William Wallace

Sophie's selection for this episode is Scottish freedom-fighter and inspiration for the movie Braveheart, William Wallace.  The parallels of his life from youth to the Battle of Stirling Bridge and his gruesome execution are partially echoed by her comparison to a revered modern leader.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

William Wallace and the Uses of a Legend, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people who were considerably more complicated than the monuments built in their honour, wearer of a scarf that my Scottish colleague in the medieval history department described this morning as very English, to which I responded, Yes, thank you, I am, and which exchange I mention, because it is, in miniature, precisely the dynamic we are going to spend the next half hour examining. I want to say something at the outset that I think is necessary, and that some of you will find either obvious or provocative depending on where you were educated and what you were told in school. The thing I want to say is this. I am English. My subject today is Scottish, and the English have a particular relationship to Scottish history that requires, at minimum, conscious acknowledgement, and at maximum the kind of sustained critical self-examination that my culture is not historically speaking especially practised at. We are working on it. Progress is intermittent. William Wallace is not a subject that a person from Kingston upon Thames approaches without a degree of inherited historical awkwardness. The English crown, in the person of Edward I of England, Edward Longshanks, the hammer of the Scots, a man of genuine administrative brilliance and comprehensive political brutality, who is one of the more instructive figures in medieval English history, and who will feature in today's episode as the antagonist he was, treated Scotland and the Scottish people in the twelve nineties and thirteen hundreds, with a combination of legal manipulation, military force, and sovereign bad faith that requires from an English historian two centuries later, neither defensive justification nor performative guilt, but honest reckoning. That is what I intend to provide. William Wallace The Name is known the face or rather the face that Mel Gibson gave him in nineteen ninety five, which is the face most people carry when they hear the name, and which I will address directly and only once, is known. The legend is known. The actual person is, by comparison, almost entirely obscure, buried under seven centuries of Scottish nationalist mythology, Hollywood production design, Walter Scott, and a poem written about a hundred and fifty years after Wallace's death by a man called Blind Harry, which tells you roughly as much about the historical William Wallace as a contemporary film about Queen Elizabeth I tells you about the historical Queen Elizabeth I, which is to say some things significantly distorted, and several things invented. Stripping away the legend to find the man is, in Wallace's case, more difficult than for almost any other subject I have treated in this series, because the legend began early, was ideologically motivated from the start, and has been so thoroughly reinforced by every subsequent generation that the historical person has, in places, effectively ceased to exist beneath it. This is not, I want to be clear, an argument that the legend is false or that it should be abandoned. Legends serve purposes that history alone cannot serve, and the Wallace legend has served and continues to serve purposes of enormous importance to Scottish identity and Scottish political consciousness. But I am a historian, and my obligation is to the person, and I intend to honour it as far as the evidence allows. Which in Wallace's case is not always very far, but further than you might think. Let's begin with what we actually know, as opposed to what Blind Harry told us, and as opposed to what Mel Gibson showed us, and as opposed to what the Wallace monument in Stirling implies. We know that William Wallace existed. We know this because he appears in contemporary documentary sources, English government records primarily, which is itself an interesting irony. The most reliable contemporary evidence for Wallace's activities comes from the administrative records of the government he was fighting, because governments keep records of the people who are causing them problems, and Wallace was causing Edward I's government very considerable problems indeed. He was born probably around twelve seventy, possibly a few years earlier or later. The sources disagree, as sources for thirteenth century Scottish minor gentry always do. His father was, according to the most plausible accounts, a knight of modest means. Sir Malcolm Wallace, or possibly Sir Allan Wallace, from somewhere in Renfrewshire, Ayrshire, or Clydesdale, depending on which local tradition you find most convincing. He was not a peasant. The Braveheart version of Wallace as a man of the common people, speaking for a dispossessed peasantry against an aristocratic establishment is not entirely wrong in its political implications, but is significantly wrong in its social specifics. He was minor gentry, he was not nobility of the first rank, but he was not a ploughman. He was educated, he spoke Latin and French, in addition to Scots, Gaelic, and Middle English, which is the education of a man with clerical connections or a family that valued learning, and probably both. He was large. This much the sources agree