Born Fighting (6 page)

Thousands flocked to Wallace. The entire country, down to the smallest of landowners, was in revolt. Their unabated guerrilla tactics stunned the English as Wallace’s army swept the countryside. Wallace’s soldiers took Scone, and for a brief time a handful of nobles, including Robert the Bruce, rallied to Wallace’s side. But then Edward, distracted in France, sent an English army north to quell the rebellion. And upon that army’s arrival, every member of the high nobility again abandoned Wallace except for the redoubtable Sir Andrew de Moray, who had brought a band of Gaelic warriors down from the north.

Edward, thinking of Wallace as a mere outlaw, did not believe that the Scottish rebel could actually lead an army. Ever the medievalist, the English king simply could not fathom that thousands of soldiers would fight under a man who was not of high nobility. And he gained comfort in this view from the actions of Scotland’s own high royalty, which collectively had decided that Wallace and his men were a rabble and in some cases dangerous to their own aspirations.

Thus Edward and Scotland’s high nobility seemed quietly to agree on one notion, no matter their lack of accord on others: William Wallace was a threat to their own personal interests.

In September 1297, only a year and a half after the Berwick massacre, Wallace led his fledgling army against the larger and far better equipped English force, whose mission was to break apart his brigands and capture him, thus ending the rebellion. The English were 60,000 strong, with another 8,000 held in reserve. Their ranks included heavily armored cavalry, seasoned longbow archers, and well-provided infantry. Against them Wallace was fielding 40,000 lightly armed infantry and fewer than 200 horses. The high Scottish nobility had deserted him. His soldiers were men from the roughest ends of Scottish life. They wore animal skins or coarse homespun cloth for uniforms. A few had fashioned metal skullcaps, but none had armor. Most had made their own weapons as well, the deadliest being the standard twelve-foot-long spear, or pike, that Scottish soldiers used when fighting from a circular formation called the
schilltron
. Others simply carried axes, some even knives.

The English army was advancing westward from Berwick. If forced to fight them in open terrain, Wallace’s army would have been quickly decimated, both by the English cavalry and by the highly skilled Welsh longbow archers, many of whom had recent combat experience in France. In a brilliant tactical move, Wallace chose to accept the English advance near the town of Stirling, where the rivers Forth and Clyde would narrow the English advance into hilly, broken terrain. He placed his forces on the steep slopes of the Ochil Hills near the Abbey Craig, looking down on the River Forth, where the English were advancing toward him from the far side.

Watching the English cavalry approach the river, Wallace gave an order that would be repeated five hundred years later by Andrew Jackson as he waited for the British to advance on his position just before the Battle of New Orleans: we are outnumbered, don’t fight too soon. Wallace carried a horn, and the word went out among his men to attack only when they heard its sound.

The English, apparently thinking Wallace’s army was little more than a gang of ruffians, could not have been more accommodating. Instead of fording the river on a wider front upstream, the English cavalry crossed to the other side over a narrow bridge. The crossing was slow. On the Scottish side of the river the ground was boggy, further frustrating the English horsemen. In time the English army was divided on both sides of the river, with its cavalry floundering at the marshy base of the steep hill. And then Wallace’s horn pierced the September air, followed by the unearthly screams of thousands of fiercely charging Scottish spearmen.

The Scots made quick work of the English, decimating their cavalry by killing the stalled horses and finishing off the knights, and within a few hours sent its shocked army into full retreat. Wallace and Andrew de Moray followed with a retaliatory offensive that covered much of Scotland and also included a fierce raid into England, although Moray, wounded at Stirling, died shortly after the battle. Wallace was now preeminent. Just as important, the nation had been fully awakened to its possibilities, and even for a short time the ever-vacillating high nobles genuflected toward the rebel leader. In March 1298, Wallace was knighted and given the title “Guardian of Scotland.” Characteristically, he chose to hold the title as a fiduciary for the absent King John Balliol rather than seeking the monarchy himself.

