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

cheese, and - praise be! - ale and wine. There were also four thousand feather beds.
    As the English army remained under arms that night, amidst the groans of the wounded and dying, Surrey knighted forty of his gentlemen, including his younger son, Edmund.
    Lord Howard returned to the army’s camp and sent a short note announcing the victory to Catherine of Aragon, the Queen Regent in Henry VIII’s absence in France.
    The next morning, a small force of eight hundred mounted Scots tried to snatch back the seventeen captured cannon but were seen off by a volley from the English artillery. 65
    Dawn revealed the true extent of the slaughter.
    The area at the bottom of Branxton Field was packed with thousands of Scottish dead, and their blood had tainted the Sandyford stream, itself choked with bodies, many stripped naked by night looters. The Scots army had lost around 12,000 men - just under half the host that had begun the battle. Among their dead was the king himself, his bastard son Alexander Stewart, Archbishop of St Andrews and Chancellor of Scotland, a bishop, two abbots, nine earls and fourteen barons. The Scottish aristocracy had been decimated: almost every noble family had lost a father, husband or son. 66 Estimates of the number of English dead ranged between 500 and 1,500.
    James’s body was found later that morning recognised by Dacre among the heaps of mangled corpses. The king had suffered ‘diverse deadly wounds and especially one with an arrow and another [caused] by a bill, as appeared when he was naked’. 67 His sword, dagger and turquoise ring were removed and kept by the Howards. 68 The corpse was carried off to Berwick, where it was embalmed and encased in lead. It was then taken to the Carthusian monastery at Sheen, near Richmond in Surrey, where it lay unburied for many years. 69 A bloodied piece of the king’s tabard (his coat bearing his arms) was sent to the queen as a trophy of war. 70
    On 16 September, a warlike Catherine of Aragon wrote to Henry reporting Howard’s claim of ‘the great victory that our Lord has sent your subjects in your absence’. She had sent on
    the piece of the King of Scots’ coat which John Glyn now brings. In this your grace shall see how I keep my promise, sending you, for your banners, a king’s coat.
    I thought to send himself to you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it. It should have been better for him to have been in peace than have this reward.
    All that God sends is for the best.
    Surrey wishes to know your grace’s pleasure as to the burying of the king of Scots’ body.
    Catherine also sent a slip of paper found in a dead Scotsman’s purse which contained details of ‘the instigation used by France to induce James [IV] to go to war with England’. 71 The king, she added piously, if not a trifle pompously, ‘must not forget to thank God’ for the victory.
    Henry’s campaign in France was not nearly so spectacular. Thérouanne had fallen a week after an English victory at the so-called Battle of the Spurs on 16 August, which was more a skirmish than a full-scale engagement. The king, now encamped at Tournai and awaiting its formal surrender, triumphantly sent the news of Flodden to Maximilian Sforza, Duke of Milan, his irrepressible swagger all too apparent:
    The king of Scots himself, with a great army invaded our realm of England and first took a little old town, belonging to the Bishop of Durham, already nearly in ruins and practically unfortified and on that account almost deserted.
    He then advanced four miles into our realm. There the noble lord, the Earl of Surrey, to whom we had committed the charge of repelling the Scots . . . met with them in a battle which was long and fiercely contested . . . With the Almighty . . . aiding the better cause, our forces emerged victorious and killed a great number of the enemy and many of their nobles and put the rest to flight.
    In a postscript, Henry added: ‘Since these were written, we