on. The contemporary English accounts describe him as a man of exceptional physical stature, a giant by medieval standards, which probably means something in the range of six feet two or three, at a time when the average adult male height was considerably less than this. He was physically powerful, a skilled fighter, and possessed of the kind of physical presence that in the thirteenth century carried its own form of authority independent of formal rank. What we do not know, despite what the legend insists, is the specific event or events that brought him to active resistance against English rule. The story of the death of a young woman he loved, Marian Braidfeute of Lamington, in the various accounts, at the hands of the English Sheriff of Lanark, and his subsequent killing of that sheriff, William Heselrig, in revenge, is present in the tradition from Blind Harry onward and may contain a historical kernel. The killing of Heselrig is probably real. It appears in sources independent of Blind Harry. The romantic motivation is unverifiable, and has the quality of a narrative that later tradition added because it is a more compelling story than political resistance to illegitimate foreign occupation, which is the actual and sufficient explanation for why a Scottish man of the twelve nineties might have decided to fight the English. We should understand what the twelve nineties meant for Scotland, because without that context nothing that follows makes sense. Scotland in the early twelve nineties was in a condition of dynastic crisis. King Alexander III had died in twelve eighty six, falling from his horse on a dark night near Kinghorn, one of those deaths by accident that change everything, because Alexander had been an effective king and the succession question had seemed well managed, and then he was gone, and it was not. His granddaughter, the maid of Norway, Margaret, was the heir, and a marriage was arranged between her and the son of Edward I of England, which would have created a union of the crowns, under conditions that might might have preserved Scottish sovereignty. Margaret died in Orkney in twelve ninety, aged seven, on the voyage from Norway to claim her throne. She never set foot in Scotland. The succession dispute that followed produced thirteen claimants and the legal process known as the Great Cause, in which Edward I was invited by the Scots magnates to adjudicate between the claims, primarily between Robert Bruce of Anandale and John Balliol of Barnard Castle, both of whom had claims through descent from David I. Edward agreed to adjudicate. He also required, as a precondition of his arbitration, that the Scottish claimants acknowledge him as Lord Paramount of Scotland, as feudal overlord of whoever became king. Most of the claimants agreed to this because the alternative was indefinite civil war, and they wanted a decision. It was in retrospect the most consequential concession in Scottish history. Edward chose John Balliol in twelve ninety two. John Balliol became King of Scots, and Edward immediately began treating him as precisely what he had been compelled to acknowledge himself to be. A feudal vassal, subject to English overlordship, required to provide troops for English wars and submit Scottish legal cases to English courts. The Scottish magnates and the Scottish Church eventually concluded that this arrangement was incompatible with Scottish sovereignty, and formed a council to govern in place of the effectively powerless Ballion. The resulting Treaty of Paris with France in twelve ninety five, the Old Alliance, was the Scottish nobility's attempt to balance English pressure with French support, and it alarmed Edward considerably. Edward's response was the invasion of Scotland in twelve ninety-six. Berwick upon Tweed, then Scotland's most prosperous trading town, was sacked and its population massacred. The Scottish army was defeated at Dunbar. Baliol surrendered his throne and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. His coat of arms was stripped from his surcoat in a public humiliation that gave him the nickname Tomb Tabard, the empty coat. The stone of destiny was removed from Scone and taken to Westminster, where it was placed beneath the English coronation throne. The documents of Scottish governance were seized, the senior Scottish nobility submitted to Edward, and swore fealty. Scotland was, in the intention and the administrative machinery of Edward I of England, annexed. It was not a conquest in the sense that he installed a new king of his own line. It was an absorption, a claim that Scotland had always been subject to English overlordship, and that the recent unpleasantness had been a rebellion, now corrected. Scotland was to be governed as a territory of the English crown. And then William Wallace killed William Haselrig, the Sheriff of Lanark. The rebellion of twelve ninety seven was not Wallace's alone. Andrew de Moray, in the north of Scotland, was conducting his own uprising simultaneously, and the two movements eventually joined. But Wallace's campaign in the Central Belt and the South drew the English military response most directly, and it was Wallace who became, during the campaign, not merely in retrospect, the figurehead of Scottish resistance. His military career lasted approximately eighteen months of active campaigning, and within those eighteen months, he achieved one thing that has never been adequately explained by purely military analysis, and that I want to spend some time on, because it is