by Linda Porter
The battle began in the mid-afternoon with a great volley of fire from James IV’s artillery aimed at the English army below. The Scottish king hoped to inflict severe casualties in the heart of the opposing force and, essentially, to pound it into a state of such weakness that it would be overwhelmed by his superior numbers in any subsequent hand-to-hand fighting. The admiral, Surrey’s son, who had arrived at the foot of Branxton Ridge before his father and the rest of the English forces, took his men back down to the other side of the small intervening ridge and desperately called for his father’s aid. The sound of the guns and the glimpses of the Scottish army, tightly drawn up in pike formations, convinced him that he would be wiped out if the rest of the English did not arrive swiftly.
Yet King James’s beloved cannons faced difficulty from the outset. They had been hurriedly positioned on soft ground and were firing downhill, making it difficult to gauge the range that they needed to inflict real damage on the English. Most of the shot flew over the heads of Howard’s men. And the Scottish gunners, under their master gunner, Robert Borthwick, were inexperienced. It has been suggested that James did not order the use of sighting rounds at this point because he did not want to reveal his position but the guns were, in any case, unstable and their position could not be quickly changed. When Surrey and his younger son, Lord Edmund Howard, arrived with Dacre’s men to back up the admiral, it became clear that they would have to combine their formations in a manner that could match the Scots. This they achieved impressively. The admiral retained the largest group of English soldiers in the vanguard, a total of about fourteen thousand men, his brother to his right and Sir Marmaduke Constable to his left. The rearguard, probably somewhat under twelve thousand men, was commanded by Surrey himself, with Lord Dacre’s cavalry behind him, ready to move as needed. Yet to appear was the Lancashire magnate, Sir Edward Stanley, whose detachment was still struggling to reach Branxton.
The English had smaller guns but their lighter ordnance was far more easily moved and their gunners were quick and accurate. They also had the advantage of firing uphill. Soon they began to inflict considerable casualties on the Scottish gunners and some of the men in the centre, under James IV’s direct command. Surrey, meanwhile, had moved the English army forward. They stopped in a marshy area at the foot of the main climb up to Branxton Ridge, where a small stream ran. The line where they halted can be plainly seen today and the ground is still damp, even in dry weather. In 1513, it became the site of a terrible slaughter.
James IV now decided that he must commit the Scottish host to the fight. The English guns were making a mockery of his state-of-the-art technology and his losses were mounting. He would defeat the English with his pike formations and their French captains and he himself would take the field. Although it may seem obvious with hindsight that he could merely have refused to give battle, or at least ensured that he personally had a safe route back into Scotland if things went awry, the character of James Stewart meant that such considerations would never have entered his head. It would be a memorable contest, the greatest test of his generalship and a timely demonstration to the rest of the world that he had mastered the latest arts of warfare. Above all, it was to be a vindication of his very personal style of kingship, an inspiring example to be recounted and admired through the long winter nights. He was forty years old and the grey was beginning to show in his reddish hair. This was his supreme moment. And so, at about five o’clock, he gave the order to advance.
On that gloomy and cold autumn afternoon, the English army at the foot of Branxton Ridge saw a fearsome sight. The Scots were moving down the hill towards them, in complete silence, as they had been trained by their king’s French advisers. There were no battle cries, no Gaelic screams or imprecations. Clutching their fifteen-foot-long pikes, the Scots, many of whom were barefooted in order to get a better grip on the slippery slopes, moved remorselessly towards their foe. None would have anticipated what transpired over the next couple of hours.
