Near Ilus' tomb, in order ranged around,
The Trojan lines possess'd the rising ground;
The sea with ships, the fields with armies spread,
The victors rage, the dying and the dead.
Iliad, book xi.
The joy of Somerset was great on perceiving that the Scots had quitted their formidable position, and, between his fleet on one flank and his artillery on the other, were deliberately marching into a mouth of fire. He and the Earl of Warwick warmly congratulated each other, and then repaired to their posts. The earl formed his division on the slope of Inveresk hill; the duke formed his line from thence till its other flank reached the plain. The mounted arquebusiers of Don de Gamboa and the men-at-arms of Lord Grey, flushed by their victory of yesterday, formed the extreme left, while Lord Dacres commanded the seaward line.
Being armed with shorter pikes than the Scots, the long and serried array of the English looked compact and low; the sun was in their rear, and above their long lines of glittering helmets poured aslant his morning rays, in which every polished sword and point of steel flashed and sparkled brightly.
On this day the royal standard of England was borne by Sir Andrew Flammock, a gentleman of approved valour, who rode near Somerset, on a magnificently caparisoned horse, and in the centre of the whole army. This scarlet banner, with its three yellow leopards, was the mark of many an eye, the aim of many a Highland archer, and Lowland cannonier; thus the unfortunate bearer had no sinecure of his office; and on Arran saying to those about him,—
"Sirs, I would give a fair barony to have yonder standard in my hand!"
"I care not for baronies," said Florence, who rode by his side; "I care not for life itself, lord earl,—and thou shalt have the banner, if human strength can win it."
"Then," adds the vicar of Tranent, who records this episode, "ere the Lord Arran could reply, the battaile began with a mighty furie."
As the chief intention of Arran was to throw the division of the Earl of Angus—if not the whole Scottish army—between the English and their fleet, the flank which marched near the sea, became (as Somerset had foreseen) exposed to an immediate cannonade from the whole line of the English ships, sixty-four in number. The booming of their artillery echoed along the indented shore with a thousand reverberations, while the pale smoke enveloped all the line of anchored ships, from their low-waisted and high-pooped hulls, to the gaudy banners and long wavy streamers which decorated their masts; and their shot of stone or iron, bowled with fatal precision among the dense masses of the men of Fife and Mearn, making long and terrible lanes of death and mutilation—of shattered limbs and dismembered bodies. This caused a flank movement by which the whole Scottish line swerved south and westward towards the slope of Fawside Hill. On perceiving this, Somerset ordered the Lord Grey at the head of his mailed men-at-arms, and Edward Shelly with his Boulogners to charge the right wing of the Scots, to the end, that both their flanks might be driven upon the centre. With this body went the bearer of the royal standard; and true to his pledge, Florence galloped to join the right wing of the Scots, that he might be nearer his intended prize.
"St. George! St. George for England! Come on, my valiant Boulogners, my true-bred English fighting-cocks!" cried Shelly, standing in his stirrups, and waving his lance as he spurred in front of the line.
In solid squadrons, with their barbed horses making the ground shake beneath their mighty rush, the men-at-arms all clad in shining steel, with swords uplifted and their faces glowing through their barred helmets with ardour and excitement, came furiously on, their trumpets sounding, and the red cross of England waving above them. On came Edward Shelly at the head of his mounted Boulogners, the last of those "five hundred light horsemen, cloathed in blue jackets with red guards," whom King Henry had taken to Boulogne;[*] and with them came Sir Ralf Vane, Sir Thomas Darcy, and the Lord Fitzwalter, all wearing magnificent armour, streaming plumes, and gay colours, leading the column of demi-lancers, a thousand heavy horse, and sixteen hundred chosen infantry, to break that portion of the Scottish line.
[*] Vide "Relations of the Most Famous Kingdoms." 1630.
The brilliant horsemen first gained the slope of Fawside Hill, and then making a sweeping wheel to their right, like a rolling sea of shining men and foaming chargers, they rushed with tremendous fury down upon the Scottish flank. There was a sudden and a fearful shock; and again, like a rolling sea from the face of a flinty bluff, this human tide of valour was hurled back upon itself in confusion and disorder.
