Battle of Flodden

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Flodden, fought on the 9th of September 1513, killed a king and shattered a kingdom in a single afternoon. James IV of Scotland led an army of roughly 34,000 men down a hillside in Northumberland and into a trap he never saw coming. By the time the fighting was done, he lay dead in the mud near Branxton village, surrounded by the bodies of his personal guard, two arrow wounds on his corpse and wounds from bladed weapons to the neck and wrist. He became the last monarch from Great Britain to die in battle.

  In terms of sheer numbers, Flodden was the largest battle ever fought between England and Scotland. The Scottish dead numbered somewhere between five thousand and twenty thousand, depending on which account you believe. Nearly every noble family in Scotland lost someone. A country that had crossed the River Tweed full of confidence left it hollowed out, its nobility decimated, its king gone, its new monarch a seventeen-month-old boy.

  How did a well-positioned Scottish army on a commanding hilltop come to grief so completely? Why did James IV, a king known for caution in diplomacy, stake everything on a downhill pike charge over ground he had never scouted? And what became of the body, the relics, and the legends of a monarch whose death some Scots refused to believe for years afterward? Those are the questions Flodden leaves behind.

• 2. Two Kingdoms, One Broken Treaty

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  The Treaty of Perpetual Peace, signed in 1502 by James IV and Henry VII of England, was supposed to end centuries of intermittent war between the two kingdoms. It did not last a decade. Cross-border raids frayed the relationship from the start. At sea, a rivalry escalated into the death of the Scottish privateer Andrew Barton and the capture of his ships in 1511. Henry VIII, who had succeeded his father, pushed matters further by claiming overlordship of Scotland.

  James chose war to honour the Auld Alliance with France. Louis XII of France was under pressure from the Catholic League, a coalition that included England, and James calculated that an invasion of northern England would pull Henry's forces away from France. Pope Leo X, who had already signed the anti-French Treaty of Mechlin, sent James a letter on the 28th of June 1513 threatening ecclesiastical censure if he broke his peace with England. James was subsequently excommunicated by Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge. None of it changed his mind.

  He prepared on every front. The Scottish navy, including the flagship Great Michael, was sent under James Hamilton, 1st Earl of Arran, departing the Firth of Forth on the 25th of July. The fleet of twenty-two vessels was meant to sail around the north of Scotland, create a diversion in Ireland, and then join the French at Brest. It was so badly delayed that it played no part in the war at all. Worse, James had sent most of his experienced artillerymen with the fleet, a decision whose consequences would be felt at Flodden.

  Henry, meanwhile, was besieging Thérouanne in France alongside the Emperor Maximilian. When James's herald arrived at the English siege camp, Henry's reply was sharp. He told the herald that James had no right to summon him, that James was married to his own sister Margaret, and that any invasion of England would be resisted. Using the pretext of avenging the murder of Robert Kerr, a Warden of the Scottish East March killed by John Heron in 1508, James prepared to cross the border.

• 3. The Ground James Chose

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  On Sunday the 4th of September, James positioned his army at Flodden Edge, a hill to the south of Branxton village. The flanks were protected by marshes on one side and steep slopes on the other. Only a direct uphill approach was possible for any attacker. James had roughly 42,000 men when he crossed the River Tweed near Coldstream on around the 22nd of August, though sickness and desertion had reduced that number by the time he reached Flodden.

  Before occupying the hill, the Scottish army had already made its presence felt. On the 5th of August, a raiding force estimated at up to 7,000 border reivers commanded by Lord Home crossed into Northumberland and burned farms and villages across Milfield Plain. Surrey countered by sending Sir William Bulmer north with 200 mounted archers, who ambushed the returning Scots in the broom bushes of Milfield Plain on the 13th of August. As many as 600 Scots were killed before they could escape. This episode, known as the Ill Raid, may later have influenced James's reluctance to fight on that same plain.

  The Scottish army had also seized several English border castles before settling at Flodden. By the 29th of August, Bishop Thomas Ruthall's Norham Castle had fallen after a six-day siege, its outer walls breached by Scottish heavy artillery. Etal and Ford castles followed. At Ford, according to the chronicle writer Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, James lingered in the company of Elizabeth, Lady Heron. Edward Hall offers a different reading: Lady Heron, held prisoner in Scotland, negotiated the castle's survival in exchange for prisoner releases.

  Surrey, writing from Wooler Haugh on the 7th of September, sent a formal challenge through his herald Thomas Hawley, the Rouge Croix Pursuivant, asking James to meet him on the plain at Milfield. James replied that it was not fitting for an earl to command a king. Surrey was stuck: a frontal assault uphill into prepared Scottish guns risked disaster, but refusing battle meant disgrace. His supply convoy from Newcastle had already been ambushed and looted by local Englishmen, leaving his army short of food and beer. The solution was proposed during a council of war by John Heron, known as the Bastard, who had intimate local knowledge of the surrounding terrain.

