James IV of Scotland was killed today in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden – concluding his failed invasion of England as the last British monarch to die in battle. Queen Katherine of Aragon, ruling England as regent, sent a piece of his bloodstained coat to Henry VIII (who was busy invading France, Scotland's ally), and had to be talked out of sending the body too. James's widow Margaret Tudor was left with a baby son as her king and a country filled with highly independent lords. I feel quite disloyal and conflicted at the moment, having considered the battle from Katherine's perspective for The Constant Princess and The King's Curse, and now switching sides. This is a paragraph about this day, from my new and unfinished manuscript – the story of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots:
The messenger sinks to his knees as if the weight of his words is too much for him to bear. He looks up at me and his white face is agonized beneath the dirt.
‘They took it,’ he says. ‘They took him. And they sent him to London for her.’
‘What?’
‘The English queen, Katherine: she wanted his body as a trophy. So they turned him over in the mud and took his breastplate and his coat, his beautiful coat, they stripped it off him, and his gloves, and his boots and his spurs. So he was barefoot, like a dead beggar. They took his sword and his crown from his helmet. They stripped him like he was a spoil of war. They threw all his things in a box, and they put his body on a cart and they have taken it away to Berwick.’
My knees give way then and someone pulls me down to sit on a stool. ‘My husband?’
‘Lord Dacre took him from the battlefield in a box. The English queen wanted his dead body for a trophy, and she has him.’
Images: Margaret Tudor by Daniel Mytens (cropped), painted c.1620-38, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015; James IV, https://www.nationalgalleries.org/object/PG 685; Katherine of Aragon c.1520, NPG L246 Lent by Church Commissioners for England