The Three Edwards (11 page)

Wallace had played no part in this humiliating farce. While the noble lords were submitting themselves to whatever punishments might be devised for them he was attacking the rear guard, succeeding to the extent of destroying the baggage of the enemy and most of the guard.

For a time after the farce at Irvine, Wallace continued to lead the only band in open resistance in the Lowlands, and word of his activities finally reached the royal ears. In the insistent notes which Edward dispatched to his lieutenants he began to refer to the knight of Elderslie as “the king’s enemy.” In the Highlands the fire had not been extinguished. Andrew de Moray, who alone seemed to share the military skill and the full fighting spark which animated the youthful Wallace, had a series of successes in the reduction of castles garrisoned by the English. One of the most colorful exploits of Wallace was chasing Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, from the house of Bishop Wishart in Glasgow.

The treasurer, Hugo de Cressingham, seems to have taken too seriously the English triumph at Irvine. Believing that this absurd exhibition meant that the back of the resistance had been broken, he sent optimistic reports to Edward. This may have persuaded the king to devote his full personal attention to his French concerns. Toward the end of August he sailed again across the Channel, leaving the responsibility for subduing the recalcitrant Scots in the hands of the governor, the Earl of Surrey.

The treasurer had said in one of his letters to the king that “William Wallace holds himself against your peace.” It would have been well for Edward had he given heed to this particular information. Wallace was indeed holding himself against the king’s peace, and the hearts of all the common people of Scotland were with him.

T
HE English leaders, fortunately for the Scottish cause, displayed a lack of energy in following up their success. Wallace took advantage of this breathing spell by gathering under his banner the common men of Scotland who had been left leaderless, and so he found himself for the first time with an army under his command. Moving rapidly, he laid siege to Dundee, at the same time sending a large part of his forces to a strong position near Cambuskenneth Abbey, where they threatened Stirling Castle, the gateway to the Highlands. This forced the English command to take action, and an army of fifty thousand foot and a thousand horse marched north under the command of the governor himself, John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. Warenne was in the late sixties and had been fighting all his life. He had grown weary of warfare and he sat his saddle in bone-stiffened discomfort. He advanced to Stirling by slow stages.

What followed can only be described as a miracle. The military experience of Wallace was limited to his own guerrilla operations. The army he commanded consisted of forty thousand foot (at the most optimistic reckoning) and 180 horse, made up largely of the men who had lost their clan leaders at Irvine but who still wanted to fight. They were brave but they were not trained soldiers in any sense of the word. Their equipment was of the crudest nature. Few of them wore a habergeon, the shirt of iron rings which had been brought back to Scotland by crusaders, and they depended instead on tunics stuffed with wool, tow, or old cloth to soften the edge of a sword thrust. Their weapons were long spears or Lochaber axes. Only a few could be classed as
gall-oglauch
, the pick of the levies from hill and valley, who fought in the front rank when the clans went into battle. Their spirits were high enough, but how far would courage go in opposing the well-trained and well-armed English?

BATTLE OF STIRLING BRIDGE 1297

The most serious weakness, however, was the army’s lack of organization. The best fighting force in the world would be helpless if it lacked authority behind it to supply arms and food and scouting facilities to keep an eye on enemy movements. Wallace lacked everything but men. The absurdity at Irvine had paralyzed the efforts of the high authorities who were supposed to direct the Scottish defense. No arms or food was forthcoming. The wild clansmen drew in their belts and subsisted on a few scraps of dried oatmeal. The few mounted men were quite inadequate to do the scouting thoroughly.

It is clear, however, that Wallace had been born with military genius. Never having heard the word strategy, perhaps, he selected nevertheless the ideal place for the test of strength. The plan of battle he followed showed him to be a master tactician as well. The strength of his army was concealed in the thickets at the base of the Ochils, a steep ridge of hills on the north of the Forth. That river, curling slowly through Stirling except when tidewater enhanced its flow, was crossed by one bridge only, a structure of wood which allowed no more than two horsemen to cross abreast. The Scots were in a position here to swoop down on the English, if they attempted to cross the river, and thus catch them on the Links in a bend of the river where the ground was too swampy for cavalry action. If the tide of battle went against the defenders, they had an easy line of retreat over the rocky Ochils behind them. Here, then, the followers of Wallace, as skillfully disposed as any army could be, watched and waited.

Warenne hugged the delusion that the Scots could be persuaded to give up the struggle and return to their homes. He made several efforts to persuade them and finally sent a pair of itinerant friars as emissaries to Wallace.

“Carry back this answer,” said the Scottish commander. “We have not come for peace but to fight to liberate our country. Let them come on when they wish. They will find us ready to fight them to their beards!”

This precipitated a division of counsel in the English high command. Warenne was not an inspired general, but he was wise enough to distrust the situation. How could they tell how many wild clansmen were concealed at the base of the Ochils? It would take a full day for the English army to cross by that solitary bridge. Was it a wise operation to undertake in the face of a foe of unknown numbers? His inclination was to wait and see if a better way of crossing the tide-fed river presented itself. Some Scottish turncoats spoke of a ford farther up which could be used to turn the flank of the Scots. But Cressingham, the treasurer, had come with the English army and he was all for prompt measures. This ambitious and avaricious churchman, described in one of the chronicles as “handsome but too fat,” was the evil genius of the English. His parsimony had
handicapped the king’s forces at the same time that his overbearing attitude had won him the hatred of the Scots. A time-server in his relations with the king, he was thoroughly distrusted by the other high-ranking officials. When a churchman charges soldiers with overcaution and even hints at cowardice, he puts them at a disadvantage.

