable name of Sir Marmaduke Tweng. Warenne hastily put him in charge of Stirling Castle while he himself fled for the Border. Behind him on the Carse of Stirling lay at least 100 dead knights and several thousand foot soldiers. True to their treacherous and unreliable natures, Stewart and the Earl of Lennox had changed sides. Having seen the way things were going for the visitors, they had scuttled away to join in the looting of the English baggage train.


Here was something far greater than could have been hoped for by even the most recklessly optimistic Scot. The English war machine - supposedly invincible, that had smashed the Welsh into submission, that was famed across Europe - had been taken apart piece by piece. Not just a victory, but a stunning, staggering victory. Scots ears were rendered briefly deaf - not by the battle’s roar but by the sudden rush of blood to the head. For the English survivors, hardest of all to swallow was the fact that they had been sent running for their lives by peasant amateurs - Scots peasant amateurs at that. And for the first time, Edward would have to pay attention to the name William Wallace. One thing was already certain: he would never forget it.


The remnant threads of the Scottish nobility, either languishing in imprisonment, fighting for Edward in France or hiding from the fight behind the sick-note of the Ragman Roll, were stunned too. In a desperate bid to ride the unexpected tsunami of patriotic fervour, smuggle themselves somehow into the midst of the celebrations, they made Wallace Guardian of Scotland. In a separate impromptu ceremony at the church of Kirk o’ the Forest, near Selkirk, he was dubbed a knight and thereby elevated at a stroke to the nobility. His able accomplice Murray, son of nobility and Wallace’s social superior, would have been an easier choice for the Scots magnates, but he had died of awful wounds sustained amid the gilded victory.


Exactly when he had succumbed is not known, although he was certainly dead within a couple of months of the fighting. His name is alongside that of Wallace on a letter written in Haddington, in East Lothian, on 11 October 1297. It was sent ‘To the Senate and Commoners of Lubeck and Hamburg’ to try and persuade the trading nations of the North Sea that it was business as usual in Scotland: ‘we ask you to make it known among your merchants that they can now have safe access with their merchandise to all harbours of the Kingdom of Scotland, because the Kingdom of Scotland has, thanks be to God, by war been recovered from the power of the English’.


Despite the triumph and the lionising of Wallace, there were still those who could not stomach the idea of Scotland being led by an erstwhile commoner. What could such a man know of politics and of the needs and wants of kings? Then there was the more glaring fact that while the Battle of Stirling Bridge had bloodied Edward’s nose, it had also made him very, very angry. Before there could be any hope of returning King John to the throne of Scots - Wallace’s sworn objective - the wrath of the English king would have to be faced.


Edward had indeed taken the reverse personally. But Stirling Bridge had been embarrassing rather than tactically significant in terms of settling Scotland’s future. Throughout the rest of 1297 and on into the spring of the following year, he was personally tied up with his war in France. But by May 1298 he was home and laying plans to crush the rebellion, and this Wallace, once and for all. Rather than leaving it in the hands of underlings, he would get the job done himself.


Wallace had not been resting on his laurels all the while. After Stirling he led his men on a punitive raid into northern England. Here, too, Scotland’s Guardian revealed his own taste for ruthless violence. The soldiers of his large and unruly army were not prevented from butchering and pillaging whomever they found in Cumbria and Northumberland. Even men and women of the cloth - none was spared.


In July, Edward crossed the Tweed at the head of a massive army - 1,500 mounted knights and men-at-arms and more than 10,000 soldiers. He also brought archers, recently armed with something new - the longbow. For all the muscle and technology at his disposal, Edward was not to have things all his own way. As he advanced through southern Scotland he encountered a land laid waste by Wallace’s policy of scorched earth. Invading armies were largely dependent on what could be gathered from the lands around them and, as the days and weeks passed, an air of desperation spread through the English and Welsh ranks. Tensions between men of two different and traditionally opposed nations spilled over into bitter fighting.


By the start of the third week in July, Edward’s army was encamped a few miles outside Edinburgh. Rations were short and hopes of a delivery of fresh supplies into the port at Berwick had been dashed by bad weather. The would-be avengers of Stirling Bridge might tear themselves apart before the Scots could even be brought to bay.


