the pope was occupied with troubles in Italy; the English estates were thoroughly reconciled to the crown. Edward summoned an overpowering army to Roxburgh, and, disregarding the Scotch borderers, who ravaged Cumberland behind him, he carried fire and sword through the whole country, penetrating even to Caithness. Debarred of all hope of foreign assistance, the Scotch nobles lost heart, and were only anxious to make terms. Two years before they had demanded that their lands in England should be restored, and the king had indignantly refused the request. They now stipulated only for the recovery of their Scotch estates, on the payment of reasonable fines, and Edward admitted them, by a general amnesty, to his peace. Probably the English earls, who had received grants of Scotch forfeitures, were bought off, or easily consented to renounce dangerous titles. of doubtful value. John de Soulis, with a noble constancy, refused these ter.ns, and retired to die, beggared and free, in France; but there was only one exception to the king's clemency. William Wallace, who had taken part in the earlier negotiations, applied, like others, for the king's grace and for permission to hold the lands he had acquired. The expression points to transactions, now unknown, by which his services had been rewarded with manors, so that he was, nominally at least, an estated gentleman. But Edward would not recognize the titles derived from war against himself, or could not bring himself to pardon the adventurer who had held all the force of England at bay. He would only agree that Wallace should come in and make his peace, that is to say, should make unconditional submission, with the understanding that he should be tenderly handled. Wallace refused these terms, and was proclaimed an outlaw, with a price set upon his head.

Unhappily for Edward and England, the measures taken to apprehend Wallace were crowned with a fatal success. By the late peace Wallace was debarred his old refuge in France.

After a long vagrancy in the moors and fens, where he supported himself by plunder, he incautiously ventured to Glasgow, and was taken in the house of his mistress, through the treachery of his servant, Jack Short, who bore a grudge against him for the death of a brother. The earl of Monteith, then governor of Dunbarton, and one of the few Scotch nobles who had served Edward with fidelity, shares with his brother, Sir John Monteith, the discredit of a service to his country's enemy against his country's defender. The large rewards showered upon the captors, and the strong escort under which Wallace was hurried through the lowlands, attest the importance which Edward attached to his capture. Faithful to his maxim, that he would not see any one to whom he would not show grace, the king sent his great antagonist to London (August 22, 1305), where he was taken through the streets in a mock procession, with a crown of laurel on his head, and tried by a special commission, consisting of three judges, the lord mayor, and John de Segrave, the beaten general of Roslyn. By strict law, as soon as the fact of Wallace's outlawry was proved against him by record of the coroner's roll, he was to be hanged, and his property forfeited to the crown; but this summary process would not have suited the English policy, which desired, before it slew its victim, to brand him as a felon. Accordingly the forms of trial were observed, and Wallace was indicted for treason, for murders and robberies, for sacrilege in churches, and for not having come to the king's peace. It is said that Wallace answered to the first count, denying that he was a traitor, as he had never sworn allegiance to the king of England. the ideas of that time the defense was valid, for allegiance was a personal tie rendered in return for certain advantages, and which gentlemen at least might withhold at pleasure, so that Wallace was not necessarily bound by the acts of his countrymen. His refusal exposed him to forfeiture of his land, and might put him out of the king's peace, but did not

By

make him a traitor. If, however, this plea was overruled Wallace had no answer, as he seems, in fact, to have made none, to the other counts of the indictment. He had undoubtedly headed a war in which men and women had been slain under circumstances of great ferocity, and churches burned or plundered by his followers. He had certainly not been worse, and probably had been more merciful, than other Scotch leaders; but he was not justified by ancestral rank in putting himself at the head of a national movement, and English pride could not forgive the mere squire who had defeated nobles and knights with burghers and Highland kerns. To Edward and his people-as even to Philip of France, and perhaps to some Scotchmen of the day-Wallace was no better than a brigand leading an armed rabble against their natural lords, and subverting the foundations of a political order more valuable to every statesman than a mere principle of nationality. Accordingly the sentence pronounced, though it struck men who remembered better times as horrible, did not seem to them unjust. By a new refinement of cruelty, Wallace was not only to be dragged to the gallows and hanged, but to be cut down while yet living, and disemboweled. This atrocious sentence was actually carried out.

Those who remember how Henry II. had spared the promoters of a wanton rebellion; how King Richard had acted by his brother John and his followers; how John himself had been compelled to plead at the bar of public opinion for the murder of the younger De Braose, and never dared to bring a rebel to formal trial; how Fawkes de Breautè was suffered to leave the country, and William de Marsh only hanged for complicity in rebellion and assassination, will understand what the clemency of our old judicial practice to all offenders in the rank of gentlemen had been, and how completely it was transformed, under Edward, into an impartial barbarity. The early lenity was, perhaps, excessive, but it did not

demoralize, like the executions which are henceforth crowded thickly into the king's bitter old age.

It is possible that Wallace's fame has been better served by his death than it could have been by his life. Though a man of rare capacity, who called the first army of independence, as it were, out of the earth, and who gave body and enthusiasm to the war, he was unfitted by position to command the allegiance of the great nobles, who could alone insure success. He would probably have weakened Bruce by dividing the patriotic interest, or else have degenerated into a mere partisan leader. From the little we know of him, he was no faultless hero of romance, or absolutely without reproach among bloody and faithless men. It is probable that he permitted a savage license before he was sobered by success and a high position; and he seems to have lost heart in the last campaign, and to have wished to renounce a struggle which he was left to maintain alone. But these frailties, dearly expiated, cannot detract from the great facts of his life that he was the first man who fought, not to support a dynasty, but to free Scotland; and the first general who showed that citizens could be an overmatch for trained soldiers; that no reproach of cruelty or self-seeking attaches to his term of government; and that the enemy of his country selected him as its first martyr.

6

XXI.

BRUCE AND BANNOCKBURN.-LONGMAN.

[Edward II. was as weak and cowardly as his father was brave and noble. He fell at once under the influence of favorites and parasites, and the greater part of his reign was occupied with struggles between him and his barons, whose object was to secure good government, and save the king from the consequences of his own folly. He undertook to carry out his father's policy in Scotland, but his overwhelming and disgraceful defeat at Bannockburn robbed him of the little influence he possessed. He was at length deposed, and the crown was given to his son. Though his fate is somewhat doubtful, it is generally supposed that he was secretly murdered in Berkeley Castle in 1327.]

THE almost inaccessible castle of Stirling was nearly the last fortress of importance which still held out against the Scots, and Bruce's brother, Sir Edward Bruce, now laid siege to it. Its governor, Philip de Mowbray, was hard pressed, and feared his garrison would be starved out before it was possible to get help from England. He therefore concluded a truce with Sir Edward Bruce, on the condition of surrendering the castle by the 24th of June, the feast of St. John the Baptist, in the following year, if it were not previously relieved by an English army. Bruce justly blamed his brother for making so disadvantageous an agreement, but he did not attempt to break it.

King Edward, having made a kind of peace with his barons, was now able to turn his mind seriously to the war with Scotland. Had he not now roused himself from his supineness, he would, in fact, have left Scotland to its fate. But, on learning De Mowbray's agreement about Stirling Castle, he made immense preparations for its relief. He summoned the whole military force of the kingdom to meet him at Berwick on the 11th of June, 1314. To this general muster ninetythree barons were commanded to repair, with horse and arms, while the different counties of England and Wales were or