First of the Scottish divisions to move was the vanguard commanded by Hume and Huntly. Engaging Edmund Howard’s forces, the weakest in the English formation, it met with immediate success as many of the younger Howard’s men took flight and his standard bearer was cut down by the Highlanders. Eventually, he was rescued by the bastard John Heron but by that time his part in the fighting was effectively over. Determined to press home his advantage, James IV now committed his second division to commence their descent; he intended to follow them closely. He did not know that Hume, who had been harried by Dacre’s Border cavalry, was about to retire to the top of Branxton Ridge and would take no further part in the fighting. Whether or not an agreement had been reached among the Borderers on both sides to hold back from further combat, the truth is that when the king needed Hume’s help, it was not forthcoming. Without it, the king and his troops faced a much more difficult task. Nor was it yet apparent that the second division, trapped by a small stream at the foot of the main hill and the slight rise behind it, were about to be cut to pieces by Englishmen wielding a weapon far deadlier than a pike in hand-to-hand fighting: the shorter agricultural hedging implement known as the brown bill, or halberd. For it was on these two factors – the uneven, boggy ground and the deadly use of a weapon that the Scottish had underestimated – that the outcome of the battle of Flodden was to hinge.
Even at this point, there were those among the king’s advisers who implored him not to risk himself. They pointed out that if he entered the fray he would not be able to command effectively but this very salient point was not what James IV wanted to hear. For him, there was now no going back. Yet even as he moved off it must have been apparent that things were not going according to plan for Errol, Crawford and Montrose, though the full extent of the disaster being wrought on the second Scottish division was not yet apparent. Hemmed in and unable to use their pikes, the men fought heroically but all three earls and hundreds of their followers were cut down by the English.
James’s huge ‘battle’ advanced down the slopes of Branxton Ridge, crossed the stream and mounted the small hill beyond. It was a stirring and colourful spectacle, even on a day without a hint of sunlight. The king himself, under his red and gold royal banner, was clad in full armour, over which he wore a gold and scarlet surcoat decorated with the royal arms of Scotland. His household knights and nobles who fought with him that day were richly dressed and armoured, too, partly for show but also to protect them from English arrows. But at Flodden this much feared weapon, the staple of English armies for centuries, inflicted far less damage than the continued volleys of shot and the viciously wielded bill. Soon there were many dead in the king’s division but it continued forward without breaking, intent on making a conclusive breakthrough of Surrey’s lines. But the English fell back at key moments of the Scottish advance, regrouping and luring their opponents ever onwards into tighter and tighter combat, cutting them down remorselessly. This brutal fighting continued for upwards of two hours, as the Scots tried unsuccessfully to counter with their swords and James, caught in the thick of the encounter, could neither summon his reserve under Bothwell nor compel the Highlanders, watching from the top of the ridge, to come to his aid.
In the end, Bothwell moved first, probably without orders, since James was not in a position to issue any. His intervention made matters worse, since he attacked Surrey’s rear with five thousand men and inadvertently put pressure on the Scots engaged in close-quarters combat ahead of him. The Highlanders, perhaps riven by internal disputes about the best course of action and dissuaded at first by one of James IV’s French commanders from charging down the hill to his aid, eventually realized that they must commit in order to save the day for Scotland. But they were prevented from doing this by the belated arrival of Sir Edward Stanley and his troops. Mounting the hill, Stanley’s men loosed their arrows in great numbers at the Highlanders, shooting most of them in the back. Lacking the protective clothing of the royal division, the Highlanders were mowed down be
fore they could come to James’s assistance.
Without hope of rescue, James and his men fought on with great bravery. Eventually, their bulky armour and ineffective weapons told against them. As his losses mounted, the king probably realized that he could not win. But he would not surrender. He would not allow himself to be taken prisoner, to sit in London at the king of England’s pleasure, or even to try to flee. How could he return to Scotland after such a defeat? In one last desperate effort, he gathered his household troops and made for Surrey’s banners, apparently hoping that if he could kill the earl, the English might yet concede. But the carnage intensified and, as his own banner-bearer was killed beside him, he knew what he must do. Thrusting himself forward into the midst of his enemies, he made his final charge. In the press of men and weapons he must have realized that he had only moments to live. His armour could not save him now. Pierced below the jaw by an arrow, his throat gashed by the unforgiving English bill, he fell dying, choking on his own gore. He had got to within a spear’s length of Surrey. And as the blood of the last king of medieval Scotland seeped into the muddy earth of Northumberland, his magnificent guns stood deserted on the hill above, the mute witnesses of his destruction.