“There is no use, Sir Earl,” he said, “in drawing out this business any longer and wasting the king’s revenues for nothing. Let us advance and carry out our duty as we are bound to do.”

The decision reached was to cross the bridge and attack the Scots on the other side. It has already been stated that the men Edward had left behind to finish his work were not great soldiers. Nothing could make this clearer than the course they had decided upon. A single glance at the bridge spanning the Forth at one of its deepest parts should have been enough to make them change their minds. Why was the bridge standing?

Wallace had been first on the ground, and there had been plenty of time to destroy this convenient method of crossing the river. A half dozen strong-armed, broad-backed Highlanders, armed with their Lochaber axes—a long-handled type of ax with a hook on the back to yank and draw with—would have had the structure down in no time at all. But there it stood, unharmed, comfortable to cross, with a wide stretch of land left open on the other side, and no enemy in sight, even though the English felt that thousands of hostile eyes watched them from the thickets.

Successful strategy consists in fighting your battles at the time and place which offer the surest promise of a favorable issue. Wallace was a self-made soldier, with only brief experience in a small way to draw upon, but he was an instinctive master of strategy. He had decided, quite obviously, that this was the time and the place to offer battle to Governor Warenne and his large army. The bridge had been left intact as bait, to draw the attention of the enemy from the ford farther up the river where six men could cross abreast safely and where the terrain was not as favorable for defense. Fording a stream as variable and strong as the Forth was not an easy matter. How much simpler to take advantage of this bridge which the stupid Scots had neglected to destroy! Wallace had guessed right. He had gambled that the enemy would elect to use the bridge and had made his dispositions accordingly.

Warenne’s tired bones kept him in bed beyond the time when the attack should have been made. Some of the English troops, impatient at the delay, crossed the bridge without raising as much as a derisive shout from the hidden Scots and then returned to their own side to wait for their ancient leader to waken. The sun was high when Warenne emerged. The bridge looked as secure as ever, the green haughs beyond were clear
for a good mile, the thickets far back could not conceivably conceal any great number of Scots. The crossing began.

What followed was a supreme test of the generalship of Wallace. He had to choose unerringly the right moment to strike. If he launched his attack too soon, he would succeed only in destroying a small part of the enemy and the main English forces would be left intact. If he waited too long, the invaders would be able to establish a strong enough bridgehead to resist any attack and to enable the rest of the army to cross behind them.

Wallace showed that he had patience as well as judgment. From his high place of concealment he watched the first horsemen come over the bridge at a sedate jog trot to test the security of the structure. When it became evident that nothing had been done to weaken it, the pace became faster. After the horsemen, who spread out fanwise under the command of a capable officer, Sir Marmaduke de Thwenge, came the foot soldiers and the Welsh archers with extraordinarily long bows over their shoulders. Soon the lush green haugh was black with the human stream, and still no sound came from the cover where presumably the Scots were waiting. Or had they decamped during the night, fearing to face such a formidable host? How Wallace succeeded in keeping his excitable troops from any form of demonstration is hard to understand, save that it is known his hand was heavy in discipline and his displeasure swift and harsh.

The Scottish leader waited until eleven o’clock. By that time a very considerable part of the English army had crossed, but not enough to diminish his confidence that he could destroy them. He gave the long-awaited signal.

The wild battle cry of the men from the Highland glens split the air. From behind the semicircle of thicket along the base of the Ochils came thousands of figures leaping in a maddened fury, their robes drawn up around their waists to leave their brawny bare legs free, the chiefs with eagles’ feathers in their bonnets, the common men with a sprig of thistle in theirs. They charged across the haughs, brandishing their deadly hooked axes and their long spears, still raising that high, keen cry which sent shivers down the spines of those who had never heard it before. There seemed to be no end to them. They poured forth from the scant cover like nondescript articles from a magician’s chest; ten, twenty thousand, and perhaps more. The boggy ground did not delay them, for they were in their bare feet. It seemed a matter of minutes only, after the order was given, for them to make contact with the enemy.

Wallace had shrewdly grouped on his right the best trained of his men, who might reasonably be termed the
gall-oglauch
of the Scottish army. These troops struck the left flank of the English as they deployed from
the bridge and went through them like a knife through a wheel of cheese. So instantly successful was this blow that they took control of the end of the bridge and no more of the English troops could get over. The efforts of those still on the swaying structure had to be devoted to resisting the pressure of the files pressing on behind them, a struggle which resulted in most of them being shoved against the Scottish spears or forced over into the rising waters of the river below. The English who had succeeded in crossing were then driven into a bend of the river to the right of the bridge, and here they were either cut down or shoved into the river, which was now salt with the incoming tide. Few, if any, managed to swim across!

Five thousand men died in less than that number of seconds. Many of the English leaders fell in the carnage, including Cressingham, who had ridden over with the van, intending no doubt to show what a churchman could do and perhaps conning over in his mind the self-laudatory note he would send the king. He was thrown from his horse in the first few moments of conflict and trampled to death. Later, discovering whose body it was, the Scots stripped off his skin and divided it among themselves as souvenirs.