THE SCOTTISH CHIEFS.

9

Archbishop of Canterbury among us, and could then be found among the staunchest of the warriors in the terrible mêlée round his father's banner. The short-sighted bookish lad, the favourite pupil of Erasmus, with all his Stuart courage, must have felt himself ill prepared to cope with the crushing English bills, the fast-flying English arrows on that dreadful September afternoon.11 The other nobleman of whom I will here make mention is Alexander Home or Hume,12 the lord chamberlain of Scotland. He was a great border-lord, from his castle being just on the other side of the Tweed. He was apparently an impetuous and dashing soldier, and at the very outbreak of the war had led a band of 8,000 marauders into England, but, on his return, with his plunder, had been overtaken by Sir William Bulmer, and his men having been sorely galled by the English archers, he had been forced to fly, leaving his banner and his brother Sir George in the hands of the enemy. But notwithstanding this proof of his zeal for Scotland, there was a suspicion (probably quite unfounded) that on the day of the fight he did not stand loyally by Scotland's king. It is true that in later years he was found on the side of the English faction in the intrigues which then distracted the kingdom, and that he was eventually put to death as a traitor; but of disloyalty to James on this day of battle there is no proof.

Now let us turn to the English army and learn the names of some of its chief commanders. General-in-chief and lord lieutenant of the north, as has been already said, is Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey. 'An old cruiked carle in a chariott,' the Scottish chronicler styles him; a 'grand old man' he would nowadays be called by his enthusiastic countrymen. Though just verging on the seventieth year of his age, he shares with his sons the labours and dangers of the campaign, and by toilsome marches through miry lanes, under drenching rain-storms, no less than by the terrible hand-to-hand encounter in the battlefield, he delivers England from the invader. Few are the generals

"This reflection is made by Brewer (I. 207 n.) who says Erasmus tells us that he could not read without holding his book to the very end of his nose.'

12 There is constant variety in the spelling of this name, which leads to much confusion. In Tytler's History of Scotland the index-maker has actually entered the same person under two different headings as 'Home, Lord Chamberlain,' and Hume, Alexander, of Hume, Chamberlain.' I think the right course seems to be to spell the name Home and pronounce it Hume, according to our usual fashion of pronouncing names differently from the spelling.

VOL. XVI.

B

who at any period of the world's history have won victories after sixty, and at this special time, for some reason or other, men were growing old early. As Prof. Brewer13 points out, Louis XII. died a complete wreck at fifty-three, Charles V., an abdicated king, died in his cloister at fifty-nine; Wolsey, who was 'an old man broken with the storms of State' even before his fall, died at fifty-five: Henry VII., a wasted and emaciated old man, died at fifty-two completely worn out in mind and body. The fearful excitement through which men had passed told heavily upon them. Like men who had struggled and buffeted for life in a stormy sea, they saved it only to drag out a few weary years on dry land.' All this makes the skill, courage, and endurance of the almost septuagenarian Surrey the more remarkable.

But why, it will naturally be asked, is this old man, head of the house of Howard, saluted only with the title of Earl of Surrey, which is usually borne by younger men, the heirs apparent of the Dukes of Norfolk? Even the inferiority of rank is an honour, for it tells of faithfulness and loyalty. Consistently Yorkist all through the troublous times of the Wars of the Roses, when some noble families were anxiously studying the art of timely tergiversation, the Howards left the head of their house, the ever-bold Jockey of Norfolk,' dead on the field of Bosworth. His son, our Lord Surrey, who had received that title from Richard III., was attainted and committed to the Tower by Henry VII. During Lambert Simnel's insurrection he refused to accept a release improperly offered him by the Lieutenant of the Tower, saying that he would only accept his freedom from the king who had ordered his imprisonment. The evident fidelity of the man attracted the new king's attention, and Henry VII. being determined to have Thomas Howard for a friend rather than a foe, released him from the Tower, and made him successively Lieutenant of the North, Lord Treasurer, and Earl Marshal. In 1502 he escorted the young princess, Margaret Tudor, northward across the Border, and presented her to the brilliantly armed knight who was about to make her his wife-that very James IV. whom Surrey is now about to meet in far different fashion, and whom he hopes to make as sorry as he is himself for letting him from the French war.' It is anticipating our story a little, to mention that in the next year, after the battle 13 Reign of Henry VIII. i. 74, n. 1.

EARL OF SURREY AND HIS FAMILY.

11

of Flodden, the Earl of Surrey received his father's forfeited title of Duke of Norfolk as a reward for his glorious victory.

