by Linda Porter
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THE BEGINNING OF the year 1547 saw two major departures from the European stage. In England, Henry VIII died at Whitehall Palace on 28 January, having spent the last six weeks of his life in detailed preparation for the regime that would support his heir, nine-year-old Edward. The old king had put in place a closed conciliar system that he thought would represent a balance of interests and guard against the rise of any one faction, but the truth was that his will and his plans were all too easily disregarded once his towering presence was gone. Eschewing emotional farewells with his wife and elder daughter, Henry died with none of his family present. Princess Mary and Queen Katherine Parr had spent Christmas 1546 together at Greenwich Palace but though the queen seems to have returned to Whitehall in mid-January 1547, she was kept well away from her husband by the men jockeying for position as he declined. Her expectations of the regency, a position she had filled with grace and competence in 1544 during the French war, were soon dashed when Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford and soon to be duke of Somerset, assumed the role of Protector to the boy king.
In France, the news of Henry’s death was received with satisfaction. The imperial ambassador reported that the duchess d’Étampes, long-time mistress to Francis I, ran to Queen Eleanor’s bedchamber yelling, ‘News! News! We have lost our chief enemy and the king has commanded me to come and tell you of ít.’19 Dismayed by this incursion of her rival, Eleanor, who was a sister of the emperor Charles V, at first thought this was triumphalism of a particularly nasty sort, and assumed that it was her brother who had died. Francis may have derived considerable pleasure from outliving the king of England, but he was not long for this world himself. It has been alleged that Henry VIII sent him a message from his deathbed reminding him that he, too, was mortal. If so, this proved prophetic. Within weeks of Henry’s death, Francis himself fell ill. His health had been in decline for some time but though he had lived a life of dissipation and was long thought to have succumbed to syphilis, it is now thought that his death was brought about by a serious infection of the urinary tract that attacked his kidneys and led to major organ failure. He had travelled outside Paris into the nearby countryside on a brief hunting expedition when it became obvious that he was too sick to go any farther. He died at the château of Rambouillet on the last day of March 1547, his son and heir, Henry, at his side, but without Queen Eleanor or his beloved sister, Marguerite. So of the three rulers who had dominated Europe for the first half of the sixteenth century, only Charles V was left. He would live on for another eleven years.
Henry VIII and Francis I were both commanding personalities whose rivalry encompassed Scotland and influenced the course of events there. But however personally they had viewed their relationship, their passing did not change the underlying truth that the French would continue to view Scotland as a natural ally against England, and the English, even without an adult monarch, would not abandon the idea of a marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and Edward VI, nor desist from their campaign to bring Scotland to heel by military might. In fact, over the next year, attitudes hardened as Henry II of France, young, vigorous and ambitious, saw an opportunity to impose himself more completely on Scottish politics than his father had ever done and Protector Somerset tried to smash the Scots into submission. The deaths of the two old kings, far from giving Scotland a remission, heralded a period of even more intense wrangling. Its outcome profoundly affected the northern kingdom of the British Isles and the child who was its queen.
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THE FIRST BOUT of the struggle for Scotland went to the French, though its importance has often been overlooked by historians. St Andrews Castle, on Scotland’s east coast, had been held by Cardinal Beaton’s murderers for more than a year when it was spectacularly recovered by a French naval fleet under the command of the Italian Leone Strozzi in July 1547. The English had given aid to the insurgents and attempted to maintain the castle’s fortifications, but they failed to anticipate the keenness of Henry II to strike an embarrassing blow against them. Governor Arran had tried to raise the siege of St Andrews using Scottish forces, but perhaps concerned about the fate of his hostage son inside, his rather half-hearted attempts to deal with the rebels had come to nothing. The French fleet battered the castle into submission in six hours, a stunning victory made easier by the defection to the French king by the able cartographer and hydrographer Jean Rotz, formerly in the service of Henry VIII but overlooked by Somerset, who was a soldier rather than a sailor. This was the new king of France’s first taste of military victory and his confidence grew as a result. Carefully planned and superbly executed, the recapture of St Andrews heralded a new dynamic in Franco–Scottish relations, demonstrating Henry II’s determination to gain the upper hand in influence there and to impose his own dynastic ambitions, just as the English were trying to do with theirs. It was certainly a setback for the reformers and one in particular suffered directly. John Knox was captured by the French and consigned to the galleys, though he spent the winter on the Loire before being sent back to Scottish waters to assist in repelling further English incursions. He wrote little of his experience of French captivity subsequently, though he continued to give spiritual advice to the Protestant lords from St Andrews imprisoned in France and his anti-Catholicism became more virulent.
