THE FLOWER OF SCOTLAND IS CUT DOWN
An innovative king and a fight not of his choosing... 500 years to the day since Flodden, how James IV’s life and death changed Scotland
THE bloody and shattering defeat at Flodden, 500 years ago today, was the responsibility of Scotland’s most ambitious and charismatic king. James IV’s reign saw the brilliant flowering of the Renaissance in Scotland – and he seemed to embody its spirit.
He encouraged and patronised the arts and sciences. He built new palaces and embellished old ones; the Great Halls of Edinburgh and Stirling Castles, much of Falkland Palace, Linlithgow Palace and the first Palace of Holyroodhouse date from his reign.
He was widely admired. The great Dutch scholar Erasmus, whom James hired to tutor his favourite illegitimate son Alexander (who died at Flodden), said the king had ‘a wonderful intellectual power, and astonishing knowledge of everything, unconquerable magnanimity and the most abundant generosity’.
The Spanish ambassador, Pedro de Ayala, told his own sovereigns – King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella – that James was ‘as handsome in complexion and shape as a man may be. He speaks the following languages: Latin, very well, French, German, Flemish, Italian and Spanish’ – as well, of course, as Scots, English and Gaelic. James was the last King of Scots to be fluent in the tongue of his Highland subjects. Later, however, Ayala observed that James was not a good general because ‘he begins to fight before he has given his orders’ – a prophetic judgment.
Scotland was fortunate in that James was 15 and capable of governing when he became king. Admittedly, the circumstances were murky. He had been involved, whether willingly or not, in the rebellion against his father, who was murdered after his defeat at Sauchieburn in 1488.
James felt guilty. All his life he wore an iron chain round his waist next to his skin as penance, and he made frequent pilgrimages to holy shrines. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his penitence, even though he was usually accompanied on these pilgrimages by minstrels and at least once interrupted his journey to visit a favourite mistress.
James was ambitious that Scotland should play a full part in the politics of Europe. To further this aim, he built royal ships and created a navy, established a ‘harness mill’ in Stirling to manufacture body-armour and invested in field artillery, the new guns cast in bronze rather than iron.
He hired experienced French and Flemish armourers and engineers to supervise production. The army he would lead to Flodden was the best equipped any Scottish king had ever put in the field.
Eager to assert his importance, he urged the Pope to organise a new crusade against the Ottomans (or Turks), and promised to take part in it. Some historians have seen this as a fanciful project and one that was out of date. Yet the Muslim threat to Christendom was real. Constantinople had fallen in 1453. Thirteen years after Flodden, the Ottomans overran Hungary and were soon besieging Vienna.
But the Pope, Julius II, wasn’t interested; he was more concerned with preventing France from dominating Italy. He did, however send James a sword and a hat. The sword became part of the Honours of Scotland, used in coronations, and may still be seen in Edinburgh Castle; the hat, sadly, was lost.
The crusade was a non-starter, but foreign policy inevitably occupied the king’s attention. For more than 200 years, Scotland had been allied with France against their common enemy, England.
One consequence was that Scots who had fallen out of favour with their king would always find a welcome in the English court, to be used to stir up trouble.
The rivalries of the Border clans also offered the opportunity to make life difficult for any Scottish king.
James IV responded by welcoming Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two princes who had been held prisoner in the Tower of London and mysteriously disappeared.
The youth may indeed have believed he was Richard. In any case, James accepted him as such, hailed him as the rightful King of England (Richard IV) and arranged his marriage to one of his own cousins.
Moreover, he led an army into England in support of ‘Richard’s’ claim to the throne, though his main object may have been to regain Berwickupon-Tweed, which had been in English hands since 1388.
YET the expedition proved a failure. Warbeck/Richard was horrified by the bloodshed and showed he had no taste for war. James, disappointed, dropped him – though he continued to pay his pension for two years, before shipping him off to try his fate in the West of England. The poor fellow had no better luck there.
James was loyal to the Auld Alliance. Others, however, wondered if it might be better to come to an agreement with England. This question – France or England? – would divide Scots for much of the 16th century.
A few years after Flodden, the historian and philosopher John Mair would write a book in which he argued that a union under one monarch would be in the interest of both Scotland and England; he was ahead of his time. It would take the Protestant Reformation and the ideological division of Europe into two camps – Protestant and Catholic – to make his argument convincing.
Nevertheless, the English king, Henry VII, saw the merit of trying to detach Scotland from the French alliance. He therefore proposed that James should marry his daughter, Margaret. Negotiations dragged on, but were eventually successful. The marriage took place and the two countries signed a Treaty of Perpetual Peace.
William Dunbar, the greatest poet of the Scots Renaissance, celebrated this union of the Thistle and the Rose.
The Thistle ‘keepit with a bush of spears’ is told by Dame Nature that it must love and protect ‘the fresshe Rose of colour reid and white’. More- over, Dunbar declared that the Rose was of more illustrious lineage than the Lily, the emblem of France – clearly advice to cleave to England and abandon the Auld Alliance.
