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(4) The men of Cheshire and Lancashire owned as their chief

leader

'the man

From whom true valour fairly springs.

Whose worthy praise and prowess great

Whose glorious fame shall never blin,

Nor Neptune ever shall forget

What praise he hath left to his king.'

So the ballad-writer (who is apparently a Lancashire man) glorifies his hero

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Sir Edward Stanley is a younger son of that Thomas, lord Stanley, who married the countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII., and whose opportune desertion on the field of Bosworth gave the crown of England to his step-son. In the stormy time of the Wars of the Roses the Stanleys, now Yorkist, now Lancastrian, had by no means steered with so even a keel as the Howards, between which family and their own there was much jealousy and dislike. But they had now settled down into fairly loyal subjects of the reigning dynasty, and the devotion with which they were served by the men of Lancashire and Cheshire made their representative Sir Edward an important person in the army.16

15 Battle of Flodden, cccxxxvii. and cccxxxviii.

16 Perhaps the reader who is generally accustomed to see only the poetical side of the battle of Flodden may be not unwilling to hear what, in plain prose, was the pay of the English combatants. In the Calendar of State Papers (No. 4,375) we have the 'Account of Edward Benstead, late Treasurer of the Wars of the King's Army in the North under Thomas, Earl of Surrey, Treasurer and Marshal of England, Lord Lieutenant and Captain-general of the said army of monies received and paid for the expenses of the army for 84 days from 4 August to 27 October 1513.'

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Paid for wages coats and conduct money for the retinue of the Earl of Surrey for one month beginning 4 August: viz. for 500 coats of white and green at 4s. each.

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MOVEMENTS OF THE HERALDS.

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Having thus described some of the chief leaders in either host I will return to the story of the manoeuvres preceding the battle.

It was on Sunday, the 4th of September, that Lord Surrey sent Rouge Cross, poursuivant at arms, to King James at Ford castle to complain of his breach of the oath which he had sworn to the king of England when peace was made between the two countries; to offer him battle, and to desire him as he was a king and a great prince that he would of his lusty and noble courage consent thereunto and tarry for the same.' Rouge Cross was also charged with a special commission as to Ford castle and its lord. If James would forbear to overthrow the castle and would restore its lord, Sir William Heron, at that time a prisoner in Scotland, Surrey would restore four Scottish captives: Lord Johnston, two Homes, and William Carr. Further, the admiral sent a private message, avouching himself the author of the death of Andrew Barton, the Scottish admiral, and prepared to justify the deed on any member of the Scottish host save the king himself.

On the 5th of September (Monday) Surrey marched to Bolton in Glendale, about six miles west of Alnwick, and there encamped for the night.

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On the 6th of September (Tuesday) no Rouge Cross returns to the English general, but instead, there appears at the outposts a harolde of the Scottish king called Ilaye.' This harolde' is detained two or three miles from the camp in order that he may not view the army, and when he delivers his message it is to the effect that if Lord Surrey will justify his message by accepting battle that is the thing which will be the most to the comfort and joy of the king of Scots. As for Ford castle the king will make no promise of any kind nor will he restore Sir William Heron; and the four Scottish prisoners he himself is come in person to redeem by dint of war.' Friday is proposed as the day of battle and accepted by Surrey. This appears to be the one fixed point to which all these messages and counter messages converge. On Friday, the 9th of September, both parties are bound in honour to meet one another in battle, come what may. Rouge Cross is set free and returns in haste to the English army: Ilay to the Scottish. The defiances of heralds are over and the manoeuvring of armies begins.

6

On the same day (6th September) Lord Surrey marches fourteen miles northward to Wooler Haugh, thus leaving the valley of the Aln and entering the valley of the Till. Meanwhile-on what day we are not informed -- James IV. has encamped his host on the heights of Flodden, one of the last spurs of the Cheviots, a magnificent position, but, as Lord Surrey pathetically remarks, more like a fortress than anything else.'17 Here he remains, splendidly posted, with ordnance all round the lower part of the hill. His army is well supplied with all sorts of provisions; the beer is so excellent that the English who captured it before the week was over would not have believed that it was so good had they not tasted and viewed it to their great refreshing.' But it is still raining incessantly, and possibly the Scots on their bleak hill top have less shelter from the rain than the English in their valley. The distance between the two armies is nearly six miles as the crow flies,' a good deal more, doubtless, by any practicable road.. It is important to notice this, because some of the chroniclers much understate the distance18 and thereby attribute to the Scottish king a greater power of watching the movements of the enemy than, in those days before Galileo's invention of the telescope, he can possibly have possessed.

