William Wallace and Glasgow

William Wallace is Scotland’s great national hero — a man of no royal blood who broke an English army at Stirling Bridge, was hunted, betrayed and butchered for it, and in the manner of his dying lit a fire that would burn until his country was free. He belongs to the whole of Scotland; but the west, and Glasgow, claim both his beginning and his terrible end, from the Renfrewshire village where tradition says he was born to the farm north-east of the city where he was finally sold to the English.

This page tells his whole story, with the Glasgow and west-country chapters set in their place: the conquered kingdom he rose against, the rising that began in the west, the great victory at Stirling Bridge, his year as Guardian, the defeat at Falkirk and the long years as a hunted man, the betrayal at Robroyston, and the London death that made him a martyr.

A kingdom conquered

Wallace was born into a catastrophe. In 1286 the Scots king Alexander III was killed in a fall from his horse, leaving no direct heir; his little granddaughter, the Maid of Norway, died on her way to Scotland in 1290, and the crown fell into dispute among a dozen claimants. Invited to arbitrate, Edward I of England seized the chance to make himself overlord of Scotland, installed the pliant John Balliol as a puppet king, and humiliated him so thoroughly that in 1296 the Scots rebelled. Edward’s answer was brutal and swift: he stormed Berwick with fearful slaughter, crushed the Scots at Dunbar, stripped Balliol of his crown, and carried off the Stone of Destiny, leaving Scotland an occupied country under English sheriffs and garrisons. It was into this humiliated, leaderless land that a younger son of the minor gentry of the west stepped out of obscurity.

The rising in the west

By the strongest tradition William Wallace was born around 1270 at Elderslie in Renfrewshire, a few miles from Glasgow, the son of a knight — Sir Malcolm Wallace, by tradition — who held his land of the High Steward of Scotland. Little is certain of his early life, but he enters history with an act of violence: in May 1297 he killed William Heselrig, the English-appointed Sheriff of Lanark — a deed later romanticised as revenge for a murdered sweetheart, but in truth the opening blow of a rising. Wallace was not alone; revolts were flaring across Scotland — he himself helped drive the English justiciar from Scone — and in the west his cause was blessed by one of the most important men in the country, Bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow, a fierce and unwavering patriot who lent the rebellion the weight of the Church. It is to this west-country rising that Glasgow’s own Wallace legend belongs — the Battle of the Bell o’ the Brae, the tale of Wallace storming the English garrison in the Bishop’s Castle by driving his men up the steep High Street; told in Blind Harry’s fifteenth-century epic, it is unconfirmed by any contemporary record, and this site tells it as the treasured legend it is.

Stirling Bridge

The scattered risings needed a victory, and Wallace, joining forces with Andrew Moray, who had raised the north, delivered one of the most famous in Scottish history. On 11 September 1297, at Stirling Bridge, the two young commanders trapped a far larger English army as it crossed the narrow timber bridge over the Forth, and destroyed it. Among the dead was Hugh de Cressingham, Edward’s hated treasurer in Scotland, whose flayed skin the victors are said to have taken as grim trophies. It was a stunning humiliation for the greatest military power in Europe, achieved by a knight of no great rank and a country supposedly beaten. The triumph was shadowed by loss — Andrew Moray was mortally wounded in the fighting and died before the year was out — but it made Wallace, overnight, the champion of Scottish freedom.

Guardian of Scotland

In the wake of Stirling Bridge, Wallace was knighted — most likely at the hand of Robert Bruce, the future king, making him Sir William Wallace — and made sole Guardian of Scotland, ruling the kingdom in the name of the deposed King John Balliol. For a few months a man risen from the minor gentry governed the realm and led its armies, harrying the English out of the south and raiding deep into the north of England through the winter. That such honours came to him at all is telling: whatever the later legend of the untutored commoner, Wallace plainly had powerful backing among the Scottish nobility and the Church. But his position rested on the sword, and the sword would soon be tested by Edward himself.

Falkirk & the years of the hunted

In the summer of 1298 Edward I came north in person at the head of a great army, its power resting on the Welsh longbowmen who would decide the day. On 22 July the two hosts met at Falkirk. Wallace drew his spearmen up in schiltrons — great hedgehog rings of levelled spears — and they held against the English cavalry, but they had no answer to the arrow-storm, and once the archers had torn gaps in the rings the horsemen poured through. The Scots army was cut to pieces. Wallace escaped with his life but not his authority, and within weeks he resigned the Guardianship, passing it to Robert Bruce and John Comyn. For the rest of his life he was a hunted man. He seems to have gone abroad, to the court of France and perhaps to the Pope, seeking help for Scotland; and when he returned, the great magnates were making their peace with Edward one by one, leaving Wallace — who would not submit — ever more alone.

Betrayal at Robroyston

By 1305 Edward had bought or beaten almost all of Scotland’s leaders, and had pointedly excluded Wallace from any pardon: the one man who would not bend was to be destroyed. The end came at Robroyston, then a farm-touch a few miles north-east of Glasgow and now within the city. On the night of 5 August 1305 Wallace was seized there, betrayed into English hands through the agency of Sir John Menteith, the Scots keeper of Dumbarton Castle — who, the story goes, lured him with the promise of a meeting with Bruce, and whose name the west of Scotland has cursed ever since. From Robroyston he was taken first to Menteith’s own Dumbarton, and then carried south in chains on the long road to London and a trial whose verdict was never in doubt. Glasgow keeps the dark place faithfully: among the modern housing at Robroyston a tall Celtic cross, raised in 1900, marks where the betrayal happened, and a well nearby long bore his name.

Westminster & the martyr

On 23 August 1305 Wallace was brought to Westminster Hall and tried as a traitor to King Edward. His reply became legend: he could not be a traitor, he said, for he had never sworn allegiance to Edward and was no subject of his. It availed him nothing. Condemned, he was dragged through the streets of London and put to death at Smithfield with the full, deliberate savagery reserved for traitors — hanged, drawn and quartered, his head set on a pike on London Bridge and the four quarters of his body sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth to be displayed as a warning. The warning failed utterly. The cold cruelty of his death made Wallace a martyr, and within months of it Robert Bruce raised the standard of revolt, seized the crown, and took up the fight Wallace had begun. It ended, sixteen years later, in the great Scottish victory at Bannockburn and, in time, in the independence for which Wallace had died. Of that long war of independence he had struck the first great blow — and become its undying symbol. His fame was carried down the centuries by Blind Harry’s epic and, in our own age, by the film Braveheart, while the towering National Wallace Monument, raised above Stirling in 1869, keeps his memory in the land he died for.

A life in dates