Execution at Smithfield

Some sentences are read aloud to end a man and instead begin a country. The court that pronounces them believes it is closing a case. The condemned, by the act of refusing the premise on which the court has been convened, transfers the question outside the room, where the court has no jurisdiction and never will.

THE LONG QUARREL

William Wallace, younger son of a Renfrewshire house, has been at war with Edward of England since the summer of 1297, when he cut down the sheriff of Lanark and went into the woods. He has been Guardian of Scotland after Stirling Bridge, and a fugitive after Falkirk, and an envoy at the court of Philip of France, and a fugitive again. Seven years of riding and hiding, of burning the granaries the English garrison depended on, of raids by night across the Tweed. The Scottish magnates have come in, one by one, and made their peace at Berwick after Dunbar. The bishops of St Andrews and Glasgow swore at Berwick. Bruce swore. Comyn swore. Wallace did not. He was not at Berwick. He has knelt to no king but the one his country lost.

On the third of August in the year thirteen hundred and five, in a house outside Glasgow, he is taken in his sleep by men of Sir John Menteith, a Scot in English pay. The irons go on at Robroyston. The road south goes through Carlisle and down the spine of England, by stages, the prisoner shown at every market town so the country can see what an outlaw looks like when the king has finished with him. He arrives in London on the twenty-second of August. He is lodged for the night in the house of a citizen called William de Leyrer in Fenchurch Street. He is thirty-five years old.

WESTMINSTER HALL

He is brought into the hall in irons at the seventh hour of the morning, bareheaded, in a tunic that is not his. A clerk steps up with a garland of green oak leaves and sets it on his head before they put him in the dock. The garland is itchy and falls into his eyes when he turns. It is a joke about an old prophecy, current in his country for thirty years, which says that a Scotsman will one day be crowned king in this hall. The clerk who places it does not look at him.

It is the twenty-third of August in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and five. The justices coming up the floor of the hall are Peter Mallory and four others. Edward, called Longshanks by the people of his own city, is not in the hall; he is in his palace upstream, listening for the verdict. The jury that will produce the verdict has been told what to produce. Mallory reads the indictment. The Latin is long. Wallace listens, and hears himself called traitor against the lord king Edward of England, traitor against his sworn lord, traitor in all the parts and articles that follow. He hears himself called the burner of churches and the slaughterer of religious and of women and of children, the article of sacrilege folded into the article of murder so that the punishment can be doubled.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

The indictment ends. Mallory looks up. There is the silence in Westminster Hall that always falls before the question. The hall is full; the citizens of London have come to see the Scot. The garland is slipping again. He has, perhaps, the length of one breath in which to decide what shape his death will take.

He could plead not guilty. To plead is to enter the court as a subject of its king, to be measured against an oath he never swore. The verdict comes either way; only the manner of the going changes. To plead is to die as one of Edward's men, posthumously enrolled in the allegiance he spent seven years refusing. The bishops at Berwick pleaded. Bruce, last year, pleaded. Comyn pleaded. The Scotland that pleaded at Berwick is the Scotland that lost.

He could be silent and let the silence be read as contempt, and die as a mute outlaw. The sentence comes either way. But there is a third thing, narrower than a plea and wider than a silence, which is to answer the question with the wrong answer, to step outside the frame of the question and refuse the court its premise. Not I did not do these things, which concedes the right to ask. But you have no right to ask. A king to whom no oath has been sworn cannot be betrayed. The court convened to try the treason cannot try a man who is not its subject. Say that, and the verdict still comes, and the hurdle still waits at the door, and the four miles to Smithfield are still four miles. But the verdict no longer means what the court means it to mean. It becomes a thing done to a foreigner by a foreign king, in a foreign hall, and the country he came from is left unspoken for. He lifts his head as far as the irons let him.

He says, in a voice that carries to the back of the hall, that he cannot be a traitor to a king to whom he has never sworn allegiance, that he is not, and has never been, the subject of Edward of England.

THE SENTENCE

Mallory, who was expecting nothing, looks down at his page of notes. The garland slips on Wallace's brow. The clerks scratch at their parchment, recording the refusal. The court convicts him without further plea, on the strength of the testimony against him. The sentence has already been written. Mallory reads it. To be drawn to the gallows for treason. To be hanged for murder. To be cut down alive and disembowelled for sacrilege, for the burning of churches in the campaigns. To be beheaded as an outlaw. To be quartered, the parts of the body to be displayed at Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth, against the four corners of the country he had pretended to govern.

He is dragged the four miles from Westminster to Smithfield on a hurdle, the ropes at his ankles, the horses at a walk, the streets of London lined with citizens come to see him. At Smithfield they hang him on the gallows until he is choking, then cut him down. They open him on the boards while he is still living and burn his bowels in front of him. The chronicle of Lanercost, kept by an English Cistercian, sets down the detail because the detail is the lesson. Suspensus est, et postea decollatus, et eviscerata fuerunt interiora ejus et combusta, the chronicler writes, and the lesson is meant for the Scottish and Welsh and Irish countries that have not yet been brought into Edward's peace. He is beheaded at the end. The body is quartered. The four parts ride out of London that afternoon for Newcastle and Berwick and Stirling and Perth. The head is set on London Bridge on a pike, the first head set there for that purpose, and a fashion is begun that will last three hundred years.

AT BURGH-BY-SANDS

Two years later, on the seventh of July in the year thirteen hundred and seven, Edward of England is lifted from his litter on the salt marsh at Burgh-by-Sands, within sight of the Solway and the Scottish shore he is again on his way to chastise. He has with him in the baggage of his last campaign a portable scaffold, built to his order, for the next round of executions. He has named the men he means to hang on it. Robert Bruce, crowned at Scone the year before, is in the heather of Carrick, with forty men and no money, hunted by his own cousins. The king dies looking north. The scaffold is never used. His son Edward of Caernarfon turns the army around within the month and goes home to bury his father and to be a different kind of king, and Bruce, given the winter, comes out of the heather, and by the spring is taking castles.

THE FOUR QUARTERS

The four quarters of Wallace's body were never recovered for burial in Scotland. Nobody knows where any of them lie; the spikes at Newcastle and Berwick and Stirling and Perth held them until the weather took them, and the weather has been thorough. The head on London Bridge is gone with the bridge. The sword called Wallace's at the National Wallace Monument above Stirling is probably not his sword. The stone at Robroyston marks where he was taken. The garland of green oak that he wore for an hour at Westminster is gone with the hour.

What survived was the refusal, set down by the clerks themselves in the act of recording it for the prosecution. The Lanercost chronicler wrote the detail of Smithfield to deter, and the detail deterred no one. By 1314, the army that came north to relieve Stirling Castle was broken in a single afternoon at Bannockburn. By 1320, the barons of Scotland wrote to the Pope at Avignon, in a Latin letter sealed at Arbroath Abbey, that as long as a hundred of them remained alive they would never on any conditions be subjected to the dominion of the English, quia non propter gloriam, divitias aut honores pugnamus, sed propter libertatem solummodo, which is to say, not for glory, riches, or honours do we fight, but for liberty alone. The sentence is Wallace's sentence translated into the high register of the chancery. The English lesson, written in his body across the four roads out of London, had taught the Scotsman the wrong lesson, which was that the cost of refusal could be paid, and once paid was a cost the country knew the price of.

Sealing wax cools quickly in a Scottish August. The seals on the Declaration, fifty of them, hang from the parchment on strips of vellum cut from the same skin. The parchment is in Edinburgh now, in a vault. The refusal is older than the parchment.