But the indecisive high nobles remained quietly against Wallace, measuring their lands, titles, and personal ambitions against the prospects of his long-term success. If Wallace were to win, he surely would turn against the Anglo-Norman version of the royal system. If he were to lose, Proud Edward would make mincemeat of those who had supported him. And so they waited him out. In July 1298, Edward I again personally invaded Scotland, adamant in his determination to avenge Stirling and destroy Wallace’s nationalist movement. Shortly thereafter, two Scottish lords secretly revealed Wallace’s positions to Edward, and the English army caught Wallace by surprise in the gently sloping, open terrain near Falkirk. As a further blow, a large portion of the Scottish army led by the high nobles marched off the battlefield when the vastly superior English army approached, including the forces under John Comyn, the lord of Badenoch, who remained one of the claimants to the Scottish throne. And Wallace, as well as his army, was doomed.

The unspoken alliances of the powerful had overwhelmed him. The hybrid nobility had betrayed him. Wallace’s army was slaughtered and shattered. Edward was resurgent. For five more years Wallace avoided Edward’s grasp, first hiding in the remote crags and glens where no English army dared to travel, then traveling to France in an attempt to gain foreign assistance for the cause of Scottish independence. Unsuccessful in that effort, he returned to Scotland in 1303 and resumed his smaller scale guerrilla activities. In short measure he was betrayed again and captured by the English, then transported to London for a show trial and a viciously barbaric execution.

On August 23, 1305, Wallace was tried at Westminster Hall. The charges were treason, as a traitor to the king. Edward I, known for having created the system of barristers still in use today, did not provide Wallace any such legal rights at the trial. Nor was Wallace allowed to reply directly to the charges against him. The records do indicate, however, that Wallace could not be silenced when he was accused of treason against the king. His response to this charge was eloquent and has echoed through the centuries to succeeding generations of Scots. “I can not be a traitor, for I owe him no allegiance. He is not my sovereign; he never received my homage; and whilst life is in this persecuted body, he never shall receive it. To the other points of which I am accused, I freely confess them all. As Governor of my country I have been an enemy to its enemies; I have slain the English; I have mortally opposed the English King; I have stormed and taken the towns and castles which he unjustly claimed as his own. If I or my soldiers have plundered or done injury to the houses or ministers of religion, I repent me of my sin; but it is not of Edward of England I shall ask pardon.”

Nor did Edward give it. Wallace was quickly convicted, then marched outside and tied to a team of horses and dragged through the streets of London to a gallows erected outside the city walls. A large crowd cheered as the Scottish hero was hanged until semiconscious, then disemboweled while still alive. After that he was “drawn and quartered,” four horses pulling his body apart by moving in four different directions, and, just to be sure, he was beheaded as well. Edward ordered Wallace’s head impaled on a pole along London Bridge. He then sent the four pieces of the rebel’s body to Newcastle, Perth, Stirling, and the luckless Berwick.

Edward’s goal in such brutality was in many ways similar to his goal in the massacre and destruction he had overseen in Berwick nine years before: the deterrence of a people through unspeakable terror. However, just as in Berwick, Edward vastly misread the Scottish people. Rather than striking fear into them, Edward’s treatment of William Wallace elevated the charismatic rebel so that even in death he quickly became the national symbol of Scotland itself.

Wallace was the first great populist leader of any Western nation. Here was a warrior to remember, up from the backward wilderness of the wild southwest, who had dared to take on the most powerful army in Europe. Here, in contrast to the calculating royal class, was a leader who fought not for fame or reward, but in pursuit of his nation’s honor. Here was a man who had persisted despite the betrayal of the self-seeking higher nobility that always had seemed more concerned about their titles and their lands than their nation. And here was a national martyr who, with his last words in the face of a certain and horrible death, spoke only about the justness of his people’s cause.

William Wallace in his life and in his dying had shown a resoluteness of spirit and grace under pressure that won the respect even of many of his enemies. And once the people grieved him, his courage certainly must have shamed many of the higher nobility who had run from Edward on so many occasions when a united Scotland might have carried the day.

Among those whom Wallace must have both shamed and inspired was, beyond doubt, Robert the Bruce, who within months of Wallace’s death had picked up the great rebel’s cudgel and vowed to finish the job.