* * *
AS MANY AS ten thousand Scots and four thousand Englishmen perished with James IV at Flodden. Close to the king fell his eldest illegitimate son, Alexander Stewart, archbishop of St Andrews, the bookish short-sighted pupil of Erasmus. Among the dead were a bishop, two abbots, twelve earls, thirteen lords, five eldest sons of peers and up to three hundred other men of rank, whether in the Church or aristocracy. Almost every Scottish family of note lost a father, brother, husband or son, sometimes all four. But, personal tragedies aside, it was the loss of their king that hurt the most. There were those who did not want to believe him dead and rumours began to circulate that he had somehow escaped and become a wanderer, a pilgrim to Jerusalem, an eternal traveller seeking forgiveness and peace. The truth was much less fanciful and pathetically undignified.
The king’s naked body, stripped, like all the Scottish casualties by scavenging English troops, was identified the day after the battle by two of his servants captured by the English and by Lord Dacre, who knew him well. It was then sent to Berwick and onward to Richmond but because James IV died excommunicate, he was never given the state funeral befitting a king. Henry VIII sought papal permission to bury his brother-in-law in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, but tombs there were vandalized during the Reformation and in the seventeenth century the Great Fire of London destroyed the old cathedral. So the last resting place of James IV is not known and he has no memorial.
The battle of Flodden itself, too painful for the Scots to remember and little known in England, became largely forgotten except by military historians, a mere footnote in centuries of Border hostilities. It was not until 1910 that a cross to the fallen was erected at this scene of a slaughter so terrible that in intensity it rivals some of the actions of the Battle of the Somme. The memorial carries the simple but poignant inscription ‘Flodden, 1513. To the brave of both nations.’ It does not need to say more.
History is not, of course, kind to the vanquished and over the years the fate of King James IV and his army at Flodden left a deep scar on the Scottish psyche. His death, coming when he was apparently at the height of his power, seemed the result of unnecessary posturing by a man seduced by an empty chivalric notion of honour. Yet this is to misunderstand both James and the times in which he lived. On the day that his life ended, James made mistakes. He lacked experience of commanding such a large force in such trying conditions, had never put his new weapons to the test before and was out-generalled by a clever professional soldier. The king and his country paid dearly for a series of misjudgements and an element of sheer bad luck. But the manner of his brutal death and the devastating loss to Scotland has overshadowed his achievement as one of Britain’s great kings. James had come hesitantly to the throne as an untried boy of fifteen. He was to occupy it with the full vigour of the remarkable man he became. Yet his achievement in putting Scotland firmly on the map of Europe and the love and regard with which he was held by most of his subjects cannot be denied. In marrying Margaret Tudor he had also introduced the possibility that his heirs might one day unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland, to create a greater Britain. Time would show that this was not merely the product of an overactive Celtic imagination but the solution to a long-running conflict between two families vying to control one island.
James IV is almost unknown now outside his native land. Even popular television histories of Scotland pass over his reign in a few sentences. This neglect does not do him justice. Perhaps the final word should go to the poet Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, who called him ‘the glory of princely governing’. It is a fitting tribute.
Part Three
Half a Tudor
1513–1542
CHAPTER SEVEN
Queen and Country
‘To my thinking, this battle hath been to your grace and all your realm the greatest honour that could be, and more that ye should win all the crown of France.’
Katherine of Aragon to Henry VIII
‘Brother, all the welfare of me and my children rests in your hands.’