• 4. The March Around

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  At 5 am on Friday the 9th of September, after a damp night on short rations and nothing to drink but stream water, Surrey's men set off on a circuitous march designed to outflank the Scots entirely. On the Thursday, Surrey had moved his army east across the River Till and picked up the old Roman road called the Devil's Causeway, heading north to camp at Barmoor near Lowick. James may have assumed he was making for Berwick-upon-Tweed to resupply.

  Surrey's army split to cross the River Till. One force under Surrey himself crossed several fords near Heaton Castle. A larger vanguard of about 15,000 men, commanded by Surrey's son Thomas Howard, the Lord High Admiral of England, crossed at Twizell Bridge downstream. According to Pitscottie, the vanguard crossed at 11 am, and James reportedly refused to let his artillery fire on the English while they crossed, saying he was determined to face them all in front of him on one plain field.

  James saw the threat quickly enough. He ordered his army off Flodden Edge and onto Branxton Hill, an adjacent commanding position that would deny the feature to the English and still give his pike formations the advantage of a downhill charge. The disadvantage was that the Scots moved onto ground they had not reconnoitered. When the Lord Admiral arrived at Branxton village with his vanguard, he could not see the Scottish position at all; smoke from burning rubbish obscured it. When he finally spotted the army arrayed on Branxton Hill, he sent his Agnus Dei pendant to his father as a signal of the gravity of his situation, and positioned his troops in dead ground to conceal his numbers.

  By about 4 pm, both armies faced each other across the slope. Surrey had between 20,000 and 26,000 men, outnumbered by the Scots but in position. On his right he placed men from Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire under his third son Lord Edmund Howard. The central battles were commanded by the Lord Admiral and by Surrey himself. Sir Edward Stanley's cavalry and archers had been last to leave Barmoor and had not yet arrived on the left flank. A reserve of mounted Borderers under Thomas, Baron Dacre, waited at the rear.

• 5. Pike Against Bill

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  James began with an artillery duel that did not go well for the Scots. Contemporary accounts blamed the difficulty of shooting accurately downhill, but the deeper problem was that the heavy guns had been poorly sited rather than carefully emplaced as their weight required. The Scottish artillery included five great curtals, two great culverins called the Seven Sisters, four sakers, and six great serpentines. These weapons fired iron balls weighing up to 66 pounds to a range of 2,000 yards. The heaviest required a team of 36 oxen to move and could fire at most once every twenty minutes. They were commanded by the king's secretary, Patrick Paniter, an able diplomat with no artillery experience. The light English field guns, old-fashioned in design and firing balls of about one pound, were easily handled and capable of rapid fire. They turned on the massed Scottish infantry ranks while the Scottish guns fell largely silent.

  The Scottish infantry had been equipped by their French allies with pikes eighteen feet long. The weapon had proved devastating in continental Europe, especially against cavalry. But it required training, discipline, and flat firm ground to work. Bishop Ruthall, writing afterward to Thomas Wolsey, put it plainly: the English bills had disappointed the Scots of their long spears, on which they relied. On the slopes of Branxton Hill, the Scots encountered something worse than English bills. An area of marshy ground lay at the foot of the hill, identified by modern hydrologists as a groundwater seepage zone, made worse by days of heavy rain. As they struggled across it, formations broke apart. The pikes became unwieldy. A later English poem described the Scots beginning to drop them "so that it seemed as if a wood were falling down."

  Home and Huntly's battle on the Scottish left advanced first and actually forced Lord Edmund Howard's outnumbered Cheshire and Yorkshire men back. Surrey sent Dacre's light cavalry to stabilise his son's position. The eventual result on that flank was a stalemate, with Home allegedly saying afterward that the man does well this day who saves himself. The battle commanded by Errol, Crawford and Montrose hit the marsh next, lost cohesion, and was cut apart in close-quarter fighting by English bills. James followed them down regardless, reaching for Surrey's bodyguard but getting no further. On the Scottish right, Argyll and Lennox's Highlanders lacked armour against Stanley's archers, who had finally arrived after their long march from Barmoor. They scattered under volleys of arrows.

  An instruction to English troops that no prisoners were to be taken explains the exceptional death toll among the Scottish nobility. The official English diplomatic report by Brian Tuke noted the Scots' iron spears and their initial good order after the German fashion, but concluded that the English halberdiers decided the whole affair.

• 6. A King Among the Dead

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  James IV was found surrounded by the bodies of his bodyguard, recruited from the Forest of Ettrick and known as the Flowers of the Forest. Despite wearing the finest armour available, he had two arrow wounds, one in the jaw, and wounds from bladed weapons to the neck and wrist. Lord Dacre discovered the body on the field. He later wrote that the Scots loved him worst of any Englishman living, because he had found the king.

  The body's journey afterward was elaborate. Dacre took it first to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where captured Scottish courtiers William Scott and John Forman identified it. It was then embalmed and taken to Newcastle upon Tyne, and eventually south to Sheen Priory near London by way of York, a city James had reportedly promised to capture before Michaelmas. A payment of twelve pounds, nine shillings and tenpence was recorded for preparing and transporting the corpse. James's banner, sword, and his cuisses, the armoured plates covering his thighs, were taken to the shrine of Saint Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral.

