William Wallace: the real story of Scotland's Guardian

Few people in Scottish history are better known and less documented. A handful of records from his own lifetime name him: a letter to the German ports of Lübeck and Hamburg, a letter of the king of France, the record of his trial, and English chronicles written by men who hated him. Almost everything else, from his childhood to his love life, comes from a poem composed some 170 years after his death. This is what the evidence says, and where the legend begins.²

Who was William Wallace? Origins and family

Wallace was probably born in the early 1270s. No record gives the date. He came from a family of the lesser nobility in the west of Scotland: not a great lord, but not the peasant of later legend either. Tradition places his birth at Elderslie in Renfrewshire, while some historians argue for Ellerslie in Ayrshire.³

The best clue is his seal. The letter that he and Andrew Murray sent to Lübeck in October 1297 carries the only known impression of it: on one side the lion rampant of the Scottish kings, on the other a bow and an arrow, which has led some to suggest that he was trained as an archer. Two historians have read its Latin legend as “William, son of Alan Wallace”. The archivists’ commentary on the letter notes that an Alan Wallace was a crown tenant in Ayrshire, which weakens the old Renfrewshire story.⁴

Later tradition named his father Sir Malcolm Wallace instead, and some accounts still give both names, but the seal points to Alan.⁵

Scotland in 1296: why did Wallace rise?

In 1296 Edward I of England invaded Scotland, defeated the Scots at Dunbar, deposed King John Balliol and carried the Stone of Destiny to England, so that no future Scottish king could be crowned on it. English sheriffs and officials took over the running of the kingdom, under John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, and Edward’s treasurer, Hugh de Cressingham.⁶

In the spring of 1297, with Edward preparing a war in Flanders, revolts broke out in several places at once. In the north Andrew Murray, a name also spelled Moray, attacked Urquhart Castle and raised the north-east against the English. In the south-west Bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow, James the Steward and the young Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, rose in the name of the community of the realm, but came to terms with the English at Irvine in July. Wallace was one rebel among several, and at first not the most important.⁷

Lanark, May 1297: the first blow

In May 1297 Wallace attacked Lanark by night and killed William Heselrig, Edward’s sheriff of Clydesdale. The Northumbrian knight Thomas Gray, whose son later wrote the chronicle Scalacronica, was in the sheriff’s company that night. He was left stripped for dead between two burning houses and survived, his son wrote, because the heat of the fires kept him alive. Historic Environment Scotland puts Wallace’s band at about thirty men.⁸

To English writers he was a criminal. The Lanercost chronicler called him “a certain bloody man” who “had formerly been a chief of brigands”, and claimed that Bishop Wishart and the Steward, not daring to break their oaths openly, had put him up to the revolt. Gray, by contrast, wrote that the commons of Scotland chose Wallace as their leader. The English historian J. E. Morris noted that few prominent Scots joined him, which is why Edward made light of the revolt before he sailed for Flanders.⁹

Stirling Bridge, 11 September 1297

By August Wallace had joined forces with Andrew Murray. On 11 September 1297 their army waited on the Abbey Craig, a crag north of the River Forth, while the English army of Surrey and Cressingham gathered on the south bank below Stirling Castle. The only crossing was a narrow wooden bridge. The chronicler Walter of Guisborough wrote that two horsemen could scarcely cross it side by side.¹⁰

How large were the armies? Nobody knows. Guisborough gave the Scots 180 horse and 40,000 foot and the English 1,000 horse and 50,000 foot, figures his own account contradicts. Modern estimates are far smaller. Cressingham wrote in July of mustering 300 horse and 10,000 foot, which one historian reckons had shrunk to about 5,500 by September. Another puts the English at little more than 6,000 foot and 300 horse, with Scots in similar numbers but with very few horsemen. Most historians agree that the English were the larger army and had far more cavalry.¹¹

The English began to cross in the morning. When as many were over as the Scots judged they could beat, Wallace and Murray sent their spearmen down from the crag to seize the end of the bridge, trapping the English vanguard in the loop of the river, on flat, soft ground where heavy horse could not fight well. Men were cut down or drowned trying to swim back, and the bridge itself was broken. Surrey, who had not crossed, fled to Berwick.¹²

Cressingham was among the dead. The Scots flayed his body, and the Lanercost chronicler claimed that Wallace had a broad strip of his skin taken “from the head to the heel” to make a baldric for his sword. Gray heard that the skin was cut into horse girths. Andrew Murray was badly wounded and died of his wounds in November 1297, leaving Wallace alone at the head of the cause. The full story is told in our article on the Battle of Stirling Bridge.¹³

