"When he had concluded all his experiments, he decided that it was not proper to trust the safety of his bride to his favourite charger; 'so King James dismounted from him, and condescended to ride on the Queen's gentle palfrey. He mounted, and the Queen was placed on a pillion behind him.'"
The real tragedy and most interesting period of Margaret Tudor's life, is that which preceded and followed the fatal expedition to Flodden, to which the genius of Mr Aytoun has lately added such additional interest in his exquisite ballads. Miss Strickland has also been strongly moved by the same catastrophe.—
"There are traditions still current in the neighbourhood of the beautiful palatial ruin of Linlithgow relative to her parting with James IV.
"Near the King's bed-chamber, and a beautiful little apartment overlooking the lake, supposed to be his dressing-room, is a turnpike stair, at the corner of the east side of the quadrangle erected by James IV. This leads to a lofty turret or mirador, called by popular tradition 'Queen Margaret's Bower.' It is surrounded by a stone bench or divan, and had once a small stone table in the centre. Here the Queen spent in tears the live-long summer's day on which her husband left her to march against England. Here, too, she is said to have passed 'the weary night of Flodden fight,' expecting news of the engagement, which came at last, but too soon.
"The fatal field of Flodden not only made Queen Margaret a widow, but rendered Scotland desolate and almost desperate. All the hope that remained to the people of averting the fury of Henry VIII., and the cruelty of his successful general, centred solely in the Queen—being founded on the near relationship of herself and their infant King to the southern sovereign."
"The Queen convened such of the nobility as survived the red field of Flodden to meet the clergy at Perth immediately. So prompt were all their proceedings, that the young King was crowned at Scone, near that city, within twenty days of his father's death. It was called the Mourning Coronation; for the ancient crown of Scotland being held over on the baby-brow of the royal infant, most of the witnesses and assistants of the ceremony burst into an 'infectious passion' of sobs and tears. They wept not only their own recent losses on the battle-field, but their late monarch, 'who was,' as Buchanan says, albeit no commender of kings, 'dear to all men while living, and mightily lamented by his people at his death.'
"When the first agony of grief was abated at the loss of the King and the terrible slaughter of the best of the nobility and gentry who fought in the serried phalanx of spears about his person, the discovery was made by the Scottish people that no other injury was like to accrue from Flodden fight. It was, to all intents and purposes, one of those bad expenditures of human life called a drawn battle. Had it taken place on Scottish ground, it would have been reckoned another Bannockburn: the English must have retreated, (for they did so on their own ground,) and the Scots would have retained possession of the field. As it was, the English had the moral advantages of being an invaded people; and, as such, their success in making a great slaughter of those who were arrayed in battle on their soil, redounded more to their true glory than is the case in most great victories. But they did not purchase it easily. Stark and stiff as James IV. lay under heaps of slain, he kept possession of that well-stricken field. The despatch of Lord Dacre clearly proves that when the English left the field at nightfall, they were ignorant to whom the victory belonged. Then the Homes and other Border chieftains plundered the dead at their leisure; their countrymen strongly suspected that they slew their King, and turned the scale of victory against their countrymen. There is the more probability in this supposition when it is remembered how inflexibly James IV. had maintained justice on his Borders—therefore he had honestly won the enmity of those rapacious septs.
"Lord Dacre made an excursion of observation, with a party of cavalry, in the morning after the battle of Flodden, to ascertain who possessed the field; he saw the King of Scotland's formidable train of brass cannon dominant over the scene, but mute and motionless; the artillerymen gone; the Scottish cannon and the silent dead were solely in possession of the battle-ground. The thickest heaps cumbered it on the spot where the royal James and his phalanx had fought; the breathless warriors lay just as death had left them, for the marauding Borderers had not dared to pursue their occupation of stripping and plundering in the full light of day."
Queen Margaret, however, did not remain long inconsolable; she had too much of the disposition of her brother Henry VIII. in her to remain long without a husband; and she fixed her eyes on a handsome youth, the Earl of Angus, whom she soon afterwards married, to the no small annoyance of her brother and his subjects. Her marriage with him gave occasion to the following pleasing verses by Gawin Douglas, the uncle of the nobleman thus honoured by the smiles of royalty:—