Randall Wallace - Braveheart

The royal governor of medieval York was the nephew of Longshanks himself. This nephew was everything Longshanks wanted in a son, if what he truly wanted was a son to mirror his father. He was ruthless and ambitious; he reacted to threats with aggression. He knew that power and the will to use it produced rewards; it certainly had in his case, for to be the royal governor of a jewel like York was to be in possession of the king’s full confidence and blessing.

And yet the first few weeks of autumn had been anything but pleasant for the governor. Word of the disaster at Stirling had spread through the country-side, such as assault on predictability and reason that hysterical thinking began to affect even his magistrates throughout he shire. Almost every day he received panicky message of alarm; Scottish raiders were on the move, they said. Some of them reported an entire Scottish army on the march! Of course no one could pinpoint an exact location of this phantom army; reports of night marches were being made by the same kind of peasants who reported stumbling on conventions of warlocks and gatherings of the undead.

Yet as the reports persisted, the governor began to believe that the Scots might be making exploratory forays into Yorkshire. Highland Scots had raided the Lowlands for centuries, stealing cattle. It was possible that the Scottish luck at Stirling — for certainly it was only luck — had encouraged the foolhardy to raid into England itself.

Still the reports persisted from more and more reasonable sources. Mayors and magistrates began requesting troops to reassure their frightened citizenry. The governor sent our scouts. The scouts did not return.

He sent out more scouts. One of them got back alive, shouting that the entire Scottish army was indeed on the move, led by William Wallace, in Yorkshire itself.

The governor convened his military advisors in the map room of the central tower of the fortress city. Choosing from the shire maps that lined the wall shelves, the governor had maps spread on every table, and he ordered his aides to assemble all the appeals for help they had received in recent days. The sought to find a pattern in Wallace’s travel. But the written appeals for help seemed to show no direction of Wallace’s movements. Their work was interrupted as the governor’s captain of defenses strode in with another note and said, “M’lord, a message from your cousin, the prince. He says London has no more troops to send us.”

“Doesn’t he understand that every town in northern England is begging for help?!” the governor erupted and then held his tongue. He was miffed at young Edward, miffed that he had no fondness for war, miffed that in spite of this his father had given him authority to direct domestic troop movements during Longshanks’s absence in France, and miffed — the truth be told — that if was Edward and not himself in line to be the next king. But the young Edward had not ascended to the throne yet, and from the rumors coming up from London, it was by no means certain that he would. Yes, Edward was Longshanks’s only son, but there was horrible bitterness between them, and while heredity was supposed to be the only channel of transmission of the divine right of kings, Longshanks was a man to change history to suit his will. Wasn’t he doing exactly that in Scotland? Or at least that’s what he was about to do until he stumbled over this stone named William Wallace.

The governor looked back to his maps and wondered aloud, “Where will Wallace strike first?”

“I should think these smaller settlements along the border…,” the captain guessed.

They heard shouts form the courtyard below their tower and looked out to see a rider dismount from a lathered, mud-spattered horse. “What news?” the captain called out.

“He advances?” the rider shouted back.

The governor pushed the captain aside and barked down at the fool, “But to what town?"

“He comes here!"

WILLIAM WALLACE RODE AT THE HEAD OF HIS ARMY ALONG a hard, dry road through fields grown brown with the autumn and though how ugly a thing panic was, especially among civilians. They were fleeing in terror, some toward the walled city in the distance, some away from it. It was strange to see them moving opposite ways; people were like flocks of birds and tended to flee at once and in the same direction. The fact that the civilians were colliding with each other going to and from York had to be assign: the royal governor had already learned of the Scottish approach and had locked the gates. Those still trying to reach the city were refusing to believe they could be turned away.

But as they saw the main body of Scots on the road, the civilians fled across the farmland, leaving behind a tangle of carts for the army to shove out of the way like a plow cutting through a field.

In camp two nights before, Wallace had asked old Campbell to find him the best carpenters in their army. These men Wallace combined with a group of Highlanders handpicked for their ability to move quickly through hostile ground. He had given these men instructions and sent them off while it was still dark. Now, as they reached the last thick stand of trees before York, one of those same Highlanders ran out to him and led Wallace and his lieutenants into the woods, where they came upon a massive contraption; its wooden wheels were as tall as the carpenters who had made them, and piled above them were thick trees lashed together and covered with layers of tangled brush to screen stones and arrows away from the warriors who would push it all.

Wallace nodded his approval. The battering ram was ready.

Standing on one of the tall stone parapets flanking the entrance of his city, just as night was falling, the governor of York looked down at the people far below him, banging on the thick wooden gate and begging to be let in, and their cries made him angry. He was tempted to order his archers to shoot them. “What is wrong with those people?!” He demanded of the captain who stood next to him, surveying their defenses. “Don’t they know this city cannot be taken?”

The captain saw the irony of the question as the citizens who lived outside the wall and were even now pleading and lifting their children in the air, as if showing them to the soldiers lining the parapets would soften their hearts enough to unbar the great gates and allow a few more to rush inside. A professional soldier, the captain saw the danger; the desperate citizens saw the city as secure — their cries made those already inside feel safer still — but the truth was the York was vulnerable. The governor has dispatched more than half of the city’s potential defenders to the various outlying towns and hamlets that had been calling fro reinforcements. Now York itself was jammed with the governor’s supporters, flatterers, favorites, and hangers-on, everyone who fled to the shadow of the great city at the first whiff of trouble and who had the influence to gain admittance. But there were not enough fighting men.

The captain, who made more of Wallace’s victory at Stirling than did the governor, knew it was possible that Wallace had intentionally concocted the depletion of the city’s forces through a shrewdly planned campaign of raiding to draw the defenders away. Wallace was unpredictable; and these royal relatives who ran the English army, they were too predictable. The captain hurried off to direct the preparations for defense against a full assault, walking away even as the royal governor was talking.

“We will not allow a bandit, to panic the greatest city in northern England!” the governor was saying to no one now. And then, looming out of the gray twilight, he saw them, the entire Scottish army coming at the city in a trot. Among the vanguard of foot soldiers rode William Wallace, huge broadsword strapped across his back. Behind him was the ram.