n army
all but destitute of supplies, outmanoeuvred James, led his men unseen
behind a range of hills to a position where, if he could maintain
himself, he was upon James's line of communications, and thence marched
against him to Branxton Ridge, under Flodden Edge.

James was ignorant of Surrey's movement till he saw the approach of his
standards. In place of retaining his position, he hurled his force down
to Branxton, his gunners could not manage their new French ordnance, and
though Home with the Border spears and Huntly had a success on the right,
the Borderers made no more efforts, and, on the left, the Celts fled
swiftly after the fall of Lennox and Argyll. In the centre Crawford and
Rothes were slain, and James, with the steady spearmen of his command,
drove straight at Surrey. James, as the Spaniard Ayala said, "was no
general: he was a fighting man." He was outflanked by the Admiral
(Howard) and Dacre; his force was surrounded by charging horse and foot,
and rained on by arrows. But

"The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,"

when James rushed from the ranks, hewed his way to within a lance's
length of Surrey (so Surrey writes), and died, riddled with arrows, his
neck gashed by a bill-stroke, his left hand almost sundered from his
body. Night fell on the unbroken Scottish phalanx, but when dawn arrived
only a force of Border prickers was hovering on the fringes of the field.
Thirteen dead earls lay in a ring about their master; there too lay his
natural son, the young Archbishop of St Andrews, and the Bishops of
Caithness and the Isles. Scarce a noble or gentle house of the Lowlands
but reckons an ancestor slain at Flodden.

Surrey did not pursue his victory, which was won, despite sore lack of
supplies, by his clever tactics, by the superior discipline of his men,
by their marching powers, and by the glorious rashness of the Scottish
king. It is easy, and it is customary, to blame James's adherence to the
French alliance as if it were born of a foolish chivalry. But he had
passed through long stress of mind concerning this matter. If he
rejected the allurements of France, if France were overwhelmed, he knew
well that the turn of Scotland would come soon. The ambitions and the
claims of Henry VIII. were those of the first Edwards. England was bent
on the conquest of Scotland at the earliest opportunity, and through the
entire Tudor period England was the home a