The Disaster at Flodden

1. The diplomatic context and the Auld Alliance obligation

Flodden grew out of a European war. Henry VIII of England joined the anti-French coalition of the War of the League of Cambrai and invaded France in the summer of 1513, laying siege to Thérouanne. The French king Louis XII invoked the Auld Alliance — the long-standing Franco-Scottish compact — and appealed to James IV to open a second front by invading northern England and forcing Henry to look homeward. France backed the appeal with money, arms, and experienced captains.

James's decision put two treaties in direct conflict. Scotland's alliance with France pulled one way; the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace with England — sealed by James's marriage to Henry's sister Margaret Tudor, and narrated in Card #11 — pulled the other. James chose France. On 11 August 1513 his herald, the Lyon King of Arms, delivered an ultimatum to Henry at the siege of Thérouanne, effectively a declaration of war. Henry reacted with fury, reasserting an old English claim to overlordship of Scotland. Because breaking the 1502 peace carried the penalty of ecclesiastical censure, James was warned by Pope Leo X in June 1513 and was subsequently excommunicated — a point that would complicate his burial.

2. The invasion of Northumberland and the Lady Heron legend examined

The Scots crossed the Tweed near Coldstream in late August 1513. James first secured his supply line and border crossings, besieging and taking Norham Castle (which fell around 29 August after roughly six days once his heavy artillery breached the walls) and Wark, then moving south to capture Etal and Ford on the River Till. He made Ford Castle his base before withdrawing to the strong high ground of Flodden Hill/Edge.

Ford Castle belonged to the Heron family. A famous story holds that James dallied amorously with Elizabeth, Lady Heron (and, in some versions, her daughter), wasting days that let Surrey gather his army. This should be treated as tradition, not fact. The romantic version derives from the Scottish chronicler Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, writing in the 1570s — roughly sixty years after the battle. The near-contemporary English chronicler Edward Hall (writing in the 1540s) gives a purely political account: Lady Heron was effectively a prisoner negotiating her own release and the sparing of Ford Castle as part of a prisoner exchange (her husband, Sir William Heron, was himself held hostage in Scotland). Modern scholarship — notably Norman Macdougall's James IV — dismisses the seduction story as later romantic embellishment, part of a body of Flodden legend that grew from a refusal to accept the defeat rather than from documented events. James in fact burned Ford before the battle.

3. The commanders

James IV commanded the Scots in person, in the medieval style, and would die fighting in the front rank. With Henry VIII in France, England's defence fell to Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey — an experienced soldier already about 70 years old, whose career reached back to Bosworth (1485) and the Wars of the Roses. Surrey had been left as Warden/Lieutenant of the North with instructions to prepare against a Scottish invasion. His son, Thomas Howard, the Lord High Admiral (appointed to that office in May 1513), led the English vanguard and helped bring the artillery north to Newcastle. The victory rehabilitated the Howards' fortunes: Surrey was created Duke of Norfolk, and the family arms were augmented with a version of the Scottish royal lion pierced by an arrow.

4. The battle and the pike-versus-bill tactical question

James chose an exceptionally strong defensive position on Flodden Edge, fortified with earthworks and artillery, dominating the approaches. Surrey, unwilling to attack uphill into that position, executed a bold flanking march: on 8–9 September he moved north and west, his vanguard crossing the River Till at Twizel Bridge, placing the English army between the Scots and Scotland and threatening James's line of retreat. This forced James to abandon Flodden Edge and reposition roughly a mile north onto Branxton Hill, where the two armies met. The battle is named for Flodden, but the fighting was at Branxton — and was known for three centuries as Branxton (or Brainston) Moor before Victorian writers popularised "Flodden Field."

