House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty by Robert Hutchinson Read Free Book Online

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. 63 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. 64
    After three hours of fierce fighting, the low-born men in the rear of the Scottish phalanxes instinctively sensed the battle was going against them. One by one, then group by group, they began to melt away as terror and sudden cowardice, like an epidemic, swept through the ranks.
    The Scots’ division on the right, 6,000 lightly armed Highlanders under the Earls of Lennox and Argyle, prepared to enter the fray to support their king’s attack. But they were ambushed by Surrey’s fifth battle, under Sir Edward Stanley, who had clambered up the steep north-east slope of Branxton Hill unobserved. A volley of arrows and a charge by Stanley’s bill men routed them and they, too, panicked and fled the field.
    As the Scots streamed away, Surrey was uncertain whether victory was truly within his grasp.
    Before nightfall, he ordered his scouts to discover whether any of his enemies had rallied and if he faced another battle the next morning. The Scots were gone, many fleeing headlong back into their homeland across the Tweed at Coldstream. But some English scavengers looted the Scottish camp on Flodden Edge and found plentiful supplies of mutton, beef,