the hinge on which the entire Wallace story turns the Battle of Stirling Bridge, September 11th, 1297. The English army sent to suppress the Scottish rebellion was commanded by John de Warren, Earl of Surrey, a competent professional soldier, and Hugh de Cressingham, Edward's treasurer in Scotland, who is by all accounts considerably less competent and considerably more financially motivated. The English force was substantial, several thousand heavy cavalry and infantry representing the most professional military force in the British Isles, and one of the most experienced in Europe. The Scots army under Wallace and Moray was larger in numbers, but composed primarily of infantry, the common foot soldiers of Scotland, with very little cavalry, none of it comparable to the English mounted knights. By the tactical orthodoxy of thirteenth century European warfare, this was not a contest. Heavy cavalry against infantry on open ground produced a predictable and one sided result. It had produced that result at Dunbar in twelve ninety six. It had produced that result across a hundred years of English military campaigns in Wales, France, and elsewhere. Wallace chose his ground with exceptional care. The fourth was the obstacle. The bridge, a narrow wooden structure capable of allowing perhaps two or three men abreast to cross at a time, was the choke point. He allowed the English vanguard to cross. He waited until approximately half the English force was across, and the bridge was at maximum congestion. And then he attacked. The English cavalry on the Scottish bank had no room to manoeuvre. The infantry behind them could not reinforce. The Shiltron, the Scottish infantry formation of densely packed spearmen, pikes lowered, rotating slowly like a hedgehog of sharpened steel, was almost impenetrable to cavalry without the space to build a charge. The English vanguard was destroyed. Cressingham was killed. The Scots, who had particular reasons to dislike him, reportedly made a belt from his skin, which is the kind of historical detail that tells you a great deal about the intensity of feeling on both sides, and which I include not for sensationalism, but because the sanitization of medieval warfare serves no one's understanding. De Waren, on the far bank with the main English force, retreated. The bridge was cut. Scotland was, for a brief and extraordinary moment, free. Wallace was appointed guardian of Scotland in the name of King John, Balliol, the legitimate king, still held by the English, and governed for a period of approximately a year. He conducted a raid into northern England, into Cumberland, and Northumberland, which served both strategic purposes, and the practical one of supplying his army from English rather than Scottish resources, and which was conducted with the organised violence that medieval raiding campaigns entailed. He wrote letters to the trading cities of Lubeck and Hamburg, informing them that Scotland was open for business, that the kingdom had been recovered, and wished to resume normal commercial relations. These letters survive. They are, alongside the record of Stirling Bridge, the clearest evidence of the quality of Wallace's mind, the strategic awareness, the understanding that a kingdom's survival requires not only military success but economic legitimacy, the reach beyond the immediate tactical situation to the larger question of what Scotland's place in the world should be. Edward I returned from France in twelve ninety eight. He was not a man who accepted military reverses with equanimity, and Stirling Bridge was the largest military reverse of his Scottish campaign. He came back with an army that dwarfed anything Wallace could field, and Wallace, who was a great tactician and not a foolish one, avoided open engagement for as long as possible. He was eventually brought to battle at Falkirk in july twelve ninety eight, and here the story changes register, from triumph to the thing that follows triumph, which in Wallace's case was defeat. The Shiltrons that had been devastating to English cavalry at Stirling Bridge were, at Falkirk, stationary targets for English longbowmen, who fired into the densely packed formations until they broke. The Scottish cavalry, such as it was, withdrew, either from cowardice, treachery, or simple tactical assessment, that a cavalry charge against English archers was suicide, depending on which source you trust, and none of the sources is entirely objective. The Scottish infantry was destroyed. Wallet survived and escaped, but the defeat was decisive in political terms. He resigned as guardian shortly afterward. What he did between Falkirk in twelve ninety eight and his capture in thirteen oh five is in the historical record, mostly silence. He went to France probably. He may have been at the French court seeking support for the Scottish cause from Philip IV, who had his own reasons to make trouble for Edward. He was briefly back in Scotland, probably. He refused, across all of this period, to submit to Edward's authority. Every other significant Scottish noble and military leader eventually made terms, at one point or another, with the English crown, and Wallace did not. Edward, accordingly, treated him as an outlaw rather than a rebel, which was a specific legal status that meant he could be killed on sight by anyone without legal consequence. The price on his head was very large. He was captured near Glasgow in august thirteen oh five, taken to London, and tried in Westminster Hall. The trial was conducted