He said of the Scottish king:
Sorry may I see him ere I die, that is the cause of my abiding behind. If ever he and I meet, I shall do that in me . . . to make him as sorry [as] I can
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and he marched north on 22 July, gathering troops en route. He imposed strict discipline on his troops, issuing orders forbidding the playing of dice or cards by common soldiers, but allowing noblemen and captains ‘to play at their pleasures within their own tents’.
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The king’s instincts proved entirely correct.
On 11 August 1513, the Scottish herald Sir William Cumyng of Inverallochy, Lyon King of Arms, arrived at Henry’s camp outside the French town of Thérouanne in the Pas-de-Calais and delivered a bleak ultimatum from his master, James IV. The ‘Auld Alliance’ between France and Scotland was alive and well. James demanded that the English monarch
desist from further invasion and utter destruction of our brother and cousin, the Most Christian King [Louis XII], to whom . . . we are bounden and obliged for mutual defence, the one of the other, like as you and your confederates be obliged for mutual invasions and actual war; certifying you we will take part in defence of our brother . . . And we will do what thing we trust may cause you to desist from pursuit of him.
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Predictably, Henry lost his temper and shouted at the herald: ‘I am the very holder of Scotland - he holds it of me by homage.’
The Scots were already prepared for war, with ample French military assistance, and their 35,000-strong army crossed the River Tweed at Coldstream eleven days later, on 22 August. They attacked Norham Castle and James’s newly acquired heavy bronze guns smashed the walls of the gatehouse. This artillery bombardment was followed by:
three great assaults, three days together, and the captain [John Anislow] valiantly defended . . . But he spent vainly so much of his ordnance, bows and arrows and other munitions that at last he lacked . . . and so [on] the sixth day, [the shortages] compelled to yield him simply to the king’s [James] mercy.
This castle was thought impregnable . . .
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The Scottish host marched eight miles (13 km.) further south and occupied a five hundred foot (152.4 m.) high, three-peaked hill called Flodden Edge, in Northumberland, erecting earth ramparts and digging trenches to defend their camp on its crest.
Surrey had reached Pontefract, Yorkshire, on his progress north and heard of the Scottish invasion on 25 August. Despite his age - he was now seventy - he hastened on towards Newcastle, sometimes travelling by carriage, as he was troubled with rheumatism or arthritis. The next day,
was the foulest day and night that could be, and the ways so deep . . . that his guide was almost drowned before him, yet he never ceased, but kept on his journey to give example to them that should follow.
His eldest son Thomas, Lord Howard, was bringing a contingent of 928 veteran soldiers and sailors up by ship: ‘All that night the wind blew courageously, whereof the earl doubted least that . . . his son . . . should perish that night on the sea.’
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Surrey heard Mass in Durham Cathedral and asked its prior to allow him to take into battle a local relic, St Cuthbert’s banner. His request was an act of heavy symbolism: the banner had been carried at the Battle of Northallerton, Yorkshire, on 22 August 1138, during the first major engagement between the English and Scots since the Norman Conquest. That day, the Scots’ king David I’s invading army was routed in just two hours by the outnumbered English militias. By bringing Cuthbert’s banner, Surrey planned to inspire his men by that famous victory, known as the Battle of the Standard.
Before there was any fighting in 1513, Surrey had to discover the Scots’ strength and tactical intentions. He sent Thomas Hawley, Rouge Croix herald, with a trumpeter to James with two letters, one written in his own hand, and the other from his son, Lord Howard, who had now arrived safely. Surrey told the Scottish king that he
unnaturally, against all reason and conscience, [had] entered and invaded his brother’s realm of England and done great hurt . . . in casting down castles, towers and houses, burning, spoiling and destroying of the same and cruelly murdering the [king’s] subjects.
Wherefore the said earl will be ready to try the rightfulness of the matter with the king in battle by Friday next coming at the farthest.
Time was running out for the English general. Surrey needed to destroy the Scots before his army melted away. Food supplies were dangerously low and for two days his troops had quaffed no beer, only ‘water and could scarce get any other sustenance for money’.