Queen Margaret to Henry VIII
IT IS UNLIKELY that Henry VIII agreed with his wife’s estimate of the significance of Surrey’s victory over James IV. All his efforts were bent on France. His Spanish queen, however, saw things differently. On 16 September 1513, one week after the death of the King of Scots, she wrote to Henry telling him that she was sending him a piece of James IV’s bloodied surcoat as a trophy: ‘In this your grace shall see how I can keep my promise, sending you for your banners a king’s coat. I thought,’ she continued, with unseemly relish, ‘to send himself unto you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it. It should have been better for him to have been in peace than have this reward. All that God sendeth is for the best,’ she concluded. Yet even at this time of triumph, she knew that her most pressing duty lay elsewhere. She was twenty-seven years old and after four years of marriage still she had not borne her husband a child who survived. There was now no need to lead her troops north in person. Instead, she intended to visit the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham in Norfolk, ‘that I promised so long ago to see’.1 There she would pray to remain fertile and produce a healthy heir. It is a poignant footnote to an otherwise strikingly repellent missive.
Yet both Katherine and the earl of Surrey knew that, in reality, it would not be wise to present Flodden as the major victory of the war against the French. The only successful action involving the English in France had been the minor cavalry pursuit grandiosely titled the battle of the Spurs and, even then, Henry VIII had not taken part. But the siege and capture of the city of Tournai was a much greater prize and no doubt one that the king himself considered far greater than the defeat of the Scots. Too much crowing by those left behind in England would earn royal displeasure. Besides, the campaigning season was drawing to a close and Surrey lacked the resources to follow up his victory. He had neither the men nor the authority to invade and occupy Scotland. His job was done. Henry VIII did not tarry long in France, either, returning home in October 1513.
King Louis XII of France, meanwhile, was dismayed by the defeat of his ally. It came at a bad time, though the reversals he had suffered in fighting the Habsburgs and Henry VIII were far from being major defeats. Writing from Amiens in northern France at the beginning of October, he made sure that the Scots understood how deeply he regretted the loss of their king, instructing the diplomats who were to be sent to Scotland to assess the state of that country to ‘tell of the king’s great sorrow at the misfortune said to have happened to the late king of Scots, at which he grieves so much that he will never be content till he has shown the love he bore to the late king, which he will try to show also to the young king, his son.’ As Queen Katherine had not held back in gloating over James IV’s death, so Louis X
II could not be restrained from an outpouring of affection which, it is fair to say, was unsuspected by those who knew this cold and calculating man well. ‘The king’s love to the late King of Scots,’ Louis said, ‘was so great that he cannot hide it, and, though he cannot bring him back from the dead, yet he would wish to make his memory everlasting in all the world as a great and virtuous king, worthy of all honour and glory, and to raise, preserve and guide his noble descendants and preserve them from their enemies.’ These were fair words, but at the end of his instructions he revealed his true concern: ‘to know the truth and the condition of the young king and kingdom and to learn what help he can give for the preservation of the kingdom and resistance to its enemies.’2 By now he possessed the better part of the Scottish navy, including the great ships the Michael and the Margaret, but if French influence in Scotland was to be maintained, he could not afford to sit on the sidelines. The country had an English queen regent but where the balance of power might lie was not yet apparent.
Yet within a year, as the alliance between Henry VIII and Emperor Maximilian finally unravelled, Louis XII would make a peace with England and marry Margaret Tudor’s younger sister, Mary, leaving the Scots out in the cold. And by then much had changed in Scotland itself.
* * *
RUMOURS OF the defeat of their army and the death of their king reached the citizens of Edinburgh the day after Flodden. The fear that the English would now stream across the border and attack the capital city itself prompted a call to arms but it soon became apparent that the enemy army was moving back to Berwick. Precisely when the news reached Queen Margaret at Linlithgow is not known, nor is her immediate reaction. The story that she had kept watch for a messenger in a room at the top of one of the towers of the palace is unsubstantiated and the idea that her screams of anguish echoed around the palace when she was told of her loss is fanciful. Yet she must have known that her life would never be the same again.