The marriage seems to have been no better and no worse than most royal ones. James didn’t give up his mistresses, but he did agree to shave off his red beard when his young wife said she didn’t like it. They had five children, only one of whom – the future James V – survived childhood.
Yet in the long term the marriage was significant, because it was James’ and Margaret’s great- grandson, James VI, who would inherit the English crown and unite the two countries in 1603. No one, however, would have expected this then, for Henry VII had a male heir.
Henry VII’s death and the accession of Henry VIII in 1509 made things more difficult for James.
Henry VII had tried to promote England’s interests by peaceful means. His son, young, energetic, boastful and fundamentally stupid, was more ambitious. He was eager to pursue an aggressive foreign policy against England’s old enemy, France, even reviving the absurd English claim to the French throne.
More seriously still, he was allied by marriage to France’s continental rival, Spain, and he signed up willingly to the alliance which the Pope was forging against France, coming together with Spain in what was cynically styled ‘the Holy League’.
This put James in an awkward position. He wrote to the Pope, accusing him of dividing Christendom by his Holy League rather than uniting it against the infidel.
There were English provocations, Scottish ships being boarded and seized by English sailors acting ‘in the name of the Holy Father’. James contemptuously told the English ambassador that his master, Henry, was lucky to have found an obliging Pope whose interests chimed so well with his own ambition.
He renewed the alliance with France, but throughout the summer of 1513 worked hard in an attempt to arrange a negotiated settlement. He
told the English ambassador he wanted to remain at peace with England. All that was necessary was for his brother-in-law to abandon his plans for war with France.
BUT Henry was determined to have his war (which he would then characteristically make a mess of). James was forced into an intolerable position. Either he stood aside, deserting his traditional ally, which would mean a humiliating loss of face – or he took the risk of war.
Reluctantly, despite opposition from some members of his council, he opted for war. There was, after all, the danger that if Henry’s French war was successful, he might then turn on Scotland, even if James had remained neutral. One can sympathise with his dilemma.
The Flodden campaign was intended to be a diversion, no more than that. It turned out, as we know, to be a disaster. Neverthe- less, despite the king’s death in battle, the huge loss of life and the scale of the defeat, the immediate consequences were less terrible than at first feared.
Edinburgh’s fortifications were strengthened by the building of the Flodden Wall; but there was no English invasion, the victorious army, mostly composed of reservists or feudal levies, being only too eager to return home.
In the long term, there is evidence of a loss of confidence, accentuated perhaps by the fact that the new king, James V, was a child; and the years before he reached his majority were marked by quarrels over the regency and struggles for the control of the young king’s person.
But it is also clear that there was an intensification of the argument about the direction which Scottish foreign policy would take, whether to adhere to the Auld Alliance or reach an accommodation with England.
James V himself would opt for the former course. Both his wives were French and, with good reason, he distrusted and disliked his English uncle, Henry VIII.
Moreover, when the Reformation disturbed the balance of power in Europe and provoked an intellectual and spiritual crisis, James rejected Henry’s urging to follow his example and reject papal authority. He did, however, take advantage of his loyalty to Rome by extracting concessions from the Pope which gave him an unprecedented control over the Catholic Church in Scotland.
THERE was intermittent warfare on the Border as Henry tried to put the pressure on his independent-minded nephew – but when James V died, suddenly and unexpectedly, a few days after his army was defeated in a skirmish on Solway Moss, the issue of Scotland’s future orientation was still undetermined.
It would be resolved in the follow- ing quarter century. If Scotland remained a Catholic country, the French alliance would hold. If the Reformers won and Scotland became Protestant, then it would come into the English sphere of influence.
The situation was made more complicated by the decision to reject Henry’s proposal that James V’s daughter, the young Queen Mary, should marry his son Edward – and instead send her to France, where she would marry the Dauphin Francis.
But the Reformers triumphed, and when Mary returned to Scotland in 1561 after the death of her first husband, she came back to a Protestant country, whose spiritual leader John Knox was described by the historian Gordon Donaldson as ‘ the greatest Angliciser i n our history’.
Mary’s subsequent failure and flight to imprisonment and death in England settled the matter. Henceforth, Scotland would be an English ally, even a satellite, without an independent foreign policy. So the scene was set for James VI and the Union of the Crowns.
He would have been unacceptable to England and its parliament if Scotland had remained a Catholic state allied to France. It is arguable to what extent this was a consequence of James IV’s venture which ended at Flodden.
ONE can speculate, but only in the realm of counterfactual history, how different things might have been if Flodden had been a victory – as it should have been, for the odds were heavily in favour of the Scots – and if James IV, the most brilliant and perhaps most capable of the Stuarts, had lived for another 20 years.
Such speculation may be futile. Nevertheless, engaging in it persuades one that Flodden was not only a disaster in itself, but a pivotal moment in our national history.