The loss of St Andrews was a setback for the English and Somerset began immediately to formulate an armed response. By the summer of 1547, he was in full control of Edward’s Privy Council and ruling the country on behalf of his nephew. Like other men of his background, he was both politician and soldier by training. For many years, he was admired by historians as the ‘Good Duke’, a man of principle who sought to rule wisely and was eventually undone by power-hungry enemies, most notably his one-time friend and fellow soldier John Dudley, earl of Warwick and later duke of Northumberland. But more recent assessments and analysis of what he actually achieved, and especially his manner of government, have revealed a man of limited ability and vision, increasingly autocratic in his approach, self-important and unresponsive. He certainly espoused religious reform and supported the sweeping changes that were being championed by Archbishop Cranmer and other reformers, but, like many men of his class, he had benefitted from the Reformation in terms of office and lands and the depth of his religious conviction is difficult to determine. There is no doubting, however, that his grab for power after Henry VIII’s death was single-minded and successful and his approach to Scotland ruthless in the aftermath of the loss of St Andrews. For this time he planned a full-scale land campaign rather than a series of disjointed raids. The Scots had a remarkable ability to recover from such attacks and had won a victory of their own against the English at Ancrum Moor in 1545. This rankled with Somerset and he was determined it should not be repeated. His ultimate aim, as he had intimated two years earlier, was to establish permanent fortifications north of the border, a ‘pale’ very like that which still surrounded Calais. What followed was yet another major defeat in a pitched battle for the Scots and the last conflict fought between the two countries before their union.
The battle of Pinkie (also known as Inveresk in the sixteenth century) was fought on Saturday, 10 September at Musselburgh at the crossing of the river Esk, just over six miles from Edinburgh. Sometimes characterized as the first modern battle fought on British soil, detailed accounts survive from a number of sources. The best known is that of the Englishman William Patten, who accompanied Somerset on what he termed ‘the Expedicion into Scotlande’ and was extravagant in his praise of the duke. Patten’s is a curious account, couched in the language of a zealous Protestant and full of biblical and classical allusions, as well as a virulent and contemptuous dislike of the Scots. There are also other reports, from a French Protestant in the service of John Dudley, earl of Warwick, and from the French ambassador in London, Odet de Selve, who obtained his information from the earl of Huntly, a commander of the Scottish army. Finally, there are contemporary maps of the battle arrays and th
e course of the conflict itself, rediscovered in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in the last century.
Somerset had ridden north during August 1547 to take command of an army of just under twenty thousand men, made up mostly of northern levies who mustered at Berwick. He was supported by seasoned military commanders such as the earl of Warwick and Lord Grey of Wilton, but a notable absence was his own brother, Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley, the Lord Admiral, who might have been expected to command the fleet. The relationship of the Seymour brothers was already souring and would get worse.
Whatever the reason for the younger Seymour’s omission from the Pinkie campaign, Somerset was not diverted from his purpose by family quarrels. His force, as was so often the case at the time, was not entirely English in composition: six hundred foot soldier mercenaries commanded by an Italian and two hundred arquebusiers on horseback under a Spanish captain. But though Somerset’s was the main army – and the one intended to engage the Scots – there was also a smaller group of two and a half thousand foot soldiers and horsemen in the western marches, led by Wharton, the architect of victory at Solway Moss, and by the earl of Lennox. It was intended as a feint, which was perhaps just as well as the anticipated support for Lennox from western Scotland did not materialize and many men from the area actually fought for Governor Arran. In fact, there was very little support for Somerset from within Scotland, despite assurances from the earl of Glencairn to the contrary. When it came to major confrontation with England, most Scots still put their country first.