Guardian of Scotland

After the victory Wallace was knighted. In the autumn of 1297 he and Murray styled themselves leaders of the army of the kingdom of Scotland. After Murray’s death Wallace ruled alone, and on 29 March 1298, in a charter for Alexander Scrymgeour, he called himself Guardian of the kingdom of Scotland and leader of its armies, in the name of the captive King John.¹⁴

One of his first acts survives. On 11 October 1297, at Haddington, Murray and Wallace, as leaders of the army of the kingdom of Scotland, wrote to the mayors and communes of Lübeck and Hamburg that Scotland had been recovered from the English by war and that their merchants could again trade safely in every Scottish port. Watson sees in the letter proof that a Scottish administration, with its own chancery, was working again within weeks of the battle. At his trial the English counted these writs among his crimes.¹⁵

In October Wallace led the army into England. By the Lanercost chronicler’s account the Scots burned and plundered across Northumberland almost to Newcastle, turned west into Cumberland, came back to finish what they had left in Northumberland, and went home on 22 November. In Scotland Wallace’s men besieged the castles still held by English garrisons: Stirling castle soon surrendered for lack of food, but Roxburgh held out and Berwick castle was relieved by Surrey early in 1298.¹⁶

The rising shook England as well. Edward’s government was at the same time forced to reissue and confirm Magna Carta in 1297. Morris argued in 1901 that news of the defeat at Stirling Bridge reached London in the middle of this crisis between Edward’s council and his rebellious earls, and that the defeat helped bring about the confirmation of the charters, granted on 10 October, while the crisis delayed any immediate English revenge.¹⁷

Falkirk, 22 July 1298: why did Wallace lose?

Edward came home from Flanders and in the summer of 1298 led a large army into Scotland himself. Wallace fell back, stripping the country in front of him, and for a time the strategy worked: short of food and facing near-mutiny, Edward was preparing to turn back when he learned that the Scots were close by. On 22 July 1298 he caught Wallace’s army near Falkirk.¹⁸

Wallace drew up his spearmen in schiltroms, dense rings of men with long spears facing outward, supported by archers and a small force of horsemen. The first English cavalry charges broke on the spears. Then Edward brought up his foot, crossbowmen, Welsh troops and English archers, who shot gaps in the rings until the knights could ride in. The Scottish horse left the field early, without striking a blow in some accounts, and the infantry who stood their ground were cut down. Sir John Stewart of Bonkill died at the head of the archers of Selkirk forest.¹⁹

The losses are again impossible to pin down. English chroniclers claimed 56,000 or 60,000 Scottish dead and more. Gray’s figure of more than ten thousand is far lower, and the editor of both chronicles thought even the lower clerical figures exceeded Wallace’s whole army. The English lost few men of rank, and the royal accounts paid for 111 horses killed in the battle. The story is told in full in our article on the Battle of Falkirk.²⁰

Gray recorded a saying that was repeated long afterwards: Wallace had brought his men to the dance, if only they would dance. Gray adds that Wallace, who was on horseback, escaped with the other Scottish lords. Watson’s verdict is sharp: with Edward himself in command, pitched battle against superior numbers was the wrong way for the Scots to fight, and it was Wallace, the supposed outsider, who made the conservative mistake of offering it, teaching his successors as Guardian to rely on raids and guerrilla war instead.²¹

After Falkirk: France and Rome

Wallace gave up the guardianship after the defeat. The chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun has him resign by the water of Forth, and by 5 December 1298 Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, and John Comyn of Badenoch had taken the office between them. If Wyntoun is right, Watson observes, Wallace is the only Guardian known to have resigned.²²

He then went abroad to find allies. In 1299 he was at the court of Philip IV of France, part of a Scottish diplomatic campaign to win French military help and to bring back King John Balliol, who had been released from English custody into the keeping of the pope that summer. Amanda Beam of the research project The Breaking of Britain places him in Paris by early November 1299.²³

In November 1300 Philip wrote to his agents at the papal court, telling them to support Wallace in his business before the pope. Whether Wallace ever reached Rome is unknown. The letter is one of only two surviving documents with a personal connection to him. It belongs to The National Archives at Kew, was lent to the National Records of Scotland in 2012, and under an agreement announced in September 2026 goes on display at Kew in 2027 before returning to Scotland from 2028 to 2031.²⁴

