Page:History of Sir William Wallace, the renowned Scottish champion.pdf/3

 HISTORY OF SIR WILLIAM WALLACE.

It was in times of the deepest calamity, when Scotland as it were was overwhelmed with affliction and sinking into the deepest despair, by the base conduct of an ignominious monarch, that Scotland was betrayed into the hands of the King of England, who put Scotland in a state of cruelty and oppresion, and sent blood and carnage over the land that Divine Providence, raised up Sir William Wallace, for a deliverer of his country, from the slavish submission to the English monarch, and a champion to avenge her wrongs. This remarkable hero was the son of Sir Malcolm Wallace, the proprietor of a small estate called Ellerslie, near Paisley, in the county of Renfrew. The exact period of his birth is not known ; but it is supposed that at the time of his father’s death, who was killed at the battle of Loudon Hill, in 1293, he was about fifteen years of age. His mother, after this disastrous event, fled with her son to the house of an uncle, where Wallace lived between two and three years, when a boy he had witnessed the se-