Captured near Glasgow weeks earlier and convicted of treason in a trial he refused to formally answer, Wallace was dragged through the streets of London before being executed at Smithfield. His body was quartered and displayed in four cities across Britain as a warning against rebellion, but his death instead fueled the Scottish independence movement that would culminate in victory at Bannockburn nine years later.
Wallace had never sworn fealty to Edward I, so English courts controversially tried him for treason anyway, alongside charges of atrocities committed during his campaigns, including the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297 where he inflicted a shocking defeat on English forces. At his trial he was crowned with a garland of oak leaves, mockingly, as 'king of outlaws,' and was not permitted to speak in his own defense.
The execution itself was designed as maximal spectacle and deterrence: he was dragged by horse through the city, then hanged, taken down while still alive, castrated, disemboweled, and beheaded, with his entrails burned before him. His head was placed on a pike on London Bridge, and his limbs sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling, and Perth. Edward's brutality backfired badly—Wallace became a martyr, Robert the Bruce took up the independence cause, and the imagery of Wallace's suffering echoes centuries later, including in modern popular culture like the film Braveheart.
Key people: William Wallace, Edward I of England