Wallace, Bruce and political correctness

Seven hundred years ago, on August 23, Sir William Wallace, the Scottish resistance leader, was sentenced to death in London. Thereafter, he was hung, drawn and quartered, and his body parts despatched for display in Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth.

Wallace's principal opponent, the psychopath King Edward I of England, certainly knew how get his message across.

Yet his message, that England held sway north of the border, seriously backfired on him, and brought Scotland's other great hero, Robert the Bruce, into the independence equation. Tyrants universally should remember the lesson. Never make a martyr out of your enemy.

An awful lot of nonsense has been talked about William Wallace since the actor Mel Gibson's absurdly inaccurate, but enormously entertaining, film Braveheart. The reality is that we know remarkably little about him, apart from that which is contained in an epic poem composed by a blind man and dictated to somebody else around 180 years after Wallace's execution.

Since Blind Harry's verses contain 11,861 lines, they more than compensate for any lack of previous detail, but the story is unashamedly littered with historical inaccuracy and blatant anti-English propaganda.

What is clear, for those prepared to dig deeper, is that, living in the late 14th century, the author was using Wallace to promote his own political agenda. William Wallace, if we are able to believe such solid evidence has survived, was most certainly not the ‘common man' of pop...

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• By : Roddy Martine
• In : Roddy Martine's World
• Issue : 23
• Page : 7
• Words : 765