As best I can tell it is not permissable to talk or write about the battle of Flodden without first asking why it is not talked about more frequently? But of course there are good reasons why this calamity (a matter of perspective, I grant you) as slipped from mind. In the first place, contemporary Scotland feels less need to remember disaster. Or even, cynics might suggest, history. Secondly, for the English it was just another occasion on which they hammered the Scots. And they did it with their reserves, so to speak, commanded by the Earl of Surrey while Henry VIII was away battling the French.
Nevertheless, Flodden was a catastrophe for Scotland, the single greatest military defeat in the country’s history. Not until 1914 would the country be as sorely afflicted by martial loss as it was in autumn 1513. (The 400th anniversary commemorations were, in general, more lavish than those that have marked the 500th.)
And, of course, the contrast between the muted commemorations of Flodden’s 500th and the hoopla that will greet Bannockburn’s 700th next year is marked indeed. But as I put it in Scotland on Sunday the other week:
Something more than a king died that day. James’s Scotland had been an outward-looking country, playing its part in European affairs. Parliament had passed what we still consider the world’s first education act, decreeing that aristocratic sons receive instruction. Universities and colleges were founded. The poetry of Dunbar and Henryson – superior it became customary to note, to any English versifiers between Chaucer and Shakespeare – reflected the muscular confidence of a country on the make.
But James was trapped between honouring the auld alliance with France – itself resisting English invasion – and maintaining the Treaty of Perpetual Peace he had signed with Henry VII in 1502. That treaty had been sealed by marriage between James and Henry’s daughter Margaret in 1503. She now complained of “the unnatural spectacle of seeing my husband arrayed in mortal combat against my brother”. To no avail; as her brother, Henry VIII, invaded France in June, so her husband James prepared to invade England.
The calamity produced a shrivelled, enfeebled Scotland. The infant James V succeeded his father but the country was open to the less than tender mercies of both French and English interference. Factionalism was rife and nearly a century of instability followed. James IV’s marriage would prove consequential, however. With Elizabeth I of England childless, it was James’s marriage that made his great-grandson, James VI, the heir to the English throne.
Though there was not, as is often claimed, a “Union of the Crowns” (it being a personal rather than a formal union) it remains the case that uniting the kingdoms of Scotland and England (and Ireland) in a single body helped pave the way to eventual political union. If that was, as the Earl of Seafield described it in 1707, “the end of an auld sang” it was an ending that had its beginnings, in some respects at least, in 1503 and 1513.
No wonder Flodden stands for something more than a simple – if ghastly – military catastrophe. It was not the last battle fought between English and Scottish armies but it was the last great battle of its type. It did not close the book on Anglo-Scottish animosity, but after Flodden it was never hard to discern which side had the upper hand.
In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Flodden took on this different hue. As Scots and English collaborated in Empire, Flodden became reimagined as the last squabble between two proud nations now happily yoked together in peace and prosperity. The melancholy was touched with romance too. As Rosebery, again, put it: “And so, like the Scottish knights in 1513, we still rally round King James IV at Flodden, and while we deplore the slaughter, we pray that Scotland may remain worthy of their high example, and that she may bear in her proud bosom sons and heroes worthy of that glorious and tragic tradition.”
And perhaps that too helps explain why Flodden is so widely forgotten today. It is inconvenient and perhaps too complicated to remember it.
Except, of course, in the south. The South of Scotland, I mean. Flodden is still recalled here. In Selkirk, Hawick, Coldstream and other parts of the borderlands, the battle is still remembered every year. The men of the Ettrick Forest live on through the ancient air The Flowers o’ the Forest and in Jean Elliot’s unperishable words
I’ve heard the lilting, at our yowe-milking,
Lassies a-lilting, before the dawn o’ day;
But now they are moaning, on ilka green loaning:
The Flowers o’ the Forest are a’ wede away.
[…] Dule and wae to the order, sent our lads to the border
The English, for aince, by guile wan the day:
The Flowers o’ the Forest, that fought aye the foremost
The pride o’ our land, are cauld in the clay.
We hear nae hair lilting at our yowe-milking,
Women and bairns are heartless and was;
Sighing and moaning on ilk a green loaning
The Flowers o’ the Forest are a’ wede away.
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