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Bannockburn
                              

ROBERT THE BRUCE
earned his place in history by wielding the terrible, swift sword that finally obtained, from England and from the pope, Scotland’s recognition as a separate nation. And yet when it came to personal honor and loyalty, Bruce was made from a far different mold than Wallace. Indeed, from all historical accounts it must be said that he was a shrewd, ethically conflicted, and violently dangerous man. To be fair, Bruce was of the royalty, and he lived in an ethically conflicted and violently dangerous time. But in the year 1305 there was little reason for the average Scot or even his fellow high nobles to trust him.

The Bruce family, which also had been known as de Brus, was said to be Celtic in its origins. But it had been granted extensive landholdings in southwest Scotland and also across the border in northwestern England after the Norman invasion, and probably was a beneficiary of the Anglo-Norman advance into Scotland. Thus from the outset Bruce, who held the Scottish title of earl of Carrick, was more closely tied to the English Crown than with the Scottish yeomanry of that rough-hewn region. The conflict of these mixed origins was reflected in his immediate family. When the infant Maid of Norway died in 1290, Bruce’s grandfather, who was known as Robert the Competitor, was one of the claimants to the Scottish throne. But once the wars of independence began in earnest, Bruce’s father fled for a while to Norway to live with one of his daughters and later retired to his holdings in England rather than return to Scotland.

Many have speculated that Bruce as well as his grandfather worked actively against the hapless “King” John Balliol and later against William Wallace. What is clear from historical accounts is that Wallace’s populist agenda would have been seen by Bruce as a threat to his more regal ambitions, and it is fair to say that Bruce did little to support the famed rebel. Indeed, whenever Wallace stumbled, Bruce seemed available to carry on the race, and it was Bruce who became the immediate beneficiary of Wallace’s efforts once Proud Edward had posted Braveheart’s head on London Bridge.

The years between Wallace’s ascendancy and his execution in London found Bruce and other members of the high nobility in a swirl of competition and betrayals as they attempted to position themselves both inside Scotland and with King Edward. In 1298, after Wallace had been abandoned on the battlefield at Falkirk and was forced to flee into the wilderness, Bruce and his archrival John “Red” Comyn, who was known as the principal representative of English interests, were chosen to replace Wallace as Guardians of Scotland. The next year Comyn, who had betrayed Wallace by marching his troops off the battlefield at Falkirk when the English army appeared, asked Bruce to meet him privately in the seclusion of the Selkirk Forest. When Bruce arrived, Comyn nearly killed him in an ambush. In 1300, Bruce resigned from the Guardianship, and in 1302 he actually went over to King Edward’s side, ostensibly because the Bruce family had never recognized John Balliol as king. Then in 1304, a year before Wallace’s execution, Bruce’s father died. This event, plus the passion that Wallace’s fate aroused throughout Scotland, led Bruce to seek the Scottish crown and unite the nation.

His ambitions were hardly met with great rejoicing in Scotland, but Bruce did have a plan. Six months after the death of Wallace, Bruce asked Comyn, now his most dangerous competitor for the country’s leadership, to meet him in the Minorite church at the border town of Dumfries. Inside the sanctuary of the church, Bruce coldly killed Comyn, opening himself up to charges not only of murder and treason, but also of sacrilege, and he was in fact excommunicated shortly thereafter.

Killing his major rival was obviously a huge personal and political gamble, but in the context of the times it also had its logic. First, it was a preemptive strike against a man who had already tried to kill him once, and might try again. Second, he had done it personally, which in its own odd way could be considered, if not honorable, at least not cowardly. And finally, the deaths of Wallace, the hero whom Scotland had loved, and Comyn, the rival who could have beaten him to the throne, left Bruce with no major competitors.