with the procedural trappings of law and none of its substance. He was not permitted to speak in his own defence in any meaningful sense. He denied the charge of treason on the grounds that he had never sworn allegiance to Edward and could not therefore be a traitor. A legally coherent argument that the court declined to engage with because the outcome had been decided before the trial began. He was condemned as a traitor, outlaw, robber, murderer, and a charge of sacrilege against English churches during the Northern raids. On august twenty third, thirteen oh five, William Wallace was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Smithfield in London, a form of execution reserved for traitors, designed to be as prolonged and degrading as possible, and which I will describe with the directness it deserves rather than the euphemism it is sometimes accorded, he was hanged until near death, revived, emasculated, disemboweled while still alive, his entrails burned before his eyes, then beheaded, and his body divided into four parts. His head was placed on London Bridge. His quarters were distributed to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling, and Perth, the strategic centres of the country he had fought for, as a statement of English sovereignty and Scottish subordination, that Edward intended to be final. It was not final. Within a year Robert the Bruce had claimed the Scottish throne and renewed the war. Bannockburn was eight years away. Scottish independence, formal, negotiated, internationally recognised, was twenty three years away with the Treaty of Edinburgh Northampton in thirteen twenty eight. Walletz did not live to see any of it. He was, in the immediate term, an apparent failure, a man whose resistance had been crushed, whose death had been made a public lesson, whose cause seemed to have died with him. He was not a failure. He was a catalyst. The resistance he embodied, the victory at Stirling Bridge, the demonstration that Scotland could fight and win. These things changed the political consciousness of Scotland in ways that outlasted his death, and that Robert the Bruce, who was an infinitely more politically sophisticated operator than Wallace, understood and built upon. Without Wallace, no Bannockburn. Without Bannockburn, no declaration of Arboreth. Without the Declaration of Arbirth, that extraordinary document of thirteen twenty which asserted Scottish independence with a philosophical eloquence that anticipates the American Declaration of Independence by four hundred and fifty years, no framework for the kind of sovereignty that Scotland eventually negotiated and defended. He was also, and I think this matters, a man who chose. In a period when every other significant Scottish figure eventually found terms with English power, Wallace did not. This was not, I think, primarily stubbornness or inflexibility. It was a consistent position, maintained at enormous cost about what Scotland was and what it was entitled to be. He never swore allegiance to Edward. He never treated the English annexation as legitimate. He governed in the name of King John and refused the premise that there was any authority above that. Whether this was wisdom or rigidity is a question that depends on what you think the long-term outcome was worth, and the long-term outcome took twenty-three years, an enormous suffering, and is still, in various senses, unresolved. History does not always vindicate the people who refuse to compromise. In Wallace's case, it did eventually. Now the Tees picture someone who emerges from relative obscurity to lead a resistance movement against what they regard as illegitimate foreign domination, not the senior figure in the existing establishment, not someone whose position was hereditary or institutional, but someone whose authority derived entirely from demonstrated military capability, personal courage, and the consent of people who chose to follow because of what they saw rather than what they were told to see. Picture someone whose political legitimacy was constructed outside and against the existing institutional framework. Someone who governed not because of where they came from, but because of what they had done, and who maintained that legitimacy through continued action, rather than through the machinery of state that normally perpetuates authority. Picture someone who achieved a single moment of such extraordinary and unexpected success a victory against all reasonable expectation, against a superior force achieved through tactical intelligence and the willingness to fight in a way the opponent had not anticipated, that it changed the psychological and political landscape permanently even after subsequent defeat. Picture someone who refused terms that every other significant figure in their movement eventually accepted, not from inflexibility, but from a consistent philosophical position about what was and was not legitimate. Someone for whom the principle was not negotiable even when the pragmatic calculation suggested otherwise, and who paid for that refusal with everything. Picture someone whose legacy is almost entirely a construction of subsequent political need, whose actual biography has been buried under myth, whose face and words and personality have been invented and reinvented by every generation that needed them for its own purposes, and whose historical reality is therefore almost impossible to see beneath the accumulated weight of what they have been made to mean. Picture someone who was