Battle of Flodden

In 1513 Henry VIII of England joined the Holy League against France and crossed the Channel to campaign in Picardy. James IV of Scotland, bound to France by the renewed Auld Alliance and to England by the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace and his marriage to Henry's sister Margaret Tudor, honored the French connection. In August he led the largest army a Scottish king had ever taken across the border, equipped with modern artillery and continental pike tactics, and took the Norham and Ford castles in Northumberland.

The English response was commanded by Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, the veteran lieutenant left to guard the north. By a flanking march Surrey placed his army between the Scots and Scotland, and on 9 September 1513 the battle was fought near the village of Branxton. The Scottish pike columns advanced downhill across ground broken by a concealed marsh; their formations lost cohesion, and in the close fighting English bills outmatched the long pikes. James fought on foot in the leading division and was killed within reach of Surrey's standard. With him died a remarkable proportion of the Scottish leadership: contemporary accounts count an archbishop, bishops and abbots, around a dozen earls, and many lords and lairds, along with thousands of common soldiers. It remains the heaviest defeat in Scottish military history.

The crown passed to James V, seventeen months old. Margaret Tudor, the widowed queen, became regent under the terms of her husband's will, the first of several unstable regencies of a long minority; she lost the office on her remarriage in 1514, and Scottish politics for the next generation turned on the contest between pro-French and pro-English factions. Henry VIII, for whom Flodden was won in absentia, gained security on his northern border but pressed no conquest of Scotland.