“Far on the left, unseen the while,
   Stanley broke Lennox and Argyle”;

on the English right, Sir Edmund Howard fell back before the charge of the Scottish borderers, who, forthwith, devoted themselves to plunder.  The centre was fiercely contested; the Lord High Admiral of England, a son of Surrey, defeated Crawford and Montrose, and attacked the division with which James himself was encountering Surrey, while the archers on the left of the English centre rendered unavailing the brave charge of the Highlanders.  With artillery and with archery the English had drawn the Scottish attack, and the battle of Flodden was but a variation on every fight since Dupplin Moor.  Finally the Scots formed themselves into a ring of spearmen, and the English, with their arrows and their long bills, kept up a continuous attack.  The story has been told once for all: 

  “But yet, though thick the shafts as snow,
   Though charging knights as whirlwinds go,
   Though bill-men ply the ghastly blow,
     Unbroken was the ring;
   The stubborn spearmen still made good
   Their dark impenetrable wood,
   Each stepping where their comrade stood
     The instant that he fell. 
   No thought was there of dastard flight;
   Link’d in the serried phalanx tight
   Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
     As fearlessly and well;
   Till utter darkness closed her wing
   O’er their thin host and wounded king.”

No defeat had ever less in it of disgrace.  The victory of the English was hard won, and the valour displayed on the stricken field saved Scotland from any further results of Surrey’s triumph.  The results were severe enough.  Although the Scots could boast of their dead king that

  “No one failed him; he is keeping
   Royal state and semblance still”,

they had lost the best and bravest of the land.  Scarcely a family record but tells of an ancestor slain at Flodden, and many laments have come down to us for “The Flowers of the Forest”.  But, although the disaster was overwhelming, and the loss seemed irreparable at the time, though the defeat at Flodden was not less decisive than the victory of Bannockburn, the name of Flodden, notwithstanding all this, recalls but an incident in our annals.  Bannockburn is an incident in English history, but it is the great turning-point in the story of Scotland; the historian cannot regard Flodden as more than incidental to both.

When James V succeeded his father he was but one year old, and his guardian, in accordance with the desire of James IV, was the queen-mother, Margaret Tudor.  Her subsequent career is one long tale of intrigue, too elaborate and intricate to require a full recapitulation here.  The war lingered on, in a desultory fashion, till May, 1515.  Lord Dacre ravaged the borders, and the Scots replied by a raid into England; but there is nothing of any interest to relate.  From