by Allan Massie
What was he to do? The Treaty of Perpetual Peace, signed on the occasion of his marriage in 1503, restrained him. On the other hand the alliance with France also imposed obligations. Attempts at mediation came to nothing. He was compelled to choose. He might perhaps have remained inactive, but such a course was alien to his temperament. Reason pulled one way, old loyalties and ambition the other.
Louis XII of France had responded to the Pope’s Holy League by issuing a call for a General Council of the Church. This was an old device that had proved a means of calling popes to order in the past. However, it was ineffective now, partly because of the strength of the alliance Julius had constructed, partly because one of his predecessors had decreed that henceforth only the Pope himself could lawfully convoke a General Council. Julius now denounced Louis as a schismatic – one who threatened to divide the Church. James, disappointed in his hopes for a crusade, unappeased by the gift of a sword and hat9 that Julius had blessed, responded by writing angrily to the Pope accusing him of dividing Christendom by his Holy League rather than uniting it against the infidel. Accordingly he renewed the French alliance, despite exposing himself to the risk of excommunication for having joined himself to a schismatic, and breaking the Treaty of Perpetual Peace. Louis for his part promised that as soon as he was able he would give his support to the projected crusade.
Henry VIII was keen to deflate his brother-in-law’s pretensions. There were incidents at sea, Scottish ships being boarded and seized by English sailors acting ‘in the name of the Holy Father’. The English ambassador told James that all the world knew that his master was acting as a servant of the Church; James replied that Henry was lucky to have found such an obliging Pope whose interests chimed so well with his own ambition.
Throughout the early months of 1513 James tried to negotiate a settlement. In a letter to his uncle, the King of Denmark, he insisted that he had been labouring for two years to keep France, Spain and England from war. France had indeed requested, or authorised, him to negotiate with England, but Henry now even refused to grant his ambassadors the customary safe-conducts. James had offered to renew the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, if Henry agreed to desist from his intention to make war on France, but the English parliament, prompted doubtless by the King, was eager for war with both France and Scotland.
James’s diplomatic efforts continued throughout the early summer months. He told the English ambassador that he wanted to remain at peace with Henry. All that was necessary to ensure this was for his brother-in-law to abandon his plan to make war on France. But he could get no such assurance. In May he sent Lord Drummond, the father of his late mistress and one of his most competent servants, frequently employed on diplomatic missions, to Henry inviting him to agree to be party to the year’s truce that Ferdinand of Aragon – since his wife Isabella’s death in effect ruler of all Spain – had just concluded with the French. He appealed to Henry to join him in working for the union of all Christian monarchs against the Turk. The English king, who would a few years later be granted the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ by Pope Leo X, was not interested. He was determined to have his French war. James was pushed into an intolerable position. Either he stood aside, deserting his traditional ally and losing face, or he took the risk of war. To abandon France was to expose himself to humiliation. Moreover, if Henry’s French war was successful, he might then turn his attention to Scotland and seek to reduce the country to the status of a vassal. Step by step James was forced to the brink of war. It is unlikely that the plea from the French queen, Anne, who called on him ‘to march three paces on to English ground as her knight’, was the deciding factor, though he wore the turquoise ring she had sent him as a token of her trust. It was not romance, but the logic of realpolitik that drove James to declare war on England in July 1513.
Nevertheless, there were still many in Scotland who thought the war rash and unnecessary. James’s wisest councillor, Bishop Elphinstone, had argued consistently for peace at any price. So did the aged Bell-the-Cat, who may have been in English pay. He put the case against war so fiercely even after the army had been mustered that James, exasperated, told him that if he was afraid, he could go home. Whereupon, we are told, the fierce old Earl burst into tears before departing. His two sons, however, remained with the army.
Other attempts were made to dissuade the King – or were at least reported afterwards. The most remarkable is to be found in the History of Scotland compiled by Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie:
Yet all their warnings, and uncouth tidings, nor no good counsel, might stop the King, at this present, fro his vain purpose, and wicked enterprise, but hasted him fast to Edinburgh, there to make his provisioning and furnishing, in having forth his Army against the day appointed, that they should meet in the Boroughmuir of Edinburgh: that is to say, seven cannons that he had forth of the Castle of Edinburgh, which were called the Seven Sisters, casten by Robert Borthwick, the master-gunner, with other small artillery, and all manner of order, as the master-gunner could devise.
In this meantime, while they were taking forth their artillery, and the King being in the Abbey for the time, there was a cry heard at the Marcat Cross of Edinburgh, at the hour of midnight, proclaiming as it had been a summons, which was named and called by the proclaimed thereof, The Summons of Plotcock, which desired all men to compear, both Earl and Lord and Baron, and all honest gentlemen within the town (every man specified by his own name) to compear, within the space of forty days, before his Master, where it should happen for him to appoint, and be for the time, under the pain of disobedience. But whether this summons was proclaimed by vain persons, night walkers, or drunken men, for their pastime, as if it was a spirit, I cannot tell truly…10
‘Plotcock’ was none other than Pluto, the Roman God of the Underworld. Sir Walter Scott observes that ‘the Christians of the Middle Ages by no means misbelieved in the existence of the heathen deities; they only considered them as devils, and Plotcock, so far from implying anything fabulous, was a synonym of the grand enemy of mankind’.