Foremost in the mêlée fought Florence, with his eyes fixed on the standard, and many a mounted man went down before him, till at last, with a shout of triumph, he laid his hand upon the pole, as it swayed to and fro, above the fighting and the falling.
"The standard!" cried Lord Grey; "by Heaven and King Harry's bones, let us save the standard!"
He made a blow at the left hand of Florence, who gave him a severe cut across the mouth just as his helmet flew open, and then by a wound in the neck completed his discomfiture. Sir Andrew Flammock was roughly unhorsed by Sir George Douglas; but he retained the standard, by tearing it (as he fell) from the pole, which remained in the hand of Florence as a trophy of victory.
It was at the present farm-house of Barbauchly that this encounter took place; and into its muddy ditch, back from the triple line of gleaming Scottish pikes, there rolled two hundred of Somerset's best cavaliers. Ratcliff, Clarence, and many others were slain, many more were wounded; while hundreds of riderless horses, wild with affright, fled over the field in every direction, some with their entrails hanging out, having been stabbed in the belly by the spears, the long double-edged daggers, or Tynedale knives of the Scots. "Rendered furious by their wounds, many of these chargers carried disorder into the English companies, which were thrown into such confusion (says an historian) that the Lord Grey had the greatest difficulty in extricating them and retreating."
While he drew off his discomfited cavalry to re-form them, there lingered near the Scottish line a single horseman, whose blue surcoat, trimmed with gold and slashed with scarlet, worn loosely and open above his armour, and whose lofty plume, as well as his trappings and bearing, marked him as an approved soldier and man of distinction. This was Edward Shelly, in the livery of a Boulogner. Rising in his stirrups, he thrice waved his lance aloft; and Florence, remembering their quarrel and appointed duel, rode forth at once to meet him. He had long since broken his lance; but he now couched in the fashion of one the pole of the English standard, which he still retained, and with it he rushed at full speed upon his challenger.
They met with a furious concussion; but as Shelly's horse swerved, his lance was broken in two athwart the breast-plate of Florence, whose impromptu weapon was splintered into twenty fragments on the right shoulder of the sturdy Englishman, who kept his saddle, but with difficulty. Each in a moment tossed aside the truncheon or fragment which remained in his hand, reined up his horse, and drew his sword; then, in full view of the Scottish right and of the English left wing, began a sharp hand-to-hand conflict, in which the utmost skill in the use of the bridle and sword was displayed by both combatants.
Florence, being reckless alike of life and danger, had evidently the best of it, as he drove his adversary, at every thrust and stroke, further up the hill towards the right, until they were within a bowshot of the tower of Fawside, the barbican of which was crowded by women and by the old men of the barony, who were all armed, in case of the place being attacked. It soon became evident that they recognized their young master, for shouts of
"Forth—forth, and feir nocht!" faintly reached his ear, mingled with shrill cries of alarm.
Suddenly his horse stumbled and came heavily down on its knees, throwing him prone to the earth. Ere he could rise, while a shriek burst from the women in the tower, Shelly had sprung from his horse, and throwing the bridle over his arm, placed his sword at the throat of the fallen.
"Here might I slay or capture you, Scot," said he; "but I have not forgotten your generosity on the night we met in that lonely castle of the Torwood. Here ends our quarrel; and in this field let us meet no more, unless it be that the fair one, whose name I jestingly mentioned on that night——"
"Nay, speak not of her," said Florence mournfully. "I seek not life, Master Shelly, but rather death; and from so honoured a sword as thine it were indeed more welcome!"
"Wherefore so sad?" said the Englishman. "Up, man, and be doing; for, by St. George! you Scots will have your hands full to-day. Here come our demi-lances again; away to your own band—you have not a moment to lose!"
Shelly remounted; Florence saluted him, and leaped lightly on his own horse.
"Farewell, Edward Shelly," exclaimed Florence with an emotion of enthusiasm; "thou art a soldier as generous as brave. I would rather be thy friend than thine enemy."
