Three hundred marke he hette unto his warison; (reward)
That with him so mette, or bring his hedde to town.
Now flies William Waleis, of pese nouht he spedis:
In moores and mareis with robberie him fedis.”
Obviously no other course could be taken. Edward had already stretched his prerogative of mercy to an extraordinary extent, by expressing his willingness to “receive” the outlaw if he made an immediate and unconditional submission. Had he so submitted and received mercy, it cannot be doubted that such lenity would have caused great dissatisfaction among the English people. But Wallace preferred to remain still in his hiding‐places, and justice was not long in overtaking him. As two Scottish earls had guided the king to his camp at Falkirk, so now a Scottish knight soon claimed the reward offered for the outlaw’s apprehension. Sir John Menteith surprised him in bed, bound him, and delivered him to the English authorities.[131]
He was carried through England a chained prisoner to his doom. He arrived in London on the 22nd of August, 1305, “great numbers of men and women,” says Stowe, “wondering upon him.” He was not lodged in any prison, nor was any lengthened proceeding entered into. His chief crime—the savage desolation of the northern counties, was a matter of universal notoriety; nor did he for a moment deny it. He was therefore lodged for one night “at the house of William Dilect, a citizen of London, in Fenchurch‐street;” and “on the morrow he was brought on horseback to Westminster,—Segrave and Geoffrey, knights, and the mayor and sheriffs of the city, escorting him. He was placed on a bench in Westminster Hall,” and his indictment was read by Sir Percy Malorie, chief justice. It charged him—not, as the Scottish historians would represent—chiefly or solely with rebellion, or with levying war, but with those special barbarities which under the name of war, he had perpetrated.
Some writers lay great stress upon the circumstance, which appears in only one chronicle, that the criminal repudiated the charge of treason—saying, “Traitor was I never, for I never gave my allegiance to the king of England.” The fact may have been so, but it is wholly immaterial. No doubt more than half the persons who have died for treason since Wallace’s days might have pleaded the same excuse. It is most probable that none of the Jesuit priests executed in Elizabeth’s days had ever sworn allegiance; and we may be sure that Thistlewood and his gang, who died in 1820, had never taken any such oath. But no one ever imagined that such a fact made the slightest difference in their guilt, or in their position.
Treason, however, or mere rebellion, would never have brought Wallace from Scotland to Westminster Hall. Comyn, Fraser, and scores of other distinguished men in Scotland, had been guilty of treason and rebellion, and had received the king’s pardon. The great difference between their case and that of Wallace consisted in those “unpardonable injuries” which, as Mr. Tytler admits, “he had inflicted on the English,” and which Edward, as the king and defender of the English, found it to be now his duty to punish. And, accordingly, his indictment justly describes him as “Willelmus Waleis, captus pro seditione, homicidiis, deprædacionibus, incendiis, et aliis diversis feloniis.”
And so it runs throughout. It says little of his treason and rebellion—it dwells more on his murders and his other cruelties. It speaks of his murder of the sheriff of Lanark, “whose body he cut in pieces,” reminding us of the fate of Cressingham at Stirling. Passing on to his invasion of the northern counties, it charges, that “with certain of his accomplices, he invaded the realm of England, and all whom he there found, subjects of the king of England, he slew by various kinds of deaths—men of religion, and monks devoted to God, he feloniously massacred; sparing none who spake the English tongue; but all, old men and young, brides and widows, infants and children at the breast, he murdered in a manner more terrible than could have been imagined.” No denial was given to these charges; in fact, none could be given: “He pleaded no defence,” says Mr. Tytler, “the facts were notorious.” His ravage of Northumberland and Cumberland, “leaving nothing behind him but blood and ashes,” was as well known and as certain a fact as the comparatively insignificant “massacre of Cawnpore” in our own day.
His sentence was therefore read. It was precisely such a sentence as would have been passed upon any doer of the like acts in the reign of William III., or in that of George III. It pronounced—