"The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood"
under a rain of arrows, against the charging knights, and the terrible bill strokes of the English infantry.
The king was not content to remain within the hedge of spears. Running out in advance, he fought his way to "within a lance's length" of Surrey, so Surrey wrote; his body was pierced with arrows, his left arm was half severed by a bill-stroke, his neck was gashed, and he fell. James was not a king to let his followers turn his bridle-rein; he fought on foot, like a Paladin, and died with honour. His nobles advanced; the spears defended the dead, and the bodies of thirteen of his peers and of two Bishops who, like Archbishop Turpin at Roncesvaux, died in harness, lay round him. An episcopal ring with a great sapphire, found at Flodden, is in the Gold Room at the British Museum.
Such was the great sorrow of Scotland; there is perhaps not a family of gentle blood in the Lowlands which did not leave a corpse on Branxton slope, where
"Groom fought like noble, Squire like Knight,
As fearlessly and well."
As matter of plain history, this honourable defeat was to my country what, as matter of legend, the rear-guard action of Roncesvaux has been to France. It was too late in literary times for an epic like the Chanson de Roland; the burden of the song was left for the author of Marmiott. But Flodden, till my own boyhood, left its mark on Scottish memories. When any national trouble befell us, people said, "There has been nothing like it since Flodden."
