Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/144

130 Wark, Etall, Heaton, and Ford castles, places of no great consequence, soon followed the example of Norham. Very different accounts are given of what took place at Ford. Some historians say that James spared it in consequence of the blandishments of Dame Heron, the wife of William Heron, the owner of the castle; and that James, lingering there, fascinated by her charms, both allowed his enemies time to gather strength, and occasioned numbers of his followers to desert and return home. But others, and with far more probability, assert that, on the contrary, James refused to listen to any terms from the Herons. One of the bitterest causes of his complaint against Henry VIII. was that John Heron, a bastard brother of this William Heron, had killed James's favourite, Sir Robert Ker, and that, having fled to England, Henry refused to surrender him. William Heron was at this moment a prisoner in Scotland, and Dame Heron, in his absence, fled to Surrey, and obtained from him the promise to give up two Scottish prisoners of importance, the Lord Johnstone and Alexander Home, on condition that James spared the castle of Ford, and liberated William Heron, her husband. James appears to have refused, rejected the exchange of prisoners, and razed Ford Castle to the ground. That done, James fixed his camp on Flodden Hill, the east spur of the Cheviot Mountains, with the deep river Till flowing at his feet to join the neighbouring Tweed. In that strong position he awaited the approach of the English army.



The Earl of Surrey, commissioned by Henry on his departure expressly to arm the northern counties and defend the frontiers from an irruption of the Scots, no sooner heard of the muster of James on Burrow Moor, than he dispatched messages to all the noblemen and gentlemen of those counties to assemble their forces, and meet him on the 1st of September at Newcastle-on-Tyne. He marched out of York on the 27th of August, and, though the weather was very wet and stormy, and the roads consequently very bad, he marched day and night till he reached Durham. There he received the news that the Scots had taken Norham, which the commander had bragged he would hold against all comers till Henry returned from France. Receiving the banner of St. Cuthbert from the Prior of Durham, Surrey marched to Newcastle, where a council of war was held, and the troops from all parts were appointed to assemble on the 4th of September at Bolton, in Glendale, about twenty miles from Ford, where the Scots were said to be lying.

On the 4th of September, before Surrey had left Alnwick, which he had reached the evening before, he was joined, to his great encouragement, by his gallant son, Lord Thomas Howard, the Admiral of England, with a choice body of 5,000 men, whom Henry had dispatched from France. From Alnwick the earl sent a herald to the Scottish king to reproach him with his breach of faith to his brother, the King of England, and to offer him battle on Friday, the 9th, if he dared to wait so long for his arrival. The lord admiral also bade the herald say from him that he had come to justify the slaughter of the pirate, Andrew Barton, with which James had charged him, and that he would take no quarter and give none to any one but the king. James denied the breach of faith, charged that on Henry, assured the herald that he should wait for Lord Surrey, and took no notice of the message of his son, the admiral.



During the interval betwixt this defiance and the appearance of the English, the minds of the Scottish nobles appear to have misgiven there, and they endeavoured to persuade James that he had already done enough in taking and destroying the King of England's castles, and gathering much plunder. Lord Patrick Lindsay represented, by a parable, the inequality of the stakes—the life and fortunes of the King of Scotland against those of an inferior man. James threatened that, if he lived to return, he would hang up Lindsay before his own castle. The Earl of Angus, the well-known Bell-the-Cat, supported Lindsay, and repeated that the English army consisted for the most part of men of mean