Pitscottie, who was himself born only in 1532 – that is, twenty years after the events narrated – assures us that he had his information from ‘a landed gentleman who was at that time twenty years of age, and was in the town the time of the said summons; and thereafter, when the field was stricken, he swore to me, there was no man that escaped that was called in the summons, but that one man alone that made his protestation, and appealed from the said summons; but that all the lave [rest] were perished in the field with the king’.
No doubt the tale had been improved over time; and indeed it is quite likely that the whole thing is an invention after the fact. Nevertheless, if there was such a summons, and we dismiss any supernatural interpretation, it must have been a sort of black propaganda intended to deter the King from his enterprise by arousing superstitious fears. Yet it demonstrates very vividly the strength of opposition to the King’s adventure. Scots might serve happily as soldiers of fortune on the Continent; they might engage in skirmishes at home. Borderers were ever ready to make raids into England. But there was rarely much appetite for ‘national’ warfare.
James himself had not wanted war, but he had no reason to fear its outcome. Admittedly Scottish armies had won few pitched battles against the English; Stirling Bridge (1297) and Bannockburn (1314) had been rare exceptions. More commonly the English longbow had proved the dominant weapon on the battlefield, destroying the massed ranks of Scottish spearmen as it had destroyed the French chivalry at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415). Efforts by successive kings to encourage the practice of archery in Scotland had been generally unsuccessful. There were few bowmen except in the Ettrick Forest. However, battles in the later stages of the Hundred Years War between England and France had suggested that the supremacy of the longbow was nearing its end. The weapon was not yet obsolete, but developments in military technology were providing the means to make it less effective.
The most important of
these was defensive armour. This wasn’t of course new in itself. Knights had gone into battle wearing heavy armour since at least the tenth century. However, this had for long offered little protection against the longbow – as the French knights had found to their cost. Now it was different. In the words of one modern historian:
By the late fifteenth century, armourers could produce excellent quality suits of ‘harnois blanc’ (white armour, meaning full plate armour) which were fully articulated and protected every part of the wearer. Contrary to popular belief, this harness did not make the wearer a lumbering, immobile target, but instead was light and flexible enough to allow considerable freedom of movement. Just as importantly, the curved and fluted shape of the armour was specifically designed to deflect sword-blows and arrows. With a maximum draw-force of 120 pounds, a longbow arrow had to strike plate armour at a 90 degree angle to have any chance of penetration. By 1513 a man wearing a complete harness of plate armour had little to fear from a longbowman.11
Most of James IV’s army did not have this protection, but his nobles and their retainers did. In 1496 James had established a ‘harness mill’ at Stirling, and recruited experienced French armourers to supervise production. The King had also imported quantities of armour from France and the Netherlands. The army he led to war in 1513 was certainly far better protected against the longbow than any previous Scottish army had been.
The development of field artillery also threatened the longbow’s supremacy. Early guns such as those which James II had procured (and which had cost him his life) were heavy and unwieldy, effective for siege work but not on the battlefield. Guns were now being cast in bronze rather than iron. They were lighter and had a more rapid rate of fire. The small iron ball fired from a bronze cannon was as effective against a castle wall as the heavier stone ball fired from an iron gun, while the bronze cannon could be manoeuvred effectively on the battlefield. James, interested in the new technology, had invested in artillery, and the train he took to war in 1513 was one of the finest in Europe.
The Scots army was still deficient in cavalry, but the best of its infantry was ready to fight in approved modern fashion. For half a century the dominant force on European battlefields had been the highly disciplined Swiss infantry, equipped with eighteen-foot pikes. They fought in phalanxes and advanced in echelon formation. James was determined to emulate them and had been importing pikes to replace the shorter Scottish spear. The evidence of the battle that ensued at Flodden suggests that he had also copied the Swiss mode of advance, for we are told that the Scots came on ‘in Allmayne fashion’ – ‘Allmayne’ meaning Swiss-German.12
There was another reason for optimism. Henry had taken his best troops to France. His northern army, commanded by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had been a guest at James’s wedding, was composed of the reserve, feudal levies of bowmen, and infantry armed with the shorter English bill. This had one advantage over the long pike, if the battle came to a standstill at close quarters, for the bill had an axe-head at its side that could be used to hack at the longer pikes and also a hook that could be employed to drag a knight from his horse or grab a foot soldier by the ankle and disable him.
Still, it seemed that the advantage lay with the Scots. Moreover, James’s aim was limited. He had no intention of penetrating deep into England; quite the contrary. His intention was only to distract the English and divert their attention away from France. If he could draw Surrey into battle and defeat him, he would win prestige for himself and might compel Henry to abandon his French campaign. Even if the English king then invaded Scotland, which he wouldn’t be able to do till the following year, James need have little fear. He could adopt what was now a traditional Scottish strategy: refuse battle, and draw the English army on till it ran out of provisions and was forced to retreat before it disintegrated.