"To-day you have been both, fair sir," replied Shelly, as he wheeled his horse round. At that moment there came a loud whiz through the air, and struck by the ball of an arquebuse, which had been fired from the tower of Fawside, the brave Shelly fell dead from his terrified horse, which dragged him by the stirrup into the ditch where so many English were already lying killed and wounded.
Florence cast his eyes upward to the tower-head, from whence the pale light smoke was still curling. He saw the tall dark figure of a woman brandishing an arquebuse, and he knew in a moment that the hand of his stern mother had fired the fatal shot.
"She again!—oh, ruthless hand!" he muttered with a half-smothered groan; and turning his horse, galloped again to the Regent Arran.
On beholding Shelly's fall a shout of rage arose from his comrades the Boulogners, and from the long array of demi-lances, whom the Duke of Somerset once more ordered to attack the Scottish right.
"By my faith, duke, you might as well bid me charge a castle wall?" was the angry reply of the Lord Grey, from whose face and neck the blood was still streaming; but now, by the advice of the skilful Earl of Warwick, the Spanish and German arquebusiers, with a body of English archers, were ordered to assail the Scottish columns in front, while several pieces of cannon played upon one flank from Fawside Hill, and the shipping still swept the other with terrible results. The foreign auxiliaries, in ranks eight deep, poured in their heavy shot, firing over forks or rests, full into the faces of the Scottish infantry, who, by the destruction of their light cavalry on the preceding day, were without means of attacking either the cannoniers or the continental troops. Thus the battle soon became general along the whole plain, and the cry of the Scots,—
"Come on, ye dogs! ye heretics!" rose incessantly above the din of the strife; for now there was the rancorous rivalry of creed to inflame the rivalry of race, and the transmitted hatred of a thousand years. Moreover, in this engagement the English were burning to avenge the defeat of their troops at Ancrumford and Paniershaugh, where Sir Ralf Evers and many men had been cut to pieces by the Earl of Angus; and now, filled with fury on beholding the destruction of his castle and the pitiless devastation of his lands, no man in all the army of Arran on this day of blood hewed a passage further into the English host than old Claude Hamilton of Preston, who forgot all about his proffered titles, and with his two-handed sword sent many a younger man to his long home.
The combined movement of the Spaniards, under Gamboa, with the Germans, under Sir Pietre Mewtas, seconded by a body of English archers showering flight and sheaf arrows point-blank into the teeth of the Scottish line, on which (as already related) the cannon were playing from both flanks, drove it into confusion; and, after suffering dreadful losses, the great column of Angus first began insensibly to retire.
At this crisis the whole air seemed laden with sound; The booming of cannon; the rattling explosion of arquebuses, hand-guns, and calivers; the smoke of which rolled like carded wool before the wind; the twang of bows; the whiz of passing arrows, which planted all the turf as they stuck with feathers upward; the clang of swords on swords or helmets; the galloping of horses; the voices of many thousands of men uttering triumphant hurrahs, fierce and bitter imprecations or cries of agony, as they were struck down wounded and bleeding to the earth;—all were there to make a mighty medley of uproar. The air of the sunny morning became dusky with the dust raised by the feet of men rushing in tens of thousands to the mortal shock; and sulphureous with the smoke of gunpowder, which was then almost a new element in Scottish war; and to this new ally in the hands of their foreign auxiliaries on one side, and to the treason and incapacity of the Scottish leaders on the other, England eventually owed the victory.
The recoil of Lord Angus's division caused a panic to run along the whole Scottish line.
It began to waver, to pause, and fall back!
"Treason! treason! to your ranks—to your standards! forward and follow me!" cried Arran, whose magnificent armour, covered with gold embossings made him the aim of many an archer, as he galloped along the line to restore order. He had already had three horses killed under him; the golden oak and pearl-studded coronet had been hewn from his helmet; the diamond cross of St. Andrew and the golden shells of St. Michael had been torn from his breast; he had broken his sword and lance, and now wielded a steel truncheon; his eyes were wild and bloodshot, and his voice had become hoarse by the reiterated orders he had issued. His efforts were vain; and vain also were those of Florence, and a few who attempted to second them; for the rapid advance of the Earl of Warwick's column, and another well-directed volley from the foreign auxiliaries, completed the discomfiture of the ill-led, ill-posted, and ill-disciplined Scots. A total and most disastrous rout ensued! The great army, which one historian likens to "a steely sea agitated by the wind," after a few moments was seen breaking into a thousand fragments, and dispersed in all directions.
