'Our power for to knaw,
We will tak feild, and wp our baner rais
Off rycht Scotland, in contrar off our fais.
We will no mar now ws in covert hid;
Power till ws will sembill on ilk syd.'
Harry, xi. 702–6.
'The rycht is ouris, we suld mor ardent be;
I think to freith this land, or ellis de.'
Harry, ix. 821–2.
'The Inglis men owt of owre land
He gert be put wyth stalwart hand.'
Wyntoun, viii. 13, 127–8.
Leaving Dundaff, Wallace proceeded, in April 1297, to Lanark, attended by nine men. He joined his wife in a house just outside the gate, and here Sir John the Graham came to him, with fifteen followers. Sir William de Hazelrig,[1] the Sheriff, the oppressor of his wife's family, and Sir Robert Thorn, presumably the Captain, soon devised a plan for taking him at disadvantage. As Wallace was returning from mass one May morning with his companions, not in armour, but pranked out in the civilian 'goodly green' of the season, he was ostentatiously insulted by an English soldier—'the starkest man that Hazelrig then knew.' He tried to get away without a disturbance; but the arrival of Thorn and Hazelrig with some 200 men in harness at once precipitated a conflict. The odds were overwhelming, and the Scots retired through the gate, Wallace and Sir John doughtily defending the rear. Reaching Wallace's house, they were let in by his wife, and passed out by a back door, while she held the enemy in parley. They at once sought the shelter of Cartland Crags.
[1] Bower calls him William de Heslope (Hislop). The indictment of Wallace has William de Hesebregg (Hazelrig); the b apparently a clerical blunder for l. Mr. Joseph Bain (Cal. ii. p. xxvii.) suggests Andrew de Livingstone, not convincingly. Livingstone preceded Hazelrig.
According to Harry, the English, enraged at being baffled, put Wallace's wife to death; but Harry professes himself unable to state the circumstances. Wyntoun, whose account is extremely similar to Harry's, says the Sheriff came to Lanark after the disturbance, and then caused her to be put to death. He adds that Wallace secretly, but helplessly, beheld her execution; an absolutely incredible assertion. Harry's version is certainly nearer the facts. The English had killed Wallace's father; they had persecuted his mother; now they had inhumanly murdered his wife. The cup was running over.
The distress of Wallace and his friends is finely depicted by Harry. It inflamed them to a desperate and exemplary revenge. Reinforced by Auchinleck with ten men, Wallace and his party entered Lanark at night by different gates in twos and threes, without exciting remark. Wallace made for Hazelrig; Sir John, for Thorn. Dashing in the door with his foot, Wallace found Hazelrig in his bedroom, and slew him on the spot, while Auchinleck, gave himself the satisfaction of 'making sikkar' with three thrusts of his knife. Young Hazelrig, rushing to the aid of his father, was also instantly slain. Meantime Sir John had burnt Thorn in his house.