“The stubborn spearmen still made good
   Their dark impenetrable wood,”

when James rushed from the ranks, hewed his way to within a lance’s length of Surrey (so Surrey writes), and died, riddled with arrows, his neck gashed by a bill-stroke, his left hand almost sundered from his body.  Night fell on the unbroken Scottish phalanx, but when dawn arrived only a force of Border prickers was hovering on the fringes of the field.  Thirteen dead earls lay in a ring about their master; there too lay his natural son, the young Archbishop of St Andrews, and the Bishops of Caithness and the Isles.  Scarce a noble or gentle house of the Lowlands but reckons an ancestor slain at Flodden.

Surrey did not pursue his victory, which was won, despite sore lack of supplies, by his clever tactics, by the superior discipline of his men, by their marching powers, and by the glorious rashness of the Scottish king.  It is easy, and it is customary, to blame James’s adherence to the French alliance as if it were born of a foolish chivalry.  But he had passed through long stress of mind concerning this matter.  If he rejected the allurements of France, if France were overwhelmed, he knew well that the turn of Scotland would come soon.  The ambitions and the claims of Henry VIII. were those of the first Edwards.  England was bent on the conquest of Scotland at the earliest opportunity, and through the entire Tudor period England was the home and her monarch the ally of every domestic foe and traitor to the Scottish Crown.

Scotland, under James, had much prospered in wealth and even in comfort.  Ayala might flatter in some degree, but he attests the great increase in comfort and in wealth.

In 1495 Bishop Elphinstone founded the University of Aberdeen, while (1496) Parliament decreed a course of school and college for the sons of barons and freeholders of competent estate.  Prior Hepburn founded the College of St Leonard’s in the University of St Andrews; and in 1507 Chepman received a royal patent as a printer.  Meanwhile Dunbar, reckoned by some the chief poet of Scotland before Burns, was already denouncing the luxury and vice of the clergy, though his own life set them a bad example.  But with Dunbar, Henryson, and others, Scotland had a school of poets much superior to any that England had reared since the death of Chaucer.  Scotland now enjoyed her brief glimpse of the Revival of Learning; and James, like Charles II., fostered the early movements of chemistry and physical science.  But Flodden ruined all, and the country, under the long minority of James V., was robbed and distracted by English intrigues; by the follies and loves of Margaret Tudor; by actual warfare between rival candidates for ecclesiastical place; by the ambitions and treasons of the Douglases and other nobles; and by the arrival from France of the son of Albany, that rebel brother of James III.