All Durham town they burnt up in a gleed.
For prisoners they liked not to keep;
Whom they o’ertook, they made their friends to weep.”
Sir Walter’s pithy sentence expresses the whole. The horde of miscreants whom Wallace led, must have come upon many aged, many infants, many sick—upon schools and nunneries. “They left nothing behind them but blood and ashes.” And yet English writers, not a few, have been found, who, after reading these facts, have actually expressed surprise and indignation that the leader of this inroad, when at last apprehended, should have been put to death on the scaffold![94]
This terrible inroad occupied Wallace and his followers during several weeks. But the enjoyment was incautiously prolonged. Before any arrangements had been made for a return to Scotland, “winter set in with great severity. The frost was so intense and the scarcity of provision so grievous, that multitudes of the Scots perished from cold and famine, and Wallace ordered a retreat.”[95]
In useless revenge for this inroad, lord Robert Clifford collected a force in Cumberland and invaded Annandale. A few villages and hamlets were burned, and about three hundred Scots were slain. It was to put an end to this wretched state of things, by making England and Scotland one people, that Edward had been labouring for several years past.
Wallace had now returned to Scotland; and in Scotland, in spite of all “the great lords,” he continued to be the ruling spirit for all the first half of the year 1298. Probably it is to the opening months of this year that we must assign a circumstance narrated by Mr. Tytler, who says: “Soon after his return from this expedition into England, Wallace, in an assembly held at the Forest Kirk in Selkirkshire, which was attended by the earl of Lennox, William Douglas, and others of the principal nobility, was elected “governor of Scotland.”[96]
The place chosen was one more adapted to secrecy than to the transaction of any important affair;[97] the persons present, whose names are produced, are but two. The phrase added: “and others of the principal nobility,” refutes itself. The support of the principal nobility was what Wallace most needed; and it is quite certain that, if any other of this class had been present, his name would have been carefully recorded. There is no fact on which all the Scottish historians are more entirely agreed than this: that, “through envy, the lords and great men of Scotland kept aloof from Wallace.” Could any numerous gathering of them have taken place at this time, it is quite certain that they would never have chosen the second son of a Renfrewshire yeoman to be “governor of Scotland.”