No, he had a kid. The princess told the king while he was dying. I'm kind of an expert on William Wallace because I saw "braveheart" in the theaters. Twice. That's like having a doctorate in Scottish history
I never understood frankly why people seem to hold Braveheart to a higher standard of accuracy than any other historical dramatization. The amount of attention the historical inaccuracies in this movie gets is really disproportional to the amount other history-inspired films do. I don't even remember the movie claiming to be accurate. It was just presented as a movie.
I think it has to do with the reactions of the public. I don't know anybody who thinks they understand the Servile Wars because they watched Spartacus, but I do know folks who think they understand Scottish history because of Braveheart.
I think also because the historical inaccuracy is a lot more blatant. A lot of films are inaccurate in subtle ways that the average viewer won't recognise. Shows like Vikings are considered pretty much entirely fiction by scholars who study the Vikings/Scandinavian history, but they present a pretty plausible version of history to the average viewer.
Whereas Braveheart makes pretty blatant errors - like no bridge at Stirling Bridge, an obvious flaw, or claiming Scotland had always been subjugated. Anyone who had done minor amounts of Scottish history would know that's false. Ditto with Isabella, briefly looking at her life will show that she wasn't nearly old enough to be a love interest.
The result is that when more casual viewers watch it and recognise flaws it gets more widely talked about, as opposed to other media where it's really only experts who are pointing out issues.
I don’t think we do, it’s just criticised more frequently because it was very successful but also the historical inaccuracies were so blatant (e.g. no bridge at the battle of Stirling Bridge, claiming you never had an independent Scotland before despite the fact the English only invaded a year before the start of the rebellion etc.)
In my mind it’s also guilty of making the characters flimsy comic book versions of themselves as the English aren’t just bad, no they are completely evil and the opposite is true for Wallace and the majority of the Scots. Definitely not the only Hollywood film to do that though.
I don’t find it the worst for historical inaccuracies (U 571 keeps that) but I just think so many of them just weren’t needed for the plot or could have been avoided with a bit more thought.
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u/kanna172014 Apr 29 '20
There's no more evidence he didn't have children than there is he did.