Arran himself knew that the death of Henry VIII did not mean the end of hostilities. Having re-armed and provisioned the major castles of Edinburgh, Dunbar and Stirling during the spring and summer, by 17 August he was ready to send out letters ordering the mustering of the Scottish host. But he was sufficiently concerned by the danger of an invasion on two fronts that he made the wrong choice of mustering place. The Scots were commanded to meet at Fala, fifteen miles south-east of Edinburgh. The English, meanwhile, were advancing up the east coast, supplied by an English fleet waiting offshore, and Arran realized that he could not defend the Scottish capital unless he moved rapidly north to cut off the invaders.
He had a very substantial army. Estimates vary as to precise numbers and, as was often the case, the English tended to claim that the Scots had a far bigger force than they did. The earl of Huntly’s figure of about twenty-three thousand men is probably the most reliable, making the Scottish force larger than the English, but not overwhelmingly so. The Scottish artillery was greater in terms of numbers of guns but not in size of the weapons themselves. Neither army consisted of any great number of professional soldiers but there was nothing unusual about this. Both divided their forces into three groups, or ‘battles’, the English infantry armed with bills (the weapon that had wrought such destruction at Flodden) and pikes, which were now more frequently used. But, unlike the Scottish force, many of the English infantry were equipped with firearms. The Scots again carried pikes and were supported by several thousand archers but the lack of firearms put them at a disadvantage.
The Scots established their camp on the western side of the river Esk, giving them control of the bridge which was a key crossing point on the road to Edinburgh. Protected by marshland to the south and the river itself to the east, the camp lay behind a turf defence to protect it from artillery fire from the English fleet. They were a formidable force, but with a mindset grounded, for better or worse, in a glorious past; ‘a chivalric elite armed for battle’, as the historian Marcus Merriman described them. As well as the earl of Arran, the army was commanded by the earl of Angus, now fifty-eight years old, and the earl of Huntly, who was resplendent in a shining new suit of armour. All three men, and especially Angus, were experienced but they were put at an immediate disadvantage when the English army, approaching from Prestonpans in the east, sent out a detachment of cavalry to engage the Scottish horsemen holding the vital vantage point of Falside Hill. The pursuit after this skirmish saw eight hundred Scots captured and Lord Hume, in command of Falside, was so severely injured in a fall from his horse that he had to be taken back to Edinburgh.
What followed is the subject of dispute between English and Scottish accounts. It seems probable, however, that Somerset, believing that he had scored a notable early success but equally aware now of the strength of the Scottish position, decided to make one last pitch for the marriage of his nephew with Mary Queen of Scots. He may have promised not merely to withdraw but to pay compensation for damage and plunder. George Buchanan and Pitscottie both concur that Somerset’s offer, contained in a letter sent to the Scottish council, was kept from Arran. Whether this is true or not, it seems unlikely that the governor would have agreed, even to more generous terms. He had made his decision four years earlier and stayed true to it. Somerset now prepared for a frontal attack on the Scottish army. But before he could move he learned that Arran was advancing on him. ‘The Scots,’ wrote Patten, ‘hasted with so fast a pace that it was thought of the most part of us they were rather horsemen than footmen.’20
Arran was advancing against the advice of both Angus and Huntly. His decision may have been less bravado and more the realization that Somerset would come at the Scottish army with the fully force of his artillery. The governor’s aim was to establish himself on Falside Hill, hoping to outflank Somerset and protect the route to Edinburgh, but the ground was difficult, marshy on one side and hilly and furrowed on the other. Of greater significance in the outcome of the battle was the inescapable fact that Arran did not have enough horsemen, especially after the encounter with the English the previous day, and that those that were left to him were demoralized by their recent losses. Nevertheless, the English were still some way short of Falside Hill when the main fighting began in the late morning. Although Angus’s division had advanced ahead of the other two, the restrictions of the terrain meant that the Scottish army was becoming too densely packed together (again, reminiscent of Flodden) and the Scots soon found themselves just ‘two bow shots asunder’ from the English lines, meaning that they were well within the sort of range where artillery could inflict severe damage.
