The Admiral sent a galloper to bring Surrey forward; and Home and Huntly charged Edward Howard, while Dacre's Tyneside men ran, as he advanced to support Howard. The Borderers, fond of raiding each other, could never be trusted to fight each other in serious war; they were much intermarried. Brian Tunstal fell, Dacre stopped Huntly; Home's men vanished like ghosts, no man knew whither; for they appeared on the field next morning. Probably they were plundering, but "Down wi' the Earl o' Home," says the old song of the Souters of Selkirk. In the centre of the vanguard the Admiral and the Percys clashed with Crawford and Errol. Both leaders fell, and James threw the weight of his centre against Surrey. To slay that general with his own hand was the king's idea of the duty of a leader. But the English guns {054}mowed down his ranks, and the Scots could not work their French artillery. The king pressed in with Herries and Maxwell at his side; the ranks of England reeled, but the Admiral and Dacre charged James's men in flank. "Stanley broke Lennox and Argyll" on the king's right; the noble leaders fell, and the nimble Highlanders rapidly made a strategic movement in the direction of safety. Stanley did not pursue them, but fell on James's right, which now had the enemy on each flank and in front. "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 {055}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." [Illustration: 0075]