Henry VIII, Part Two

Henry VIII made Scottish blood boil when he claimed to be the overlord of Scotland. When England went to war with France, Scotland was forced by the Auld Alliance (her mutual defense pact with France) to attack England from the north. Relations between Scotland and England were (and continue to be) tenuous at the best of times, and Henry’s pompous rhetoric didn’t incline James IV of Scotland to seek a peaceful solution to the present difficulties. The Scottish king declared war on her long-time nemesis, and Pope Leo X – in cahoots with England against France – threatened James with ecclesiastical censure if he didn’t relent in breaking the last Scottish peace treaty with England. Rather than budge, James stepped up his game: he sent Scottish ships to bolster Louis XII’s French navy. James was excommunicated for increasing the hostilities, but he was unfazed; a war was on, and he had an ace in his deck: the Great Michael, one of the largest oceangoing vessels ever built.

The Scottish Great Michael 

The four-masted Great Michael was named after the Archangel of the Bible, and it displaced one thousand tons, carried twenty-four guns on the broadside, one basilisk forward and two aft, and thirty smaller guns. Her oaken walls were ten feet thick, and she had a complement three hundred sailors, one hundred twenty gunners, and close to a thousand soldiers. The Great Michael was originally commissioned to support a Scottish crusade against the Ottoman Empire to reclaim Palestine for Christendom; a ship as mighty as the Great Michael would be needed to offset Ottoman dominance in the Mediterranean. These plans changed when their commitments in the Auld Alliance forced their hand in a renewed ‘crusade’ against England. The Great Michael – along with the Margaret and James – were tasked with raiding English shipping before saddling up with the French navy. The commander of the squadron, James Hamilton, the 1st Earl of Arran, decided on easier pickings in Ireland. After plucking good loot in the western isles, the Scottish convoy ignored English shipping and sailed straight for their French compatriots. 

Back in the British Isles, James was planning a land invasion of northern England. Henry was besieging Therouanne when a Scottish herald delivered a letter from the Scottish king. James implored Henry to back off from attacking France, which was a blatant violation of their previous treaty. Meeting the herald in his tent, Henry declared that James had no right to summon him; furthermore, he ought to be England’s ally rather than enemy, since James was married to Henry’s sister Margaret. He added, ‘And now, for a conclusion, recommend me to your master and tell him if he be so hardy to invade my realm or cause to enter one foot of my ground, I shall make him as weary of his part as ever was a man that began any such business!’ Henry’s ego, bolstered by his recent victory at the skirmish of the Spurs, seethed in his response – but, as it were, if Scotland invaded, it would be left to his Regent, Queen Catherine, to deal with the threat. He’d set up a northern English army in case of any such eventuality, and he trusted the defense of England to their skills. Henry, for his part, wouldn’t dare leave French soil and jeopardize his lofty ambition of seizing the French crown.

an array of late medieval/early modern artillery

James used vengeance for the murder of a Warden of the Scottish East March who’d been killed by John ‘The Bastard’ Heron in 1508 as pretext for his invasion of England, and he gathered an army of thirty thousand men supplemented with artillery. His ‘artillery train,’ pulled by borrowed oxen, included five ‘modern’ cannons from Edinburgh Castle as well as twelve ‘vintage’ culverins. King James IV, flanked by the standards of St. Margaret and St. Andrew, spearheaded the invasion. England wasn’t unprepared: Henry had engineered an army with artillery in northern England to counter any such hostile movements, and James – according to a sense of outdated-but-not-yet-extinguished chivalry – gave the English a month’s heads-up of his planned invasion, giving the English time to dig out the banner of Saint Cuthbert from Durham Cathedral (the banner had been carried by the English in victories against the Scots in 1138 and 1346, and the soldiers considered it a good luck talisman). The Earl of Surrey, receiving news of the Scottish march, bolstered the defenses by assembling more troops and joining those already staged in the north. When Queen Catherine heard about the invasion, she ordered Thomas Lovell to raise an army in the Midland counties and instructed him to reinforce Surrey’s forces. 

The Scots took a string of lightly-defended English castles on their jubilant march south. At Ford Castle, the Scottish leaders parleyed with the English; neither were willing to turn tail and run, so they began planning an official Day and Time to decide the course of the campaign by feat of arms. As they were working to pin things down, the Earl of Surrey moved his forces north of the Scots, cutting off their retreat; the Scots had to move their camp two miles to Branxton Hill, where their route of retreat wouldn’t be jeopardized. The armies closed in on each other, and Surrey sent a messenger to James to inquire about his readiness to play; James answered that they’d start the game at noon. 

an artist's rendering of soldiers from both sides of Flodden

An hour before the allotted time, English soldiers and artillery crossed the nearby Twizel Bridge to get into position. James, ever chivalric, decried suggestions of firing his artillery against the vulnerable English trotting across the bridge. The Scots, divided into five formations atop Branxton Hill, allowed the English – divided into two ‘battles’ with two wings – to form up on the water-logged, marshy plain below. James patiently allowed the English to make themselves good and ready, and then he ordered the Scottish host to begin descending the hill – and thus abandoning a prime defensive position. The English, seeing the Scots marching their way, began moving across the plain to meet them. 