Hardly a month later, on March 25, 1306, Bruce declared himself king of Scotland and arranged his own coronation in the royal seat at Scone. In many eyes this was the ultimate form of Scottish chutzpah—having killed Comyn, the best way for Bruce to avoid charges of murder and treason was to place himself quickly and firmly above anyone who might bring them. The coronation itself was sparsely attended, including only members of his family, a few bishops, and Isabella, the countess of Buchan, whose brother was then a prisoner of the English. Comyn’s powerful family swore a blood oath against Bruce. Many ordinary Scots also opposed him, unable to forget that only a few years before, while William Wallace was on the run, Bruce had joined forces with Edward himself.

In London, the news of Bruce’s crowning sent Proud Edward into a mad fury. Ridiculing Bruce as “King Hob” (old English slang for a clownish lout), Edward swore a famous “oath upon the swans” that he would not rest until Scotland was finally conquered. And within weeks the now-aging Hammer of Scotland was leading yet another army into the land of the north, slashing and burning a path toward his latest impetuous usurper. Within three months the English had smashed Bruce’s small army in a battle at Methven Park near Perth, summarily hanging their captured prisoners and driving Bruce north into the Highlands.

As Bruce avoided him, Edward’s retribution was ferocious. Isabella, who had attended Bruce’s coronation, was put into a cage in Berwick and kept there for four years, never fully set free for the rest of her life. Bruce’s brother Nigel was seized and executed without a trial, and two other brothers were also soon killed by Edward. His wife and daughter, attempting to escape to Norway, were captured and kept prisoner. Over the next year Scotland itself fell into civil war as several powerful families took up arms against him.

But Bruce did indeed have a saving grace: resoluteness. He kept fighting, and in fighting he kept adapting, matching the strengths of his smaller forces against the weaknesses of those who sought to destroy him. And then he started winning. Bruce knew that his only hope was to gain the respect of the typical Scot. Ironically—but also predictably—the common penchant for disliking Bruce was eased by the passions that Proud Edward had set loose, both with the execution and desecration of William Wallace and his latest foray into Scotland. Quite simply, the whole of Scotland was finally ready to repulse the English, and this time they were in search of a leader. And in historic Celtic fashion, Bruce finally won over the doubters by his unrelenting efforts on the battlefield.

In the summer of 1307 fate intervened in his behalf. Edward I, aged and in ill health, died while moving toward yet another battle in Scotland. As Churchill put it, “Edward was now too ill to march or ride. Like the emperor Severus a thousand years before he was carried in a litter against this stern people, and like him he died upon the road. His last thoughts were on Scotland and on the Holy Land. He conjured his son to carry his bones in the van of the army which should finally bring Scotland to obedience.”
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The Hammer of Scotland passed his throne on to Edward II, whose skills were far less than those of his father and in the end were no match for Bruce’s.

The battles piled up, some against the English and others against powerful Scottish families who had their own ambitions. But other Scots, now including the leaders of many of the powerful Celtic families just beneath the high nobility, gradually came over to Bruce’s side. He began to win more than he lost and he kept on fighting. On the battlefield, Bruce was a smart tactician and a skillful innovator. As Professor Mackie writes, Bruce developed a highly effective battlefield doctrine against the English, relying on smart defenses of his own choosing and a maneuverable offense that allowed him to concentrate his forces. In sum, he “denied ground to hostile cavalry by digging trenches to prolong his short battle line; he avoided pitched battle; he destroyed the castles which he captured, and moved swiftly while his enemy, relying on heavy horses, were sometimes unable to stir until the fields could supply fodder.”
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One can question Bruce’s ethics and recoil from the extremes he took to eliminate personal enemies, but such judgments must be balanced against his goals as a national leader and his brilliance as a fighter. Wallace had the heart. Bruce had the stomach, and the brains.

By early 1314, Bruce’s forces had taken all the major castles in Scotland except Stirling, and it was there, not far from where William Wallace had first defeated the English fourteen years before, that Bruce lured the English into the most decisive battle in Scotland’s history. Laying siege to the castle, Bruce obtained an agreement from its commander, Philip de Mowbray, that if the English were unable to lift the siege by midsummer’s day, the castle would be surrendered. In London, Edward II ordered a general levy of the whole power of England and marched northward with an army of 30,000 men, including some 3,000 knights and men at arms and his famous Welsh longbow archers.