Edward was facing the prospect of a frustrating, even humiliating withdrawal when word reached him that Wallace and his force had been spotted just 20 miles away, at Falkirk. Determined the opportunity would not be missed, Edward force-marched his men towards what he hoped would be a final showdown. English and Welsh blood was already up; the anti-Wallace propaganda machine had gone into overdrive in recent weeks and the soldiers believed they were in pursuit not of a man, but of an ogre who wanted to skin them alive.


The sight of the English approach can only have been a mixed blessing at best for Wallace. It might have been better for him had Edward begun a frustrated march for home - at least then they could have been harried and tormented as they headed south through a wasted land. Now a pitched battle was in prospect. He had managed victory - resounding victory - at Stirling just the year before. Perhaps it was best to get it over with, while Scots spirits were high. Now, though, he was without Murray, a man often painted by history as the real tactical and military genius of the rebellion. Wallace was the heart and soul of Scotland, but would he also pass muster as her commander-in-chief?


It was too late in the day for fighting by the time Edward got his men within reach of the rebels, so they hunkered down in their thousands for an uneasy night of mumbled rumours and broken sleep. With the dawn of 22 July came orders to form up and face the monster. Wallace had his men arrayed in gigantic schiltrons - thousands of men packed shoulder-to-shoulder, long spears prickling in every direction. Between these hedgehogs was a body of Ettrick archers, commanded by Sir John Stewart and, roving around the fringes and ready to be unloosed whenever needed, were the horses and riders of the Scots cavalry. These were smaller beasts than those of fabled English heavy horse, their riders only lightly armed, but they might prove vital just the same.


The first charges by the English cavalry were galled by the stubborn resolve of the spearmen in their schiltrons. So long as order and discipline could be maintained, they made a formidable obstacle. No headway could be made by the infantry on either side and for a while it seemed deadlock might stifle any chances of a telling breakthrough. Wallace may even have found cause to hope his men might carry the day by dogged determination alone.


In the end it was the Scots cavalry that made the difference - by unceremoniously quitting the field. No explanation for their action was available on the day and none has surfaced since. In the absence of fact there have been rumours - of cowardice, of treachery - but in any event their departure made all the difference. Emboldened by having the field to themselves, the English horse now advanced towards the Ettrick archers. Where before the bowmen had been protected by the presence of the Scots cavalry, now they were exposed and dangerously static on the field. Under the command of their leader, Wallace’s loyal follower Sir John Stewart, they bravely stood their ground. But the weight and purpose of the heavy horse was too much and they were soon cut down to the last man.


There was a first wavering then by the men of the schiltrons, helplessly watching the harvest of their comrades. Then English attentions turned upon them as well. Edward’s archers stepped out from cover and directed their bows of the long red yew upon Scots foot soldiers for the first time. Accurate and deadly from many hundreds of yards distant, they rained darkening storms of iron-tipped shafts down upon the heads of the spearmen.


Like the Spartan 300 at Thermopylae nearly 1,800 years before, the Scots stood briefly in their sudden shade, and then fell for ever - revenge for what had been done at Stirling. It was a bloodbath. It was said the Scots fell like blossoms in an orchard when the fruit has ripened.


Pushed beyond endurance by the countless dead dropping around them, the surviving spearmen broke and ran. Before there had been stubborn, seemingly immovable schiltrons; now there were disordered scrums of frightened, traumatised men breaking and running for cover. The English cavalry completed the rout and Wallace and his surviving few fled the field.


Soon after Falkirk, Wallace resigned his role as Guardian. He stepped out of the spotlight for a time then, though the folk myths insist he carried on his fight from the shadows. He is supposed to have returned to his favoured guerrilla tactics, snapping at the heels and loins of the English wherever and whenever he could. And while the reins of leadership of the Community of the Realm were taken up by men like John ‘the Red’ Comyn, Robert Bruce the younger and Bishop William Lamberton of St Andrews, Wallace briefly left the country.


The return of King John remained the sole objective of the rebellion and Wallace made his way to the court of Philippe IV of France in hope of exploiting the Auld Alliance in Scotland’s favour. Only young Robert Bruce had cause to dread the return of the king. The Bruces owed their hold on their Annandale lands not to Balliol, but to Edward. With that in mind, naked self-interest was always closer to young Robert’s heart than any loyalty to his absent king. In the end, Wallace’s efforts as a diplomat came to naught. Philippe was too busy it seemed, fighting and losing to the Flemish, to be bothered by requests to honour a promise.