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His son’s letter was more provocative and more personal. It boasted that, during his voyage north, ‘he had sought the Scottish navy, then being at sea, but he could not meet with them, because they were fled to France, by the coast of Ireland’. James had
many times [sought Howard] to make redress for Andrew Barton, a pirate of the sea . . . he was now come in his own person to be in the vanguard of the field to justify the death of [Barton] against him and all his people.
Howard pledged that neither he nor his soldiers would take any Scottish nobleman prisoner, ‘but they should die if they come in his [reach], unless it was the king’s own person, for he trusted to no other courtesy at the hands of the Scots’. This fighting talk was deliberately designed to antagonise James IV and force him into battle: if he retreated, he would be dishonoured as a coward.
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The English commanders were not alone in disparaging their foes: among the Scots, Lord Patrick Lindsay dismissed Surrey as ‘an auld crooked earl lying in a chariot’ - a snide, sniping reference to his arthritis.
Rouge Croix returned with James’s agreement to wait for battle until noon on Friday 9 September. All the bonhomie and boisterous goodwill of the wedding of his queen, Margaret Tudor, a decade before had vanished. The Scottish king contemptuously dismissed Surrey’s letter as being unseemly for an earl to challenge a prince.
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The herald also brought disturbing intelligence - that the Scottish army was positioned
on a high mountain called Flodden on the edge of Cheviot, where was but one narrow field for any man to ascend up the hill . . . to him and at the foot of the hill lay all his ordnance.
On the one side of his army was a great marsh, encompassed with the hills of Cheviot, so he lay too strong to be approached on any side . . . except that the Englishmen would have temerariously run on his ordnance.
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The Scots had chosen a formidable position and would quit it at their peril to fight on level ground. They clearly hoped to force Surrey to launch a suicidal uphill assault upon them, in the face of overwhelming artillery fire.
But the earl was too wily a general to sacrifice his hungry army on those steep slopes. On 8 September, just after noon, the 23,000 men of the English army struck camp at Milfield, south-west of Flodden Edge, and began a long march behind and around the Scottish flank. Their unexpected manoeuvre threw the Scottish commanders into confusion: were the English now invading Scotland? Were they going to attack them from the rear? Was their road back home now cut off? By the next day, James had to counter-march his forces north across Branxton Moor to deny the English the heights behind him. Surrey had lured the Scots out of their fortress-like prepared positions and neutralised their enormous tactical advantage.
James deployed his troops on the forward slope of Branxton Hill in four densely packed formations or ‘battles’, positioned two hundred feet (61 m.) apart, their movement hidden by dense clouds of acrid white smoke from burning piles of stinking, soiled bedding straw. His army had substantially shrunk through desertion over the previous few days, and he probably mustered 29,000 men for the fight.
Lord Thomas Howard, riding ahead of the English vanguard, suddenly saw his enemy, like black forests of pikes, as the smoke cleared, not 440 yards (0.4 km.) away: ‘The Lord Admiral was confronted by the four great battles of the Scots, all on foot, with long spears like moorish pikes, which [warlike] Scots bent [lowered] them forward’ ready to charge.
It must have been a dreadful shock. Howard snatched the medallion bearing the
Agnus Dei
- the Lamb of God - from around his neck and sent it off by mounted messenger to his father, urging him ‘in all haste to join battle’, while he hurriedly formed up his men out of sight, in the boggy Pallinsburn valley.
The English forces ran up and deployed themselves into five battles, each commanded by Surrey, Lord Howard, Sir Edmund Howard (the thirty-five-year-old third son of the earl), Sir Edward Stanley and Thomas, Lord Dacre.
The Battle of Flodden
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opened shortly after four o’clock with an hour-long exchange of artillery fire in pouring rain and high winds. The heavy Scottish siege guns fired downhill but their gunners found it difficult to depress the barrels sufficiently to bring effective fire on the English. Their cannon balls either ploughed into the soft earth, or flew overhead, doing little damage to Surrey’s troops, drawn up in ‘dead’ ground in the valley. For their part, the English, armed with lighter cannon, fired more rapidly and bounced their two-pound (0·91 kg.) stone shots at their targets. They first fired at the Scottish artillery, and, after neutralising their threat by killing their gunners, switched their aim to the enemy’s massed battles of roughly 9,000 men apiece, causing terrible carnage as the shots scythed through the ranks.