"They fly! they fly!" burst from the victors.
All became flight, chaos, confusion; and the fugitives, in their haste to escape the English cavalry, threw aside all that might encumber their movements. More than twenty thousand spears and partisans strewed the ground, with helmets, cuirasses, back-plates, bucklers, gauntlets, swords, daggers, mauls, Jedwood axes, bows, belts, sheafs of arrows, drums, banners, trumpets, cannon, pistols, hand-guns, and all the débris of a mighty host; and the pursuit of the unarmed fugitives continued from one in the day until six in the evening—nor even then were the English sated with slaughter.
Exasperated by their first defeat, the demi-lances and the men-at-arms of Boulogne, were especially severe in their actions.
"Remember Paniershaugh!" was their cry; and others shouted,—
"Shelly, Shelly! remember Ned Shelly!" for, says Master Patten, "On the field we found that worthy gentleman and gallant officer, pitifully disfigured, mangled, and discernible only by his beard."
In their haste to escape, many of the Scots cast aside their shoes and doublets, and fled in their shirts and breeches. Many concealed themselves in the furrows of the fields, and were passed unseen by the English cavalry, who swept on after others. In short, it was one of those routs or panics to which undisciplined troops are at all times liable.
To Edinburgh the din of the distant battle had come by fits upon the autumnal breeze; and when the English infantry reached Edmondstone Edge, and found themselves among the plunder of the Scottish tents and camp-equipage, the shout they raised was distinctly heard in the streets of the capital, where that day's slaughter made three hundred and sixty widows. Among those who fell was the merchant John Hamilton, mentioned in the thirty-first chapter of our story.
Thousands of the Scots threw themselves into the Esk, and perished miserably under the cannon from the ships, the shot of the Spaniards, or the swords of the English horsemen, when they scrambled ashore. On the narrow Roman bridge, the press of fugitives was frightful, as the Lord Clinton's great ship was pouring her broadsides upon it, and on the defiling masses. Here were slain the good Lord Fleming of Cumbernauld; the Masters of Livingstone, Buchan, Ogilvy, and Erskine, all sons of earls; the Lairds of Lochinvar, Merchiston, Craigcrook, Priestfield, Lee, and many others, with their friends and followers, till the barricade of mail-clad dead impeded the passage of the living; and so little did their consecrated banner avail the band of armed monks, that they nearly perished to a man, and the symbol of "the afflicted Church" was found on the field, soaked in their blood, torn and trampled under foot. The Esk was literally crimsoned with blood, for nearly half the Scottish army perished along its banks, the English having made a vow before the battle, "that if victorious, they would kill many and spare few."
The aspect of the field, says Master Patten, was frightful; the bodies lay so thick and close.
"Some without legs, some houghed and half-dead, others the arms cut off, divers their necks half asunder, many their heads cloven, the brains of sundry dashed out, others their heads quite off, with a thousand kinds of killing. In the chase," continues this minute reporter, who writes of the affair with great gusto, "all, for the most part, were killed either in the head or in the neck; for our horsemen could not well reach them lower with their swords. And thus, with blood and slaughter, the chase continued five miles westward from the place of their standing, which was in the fallow-fields of Inveresk, unto Edinburgh Park (about the base of Arthur's Seat), and well-nigh to the gates of the town itself, and unto Leith; and in breadth, from the shore of the Firth up to Dalkeith southward; in all of which space the dead bodies lay as thick as cattle grazing in a full-replenished pasture. The river Esk was red with blood, so that in the same chase were counted, as well by some of our men who diligently observed it, as by several of the prisoners, who greatly lamented the result, upwards of fourteen thousand slain. It was a wonder to see how soon the dead bodies of the slain were stripped quite naked, whereby the persons of the enemy might be easily viewed. For tallness of stature, cleanness of skin, largeness of bone, and due proportion, I could not have believed there were so many in all their country."
