Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/112

 the mint in Ireland, which he held till the change of administration in May 1827. Canning pressed him to join his government, but he refused. The death of Canning was followed by the ministry of the Duke of Wellington, and on the same day as the publication of the ministerial appointments (2 Feb. 1828) it was announced that Wallace had been made a peer. The title he assumed was Baron Wallace of Knaresdale. Till his death, on 23 Feb. 1844, Wallace resided at his seat, Featherstone Castle, Northumberland. Wallace married, 16 Feb. 1814, Jane, sixth daughter of John Hope, second earl of Hopetoun, and second wife of Henry Dundas, first viscount Melville [q. v.] This lady died without issue on 9 June 1829. The peerage became extinct. The male heir was his cousin, John Wallace of the Madras civil service; but the estates were left to Colonel James Hope, next brother to the Earl of Hopetoun and nephew to Lord Wallace's deceased wife; he assumed the name of Wallace.

[Gent. Mag. 1844, i. 425–30; Burke's Extinct Peerages.] 

WALLACE, VINCENT (1814-1865), musical composer. [See .]

WALLACE, WILLIAM (1272?–1305), Scottish general and patriot, came of a family which had in the twelfth century become landowners in Scotland. The name or  which Wallace himself used, and various other forms, of which le Waleis or Waleys are the commonest in both English and Scottish records of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, meant originally a Welshman in the language of their English-speaking neighbours both in England and Scotland. It was a surname of families of Cymric blood living on or near the borders of Wales and the south-western districts of Scotland, originally inhabited by the Cymric race of Celts, like the surnames of Inglis and Scot in the English and Scottish debatable and border land. The family from which William Wallace sprang probably came with the FitzAlans, the ancestors of the Stewarts, from Shropshire. To this connection Blind Harry refers in the somewhat obscure lines as to Malcolm, the father of William Wallace: The secund O [i.e. grandson] he was of great Wallace, The which Wallas full worthily that wrought When Walter hyr of Waillis from Warrayn socht. (O or Oye means grandson, but whether ‘the second O’ can mean descendant in the fourth degree is not certain.) The mother of Walter, the first Stewart, was a Warenne of Shropshire, and he may have wooed, as has been conjectured, a Welsh cousin with the aid of Richard Wallace, the great-great-grandfather of Malcolm Wallace. Ricardus Wallensis held lands in Kyle in Ayrshire under Walter, the first Steward, to whose charter in favour of the abbey of Paisley he was a witness in 1174. The lands still bear the name of Riccarton (Richard's town). A younger son of Richard held lands in Renfrewshire and Ayr under a second Walter the Steward early in the thirteenth century. He was succeeded by his son Adam, the father of Malcolm, the father of William Wallace. William Wallace's mother was Jean Crawford, daughter of Sir Reginald or Rainald Crawford of Corsbie, sheriff of Ayr. Malcolm Wallace towards the end of the thirteenth century held the five-pound land of Elderslie in the parish of Abbey in Renfrewshire under the family of Riccarton, as well as the lands of Auchenbothie in Ayrshire. Elderslie is about three miles from Paisley, and continued in the Wallace family down to 1789, though it reverted to the Riccarton branch owing to the failure of direct descendants of Malcolm Wallace.

Probably at Elderslie William Wallace was born; but there is little likelihood that an old yew in the garden, or the venerable oak which perished in the storm of February 1856, or even the small castellated house now demolished, to all of which his name was attached by tradition, existed in his lifetime. His father is said to have been knighted. Whether this is true or not, the family belonged to the class of small landed gentry which it is an exaggeration to call either of noble or of mean descent. William was the second son. His elder brother is called by Fordun Sir Andrew, but by others, including Blind Harry, Malcolm. Fordun says he was killed by fraud of the English. There is evidence that he was alive in 1299, so that his death cannot have been the cause, as has been suggested, of the rising of Wallace. Still it is evident that his family, as well as himself, were enemies of England. His younger brother John was executed in London in 1307, two years after Wallace met the same fate. Both William and a brother named Malcolm are described as knights in a letter of 1299 by Robert Hastings, sheriff of Roxburgh, to Edward I (Nat. MSS. of Scotland, ii. No. 8), which turns the balance in favour of Malcolm, and not Andrew, having been the name of the eldest brother.

The date of the birth of Wallace is unknown. His biographer, Blind Harry, who collected, nearly two centuries after, the tra-