The Scottish host descends towards the English on the plain

Most of the Scottish soldiers, numbering around thirty thousand, carried pikes (basically long spears) into battle; the English, numbering a little less at twenty-six thousand, wielded bills (a polearm with a hooked blade at the end). As the armies marched towards each other, the artillery from both sides opened fire. Because the Scottish artillery was situated atop Branxton Hill, their shots flew over the heads of the incoming English; the English artillery, parked on the plain, was able to scour the hill with plunging fire – and they made a mess of the Scottish advance. Though English longbowmen fired into the enemy soldiers coming down the hill, by this point armor had evolved so that most arrows were deflected or neutered; only a well-placed shot could kill or maim. The advanced armor, however, stood no match against artillery fire, and the English cannonballs gouged the hillside in washes of blood and body parts. The Scottish, seeing their shots shooting over their enemies’ heads, and suffering the attrition of artillery fire amid their ranks, grew concerned – and concern is never a boost in battle. 

a vicious contest between Scottish pikes and English bills

When the two sides met at the base of the hill, the English had the edge – and they continued to have the edge, due in no small part to the fact that their bills were far more lethal in the melee than the Scottish pikes. The pikes – described by a contemporary as ‘keen and sharp spears five yards long’ – didn’t fare well in the hilly terrain. The pike’s lethality came by creating an organized ‘hedge’ or wall of spear-points against the enemy, not unlike the phalanx of the ancient world. When pikemen presented a united front, only the bravest and luckiest soldiers could get through them. At Flodden, however, the Scots had become ragged in their descent down the hill, and the artillery fire had thinned their ranks and broken their cohesion. As the two sides came together, the English with their bill-hooks had the distinct advantage; those pikemen who were able to get a hedge of spears up were dismayed when the bills’ hooked blades were used to knock the pikes aside or to even tear them from the hands of their wielders. 

The first Scottish soldiers, led by high-ranking Scottish earls, were quickly repulsed and slain. As the two sides melded into one, the artillery fire slackened: the Scottish cannon weren’t hitting anything regardless, and the English didn’t want to throw metal into their own ranks. The English chronicler Edward Hall describes the vicious hand-to-hand fighting at the foot of the hill, saying that it ‘was cruel, none spared other, and the King himself fought valiantly.’ The King he refers to, of course, was James IV, as Henry VIII was across the Channel in France; and though James fought valiantly, he couldn’t steal victory from the jaws of defeat, and those very jaws closed around him. James was fatally wounded by an English arrow and the strike of a bill, and he died within a spear’s length of the Earl of Surrey. At James IV’s death, the meager Scottish resistance broke. Because no clear lines of retreat had been marked out, and because most of the Scottish officers were dead or dying on the field, the retreat devolved into a rout, and many were slain by marauding English cavalry. The Scottish artillery was abandoned, the gunners fleeing for their lives, so the English claimed the cannon and culverins as their own. The Bishop of Durham, laying eyes upon the booty, claimed a group of culverins called the ‘seven sisters’ were the finest artillery pieces he’d ever seen. The army treasurer counted seventeen captured guns worth 1700 marks. Defeating the Scots and slaying their king was a good ending, but the booty made it all the more worth celebrating. The Scots, of course, weren’t celebrating; the council of Scotland sent a hurried plea for help to Denmark, where the Scottish ambassador was asked how such a crushing defeat happened. 

The ambassador blamed the late James IV for dislodging from a prime defensive position atop the hill to attack the English on marshy ground; lesser blame, but blame nonetheless, was given to Scottish inexperience (not, he made clear, English valor). The ambassador also noted, rather wisely, that James made a tragic blunder in following the chivalric medieval notion of putting leading officers in the front line; the English, in line with evolving Renaissance tactics, held their leaders back from the fray so as to better orchestrate the battle. The loss of so many Scottish officers resulted in the panicked retreat turning into a disorganized rout. The Scottish ambassador recognized that the tactics of war were changing as technology advanced, and the Battle of Flodden (or, as some call it, Branxton Hill) serves as a sort of ‘transitional piece’ between medieval and early modern warfare in the British Isles. Because the Scots and English fought in brutal hand-to-hand combat with medieval weapons, Flodden has been called the last great medieval battle in the British Isles; this was the last time that bill and pike would meet as equals on the field of battle. In 1515 Francis I of France defeated the infamous (and, according to some, invincible) Scottish pikemen at the Battle of Marignano by using a combination of heavy cavalry and artillery. The days of medieval warfare were truly drawing to a close.