James had modernised his army along continental lines, re-equipping his infantry with long pikes (some cited at around 15–18 feet) in the Swiss/German fashion, a change from the shorter spear of the traditional Scottish schiltron, and had French captains to drill them. The battle opened with an artillery exchange in which the lighter, more mobile English guns outperformed the heavier Scottish pieces, and with English longbow fire. When the Scottish columns advanced downhill "after the German fashion," the ground undid them: a marshy valley (the Pallinsburn) at the foot of the slope and the wet, broken terrain robbed the dense pike blocks of momentum and cohesion. Once the formations lost order, the English billmen — wielding the bill or billhook, a shorter polearm with a hooked, axe-like head — had the advantage in the close, disordered melee, hacking at pike-shafts and pulling men down. Flodden became, in a common summary, "the victory of the bill over the pike." Historians debate how far the pike itself was to blame: the more careful assessment is that the weapon was not intrinsically inferior but that the Scots had too little time to master its demanding discipline, lacked the protective skirmishers the Swiss integrated, and were fatally hampered by terrain and by the loss of leaders who fought in the front ranks. James IV was killed in close combat near Surrey's division, within a short distance of the English commander. He is commonly and accurately described as the last reigning monarch of Great Britain to die in battle — a claim repeated by the Battlefields Trust ("the last time a reigning British monarch was killed in battle") and by mainstream historical reference works alike.

5. Casualties and the "Flowers of the Forest" legacy

Casualty figures are genuinely uncertain. Historic England's Battlefield Report notes that Scottish casualties "were put by the English at between 10,000 and 15,000," while early English reports claimed their own losses were as low as 400 men; Surrey was ready to admit to about 1,500 killed, and figures were revised again about twenty years later by the historian Polydore Vergil. The most commonly cited round figure for the Scottish dead is around 10,000, though the credible range is wide; some estimates of English losses run to around 4,000. What is not in doubt is the exceptional concentration of loss among Scotland's leadership. The dead included James IV himself; his illegitimate son Alexander Stewart, Archbishop of St Andrews; two bishops; abbots; around nine to twelve earls; and a dozen or more lords of Parliament, together with many knights, lairds and clan chiefs. Contemporaries and later historians agree that hardly a noble family in Scotland was untouched.

This catastrophe is remembered in the lament "The Flowers of the Forest." An important distinction must be flagged: this is not a 1513 composition. The melody survives from the early 17th century (recorded c. 1615–1625 in the John Skene of Halyards Manuscript as "Flowres of the Forrest"), and the words most people know were written by the poet Jean (Jane) Elliot, who framed the tune as a lament in 1756 and published it — anonymously — in 1776; it is her only surviving work, and she used one or two fragments of older traditional material. It was at first taken for an ancient surviving ballad until Robert Burns suspected it was an imitation and, together with Ramsay and Walter Scott, established Elliot's authorship. (Alison Cockburn wrote another 18th-century set of words.) The song is therefore a much later, retrospective memorial inspired by Flodden's memory, not a contemporary voice from the battlefield.

6. The disputed fate of James IV's body

What is reasonably well documented: a body identified as James IV's was recovered from the field and taken to Berwick, embalmed, and sent south to England. Because James had died excommunicate (for breaking the 1502 peace), his burial was canonically problematic. Henry VIII obtained papal permission (late November 1513) to bury him in consecrated ground at St Paul's, but no funeral was ever carried out, and the lead-wrapped corpse ended up stored at the Carthusian monastery of Sheen (Richmond), where it was neglected and, after the Reformation-era dissolution, effectively lost.

Beyond this, the story becomes Disputed and largely apocryphal. The Elizabethan antiquary John Stow reported seeing the body among rubble at the dissolved Sheen; a later tradition holds that workmen severed the head, that it passed to one of Elizabeth I's glaziers (named as Lancelot Young) as a curio, and was eventually thrown into a charnel pit at the church of St Michael, Wood Street, London. The often-repeated detail that workmen "played football" with the king's head has little hard evidential basis and should be flagged as legend. The precise fate of the remains is genuinely unknown, and proposals around the 2013 quincentenary to locate and DNA-test them concluded the body may never be found.

