To find our way through or over such obstacles as these can be no easy task. Our first duty is to seek for credible testimony; but in the present case this is all on one side. “It is a necessary condition,” says Sir G. C. Lewis, “for the credibility of a witness, that he be a contemporary.”[83] Now, of writers who lived in Edward’s day, we have in England some ten or twelve,[84] but in Scotland we search for a single contemporary in vain. Not a line of history written in Scotland in Edward’s day can be found.
Yet, if we draw our idea of William Wallace from the English chroniclers of that time, what other belief can we discover but that which was universal in England from the thirteenth century down to the eighteenth? The Scottish leader was, with all those generations of Englishmen, a rebel leader, a marauder, a ruthless homicide, a miscreant. He had ravaged the north of England with relentless fury, “sparing neither sex nor age.” How, then, could Englishmen regard him, but as their descendants regarded Nana Sahib of Cawnpore in more recent days? But the horror excited by the name of Wallace was naturally the more intense of the two, because the Scottish leader had committed a thousand times more cruelties than ever were perpetrated by the Indian insurgent.
Whence came, then, the opposite view;—that which in Scotland is both deeply seated and quite universal? It was mainly engendered by a wandering minstrel, a village Homer, who lived two centuries after Edward’s day, and who, taking Wallace for his Achilles, composed a whole Iliad of rhymes, by which he gained a subsistence during his life, and which, surviving after his death, gradually convinced the people of Scotland that their forefathers had known “one of the greatest of heroes.” Major, the Scotch historian, who wrote in the first half of the sixteenth century, thus speaks: “Henry, who was blind from his birth, in the time of my infancy composed the whole ‘Book of William Wallace,’ containing the things which were commonly related of him. By the recitation of these he obtained food and raiment. For my own part, I give only partial credit to writings of this description.”
That Major was quite right in “giving only partial credit” to the itinerant minstrel, will be evident enough to any one who reads a page of “Blind Harry.” The book, composed two centuries after the time of which it treats, bears the same relation to real history as did the “Iliad,” or king Arthur’s “Romaunt.” It extends Wallace’s military career, which began in A.D. 1297 and ended in 1298, over more than twenty years. It multiplies the two battles which he really fought into seven. It brings a queen of England to his feet—there being no queen of England at that time in existence. It makes him “duke of Guienne,” and places him under the patronage of the archbishop of Canterbury; in short, it is a romance, having no more resemblance to real history than is possessed by “The Seven Champions of Christendom.”
Yet out of this very unpromising sort of document there have been fabricated, in modern times, a score or two of “historical tales,” both in prose and verse. Some of our best female writers—such as Joanna Baillie and Felicia Hemans, have delighted in extolling “the noblest of Scotia’s sons.” Yet, a strange subject is this for a female pen! Of Wallace’s personal character we have scarcely an outline traceable to any Scottish origin, except we receive as true the legends of “Blind Harry.” And this writer’s descriptions convey no other idea than that of a being of extraordinary ferocity.
The minstrel thus introduces him to our notice:—
“He of age was but eighteen year old;
Weapons he bore, either good sword or knife.”
And these weapons were meant for use against the English; of whom—
“If he found one without another’s presence [i.e., alone]