No attempt was made in the Lothians to stop Edward’s advance, but the Scots, under the regent, John Comyn of Badenoch, made a vigorous effort to hold the line of the Forth against him.  Their plan seemed to promise well, for Stirling castle was still in Scottish hands.  Edward crossed the river by a ford, and all organised efforts to oppose him at once ceased.  Prudently leaving Stirling to itself for the present, he hurried to Perth.  After spending most of June and July at Perth, he led his army northwards, nearly following the line of his advance in 1296, through Perth, Brechin, and Aberdeen, to Banff and Elgin.  The most remote point reached was Kinloss, a few miles west of Elgin, in which neighbourhood he spent much of September.  Then he slowly retraced his steps and took up his winter quarters at Dunfermline.  In all this long progress, the only energetic resistance which Edward encountered was at Brechin.  Flushed with his triumph, he ordered Stirling to be besieged, and from April, 1304, directed the operations himself.  The garrison held out with the utmost gallantry, but at last a breach was effected in the walls, and on July 24 the defenders laid down their arms.  Long before the Scots people despaired of withstanding the invader, the nobles grew cold in the defence of their country.  In February, 1304, the regent and many of the earls made their submission.  It was more than suspected that this result was brought about by the threat of Edward to divide their lands among his English followers.  But on Comyn and his friends showing a desire to yield, the king readily promised them their lives and estates.  Believing that his task was over, Edward returned to England in August after an absence of nearly fifteen months.  He crossed the Humber early in December, kept his Christmas court at Lincoln, and reached London late in February.  As a sign of the completion of the conquest, he ordered that the law courts, which since 1297 had been established at York, should resume their sessions in London.

A few heroes still upheld the independence of Scotland.  Foremost among them was Sir William Wallace, who, since his mission to France in 1298, had disappeared from history.  The submission of the barons to Edward gave him another chance.  He took a strenuous part in the struggle of 1303-4, and he was specially exempted from the easy pardons with which Edward purchased the submission of the greater nobles.  It was the daring and skill of Wallace that prolonged the Scots’ struggle until the spring of 1305.  But he was then once more an outlaw and a fugitive, only formidable by his hold over the people, and by the possibility that the smallest spark of resistance might at any time be blown into a flame.  At last he was captured through the zeal, or treachery, of a Scot in Edward’s service.  In August, Wallace was despatched to London to stand a public trial for treason, sedition, sacrilege, and murder.  He denied that he had ever become Edward’s subject, but did not escape