THEY WERE THERE

These famous--and infamous--men and women lived and died on the front lines of history.

William Wallace

Mel Gibson's epic blockbuster Braveheart may have introduced William Wallace to a global audience, but the people of his native Scotland have known him for centuries as one of their greatest patriotic heroes. In 1297, the upstart rebel leader won a huge victory over the troops of the Lord of Surrey, the English governor of Scotland, at Stirling Castle. The armies of King Edward I invaded in full force the following year, however, defeating Wallace's men in the Battle of Falkirk. Embarrassed by the loss, Wallace still remained defiant, even as most of the other Scottish nobles submitted to Edward, who captured Stirling in 1304. Wallace was finally arrested in 1305 near Glasgow, after he was betrayed by a fellow Scot, Sir John Monteith.

Taken to London, Wallace was tried for high treason in Westminster Hall. Rebellious to the end, he declared that he had never pledged allegiance to Edward and so couldn't be guilty of treason. He was convicted and sentenced to death. The customary punishment for convicted traitors at that time was brutal: Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered, and decapitated. His head was then placed on a spike at London Bridge and the quarters of his body were distributed to four different Scottish towns and hung in public display. Edward may have thought this gruesome spectacle would break the Scottish spirit, but he was sorely mistaken, as Wallace became a martyr to the cause of freedom. Barely a year after his execution, Robert the Bruce revived the eventually successful rebellion, and was crowned king of Scotland in 1306.

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Oscar Wilde

Until the last decade of his life, Oscar Wilde was a writer who was best known for his flamboyant personal style and his presence in London's fashionable circles. In the late 1880s, however, he produced all of his best-known work, including his only novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and his comic plays, the most famous of which was The Importance of Being Earnest. In April 1895, just as Wilde was riding high on the success of his plays, he filed a criminal libel suit against a British nobleman, the Marquess of Queensberry, who had accused Wilde of homosexuality. Wilde (who was married, with two children) had met Queensberry's son, Lord Alfred Douglas, in 1891, and the two had begun an intimate friendship, which enraged the Marquess. Douglas encouraged Wilde to file the libel suit, which quickly dissolved due to mounting evidence against Wilde, who was soon arrested and put on trial himself. Convicted of "gross indecency," Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labor.

For the first months of his sentence, Wilde was held at Pentonville and Wandsworth prisons in London; he was later transferred to the prison in Reading, where he would serve out the majority of his time. At Pentonville, Wilde was required to walk a treadmill for six hours every day to fulfill the "hard labor" part of his sentence. Treadmills (also known as treadwheels or, to prisoners, as "shin scrapers") were an innovation added to English prisons after 1818; they could hold up to 40 men at a time, and were often used to perform functions such as grinding corn or pumping water, or purely for punishment. In the words of one prison chaplain who saw him at Wandsworth, Wilde was "quite crushed and broken" by the daily routine of prison life. Released in 1897, the bankrupt Wilde went to France, where he would live out the remainder of his life in increasingly poor health. He died in 1900, of acute meningitis brought on by recurrent ear infections. Wilde's last work (aside from the posthumously published De Profundis, excerpted from a letter he wrote to Douglas in prison) was The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long poem about the grim nature of prison life: "We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns/And sweated on the mill:/But in the heart of every man/Terror was lying still."

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Anne Boleyn

King Henry VIII went through a great deal of trouble to marry his second wife, Anne Boleyn. When Pope Clement VII refused to grant him a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Henry married Anne secretly in 1533 and had the archbishop of Canterbury declare his first marriage null and void. This conflict between the king and the Catholic Church caused a break between England and the Church that would reverberate for decades to come. But Henry soon lost interest in Anne, who bore him a daughter--the future Elizabeth I--but not the son he wanted. She was also unpopular in court, and some of Henry's advisers, including Thomas Cromwell, chief architect of the English Reformation, urged him to replace her.

