This year is the 500th Anniversary of the Battle of Flodden. Much has been written about the Battle and how and where it occurred, and I suppose much more will be said this year. However one question that is rarely asked is what would have happened if the Scots had won?
In order to answer this, we have to look at the general background. Henry VIII was by then only 22 years old, and had been King for only 4 years. He was engaged for most of that time in a war against France, and the majority of his Army was abroad. He was therefore in a vulnerable position. It was the French who contacted their old allies the Scots and asked them to invade England, and thus divert attention and resources away from France. The French offered the Scots a good deal of assistance in the form of advisors, training and weaponry.
In spite of all this, it was not a very determined invasion. The Scots Army crossed the border, attacked a few local castles and settled in on Branxton Hill where they dug in and made fortifications all facing south into England. Branxton is only about 3 miles from the border, so it was not a major invasion.
Katherine of Aragon was both Queen and Regent in the absence of her husband, and she ordered an army to assemble under the command of the Earl of Surrey (the victorious general at Bosworth in 1485) who marched his army around the rear of the Scots’ encampment, thus cutting off their line of retreat back to Scotland.
For the purposes of this discussion the details of the battle are not relevant, but if the Scots had had a decisive victory, then James IV of Scotland would have marched on to take York. Given that the King and much of the English army was abroad, it is difficult to see how he could not reach London and seize the throne. Having done that, I suspect England would have been divided up between France and Scotland with a new border around York.
Without Henry VIII England would have remained a largely Catholic country, and all our beautiful abbeys and churches would still be standing. The Stuart line was certainly alive and well until the 18th Century and no doubt there are survivors to this day who could have continued a monarchy in Scotland. I suspect French would have become our native tongue and the Scots would have remained with the Gaelic, and English may well have disappeared from the world stage.
Once we imagine England as part of France, and a larger independent Scotland, the picture is more complex. It seems very likely to me that there would have been a revolution in both countries that would have brought about democracy with a parliament, or an assembly of some kind. Clearly there would have been no Napoleonic Wars, and probably no Great Wars, since the might of a Franco/Scottish army and navy would have defeated Germany from the outset.
So had the Battle of Flodden been won, I might be sitting in an independent Scotland whose border was somewhere in Yorkshire, with a Scottish monarch on the throne, or I might just be in France with no monarchy at all. Such a France would be a major member of the EU, largely governing its business. Millions would not have died in those long and disastrous wars and this would have been a vastly prosperous country, perhaps one of the leading economies of the world.
And why didn’t all these desirable consequences come to pass? Because of a boggy field in Northumberland where the Scottish army got stuck 500 years ago.
Of course, it is equally possible that the Scots may have just returned home with their spoils, valuable prisoners and equipment, and celebrated their victory there, in which event nothing would have changed at all, except for one small fact, namely the vote for Scottish Independence would be this year, not next!
