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A political history of Britain in the places where it happened: parliament and palace, courts and counting houses, and the streets where people pushed back.
The man who led Scotland's revolt against English rule was executed on this spot in 1305.
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William Wallace led the Scottish revolt against Edward I of England, the king who had forced Scotland's own king off the throne in 1296 and taken the country for himself. In September 1297 Wallace destroyed an English army at Stirling Bridge and was made a Guardian of Scotland - one of the men who governed the kingdom in place of the king it no longer had. He was beaten badly at Falkirk the following summer, gave up the guardianship, and spent seven years as a fugitive until a Scottish knight in Edward's service handed him over near Glasgow on 5 August 1305.
He was brought to Westminster Hall on 23 August and charged with treason, which means betraying your own lawful king. Wallace's answer was that he could not have betrayed Edward, because Edward had never been his king and he had never sworn to obey him. It made no difference. The same day he was dragged behind a horse to the Elms at Smithfield - open ground the city used for markets, tournaments and executions - and hanged, cut down alive, castrated, disembowelled, beheaded and cut into four. His head went on a spike on London Bridge and the four quarters north to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth - one of them the town where he had beaten an English army eight years before.
The charge was the whole argument: to call it treason was to insist that Scotland was Edward's to rule and Wallace his subject to punish. The argument lost. Nine years later, on 23 and 24 June 1314, Robert the Bruce met the army of Edward's son at Bannockburn outside Stirling and destroyed it - the victory that put Scottish independence beyond English reach, and that England finally conceded in writing in 1328.
The memorial is a granite tablet set into one of three blank window bays on the hospital wall, paid for by Scots at home and abroad and unveiled on 8 April 1956. There are usually flowers below it, and the blue and white Scottish flags people leave there. Under the English inscription is a line of Latin: I tell you the truth. Freedom is what is best. Sons, never live life like slaves.
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