Initially, the Scottish pikemen held off the English advance led by Lord Grey of Wilton but as the English artillery fire began to rake them, the Highlanders under the earl of Argyll misinterpreted a wheeling manoeuvre by Angus as a retreat. Panic spread like wildfire, soon reaching Arran’s division. Somerset was far too seasoned a soldier not to notice what was happening to his foes. Angus strove desperately to keep the Scottish force together even after the three original battles had disintegrated. As he tried to regroup with Huntly, the latter’s men mistook Angus’s force for the English. Huntly stayed with his rearguard until he saw that the Scottish position was hopeless and then withdrew. He was subsequently taken prisoner. How and when Arran left the field is open to doubt, though the tale of his cowardice in calling for his horse and fleeing early on is one put about by his enemies and perhaps understandable given the scale of the defeat of the Scots. Angus, however, showing his powers of survival, hid in a ditch and managed to escape.
Ten thousand other Scots were not so fortunate. The rout of a broken enemy was a long-established rite of medieval warfare and Pinkie, despite its more ‘modern’ tactics, was no exception to this bloodletting. Fleeing in panic, some towards Dalkeith and others overland or along the shore to Edinburgh, the Scots were pursued and cut down over a period of about five hours. Large numbers of them drowned in the river Esk or simply dropped dead of exhaustion. The variety of miserable ends they met was chillingly described by William Patten:
Dead corpses lying dispersed abroad. Some with their legs cut off; some but ham-strung and left lying half-dead; others with the arms cut off; divers, their necks half asunder; many, their heads cloven; of sundry, the brains smashed out; some others again, their heads quite off; with a thousand other kinds of killing … And thus, with blood and slaughter of the enemy, the chase was continued.21
; Many prominent Scottish families lost one or more of their sons and heirs at Pinkie, where a generation of promise and the hope of continuity vanished almost as completely as at Flodden forty years before. The studious and rather priggish little boy who was king of England wrote to congratulate his ‘dearest uncle’ for the victory, thanking God for his support and promising to reward the earl of Warwick and the other English noblemen who had been instrumental in defeat of the Scots. It seemed as if history was repeating itself and that Scotland, utterly defenceless and broken, stood once more at the mercy of the Tudor dynasty.
Astonishingly (at least in retrospect), Somerset did not follow up his victory. He marched as far as Leith and then left for England on 18 September, little more than a week after his stunning defeat of the Scots. Like English soldiers before him in the sixteenth century, he seems to have accepted that taking Edinburgh was a move too far. He was also fixated on the idea of a series of fortified garrisons in southern Scotland that would give a permanent presence and launch point for future offensives without the apparently impossible task of occupation. The duke now embarked on a serious propaganda campaign of tracts and publications urging union between England and Scotland as the best way forward for both countries. Aimed primarily at the Protestant minority and wholly unacceptable to most Scots, it nevertheless set the tone for a debate and an alternative vision of their future that would become more urgent and divisive with the passing years. Initially, Somerset’s literary efforts probably had more effect in England, where they formed an important element in the thinking of a trusted member of his household, one William Cecil, who would later play a crucial role in Anglo–Scottish relations. Cecil was already taking an interest in the career of John Knox, who became chaplain to Edward VI. But in Scotland the opposing view, based on an appeal to patriotism, albeit with large elements of self-interest in the actions of some of the leading Scottish aristocracy, was always very powerful. In the case of the earl of Angus, it ultimately proved stronger than any monetary inducement he had received from the Tudors over the years. In February 1548, the earl defeated an English force led by Wharton and the earl of Lennox in the western Borders, effectively putting paid to Somerset’s ambitions in that part of Scotland. He and the duke hated one another.