  Thomas Hawley, the Rouge Croix pursuivant, was first to bring news of the victory to Catherine of Aragon, carrying the blood-stained surcoat of the King of Scots to her at Woburn Abbey. Catherine sent Hawley on to Henry at Tournai, and then sent John Glyn on the 16th of September with James's coat and iron gauntlets and a detailed account of the battle. She suggested Henry use the coat as his battle-banner, and wrote that she had considered sending him the king's body too, but that English hearts would not allow it.

  Despite all of this, Scotland refused to accept that James was dead. A Scottish merchant at Tournai in October claimed to have spoken with the living king. Lindsay of Pitscottie recorded two legends: that four great men on horseback had carried James from the field on a dun hackney, and that he had escaped toward Kelso. John Lesley added that the body taken to England was actually a lord named Bonhard, not the king. George Buchanan recorded a rumour that James had left his Squire of Attendance, Alexander Elphinstone, 1st Lord Elphinstone, to fight in his place, and that the English had simply mistaken Elphinstone's corpse for the king. The gold crucifix James had worn in the field, set with three balas rubies and three sapphires and containing a fragment of the True Cross, was listed in the jewel book inventory of Henry VIII in the chapel of the Tower of London.

• 7. Scotland After the Battle

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  Ten days after Flodden, the Lords of Council met at Stirling on the 19th of September and created a General Council of the Realm. Thirty-five lords, clergy, and minor barons were charged with governing in the name of Queen Margaret Tudor and her son. On the 21st of October, the full Parliament of Scotland met at Stirling Castle and crowned the seventeen-month-old child as James V in the Chapel Royal.

  Margaret Tudor remained guardian of the king but was not made Regent. The French soldier Antoine d'Arces arrived at Dumbarton Castle in November with a shipload of armaments. The English had already known about the planned shipment from a paper found in a bag abandoned at Flodden. D'Arces promoted John Stewart, Duke of Albany, a grandson of James II of Scotland, as Regent rather than Margaret. Albany, who lived in France, eventually arrived in Scotland on the 26th of May 1515. By that date Margaret had already remarried, taking the Earl of Angus as her husband, and had given birth to James's posthumous son Alexander.

  The Scottish ambassador Andrew Brounhill was sent to Christian II of Denmark soon after the battle to explain what had happened. His instructions blamed James IV directly for leaving a favourable hilltop position to attack the English on marshy ground, and credited the English victory to Scottish inexperience rather than English bravery. The letter also contrasted the Scottish practice of placing officers in the front line, in medieval style, with the English commanders who stayed with the reserves in what the document called the Renaissance style. With no officers to coordinate a retreat, the rout was complete.

  The losses spread through every corner of Scottish society. Nearly every noble family in Scotland lost a member. A register of royal charters records land transactions triggered by the deaths of feudal tenants. The Exchequer Rolls track others under entries recording that they died in campo bellico, in the field of war. The song Flowers of the Forest, mourning those losses, was still being sung centuries later: "We'll hae nae mair lilting, at the yowe-milking, Women and bairns are dowie and wae."

• 8. Memory and Commemoration

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  Thomas Howard, the Earl of Surrey who commanded the English army, was restored to the title of Duke of Norfolk as his reward. The arms of the Dukes of Norfolk still carry an augmentation of honour from Flodden: a modified version of the Royal coat of arms of Scotland with the lower half of the lion removed and an arrow through the lion's mouth. At Framlingham Castle the Duke kept two silver-gilt cups engraved with the arms of James IV, which he bequeathed to Cardinal Wolsey in 1524.

  Sir Richard Assheton, who raised a company of archers from Middleton, near Manchester, rebuilt his parish church, St Leonard's, Middleton, and installed what has been called the oldest known war memorial in the United Kingdom. The Flodden Window in stained glass depicts and names the archers and their priest. The success of the Cheshire yeomanry under Richard Cholmeley led to his later appointment as Lieutenant of the Tower of London.

  The Quincentennial of the battle in 2013 was marked by a programme funded partly by an £887,300 Heritage Lottery Fund grant, including expansion of the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum and a solemn commemoration. The battlefield near Branxton still looks much as it did in 1513, though the marshy burn that broke the Scottish formations has since been drained. A monument erected in 1910 stands near Branxton village, and a marked trail with interpretive boards runs across the ground.

  British historians sometimes use Flodden to mark the end of the Middle Ages in the British Isles. Another candidate they offer is the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Two years after Flodden, Francis I of France defeated the Swiss pikemen at the Battle of Marignano using heavy cavalry and artillery, ending the era in which the bill and the pike could meet as equals. The Flodden Window in Middleton, with its named archers and their priest, remains a rare surviving record of who exactly stood in those lines on that wet Friday afternoon.