In pursuit of his strategy, James took up a strong position with his back to Scotland on Flodden Edge, only a few miles across the border. This was a saddlebacked hill almost a mile in length. The army’s position on one flank was protected by marshy ground, while on the other the ground fell away steeply towards the River Till, a tributary of the Tweed, which as it approached the sea marked the frontier between Engand and Scotland. Awaiting the English, James had his artillery positioned behind trenches. Surrey could attack only from the south, across rising open country, a hazardous operation.
Too hazardous, indeed. Surrey was an experienced commander, and it was obvious to him that the Scots’ position was very strong, so strong as to deter an attack. Accordingly he determined to outflank the Scots, march round behind them, and position his army between them and the Tweed. This manoeuvre was itself risky, for the Scots might choose to attack his line of march. But the alternative for Surrey was to withdraw and refuse battle. That course too was dangerous, all the more so because he was short of provisions, and had reason to fear that some of his levies would make for home if there was no immediate requirement to fight a battle. As it was, he effected his march successfully in the early morning of Friday, 9 September. James responded by abandoning his position on Flodden Edge, turning his army about to take up a position on Branxton Hill. So it happened that the two armies were now in place, the wrong way round as it were, the Scots with their backs to England, the English with theirs to Scotland. This made battle unavoidable. Nevertheless, the Scottish position remained formidable. They held the high ground. Their troops were fresh, while the English were wearied by their march; and they were better provisioned. Surrey would have to launch an attack uphill. That prospect was less daunting than it had been when the Scots were dug in on Flodden Edge, but still unattractive.
James’s plan was simple and, in theory, sound. The Scots artillery would open fire, and this would provoke Surrey to attack up the slope of Branxton Hill. When they did so, James would, at the right moment, launch his pike columns forward, in the approved ‘Allmayne fashion’. With the advantage of the ground, they would surely push the disordered English back, till retreat turned into rout.
That was the theory. Reality was different. The heavy Scottish guns, designed for siege work, had a slower rate of fire than the lighter English ones. Moreover, the apparent advantage of the ground turned against them. They were firing downhill, and their cannonballs, instead of bouncing and doing damage in the ranks of the English army, embedded themselves in the soft earth. Meanwhile the English gunners, at perhaps 600 yards range (twice the effective distance of the longbow) began to direct their fire at the phalanxes of Scottish pikemen.
James was now confronted by a choice he hadn’t expected. He could either withdraw his army behind the ridge of the hill, out of range of the guns, and hope that the English, seeing this, would respond by advancing up the slope. But orderly retreat was a risky manoeuvre, and it was probable he couldn’t trust his troops, inexperienced and at best half-trained, to carry it out. The alter native was to order his pikemen to advance in an all-out attack – another risk but one in accordance with advanced military thinking and Swiss practice. ‘The best remedy’ – for an army under artillery fire – was, according to Machiavelli in his treatise The Art of War – to make ‘a resolute attack on it [the artillery] as soon as possible’.13 In theory, again, the advantage lay with the more numerous Scots.
James himself led one of the ‘battles’, columns of pikemen. He has been criticised for this, on the grounds that it made it impossible for him to direct the course of the encounter. But on the one hand the Scots expected their king and his chief nobles to take the lead in the battle and expose themselves to danger, and on the other, once this sort of battle was joined there was very little that a commander remaining in the rear on the hill could do to influence its course.
As it happened, while the Scots triumphed on one wing and were routed and fled for home on the other, the decisive battle was in the centre, where the King himself was to be found. What determined its outcome was not faulty tactics on James’s part, but the lie of the land, for at the bottom
of the hill there was a little stream invisible from the top, which the pikemen had to cross to get at the English on the other side. The stream was not wide – a man could leap it – but what is an insignificant obstacle to an individual may be formidable to an army. The momentum of the advance slackened, then was lost altogether. Instead of charging into the English ranks in a powerful column, the Scots did so irregularly, and the battle in the centre became a desperate hand-to-hand encounter in which the versatility of the English bills had an advantage over the long Scottish pikes. At some point, perhaps quite early in the struggle, the men in the rear of the Scottish columns seem to have lost heart, and fled. This enabled the English archers, previously ineffectual (partly because the wind and rain reduced their range), to get round the Scottish flank and fire from close range into the heaving mass.
So the battle turned against the Scots. Instead of the promised comprehensive victory, they were now under huge pressure, fighting for their lives and with no obvious way of retreat to Scotland. James himself is said to have led a charge – perhaps by now a desperate one – against the spot where Surrey’s banners flew, and to have been ‘slain within a spear length from the said Earl of Surrey’. In the thick of the fighting few probably saw him fall. The struggle went on till night fell, while beyond the field English cavalry pursued fleeing Scots.
In the words of the old poem:
