The Scottish Chiefs

William Wallace from Lanark to the scaffold at Smithfield: the murder of his wife, Stirling Bridge, the betrayal, and Bruce afterwards. Porter published this in 1810, four years before Waverley, and Scott's admirers quietly credit her as his forerunner, and generations of Scottish schoolchildren learned their national story from it rather than from any historian. Fifty-one plates by painters including Frederic Leighton and Walter Crane trace the houses and landscapes that frame a story of exile and return.