Thus far the invasion has prospered. King James has taken some important fortresses (no one who knows the story of Norham or marks

17 The position is thus described in the ballad (ccccix, ccccx.) :—

'Even on the height of Flodden Hill

Where down below his ordnance lay,
So strong that no man's cunning skill
To fight with him could find a way.
Such mountains steep, such craggy hills,
His army on one side did not lose,
The other side, great grizzly gills,

Did fence about with mire and moss.'

18 For instance, Hall, whose account of the battle is generally accurate, says that Surrey set forward to a place called Wooller Hawgh, and there lodged on Tuesday night, three littell miles from the king of Scots.' In fact Wooler

Haugh is quite six miles from the heights of Flodden. And again, on Thursday the Englishmen 'took their field under a wood side called Barmer [Barmoor] wood, two myle from the Scots.' But the map shows that the present village of Barmoor is six miles in a straight line from Flodden heights, and that the English camp could not be pitched more than a mile on the Flodden side of that village. The ballad is more accurate than Hall:

The total army did ensue

And came that night to Wooler Haugh,
There th' English lords did lodge their host,
Because the place was plain and dry,

And was within six miles at most

Whereas their enemy's host did lie.'-ccccl-ccccli.

LORD SURREY'S FLANK MARCH.

17

its present ruins will deem its capture a trifling achievement): though he has not marched far into English territory, still he is within it, splendidly posted and well provisioned, and the English lieutenantgeneral, ill-supplied with provisions and munitions of war, is about to be forced to give him battle with forces certainly not superior in number, perhaps greatly inferior, and with great disadvantage of position. Assuredly it was not the Scottish king but the English earl, who, in the early days of that week, anxiously pondered the military chess-board and doubted what would be the event of the game.

But by one daring manoeuvre all the conditions of the problem were to be changed, and if we may believe the writer of the ballad, the suggestion of this manoeuvre to Surrey came from an unexpected source, and was made with dramatic suddenness. Some four or five years before the time of which we are speaking, Sir Robert Ker, the Scottish warden of the middle marches, had been set upon and slain by three Englishmen, one of whom was the bastard Heron, half brother to the lord of Ford castle. Lilburn, one of the murderers, was arrested by the Scots, but Heron and his other accomplice, Starhead, escaped. However, Henry VII., who was then reigning in England, anxious not to imperil the peace which had been sealed by the marriage of James and his daughter Margaret, declared the lives of Heron and Starhead forfeit. Starhead was kidnapped, carried across the border, and slain by Sir Robert Ker's son; but Heron remained for some years in hiding, and the English king, loving peace apparently more than justice, gave his brother, Sir William Heron, as a prisoner into the hands of the Scots. At length in the year 1511 news arrived that the bastard Heron had died of the pestilence, somewhere between Newark and Northampton, and doubtless Henry VIII. and his councillors congratulated themselves that a troublesome affair was thus well ended.

But now a horseman clothed in scarlet, and with his visor down, came riding into the camp, and dashed into the presence of Lord Surrey. Having fallen on his knees before the general and prayed for the preservation of his life, he was bidden to utter his name, and the crime for which he sought forgiveness. He declared himself to be guiltless of treason, but not of disobedience to his king.

VOL. XVI.

с

And as for murthering Englishmen,

I never hurt man, maid, or wife,
Howbeit, Scots some nine or ten

At least I have bereaved of life.'-ccccxxiii.

Being further pressed, he declared himself to be the bastard Heron, and when he raised his visor all men saw that he was indeed the same. His death by the pestilence had been a tale trumped up by his servants to save him from the necessity of repairing, by the king's command, to London, and there surrendering himself to justice; and for two years the man believed to be dead had been living in hiding in his own house, his secret known to none but his wife and three servants. Now he had come, being, as he said, brought up on the borders, and knowing every foot of the country, to offer his guidance to the Earl of Surrey, guidance which was joyfully accepted by that general, and which probably changed the fortune of the campaign.

In the position which Surrey occupied on Tuesday, the 6th September, he was, as we saw, about six miles distant from the Scottish camp, and no river or important natural obstacle interposed between him and the enemy. Now, on Thursday, the 8th September, he crosses to the other side of the Till, putting that deep, though not wide, stream between him and the Scottish camp, and marches eight miles northward to Barmoor. A strange, and at first sight unintelligible, manoeuvre for a general who has pledged his word of honour to fight with the Scots on the following day. He seems, when we look at the map, to be, for no earthly object, increasing the distance between himself and his enemy. But look, not at the map, but at the face of the country, and you will soon see his motive. While he is at Wooler Haugh all his movements are, if the day be clear, pretty easily discernible by the army posted on Flodden hill. At Barmoor he has already got behind that screen of hills which stretches all round the north-eastern horizon, from Doddington to Twizell bridge, and of all his subsequent movements James must remain in hopeless ignorance.

On the eventful Friday morning (9th of September) the van of the army (which apparently was much the larger portion) under the command of the admiral, and drawing all the cannons with

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