By the spring of 1536, Henry had his eye on Jane Seymour, who would become his third wife. That May, he ordered officials to imprison Anne in the notorious Tower of London, accusing her of adultery with four different men, incest with her brother and conspiracy to kill the king. Although Anne may have been guilty of adultery, she was likely a victim of Henry's ruthlessness. After a trial led to a unanimous conviction, Anne's alleged lovers and her brother were executed. On May 19, 1536, officials led Anne herself to a scaffold built on Tower Green. Instead of the axe, she was beheaded by a traditional French method: the sword. An executioner--wearing black garb, a high horned cap and a half-mask--was brought over from Calais to do the job. Eleven days later, Henry married Jane Seymour.

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Guy Fawkes

By the beginning of the 17th century, Roman Catholics in England had been oppressed by the ruling Protestant monarchy for more than 50 years. In 1604, a group of Catholics led by Robert Catesby began plotting to kill King James I, who had succeeded Elizabeth I on the throne the previous year. The so-called Gunpowder Plot aimed to blow up the palace at Westminster during the state opening of Parliament, when King James I would be inside. After James's nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth succeeded him, the plotters hoped, she would marry a Catholic prince and repair the rift between England and the Church. To help with the plan, Catesby enlisted Guy Fawkes, a converted Catholic who had been fighting with the Spanish military in the Netherlands. Fawkes hid 20-30 barrels of gunpowder in a rented cellar underneath the palace, where British authorities caught him close to midnight on November 5, 1605.

On the orders of King James, Fawkes was taken to the Tower of London and interrogated. When he refused to name his co-conspirators, the interrogators subjected him to the most feared of torture devices: the rack. Often used to obtain confessions of heresy during the Spanish Inquisition, the rack was never legalized in England. In this case, however, the king himself authorized its use, writing (in Old English and Latin) to Fawkes' interrogators that "If he will not other wayes confesse, the gentler tortours are to be first usid unto him et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur [and so on step by step to the most severe]." Fawkes finally relented and named his accomplices. He signed two confessions, one immediately after being tortured and one eight days later; his signature ("Guido") on the first is so weak and shaky it can barely be made out, while the second one ("Guido Fawkes") is clear and readable. Tried and convicted by a special commission on January 27, 1606, he and his fellow plotters were hung, drawn and quartered across from Parliament several days later. England now celebrates Guy Fawkes Day every November 5, when people light bonfires and set off firecrackers to commemorate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot.

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Marie Antoinette

A daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria, Marie Antoinette became queen of France in 1774, when her husband was crowned King Louis XVI. Over the next 15 years, her famously extravagant lifestyle became the most visible symbol of the monarchy's excess, during a time when France's national debt was ballooning and its citizens were becoming increasingly angry and frustrated with the unwieldy feudal system. After a furious mob stormed the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, the queen was more steadfast than her husband in her opposition to compromise with the republican rebels. When told the French peasants were starving without bread, she was said to have responded "Let them eat cake!" and this callous remark earned her the undying hatred of much of the French populace.

In October 1789 the king and queen were forced from their palace at Versailles to Paris, where they were essentially held hostage. Marie Antoinette conspired with the Comte de Mirabeau and others to escape and to undermine the revolutionary movement; her efforts were unsuccessful. The French monarchy was overthrown for good in 1792, and Louis was executed the following January at the guillotine, the brutally efficient decapitation device invented as a humane means of execution by Doctor Joseph Guillotin. Instead of healing the country, the king's death ushered in the so-called Reign of Terror. The radical Committee of Public Safety went after the French aristocracy with a vengeance, executing almost 3,000 people between April 1793 and July 1795. The most famous of these victims was Marie Antoinette, who was placed in solitary confinement several months after her husband's death. She was reputedly so afraid for her safety in those months that her hair turned completely gray. On October 16, 1793, after being tried and convicted by the revolutionary tribunal, she met her end at the guillotine.

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