As the Earl of Surrey (for so we must continue to call him) was twice married, and left several children, it will make the narrative clearer to introduce here a portion of the Howard pedigree :

I do not want to trouble you with more genealogical details than I can help, but by just glancing over this pedigree you will see how much that is glorious and how much that is tragical in English history connects itself with the descendants of the hero of Flodden. Two of the ill-fated queens of Henry Tudor, two lovely women who, by his order, passed from his marriage bed to the scaffold—namely, Anne Boleyn and Katharine Howard-are granddaughters of the Earl of Surrey. Lord Howard of Effingham, the victor of the Spanish

Armada, is his grandson; the great queen under whose orders he fought, who had the heart of a king, and a king of England, too,' is his great-granddaughter. Lord Surrey, the poet and courtier, father of English blank verse, and praiser of the mysterious Geraldine, is another grandson, and he, like his crowned cousin, ends his young life at the headsman's block on Tower hill. So, too, does his son Thomas, the fourth Duke of Norfolk, beheaded in 1572, on account of his treasonable schemes for rescuing and marrying Mary, Queen of Scots. Here we have the descendants of the two protagonists on Branxton moor brought into strange relations with one another. How little could James Stuart and Thomas Howard in that September afternoon of 1513, when the bills and the lances were making such fatal chasms in the ranks of the warriors around them, have dreamed that the day would come when a Howard, duke of Norfolk, great-grandson of the one, would lay down coronet and life for the love of Mary Stuart, granddaughter of the other!

sons.

The Earl of Surrey was accompanied to the field of battle by two His eldest, Thomas, lord Howard14 (who eventually succeeded him as Duke of Norfolk, and narrowly escaped execution at the very end of the reign of Henry VIII.), held at this time the office of lord high admiral, which had been conferred upon him after the death of his younger brother, Edward, who died in 1512, gallantly fighting the French in the harbour of Brest. To prevent confusion between him and his brother, it will be well to call him by his title, admiral, rather than by his name. This brother, Sir Edmund Howard (in after days father of Queen Katharine Howard), a young and somewhat inexperienced officer, had, perhaps by his father's partiality, a somewhat higher position in the army than he was strictly entitled to by his previous services.

Beside the three Howards, the officers on whom it is chiefly necessary to fix our attention are Bulmer, Tunstall, Dacre, and Stanley.

(1) Sir William Bulmer, sheriff of the bishopric of Durham, commands the troops furnished by the great prince-bishopric, and bears the banner of St. Cuthbert. All this portion of the host is

14 As he bore the courtesy title of Lord Howard, this, rather than Lord Thomas Howard, is the correct mode of designating him.

burning to avenge the injury done to the honour of St. Cuthbert by the attack on the fortress of Norham, over which his banner was waving.

(2) Closely joined with Sir William Bulmer was Sir Bryan Tunstall, 'the stainless knight.' His father had been so named by Henry VII. because of his unshaken truth and loyalty. The elder Tunstall had through all the troublous times of the civil wars remained true to the house of Lancaster, had crossed over with other Lancastrian refugees to the court of Brittany, had returned and fought for Richmond on the field of Bosworth, and again at Stoke with Martin Swart. There seems to have been a pleasant fantasy in passing on to the son the same honourable epithet (stainless') which had been borne by the father.

(3) Lord Dacre, who was the chief leader of the men of Cumberland, may perhaps be considered the English counterpart of Lord Home. Like him, a borderer who had borne a conspicuous part in the savage cut-and-thrust of border warfare, a warden of the west marches and a frequent representative of the Tudor kings at the Stuart court, he nevertheless was accused by his enemies of secret leanings to the Scottish side. I can discover nothing in his conduct, either at Flodden or in the events which followed it, to justify such a suspicion, but I think it is worth noticing that these men of the border, on either side, were not such deadly enemies as to escape the occasional imputation of being too close friends. I liken them to the 'middle party,' the moderate men in political strife, who know the real difficulties both of the attack and the defence, and who, because they cannot raise the war-cry of either party with the same unreasoning fervour which rings in the voices of the extreme men (who spent their lives far from the border and know nothing of its strength or its weakness), are in each camp looked upon with coldness and almost denounced as traitors. We note, in passing, that this borderlord, Dacre, who has his stronghold at Naworth castle, is ancestor of that well-known Bessie wi' the braid apron,' who married Belted Will' Howard, the grandson of the poet-Earl of Surrey, and thus brought the Howards to Naworth, where they still reign as Earls of Carlisle.