7. The immediate aftermath and the Flodden Wall

Flodden created an acute political crisis. The heir was James V, an infant of about 17 months, crowned at Stirling on 21 September 1513. The near-decapitation of the political class left the kingdom short of experienced leadership at the worst possible moment, and Scotland entered a long, faction-ridden regency. England, however, did not exploit the victory: Surrey disbanded his army and made no serious push north, so the strategic consequences fell far more heavily on Scotland than on England.

In Edinburgh, fear of an English advance prompted the construction of the Flodden Wall, an extended town wall enclosing a larger area of the burgh — nearly 140 acres — to the south. Begun in the wake of the defeat (traditionally dated from 1513), it was, according to Historic Environment Scotland's designation record, built "in several phases until around 1560; as a consequence, the construction method was neither uniform nor consistent," and it had six main ports. It stood generally around 1.2 metres (about 4 feet) thick and up to 7.3 metres (24 feet) high. Substantial fragments survive today — notably around Greyfriars Kirkyard, along the Vennel (with a surviving corner tower), and near the Pleasance — and it was later extended by the early-17th-century Telfer Wall.

8. Bridging to 1542: the reign of James V

The minority and regencies (1513–1528). By James IV's will, his widow Margaret Tudor was to be regent while she remained a widow; Parliament confirmed her. But her marriage in August 1514 to Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, cost her the regency and split the nobility. A pro-French party brought over John Stewart, Duke of Albany — James V's nearest adult male relative, French-born and a living symbol of the Auld Alliance — who governed as regent for much of 1515–1524. The young king became a pawn: after Albany's final departure to France, Angus seized control and effectively held James captive until the king escaped in 1528.

Personal rule (1528–1542). James V began his personal rule by driving out Angus and forfeiting the Douglases, and thereafter ruled with a marked suspicion of his nobility — the legacy of his manipulated childhood. He was an effective if not universally loved king: he restored royal authority, brought the Borders and Isles under firmer control, enriched the crown (partly at the church's expense), and cultivated a Renaissance court. He famously kept the Catholic faith, resisting his uncle Henry VIII's pressure to follow England into a break with Rome.

Marriages. James strengthened the French alliance through two French marriages. In 1537 he married Madeleine of France, daughter of Francis I; already frail, she died within weeks of reaching Scotland, in July 1537. In 1538 he married Marie de Guise (Mary of Guise), a widow of the powerful House of Guise, who would later serve as regent for their daughter.

Solway Moss and death. Relations with England collapsed; after James snubbed a planned meeting with Henry at York, war followed. On 24 November 1542 a Scottish army was routed at Solway Moss near the border — a humiliating defeat caused by disorganisation and a broken chain of command rather than English numbers (the English force was far smaller). James was not present. He retired to Falkland Palace and, already ill (his symptoms suggest a fever, possibly dysentery, rather than the "broken heart" of legend), died on 14 December 1542, aged 30. Six days earlier, on 8 December, Marie de Guise had given birth at Linlithgow to a daughter, Mary — his only surviving legitimate child, who became queen at less than a week old.

The "it cam wi' a lass" line examined. Tradition holds that, told the child was a girl, the dying king said "It cam wi' a lass, and it will gang wi' a lass" — a reference to the Stewart line's origin through Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert the Bruce, and a prophecy that it would end with a female heir. This should be flagged as tradition, not verified fact. The earliest surviving record is John Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland (composed in the 1560s, some two decades after the event), and Knox's actual wording is different and blunter (to the effect that "it came from a woman and it will end in a woman"). The now-famous polished Scots phrasing comes from Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie's chronicle of the 1570s. Modern scholarship (Jamie Cameron's James V, completed by Norman Macdougall) treats such post-Reformation chronicle anecdotes with caution, and the line is best read as an evocative literary tradition rather than a documented deathbed utterance. (The "prophecy," ironically, is often noted as being fulfilled not by Mary but by Queen Anne in 1714.)