Flodden: the rout of Scotland’s renaissance
August 2003
Gordon Casely
The battle of Flodden has appalled Scotland for generations. The event took place 490 years ago this month, starting at 4.15 on the afternoon of Friday, 9 September 1513. Two hours later, King James IV of Scots and a majority of the leaders of our nation had been utterly annihilated. In the outcome of an afternoon, 9000 Scots, noble and commoner alike, were consigned to pits, to be happed in red Border earth.
Thus perished the flower of Scotland – king, two abbots, at least nine earls, 15 barons, many lairds, and James’s natural son Alexander, Archbishop of St Andrews.
DEATH OF A KING: The death of King James IV, from Flodden 1513 by Niall Barr. [Richard Scollins courtesy of Keith Durham]
Flodden today is marked by the granite cross on the summit of Pipers Hill at the northern edge of the battlefield. It bears the words, To the brave of both nations.
Flodden proved to be the last time that a King of Scots led a united Scots army into battle. The disaster that was Flodden destroyed our nation’s natural succession, impoverished our leadership, opened us to internecine quarrel, and caught us on the back foot at the union of the Crowns four centuries ago this year. I believe that we never recovered our balance, and that the brave attempt to colonise Darien in 1698 coupled with seven years of disastrous farming weather at home near bankrupted us, leading the way to the shotgun marriage of the union of 1707.
A decade before, all had begun so well, the eligible and handsome James IV marrying the beautiful Princess Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII and sister to Henry VIII. This ‘marriage of the Thistle and the Rose’ caused universal rejoicing, and all Scotland welcomed this new young English queen. King’s College, Aberdeen, still carries the marital arms of James and Margaret on the front (west) elevation, a badly eroded heraldic panel just barely visible. The arms feature the only stone carving of a Tudor dragon supporter that I know of in Scotland – the dragon beastie introduced by Margaret’s father King Henry VII (1485-1509), and used by English monarchs until the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603). Look for it to the left of the shield.
Coincidentally, the same wall includes the arms of James’s illegitimate son Alexander Stewart, then the 24-year-old Archbishop of St Andrews, killed with his father at the battle.
Flodden was an unnecessary confrontation, the result of kingly ambition by James on an international field. The Auld Alliance between Scotland and France had been recently renewed. There had been English attacks made upon Scottish ships at the time when Henry VIII, on behalf of the papacy, invaded France. James accepted at face value a guarantee of support from the king of France if Scotland would use the Auld Alliance against the English. Thus the catastrophe of Flodden became the result of James’s flawed foreign policy, with his declaration of war on England made with nothing at all to gain for Scotland.
Even so, King James held all the winning cards on that September day 490 years ago. At Edinburgh he amassed some 30,000 men, both Highlanders and Lowlanders, plus an awesome array of modern weaponry. These well-fed troops crossed the Merse and sallied through the edge of northern Northumberland, taking the fortresses of Etal, Ford and Norham with ease. They drew themselves up a prime position on Branxton Hill above the kirk and hamlet of the same name, the Tweed at Coldstream just a mile or so away in Scotland.Principal battalions included the Earl of Huntly’s Highlanders.
The Scots sat at 450 feet above sea level, with the English 200 feet lower on Pipers Hill, and positioned between the Tweed and the Scots. In addition, the English were tired. With minimal notice of the Scots invasion, the 70-year-old Earl of Surrey had marched more than 20,000 men at high speed from Yorkshire. Surrey’s years had done nothing to dim his brilliant grasp of military strategy, and in this he was ably assisted by his two sons, Edmund Howard, and Thomas the younger. Surrey was Henry VIII’s chief lieutenant, with Thomas the Lord Admiral of England.
Henry’s words to Surrey were, “I trust not the Scots, therefore I pray you not be negligent”. In the event, Surrey proved neither negligent nor negligible, as the Scots were to discover – a tale re-created in the sixth canto of Sir Walter Scott’s metrical romance Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field.
The battle highlights the best and worst of strategy and planning. Where was the competence associated with rapid decision-making? The Scots may have been backed by the latest of weaponry, but their otherwise excellent cannon were unable to be lowered enough to fire downhill. English artillery, though weaker numerically and in quality, nevertheless hit home.
Suddenly Scotland was no longer rampant, and in a move that depicts the desperation of the moment, James’s army moved down the rain-soaked hill to engage the English with their spears, casting off shoes and fighting in their hose to gain better grip on the muddy ground.
Other battles have caused Scotland more unhappy political results, but Flodden was the most disastrous of all in immediate loss, nothing less than calamitous. For long afterwards it was said that not a family in Scotland did not own a grave in Branxton, a scale of loss possibly not repeated across Scotland until World War I.
In a mutual unwillingness to take prisoners, an entire generation of leaders, administrators and thinkers had been wiped out in an afternoon – the Chancellor of Scotland, the Bishop of the Isles, the Dean of Glasgow Cathedral, 14 Lords of Parliament.
The following day the body of the king was identified with difficulty, and only then through the help of the English Lord Dacre, who knew him well. The king had been stripped naked by looters, head transfixed by an arrow, skull cleaved by an English halberd, and one hand almost severed. Thus perished the 40-year-old monarch – and vanished for all time, for to this day, his body remains lost. Embalmed and dispatched ultimately to London, the king of Scots lay unburied in a lead coffin in a Carthusian monastery near Richmond for many years. By the time James VI united the thrones of Scotland and England in 1603, the bones of his great-grandfather were gone from human ken.
Politically Flodden bedevilled Scotland both with yet another minority (for James V was barely two years old), and raised questions over the wisdom of maintaining a Franco-Scottish alliance. Flodden ended for ever what had been Scotland’s golden age of renaissance.
The Flowers of the Forest: a lament for Flodden
by Jane Elliot*
I’ve heard them lilting at our ewe-milking,
Lasses a’ lilting before dawn o’ day;
But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning,
The Flowers of the Forest are a’ wede away.
At bughts, in the morning, nae blythe lads are scorning,
Lasses are lonely and dowie and wae;
Nae daffing, nae gabbing, but sighing and sabbing,
Ilk ane lifts her leglin and hies her away.
In hairst, at the shearing, nae youths now are jeering, Bandsters are lyart, and runkled, and gray:
At fair or at preaching, nae wooing, nae fleeching–
The Flowers of the Forest are a’ wede away
Dool and wae for the order, sent our lads to the Border!
The English, for ance, by guile wan the day;
The Flowers of the Forest, that fought aye the foremost,
The prime of our land, lie cauld in the clay
* Poet Jane Elliot (1727-1805) was the daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto, in Teviotdale in Roxburghshire.We’ll hear nae mair lilting at our ewe-milking;
Women and bairns are heartless and wae;
Sighing and moaning on ilka green loaning–
The Flowers of the Forest are a’ wede away.
Gordon Casely is a journalist who runs Herald Strategy the Aberdeen-based corporate communications and heritage consultancy. His wife wishes he would go and get a real job.
This is an article from the August 2003 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.