The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Huntly, with fifteen hundred men, were captured, and, with thirty thousand suits of mail found in the camp and on the field, sent on board the fleet.
Previous to all this, Florence collected a few horsemen by the force of example, and made three desperate charges, which kept Gamboa's fiery Spaniards and the Lord Fitzwalter's demi-lances in check until the regent and his train had passed the Esk. On achieving this, Arran, whose helmet was now completely cloven, and the housings of whose horse were covered with blood, exclaimed,—
"Fawside, the day is totally lost, and I am living: and without a single wound!"
"And I too, though seeking death everywhere."
"So much the better; I have for you a task of honour and peril to perform."
"Name it—quick, my lord; we have not a moment to lose," cried Florence breathlessly.
"Ride for Edinburgh—get forth the queen and queen-mother, and, with whatever men you can collect, take the road for the north—there await my orders—away!"
"Farewell; but I must have one other dash at these English demi-lances," he exclaimed, wheeling round his horse.
Cold in the cause of Scotland, and heedless whether the field was lost or won, too many of the peers showed but an indifferent example to their soldiers; others, with an eye to the promised pensions, gold, titles, and rewards, wished well to Somerset, and openly fled, like traitors, as Arran called them. Hence the rhyme, with which the poor Scots consoled themselves,—
'Twas English gold and Scots traitors wan
The field of Pinkey, but no Englishman.
According to Buchanan, the Highlanders escaped without loss, as they formed themselves into a dense circle, and in this strange order retreated over the most difficult and rocky ground, where no men-at-arms could follow them. Their retreat was covered by the MacNabs, among whom the twelve tall sons of Aileen were conspicuous by their vigour and bravery.
Arran retired with a body of fugitives to Stirling, and on the day after the battle fresh scenes of disaster and devastation occurred in Edinburgh. In every street rapine and outrage were triumphant. Holyrood was sacked, the churches were despoiled, and Leith was set in flames.
There was one citizen of Edinburgh, who, after bearing himself gallantly throughout that bloody day, on finding that he was unable to bear away, like the pious Eneis, his blind and aged father, while having a young wife and her babes to protect, stood for nearly an hour amid the flames of rapine and a hundred weapons that gleamed around him, defending with his two-handed sword the archway that led to his house. A horde of assailants, flushed with ale, wine, triumph, and ferocity, opposed him; but valiantly he faced them all, until a ball from the arquebuse of a Spaniard pierced his heart and he fell dead. This citizen was Dick Hackerston; but to this hour his name is borne by the street or wynd which he so valiantly defended.
While the English were stripping the dead and slaying the wounded on the field, the little garrison in Fawside tower fired on them briskly, from bartizan and loophole, until they were environed by a body of men-at-arms under Sir Ralf Vane, who on finding the defender was a lady, tied a handkerchief to his sword and riding forward called upon her to yield.
"Yield thou!—false kite, what make ye here?" was the scoffing reply of the fierce Dame Alison, in whom the events of the day had kindled the keenest excitement. "I hold my house of the queen of Scotland, and will yield it to no Englishman,—least of all to a popinjay squire like thee."
"I am Sir Ralf Vane, madam, a captain of demi-lances, and ere now have had a château yielded to me by a marshal of France."
"The more fool he," she replied; while Roger of Westmains, sent a bullet close to Vane's right ear.
"Surrender to thee, indeed!" he exclaimed; "thou loon and heretic tyke, I would as soon think of ploughing up the devil's croft."
A cannon was now brought up; a single shot blew the gate open; then the tower was given to the flames; and as none were allowed to come forth by the doors, and the windows were (as we may still see them) grated with iron, all within perished miserably.
"The house was set on fire," saith Master Patten complaisantly in his seventy-fourth page; "and for their good-will all were burnt or smothered within." So Lady Alison died by the same dreadful death, which, but a few days before, she had devised for the Hamiltons of Preston.
Roger of Westmains, many other old men, and the wives of all her tenants perished with her: but, as already mentioned, the spirit of this stern woman is still said to haunt the ruined tower on each anniversary of that day of cattle and disaster, the Black Saturday of 1547.