captured, tried in a proceeding that had all the form of legal process and none of its substance, condemned on charges that were legally questionable and executed with a deliberate brutality designed to send a political message, and whose execution, intended as a final suppression, became instead the act that most powerfully confirmed the legitimacy and the permanence of what they had fought for. Who is this person? It is Nelson Mandela, I know. That comparison will seem to some of you either obvious or presumptuous, and I want to address both reactions to those who think it is presumptuous. I am not claiming equivalence of scale or global significance. I am claiming structural rhyme. And the structural rhyme, when you lay the biographies alongside each other, is one of the most precise I have found in this series. I want to trace it carefully. Nelson Roli Lahla Mandela was born on july eighteenth, nineteen eighteen in Mvezo, a small village in the Umtata district of the Eastern Cape, in what was then the Union of South Africa. His father was a chief of the Thembu people, a man of local authority and traditional standing, who lost that position following a dispute with the local colonial magistrate. Mandela's first childhood lesson in the relationship between indigenous authority and colonial power delivered at close quarters and at his father's expense. He was educated at mission schools and then at the University of Fort Hare, the only institution in South Africa at that time that offered higher education to black students, where he was elected to the student's representative council and then suspended for participating in a student strike. His first experience of the gap between the formal procedures of institutional authority and the actual exercise of power, and of the cost of challenging that gap. He came to Johannesburg, studied law, became the first black lawyer to establish a legal practice in South Africa. He joined the African National Congress in 1944 and co-founded the ANC Youth League, which pushed the organization toward more direct mass action against the apartheid system. He was a tall man, over six feet, physically imposing, possessed of the kind of personal presence that rooms reorganise themselves around, a quality that the prison that would confine him for twenty-seven years was designed, among other things, to suppress. The apartheid system, instituted by the National Party government, elected in 1948, was one of the most comprehensively theorized and systematically administered structures of racial oppression in the twentieth century. It was not merely discrimination, it was a complete legal and administrative framework designed to control every aspect of black South African life, where you could live, where you could work, whom you could marry, where your children could be educated, what legal recourse you had, what political participation was available to you. It was in its scope and its ideological consistency, the colonial project at its most explicit and its most brutal, and it was administered by a government that presented it to a domestic white audience and to the international community as a form of rational social order. Mandela's response to it moved through several phases that are important to understand, because the popular image of Mandela, the saintly reconciler, the patient sufferer, the embodiment of nonviolence and forgiveness is like the popular image of Wallace, a significantly simplified version of a considerably more complex person. The simplification is not malicious. It is the natural process by which legends are made, but it obscures the man. In the nineteen fifties, Mandela participated in the Defiance Campaign, the ANC's programme of deliberate nonviolent civil disobedience against apartheid laws, and was subject to repeated banning orders, restrictions, and harassment by the South African security apparatus. In nineteen sixty, following the Sharpville massacre, in which sixty-nine protesters were killed by police, the ANC was banned. The government's response to peaceful protest was increasingly violent suppression, and Mandela, in nineteen sixty one, concluded, reluctantly, carefully, after genuine internal debate within the ANC, that nonviolent resistance alone was no longer a sufficient response to a government that had demonstrated its willingness to kill peaceful protesters. He co-founded Unconto We Sisue, Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the ANC, which conducted sabotage campaigns against government infrastructure. He went underground, travelled internationally seeking support and military training, and was arrested in 1962. He was convicted of incitement and leaving the country without a passport. While serving this sentence, he was charged in the Rivonia trial of 1963 to 64 with sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government. He faced the death penalty. His statement from the Doc at the Ravonia trial, one of the great political speeches of the twentieth century composed with a lawyer's precision and delivered with a statesman's calm, is the Wallace Sterling Bridge moment of his story. It was the moment when the full measure of the man became visible, and it became visible in a context designed to suppress it. He ended the statement with words that have been read and quoted and debated for sixty years. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. The judge chose not to sentence him to death. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robin Island, twenty seven years from nineteen sixty four to nineteen ninety, in a cell of approximately two metres by two metres, breaking rocks in the prison quarry, the lime dust damaging his eyes, the cold of the Cape Winters, the deliberate institutional humiliation of the apartheid prison system, and throughout the study of law and history and politics, the correspondence maintained under censorship, the maintenance of an internal life, and an intellectual and moral seriousness that the prison was designed to extinguish. This is the Wallace comparison at its most precise and most uncomfortable. Both men were imprisoned by a government that had the formal machinery of law and used it for political purposes. Both were convicted in proceedings where the outcome was determined before the evidence was heard. Both were subjected to conditions designed to be degrading and punitive, intended as a statement of sovereign power over a defeated enemy. And in both cases the imprisonment did not extinguish what it was designed to extinguish. It confirmed it. Wallace's execution became the act that most powerfully demonstrated the illegitimacy of English sovereignty over Scotland, because it showed what that sovereignty required and what it was willing to do to maintain itself. Mandela's imprisonment became the act that most powerfully demonstrated the illegitimacy of apartheid, because twenty seven years of a man's life spent in a cell for the stated belief that all people are equal is a more effective argument against the system that imprisoned him than any speech he could have made as a free man. He was released on february eleventh, nineteen ninety. He was elected president of South Africa in nineteen ninety-four. He served one term and left office voluntarily in nineteen ninety nine. He died on december fifth, twenty thirteen, age ninety five. The parallels with Wallace are structural and thematic. First, the outsider authority. Wallace's authority was not hereditary or institutional. It derived from demonstrated military capability and the consent of people who chose to follow him. Mandela's authority was similarly constructed outside the institutional framework that controlled South Africa. He had no formal position in the government, no army, no state resources, and his leadership of the liberation movement derived entirely from what he was and what he'd done, and what he was prepared to endure. Second, the pivotal moment that changed the psychological landscape. Stirling Bridge demonstrated that Scotland could fight and win, and changed what Scottish Resistance believed was possible. The Ravonia statement demonstrated that the ANC's cause could be articulated before the highest court in South Africa with the death penalty as the potential sentence without retreat or apology or compromise, and changed what the liberation movement believed was possible. Third, the refusal of terms. Wallace refused to submit to Edward and paid for it with his life. Mandela refused throughout his imprisonment, to accept the various conditional release offers the apartheid government made to him, all of which required him to renounce the ANC or condemn violence. Offers he declined, because accepting them would have legitimized the government's framing of his imprisonment as a criminal matter rather than a political one. Both men, at the moment when acceptance would have been most materially advantageous, refused. Fourth, the construction of legend over person. Wallace was buried under Blind Harry and Walter Scott and Mel Gibson. Mandela has been buried under the global mythology of Mandela as saint, as reconciler, as the embodiment of forgiveness so perfect it transcends political complexity, in a way that erases the man who co founded a military organization and spent twenty seven years declining to make it easy for his captors. Both men are more complicated than the legends, and the complications are the more interesting story. Fifth, the use of the legend by subsequent political movements. The Wallace legend has been deployed by Scottish nationalist politics across seven centuries and continues to be deployed today, sometimes accurately, sometimes as pure myth. The Mandela legend has been deployed since his death by people across the political spectrum who would like to claim his legacy, including some whose positions he would have found objectionable. Both men were turned after death or during life, into symbols whose flexibility exceeded their actual positions. This is the cost of becoming a legend, while the politics remain unresolved. Where do the parallels strain? Wallace died in thirteen oh five, and the cause he gave his life for Scottish independence is still, in twenty twenty four, a live political question, incompletely resolved with a third referendum on the horizon. The long term verdict of history is genuinely not yet in. Mandela died in 2013, and the constitutional democracy he helped establish is still functioning imperfectly but recognizably thirty years after the end of apartheid. In terms of the direct, measurable outcome of what he fought for, Mandela is the more completely vindicated figure. Mandela also lived to see his vindication, which Wallace emphatically did not. The quality of Mandela's later life, the presidency, the global statesmanship, the extraordinary moral authority of a man who had been through what he had been through and emerged without bitterness as the defining public quality is not available as a comparison point because Wallace was thirty five and executed. The