And so the struggle that I once heard a powerful Scots nobleman refer to as “Wallace’s dirty wee war” began, and I bore witness to it, impotent to change a single part of it, appalled by its ferocity, and yet paradoxically thrilled and proud to be a part of it, even as a mere observer. When I first heard that nobleman’s description, years afterwards, I took umbrage, thinking it an insult, but then I saw its truth. The conflict was a small one, for the first two years at least, a series of skirmishes rather than a full-blown war, and it was certainly dirty—dingy and dire and destructive to everyone involved.
I have always found it strange, though, that Wallace’s reputation as a dishonourable, disreputable fighter emerged from that time. From the perspective of those who yet adhere to the chivalric code, his methods are seen to this day as outrageous and unacceptable, no different from brigandage and lawless savagery. But when, in war, has savagery ever been unacceptable as a means to victory? When, for that matter, has the strict code of chivalry ever been respected or observed in the chaos of battle, amid spilling blood and entrails and shattered flesh? William Wallace, in those earliest days of his struggle, was an unknown, a desperate man fighting for his beliefs at the head of a small band of willing but untrained followers who were ill equipped for the task they faced and were therefore, on the surface at least, utterly incapable of withstanding the forces ranged against them. There was never any possibility that he and his ragamuffin outlaws might hope to stand toe-to-toe against the enemy that threatened them. The mere thought of such a thing was laughable; they would have been slaughtered instantly, obliterated under the hooves and booted feet of the disciplined ranks opposing them.
Wallace’s men were peasants, farmers for the most part, but while they lacked the weapons and armour their opponents had, their supposed impotence was misleading. They were fighting on their home ground and they knew every fold and wrinkle of the land around them, and so they turned the land itself into a weapon, picking their fighting sites and then striking from ambush, their actions predictable only in the certainty that they would be unpredictable. Thus they fought, and thus they won consistently, in defiance of all the maxims of warfare, proving themselves to be adaptable, elusive, and ultimately invincible.
Over the decades between then and now, I have found it both ironic and tragic that Wallace is condemned as a base-born, ignoble brigand for the way in which he waged war and the methods that he used, while King Robert himself, who perfected those same methods in the two ensuing decades and carried them to unprecedented extremes both on and off the field of battle, is universally hailed as the Hero King. Yet it is true; Wallace’s methods appalled his enemies, not all of whom were English, whereas Bruce used precisely the same methods and emerged victorious, his reputation unblemished.
The reason, of course, lies in the perceptions of jealous and embittered men. William Wallace was not a belted knight. He became one later, knighted in order to allow him to assume the mantle of Guardian after the death of his friend and fellow leader, Sir Andrew Murray, but when he first moved to challenge England’s power, he was not. No matter that his father’s brother Malcolm had been a knight, or that his own elder brother wore the silver spurs. William Wallace himself did not, and that alone was sufficient to demean him in the eyes of lesser, spiteful men who set store by such things as birth ahead of ability. It laid him open to their sneering disdain and to accusations—though always from a distance well beyond his hearing—of being an upstart. He was deemed a commoner, ignoble from the outset and therefore, in the eyes of his self-styled betters, entitled neither to hold nor to voice an opinion on anything that mattered.
They were all wrong, of course, for as history has demonstrated, my cousin had one attribute that enabled him to rise above his detractors and to capture the attention, the love, and the admiration of a society comprising many races: he was William Wallace, the only man of his time with the God-given strength and natural ability to offer hope to his broken, strife-ridden homeland and to instill in his people a sense of pride, and something greater yet, an unprecedented sense of unity and nationality.
I saw that process begun in Selkirk Forest, with the dispatching of the first patrols sent out against the English. Yet even in writing those words, I am contributing to the general inaccuracy that surrounds that entire time. To speak of patrols sent out against the English suggests that the English were there, formally, and that Wallace fought against them formally. But in the hair-splitting language of Edward of England’s lawyers, that is demonstrably untrue. In terms of strict legality, enshrined with great formality in the annals of the English court, there were no English troops, per se, abroad in our land at that time. That term, abroad, is all-important, because it connotes mobility and far-ranging activity. Scotland’s south was swarming with English soldiers that June, and had been for more than a year, but every man of them, ostensibly at least, had a sound and defensible reason, set down on parchment by the Plantagenet’s lawyers, for being there, in residence upon their royal master’s behalf, but not abroad in the land.