By 1303, when Edward found the energy to return to the job of crushing the rebellion, Scotland was a nation alone. The Community of the Realm of Scotland quickly realised the cost of more war would be too much for the country to bear. They sought terms. Even Edward, in his sixties now and tired, had lost the stomach for it all. Apart from anything else, the wars in Scotland had taken an enervating toll on his finances and by 1304 he just wanted to draw a line under the whole sorry affair.


Most of the Scots nobles were to be left more or less alone, their lands intact. William Wallace, however, could not be forgiven. While Edward lived, his grudge against the leader of brigands could never die. At a parliament ordered by Edward at St Andrews in March, Wallace was made an outlaw. Some 129 Scottish landowners accepted Edward as their liege lord at the same time. Among those bending the knee was Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow. Robert Bruce was tucked safely at Edward’s heel as well. The document they signed up to was called ‘The Ordinances of 1305’ and in truth it quietly marked the completion of Edward’s second conquest. There was no mention of a kingdom, far less a king of Scotland. In fact they signed in meek acceptance of Edward’s truth - that they held territory now in a place to be described merely as a ‘land’.


Wallace was on the run, eking out an existence in the caves and forests of his homeland. Edward turned the screws tighter and tighter. Those who had been Wallace’s friends and followers were bullied into turning traitor to him. He was finally captured and handed over to the English by Sir John Mentieth, uncle of Sir John Stewart who had died for Wallace at Falkirk. In the evening of 3 August 1305 he was surprised and taken in a house at Robroyston, outside Glasgow. Transported to London, he was presented before Edward’s judges in Westminster Hall. Supposedly in mockery of his ambitions, he was made to wear a crown of laurel leaves.


Wallace had never claimed the crown. He had fought only and always for King John but the English judges cared about their own truth and no other. There was no trial. Wallace was an outlaw and therefore already condemned. The words of the indictment that echoed around the walls and rafters of the great hall were just sound effects for a royal command performance. Edward did enjoy his shows.


Wallace had notoriously committed killings, they said. Arson, destruction of property, sacrilege - Edward was master of the law and he was showing off. Wallace had assumed the title of Guardian and had seduced his fellow Scots into an alliance with the French. Only at the utterance of the words ‘treason’ and ‘traitor’ did Wallace raise his voice in reply. He had never in his life sworn allegiance to the English king - his name, after all, was absent from the Ragman Roll. ‘How am I a traitor,’ he demanded to know, ‘when England is foreign to me?’ Edward’s judges were unmoved, of course. When King John had sworn allegiance to Edward in return for his throne, they said, he had done so on behalf of every one of his subjects. Wallace was trapped in the web of Edward’s legal arguments, the outcome a foregone conclusion.


It was 23 August 1305 and with the sentence of the court ringing in his ears, Wallace was marched outside. The butchery of Scotland’s finest patriot was performed on a spot across the road from the modern Smithfield Meat Market. In accordance with the conventions demanded by a traitor’s death, he was first of all throttled at the of end a hangman’s noose. Once he had regained full consciousness his genitals were cut from his body. The knife was used then to open his abdomen so that his stomach, intestines and lungs could be ‘drawn’ from inside him. His heart was last, wrenched from his chest and held aloft for the appreciation of the crowd. Finally he was beheaded with a blow of the executioner’s axe. His head was exhibited upon a spike on London Bridge. His corpse was cut in four and the quarters sent for public display in Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth.


The destruction of the body was a deliberate and calculated act. It was Edward’s hope that without a body to be buried, a grave for mourners to gather round, the man would soon be forgotten. Of course the opposite was true, and the Wallace legend is immortal.


In the end, his mission on earth had failed. King John of Scotland was king in name only, his nobles imprisoned or under oaths of fealty to another. Edward I, Hammer of the Scots, had won every battle that mattered. Scotland in 1305 was nothing more than a region of England. But there was another battle, a battle without end. Far from winning it, Edward was blind, deaf and dumb even to its existence. It was the battle for the people of Scotland.


In his fixation with the crown of Scotland, Edward had underestimated her folk. He had torn the heart from one of them, but hundreds of thousands more were beating still, and loudly. Patriotism - the love of country - was not the cause of Scotland’s wars of independence, but their product.


Edward’s determination to crush them had served only to define for the Scots who they really were.