full arc of Mandela is richer, and in its totality more remarkable than Wallace's. And the scales of consequence are different. Mandela's work contributed to the peaceful negotiated end of one of the most comprehensively oppressive systems of racial governance in modern history in a country of forty million people, in a way that avoided the full scale civil war that most observers had predicted was inevitable. Wallace contributed to Scottish resistance to English annexation in the thirteenth century and indirectly to the eventual formal independence of Scotland, which was achieved by Robert the Bruce and others building on what he had started, both are historically significant. They are not equivalent in scale. The verdict Wallace and I say this fully aware that an English historian choosing a Scottish freedom fighter over Nelson Mandela requires a careful explanation, and I want to provide it. It is not that Wallace was a greater man. I am not sure he was. It is not that his cause was more just. Both causes were just. It is not that his suffering was more extreme. Mandela spent twenty seven years on Robin Island. Wallace spent approximately six years as a fugitive and outlaw before being captured and killed. It is that Wallace's story is, in the deepest structural sense, more purely itself. It has no redemption arc. There is no release from prison, no negotiation, no presidency, no Nobel Prize, no long and honoured old age. There is Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, and the silence of the fugitive years, and Smithfield. The arc is short and steep and ends badly, and then, two decades later, slowly and incompletely, the thing he died for comes into being, and he is not there to see it. That is the shape of tragedy. Not the Shakespearean tragedy of a fatal flaw, though Wallace may have had those two. The refusal of all compromise is not without its costs. It is the tragedy of the man who is necessary and who is consumed by the thing he is necessary for, and who is vindicated not in his own time but in the time of others by people who built on what he started and knew what they owed him. I am English. My country killed William Wallace. The English crown stripped him of his life with a thoroughness and a deliberateness that was intended to send a message about the cost of resistance, and the message it sent to Bruce, to the Scottish magnates, to the Scottish people was not the message intended. The message received was this is what English sovereignty requires to maintain itself. Scotland looked at what English sovereignty required to maintain itself and made its decision. Grew up in Kingston upon Thames. We have a perfectly pleasant river, and some excellent scones, and a local pride that is, I think it is fair to say, untroubled by the weight of the kind of history that requires reckoning. William Wallace is someone else's history in a very particular way, someone else's grief, someone else's pride, someone else's ongoing argument about who they are and what they are owed and what was done to them, and not yet fully accounted for. I approach that history with the respect it deserves and the honesty it requires. He was not, as blind Harry would have it, twelve feet tall and single handedly responsible for every English defeat in Scotland for a decade. He was a man of the minor gentry, from somewhere in the lowlands, probably around thirty-five years old, who looked at the situation his country was in and decided that the correct response was resistance rather than accommodation, and who was right about that in ways that cost him everything, and that history has since confirmed. He deserves better than a Mel Gibson film, however much I understand why that film was made, and what it meant to the people for whom it meant something. He deserves the honest account of what he actually did. The ground chosen at Stirling Bridge, the children's in the morning mist, the letters to Hamburg and Lubeck, the refusal at every stage to pretend that Edward I's claim to Scotland was legitimate. That is a real story. It is a better story than the legend. It does not need a kilt. William Wallace, born approximately twelve seventy, somewhere in the Scottish Lowlands, died august twenty third, thirteen oh five at Smithfield, London, Guardian of Scotland, never defeated in open battle until Falkirk, never submitted to English authority, never swore allegiance to Edward I, executed for treason against a king to whom he had sworn no allegiance, which is not treason but resistance, and which is what it always was, and what it has always been understood to be by everyone except the English crown that killed him. Still argued about, still claimed. Still, on the walls of the Wallace Monument in Stirling, looking out over the field of Stirling Bridge, where he changed what was possible for a country that is still working out what to do with the possibility he opened, he would have found the comparison to Mandela either flattering or entirely obvious. I suspect knowing something of both men, he would have found it obvious. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you for being here. Summus MacPhail's historical account is solid, and for the Scottish Wars of Independence more broadly, I recommend Michael Penman's work on Robert the Bruce, which gives the fullest context for what Wallace started. And if you are Scottish and you have sat through a history lesson that was taught by someone who did not acknowledge what England did and what it cost. Good night.