On the face of it, Bruce would appear to have erred. The English outnumbered his army by more than three to one. Having carefully avoided static defenses for years, he was now placing his soldiers into fixed positions. By interposing themselves between the English and Stirling Castle, they would have no room to maneuver, and they also could be devastated by cavalry charges and the type of longbow arrow showers that had taken apart the pikemen of Wallace’s army at Falkirk.

But Bruce brought two intangible advantages to this fight. First and foremost were his highly disciplined soldiers. Under his feudal authority, Edward had levied an army that was, in Churchill’s words, “hard to gather, harder still to feed,” so massive that “it took three days to close up from rear to front.” But the clans had come together for Bruce, forming his army from the bottom up. His fighting force, as always with the Scots, was unbreakable in spirit, its common soldiers locked at the elbows and determined to fight—“the hard, unyielding spear men who feared nought [
sic
] and, once set in position, had to be killed.”
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Bruce’s second advantage was his own tactical brilliance. Anticipating both the English advance and the makeup of its army, he chose his terrain carefully and as a result was able to control the tempo of the battle. Edward’s force was better suited for the open fields of Flanders, where the cavalry might penetrate much like the armored forces did during World War II seven centuries later, and the longbow archers might wreak the same kind of havoc in the wide terrain as did machine guns and artillery. Instead, Bruce carefully prepared his defenses with a keen eye to sloping hills, boggy marsh, and the protection of nearby woods, so that he might channel the English into a narrow attack and at the same time take away their ability to maneuver.

Taking a page from Wallace’s earlier battle plan at Stirling, Bruce set his forces on the far side of the Bannock Burn, or stream, which the English would cross while approaching the castle. But he went further; his tactical acumen sharpened by years of constant fighting, Bruce added a few twists of his own. By placing his main forces on the high ground above the stream with both flanks merged into thick woods, he precluded an envelopment by English cavalry so that their only approach to his main forces would be through a frontal assault as they crossed the Burn. Then he made the low ground between his forces and the Bannock Burn a minefield of surprises; his soldiers dug and then camouflaged trenches and deep holes that would break a cavalry charge and utterly confuse the English side of the battlefield. And finally, anticipating that young Edward would move the Welsh archers on a flank, Bruce kept a small force of horsemen under his direct command, ready for an immediate counterattack.

As the English forces formed for battle, one of their knights provided Bruce what turned out to be a divine opportunity to motivate his army. Henry de Bohun rode forward in an apparent surprise move toward Stirling Castle and ended up challenging Bruce to individual combat. The knight charged him. In full view of his cheering army, Bruce turned his horse away from Bohun’s lance and then smashed the knight’s head apart with one blow of his battle-ax.

On the morning of June 24, 1314, the English began their assault, their cavalry leading the charge across the Bannock Burn and into the killing ground Bruce had prepared. The camouflaged ditches and holes disoriented them, but still they moved forward, up the hill toward the unmoving spearmen who made up the Scottish
schilltrons
. One cannot tell this tale better than Churchill himself.

As neither side would withdraw the struggle was prolonged and covered the whole front. The strong corps of archers could not intervene. When they shot their arrows into the air . . . they hit more of their own men than of the Scottish infantry. At length a detachment of archers was brought round the Scottish left flank. But for this Bruce had made effective provision. His small cavalry force charged them with utmost promptitude, and drove them back into the great mass waiting to engage, and now already showing signs of disorder. Continuous reinforcements streamed forward toward the English fighting line. Confusion steadily increased. At length the appearance on the hills to the English right of the camp-followers of Bruce’s army, waving flags and raising loud cries, was sufficient to induce a general retreat, which the King himself, with his numerous personal guards, was not slow to head. The retreat steadily became a rout. The Scottish schilltrons hurled themselves forward down the slope, inflicting immense carnage upon the English even before they could re-cross the Bannock Burn. No more grievous slaughter of English chivalry ever took place in a single day. [The Scottish] feat in virtually destroying an army of cavalry and archers mainly by the agency of spearmen must . . . be deemed a prodigy of war.
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