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As the Scots pikemen fell like ninepins, James ordered his host to attack down the slope. He dismounted from his horse, was handed a pike, and went to the front of his own square of pikemen and led them on towards the English lines.
As the Scots, their pikes levelled, reached three hundred paces down the hill, they came within range of the English archers, armed with the much-feared longbow that had created such deadly havoc among their ancestors in Anglo-Scottish battles down the centuries. That day, however, the weapon proved ineffective: the drenching rain had soaked the bowstrings, reducing the pull of the bow, and the strong winds disrupted the volleys. The Scots were also well armoured and the front ranks carried
pavises
, or tall wooden shields, for protection, so few were initially killed by arrow.
The 8,000-strong Scottish vanguard was made up of Gordon clans-men, armed with axes and mighty two-handed claymore swords, led by Alexander Gordon, third Earl of Huntly, and a deep phalanx of pikemen from the borders, commanded by Alexander, third Lord Home. The nimble Gordons cleaved their way through the front ranks of Edmund Howard’s division on the right of the English line, leaving gaps where the pikemen, by weight of numbers, crumpled resistance.
Edmund Howard and his captains tried to rally their 3,000 troops, but many fled, panic-stricken, abandoning their leaders to their fate. As the Scots skewered many an English soldier on the end of their sixteen-foot (4.88 m.) pikes, the nobles were left isolated in penny packets of resistance, fighting for their lives. Howard’s personal standard-bearer was cut into pieces and his banner lost. Two of his servants were killed. He was beaten to the ground three times before Dacre swept across with Surrey’s reserve of 2,000 border reiver cavalry and drove off the Scots, some of whom had become distracted by the lure of booty from the English baggage train. Edmund Howard still had to cut his way through to the refuge of his elder brother’s 5,000-strong vanguard, on his left, on the ridge called Piper’s Hill. This was now battling, beneath St Cuthbert’s banner, with a thick mass of pikemen, led by the Earls of Errol, Crawford and Montrose.
The Scots had copied their tactics from the fearsome German
Landsknecht
mercenaries, who relied on collective discipline, large numbers, momentum and the length of their pikes, to roll over their foes. At Flodden, the charge by the three Scottish earls’ 6,000 men was disrupted by a small stream called the Sandyford - scarcely wider than ‘a man’s foot over’. After clearing this, they had to clamber up the slope to reach Lord Howard’s men less than one hundred yards (91 m.) away, considerably slowing their pace and breaking up their tight formation. Though the English recoiled, they absorbed their weakened charge and held their line. In the dense mêlée, the Scots pikes were instantly transformed from lethal weapons into unwieldy encumbrances, and were pushed aside by the English infantry, keen to come to close quarters to stab and hack with their shorter bills. The pikes were thrown down, swords drawn and axes pulled out of the Scots’ belts for close combat.
Minutes later, further to the left, James’s division clashed with Surrey’s 5,000-strong rearguard, fighting under Henry VIII’s royal standard of the red dragon, just west of the village of Branxton. The weight of their charge pushed the English back two hundred yards (182 m.), near to where today’s monument to the battle now stands.
The battle was cruel and none spared other and the king himself fought valiantly. O what a noble and triumphant courage was this for a king to fight in a battle as a mean soldier wrote one contemporary chronicler.
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James, who fought to within a spear’s length of the Earl of Surrey, directing the battle from his carriage in the English rear, suffered five sword thrusts and an arrow wound but still managed to kill five English with his pike, before it shattered. He threw away the stump and with his sword slew five more. But then, surrounded by men-at-arms jabbing and slashing at him with their poleaxes, he was cut down.
A terrible blood lust now gripped the English.
Some of the Scottish nobles in the front ranks, hemmed in by the press of men behind, begged for their lives to be spared in return for a ransom.
Many . . . Scottish prisoners could and might have been taken but they were so [vengeful] and cruel in their fighting that when the Englishmen had the better of them, they would not save them, though it were that diverse Scots offered great sums of money for their lives.
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