Edward I by Robert Seeley

Author:Robert Seeley [Seeley, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Serapis Classics
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WILLIAM WALAYS, A.D. 1297, 1298.

We come now to a passage in this history which is beset with more than ordinary difficulties. Romance has entered the field, and has nearly thrust truth out of it. “Wallace,” as he is called in modern times, has been elevated to a similar place in Scottish story that Arthur holds in English, and Patrick or Brian Boru in that of Ireland; but with this difference, that while nobody in England takes “the romaunt of Arthur” to be a history,—in Scotland “the romaunt of Wallace” has by degrees occupied and taken possession of the place which history ought to hold.

Nor has this strange error been confined to Scotland.

Into England, by the industry of Scottish historians, it has been largely introduced, so that now the descendants of those who regarded Walays as a mere marauder and cut ‐throat, have been taught to look upon him as “the renowned Sir William Wallace, his country’s deliverer.”

To find our way through or over such obstacles as these can be no easy task. Our first duty is to seek for credible testimony; but in the present case this is all on one side. “It is a necessary condition,” says Sir G. C. Lewis, “for the credibility of a witness, that he be a contemporary.” Now, of writers who lived in Edward’s day, we have in England some ten or twelve, but in Scotland we search for a single contemporary in vain. Not a line of history written in Scotland in Edward’s day can be found.

Yet, if we draw our idea of William Wallace from the English chroniclers of that time, what other belief can we discover but that which was universal in England from the thirteenth century down to the eighteenth? The Scottish leader was, with all those generations of Englishmen, a rebel leader, a marauder, a ruthless homicide, a miscreant. He had ravaged the north of England with relentless fury, “sparing neither sex nor age.” How, then, could Englishmen regard him, but as their descendants regarded Nana Sahib of Cawnpore in more recent days? But the horror excited by the name of Wallace was naturally the more intense of the two, because the Scottish leader had committed a thousand times more cruelties than ever were perpetrated by the Indian insurgent.

Whence came, then, the opposite view;—that which in Scotland is both deeply seated and quite universal? It was mainly engendered by a wandering minstrel, a village Homer, who lived two centuries after Edward’s day, and who, taking Wallace for his Achilles, composed a whole Iliad of rhymes, by which he gained a subsistence during his life, and which, surviving after his death, gradually convinced the people of Scotland that their forefathers had known “one of the greatest of heroes.” Major, the Scotch historian, who wrote in the first half of the sixteenth century, thus speaks: “Henry, who was blind from his birth, in the time of my infancy composed the whole ‘Book of William Wallace,’ containing the things which were commonly related of him.

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