Book Review: Fatal Rivalry

Keeping Up with the TudorsFatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513 – Henry VIII, James IV and the Battle for Renaissance BritainBy George GoodwinW. W. Norton, 2013 The bloody Battle of Flodden Field, fought on 9 September 1513 between the invading Scots under King James IV and Thomas Howard, the Earl of Surrey, is now a neat 500 years ago and hence ripe for a trot around the bookstore new release tables. Historian George Goodwin, who last entertained and instructed his readers about a different pivotal English battle, Towton, now enters the lists to give Flodden its anniversary volume – and with impressive results: Fatal Rivalry is even better than Fatal Colours. Certainly in Flodden he has a dramatic story to tell, one thickly populated with fascinating characters. Goodwin characterizes Surrey has “England’s leading military man,” and like everyone else who studies this particular battle, he seems to develop a grudging but sincere affection for James IV, that blustering dreamer who seized the opportunity of King Henry VIII’s absence from his realm (he was making war in France) to invade his realm from the north. This wasn’t exactly a novel strategy, and Henry (whose older sister Margaret was married to the Scottish king) was prepared for it. When James marched a large army across the Tweed into England in August, Henry’s precautions made certain he was met with the best men and the best equipment.And, as Goodwin makes clearer than any writer before him since Garrett Mattingly, also the right general. Not the men at the scene – Sir Edward Stanley, Baron Dacre, or any of the grasping Howard family seeking to (and eventually succeeding at) restoring their tarnished family fortunes – capable as they are, but rather Henry’s regent in his absence: Katherine of Aragon, his queen. “She may not have produced the male heir which she herself, her King and her country craved, but she was given an extraordinary amount of power for a Queen Consort,” Goodwin writes. “It would be Katherine, rather than Henry, who would be James’s strategic rival in 1513.”As was the case with Towton, so too with Flodden: there’s a good deal of historical background to fill in, and Goodwin does a very confident job of it. He grounds his treatment of Renaissance war on his understanding of Renaissance peace; to illuminate the wars of Henry VIII, Goodwin shines a light on the peace of Henry VII, who “set out to do something that Richard II had tried and failed to do before being replaced by Henry IV: to separate himself physically from his nobility and to raise the crown to another level above them.” This, too, is a largely sympathetic portrait, part of the ongoing favorable reclamation of Henry VII’s career, and Goodwin fills it with aphoristic insight:

Henry also spent lavishly on his court, on festivals and on tournaments. He encouraged jousting for the nobility and those with noble bearings in the saddle. In former times jousting had functioned as practice for war; under Henry it become a replacement for it. ‘By nature he preferred peace to war,’ was Polydore Vergil’s judgment of the King. In so doing, Henry was changing the traditional relationship between king and nobility. Unlike an Edward II or Henry V, he did not seek to be the warrior leader of a warrior class; indeed, at his major battles of Bosworth, Stoke and Blackheath he was, at least initially, to the rear of his forces. Though, according to Vergil, this was in no way due to any lack of personal bravery: ‘his spirit was so brave and resolute that never, even in moments of greatest danger, did it desert him.’

But although Henry is enigmatic and Surrey is almost tragic and James is melodramatic, the heart of the book is Queen Katherine, who got her most important training, Goodwin tells us, from her warrior-queen mother:

In matters of war, as in much else, Isabella had ensured that Katherine would share her interests. Henry’s Queen may have participated in the same cheerleading activities as earlier English consorts, writing to Wolsey that she was ‘horribly busy with making standards, banners and badges,’ but these were for troops under her own command. Indeed, she had been fully involved with the weightier matters for some time. It had been Katherine, rather than Henry, who the previous November had asked the Venetian Ambassador, Andrea Badoer, about the cost of galleys and shown herself to be ‘very warm in favour of this expedition’ against France.

When Flodden was over, the English were victorious and the Scots were defeated in the most immediate, resounding way the era allowed: their king was killed on the battlefield (fervent later Howard family propaganda would claim that Surrey himself struck James down). Scotland was thrown into its old familiar turmoil with yet another regency government, and Katherine’s public renown was enormously enhanced (she didn’t spoil it by having James’ hacked-up naked body shipped to France as a present for Henry, although – bloodthirsty Spaniard that she was – she wanted to). Any deeper role Margaret Tudor may have played in all of it was overlaid with a velvety silence – then and now.Goodwin handles all of this with deliberation and just enough of a storyteller’s flair. If he felt like continuing with his “Fatal” series of key English military encounters, no sane reader could possibly object. Perhaps next time could feature Katherine’s equally sanguine daughter Queen Mary I’s own war in France and loss of Calais in 1558  - Fatal Harbor?