The hunted years and the capture, 1303 to 1305

By 1304 the war was lost. Most of the Scottish lords, John Comyn among them, submitted to Edward that year. Wallace, who never did, was an outlaw in his own country, and Edward offered a large reward for his capture or death.²⁵

English patrols hunted him. Watson’s study of the English accounts, like A. F. Murison’s older biography, shows that in March 1304 a force under Sir John Segrave, guided by a local man paid ten shillings for the service, routed Wallace and Sir Simon Fraser at Happrew near Peebles, though both men escaped.²⁶

On 5 August 1305 Wallace was taken at Robroyston near Glasgow and handed over to the English by Sir John Menteith, a Scottish knight who then held Dumbarton castle and its sheriffdom for Edward. Menteith kept Edward’s favor afterwards.²⁷

How did William Wallace die? Trial and execution, 1305

Wallace was brought to London and on 23 August 1305 led into Westminster Hall, where he sat on a bench at the south end wearing a crown of laurel. There was no trial in the modern sense: a commission of five, among them the justice Peter Mallore, read the charges, treason above all, and pronounced the sentence. Wallace was not allowed to defend himself, but he answered that he could not be a traitor to Edward, because he had never sworn allegiance to him.²⁸

The same day he was dragged through the city at the tails of horses to the Elms at Smithfield. There he was hanged, cut down still alive, disemboweled and beheaded, and his body was cut into quarters. His head was set on a pole on London Bridge. The Lanercost chronicler lists where the quarters went: the right arm to Newcastle upon Tyne, the left arm to Berwick, the right foot to Perth and the left foot to Aberdeen. The sentence itself, as Murison gives it, and the National Wallace Monument name Stirling instead of Aberdeen. A memorial tablet at West Smithfield now marks the place.²⁹

Was William Wallace a good commander?

His military record is short: one great victory, one heavy defeat, a winter of raids and sieges, and years as a fugitive. Stirling Bridge showed an eye for ground and timing: the Scots waited on high ground and struck while the river split the English army in two. Falkirk showed the limits of an army of spearmen with few horsemen and archers against a king who could combine cavalry and missile troops.³⁰

Historians weigh him differently. Morris, writing about Edward’s wars, saw behind the shifting loyalties of the Scottish nobles “the unbroken national spirit of a people first aroused by Wallace”. Watson credits him with restoring a working Scottish government within weeks of Stirling Bridge, and faults him for Falkirk.³¹

His enemies saw a brigand. The Lanercost chronicler mocked his rise in Latin verse and greeted his death with lines calling him the plunderer of shrines and the butcher of thousands. Edward meant the quarters as a warning. The Gale biography of Wallace observes that they became banners of the cause he had fought for instead. The war Wallace began was finished by Robert the Bruce, crowned in 1306, who defeated Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314.³²

The legend: Blind Hary, the Wallace Monument and Braveheart

Most of what people think they know about Wallace comes from The Wallace, a Scots poem of about 11,000 lines composed in the 1470s (about 1478 by its editor Matthew McDiarmid’s reckoning) by a poet known as Blind Hary and preserved in a single manuscript copied by John Ramsay in 1488. The Polish medievalist Władysław Witalisz, reviewing Anne McKim’s edition, reports her reading of it as a patriotic eulogy in which historical truth gives way to the celebration of a national hero, and notes its confused chronology, which has Wallace take up arms at eighteen in Dundee and die at forty-five.³³

In the nineteenth century the hero was cast in stone. The National Wallace Monument on the Abbey Craig, where he waited before Stirling Bridge, was paid for by public contributions of more than £15,000. Its foundation stone was laid on 24 June 1861, the anniversary of Bannockburn, and it opened on 11 September 1869, the anniversary of Stirling Bridge. Designed by J. T. Rochead of Glasgow, the 220-foot tower keeps the Wallace Sword, first recorded at Dumbarton Castle in 1505 and moved to the monument in 1888.³⁴

Then came Braveheart (1995). Its Battle of Stirling Bridge is fought on an open field in which the bridge plays no part, a version that, as Historic Environment Scotland notes, no contemporary chronicler supports. Its romance between Wallace and Isabella of France is invented: at the time of Falkirk she was a small child in France, and she married the future Edward II only in January 1308, more than two years after Wallace’s death.³⁵

Stripped of legend, the story is still remarkable: a minor knight who for a year led a kingdom against Edward I, built its government anew, and gave his life rather than swear an oath he had never taken. Read the story of his battles at Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, the wider military history of Scotland, or the greatest British commanders.³⁶