The Renaissance King Who Lost His Head For Honour

James IV was, by most accounts, the finest king Scotland ever had. He was a Renaissance prince — he spoke several languages, funded the first printing press in Scotland, built a great navy, patronised science and medicine, and turned his court into one of the most brilliant in Europe. He’d married Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII of England, in a union meant to bind the two kingdoms together in a “Treaty of Perpetual Peace.” For once, England and Scotland were family.

And then it all fell apart, because James was a man who believed in honour.

THE HORROR — the catastrophe In 1513, Henry VIII took an English army to France to make war on the French king. But Scotland had an older loyalty — the Auld Alliance, its centuries‑old bond with France. The French called on James to honour it, and James, bound by his word to France even though it broke his treaty with England, declared war and invaded northern England while Henry was away.

On the 9th of September 1513, the Scottish army — large, confident, and led by the King himself — met an English army under the elderly Earl of Surrey near the village of Branxton, at a place called Flodden.

It was a disaster almost beyond description.

The Scots had the newest weapons, long continental pikes, but the ground betrayed them — a boggy slope that broke up their formations, and in the close, churning mud the English bill, a shorter hooked polearm, butchered the tangled Scottish ranks. And James IV did something no sensible commander should. He was a warrior king who believed a king should fight, so he got off his horse, took a pike in his hands, and charged into the thick of the fighting on foot, at the head of his men, straight toward the English commander.

He almost reached him. James was cut down within a spear’s length of the Earl of Surrey — his hand, his neck and his body slashed open, an arrow in his jaw. And when the King fell, the flower of Scotland fell around him.

The scale of the death that afternoon is what makes Flodden a national wound Scotland has never quite forgotten. In a few hours, Scotland lost its King. An archbishop. Two bishops. Two abbots. Around twelve earls. Fifteen lords. Clan chiefs and lairds beyond counting. And somewhere around ten thousand ordinary Scots, dead in the mud in an afternoon. It’s said that almost every noble family in Scotland lost someone at Flodden. An entire generation of the country’s leadership was wiped out in a single battle, leaving a seventeen‑month‑old baby — James V — as king.

James IV holds a grim distinction: he was the last monarch in the whole of British history — English, Scottish, or otherwise — to be killed in battle. No king or queen of these islands has died in combat since that afternoon in 1513.

THE HORROR — the body And here is where it stops being a tragedy and becomes a horror story.

They found a body on the field they believed was the King’s, stripped and mutilated among the heaps of the dead, and carried it off. The English took it to Berwick, embalmed it, sealed it in lead, and sent it south. It was delivered to Catherine of Aragon — Henry VIII’s queen, ruling England while her husband was in France.

Catherine’s response tells you how they felt about James. She stripped the dead king’s coat — the surcoat he’d worn into battle, stiff with his own dried blood — and sent it to Henry in France as a trophy of war, a banner to celebrate the victory. She wrote that she had wanted to send the King’s whole embalmed body, but that Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it. So they settled for the bloody coat of a dead king as a party favour.

Then came the problem of what to do with him.

Before the war, James had broken the “Treaty of Perpetual Peace” by invading England — and that treaty had been guaranteed by the Pope, who had decreed that whoever broke it would be excommunicated. James IV had died an excommunicant. And an excommunicated man could not be buried in consecrated ground.

So the embalmed corpse of the King of Scots — one of the great monarchs of his age — could not be put in the earth. Henry got special permission from the Pope to bury him honourably at St Paul’s Cathedral. And then, somehow, he just… never did.

Instead, the lead‑wrapped body of James IV was dumped in a storeroom at Sheen Priory, a monastery in Surrey, and left there. For years. Decades. The English antiquarian John Stow, who saw it with his own eyes, recorded that it lay “lapped in lead, thrown into an old waste room, amongst old timber, stone, lead, and other rubble.” A king, propped in a junk room like a broken piece of furniture, an object of morbid curiosity for anyone who wandered in.

Then Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, Sheen was torn apart, and the body was left to the mercy of the workmen.

And they used him for sport. According to Stow, the labourers found the embalmed corpse and, at some point, the head was hacked off — and the head of James IV, King of Scots, still with its red hair attached and the smell of the embalming spices on it, was kicked around the ruins as a football.

THE MODERN RELIC The head’s journey got stranger from there. Stow records that Queen Elizabeth I’s master glazier, a man named Lancelot Young, was drawn by the pleasant smell of the embalming and simply took the dead king’s severed head home with him as a curio — a keepsake, a conversation piece, a king’s skull on a shelf.

Eventually, growing tired of it, or perhaps troubled by it, Young handed the head over to the sexton of the church of Great St Michael, Wood Street, in the City of London, and asked that it be buried. But it wasn’t given a grave. It was, most accounts believe, simply thrown into the church’s charnel pit — a communal bone‑hole — and mixed in with the anonymous dead.

And that is where the trail goes cold. The body, lost when Sheen was destroyed, has never been found. The head, tipped into a bone pit at Great St Michael’s, was scattered among nameless bones. And here is the final, perfect indignity: the church of Great St Michael is long gone, and the churchyard where the head was thrown is now built over — occupied, for years, by a pub.

So there is no tomb. The last king in British history to die in battle, one of Scotland’s greatest monarchs, has no grave at all. His body vanished. His severed head was a plaything, then a souvenir, then rubbish in a pit under what became a London pub. Nobody knows where a single bone of him lies today.

The relic, then, is an absence and a lament. You can visit the battlefield at Branxton in Northumberland — Flodden Field is open ground, marked by a memorial cross raised in 1910, inscribed simply “To the Brave of Both Nations.” And Scotland turned its grief into one of the most haunting pieces of music ever written: “The Flowers of the Forest,” a lament for the men who fell at Flodden, still played on the bagpipes at funerals and remembrance services to this day. It is, by tradition, considered so sorrowful that pipers will only play it at actual funerals and memorials — never for practice, never for show.

A king who fought on foot with his men, and got a bloody coat sent to his brother‑in‑law as a joke, a head kicked around a building site, and a pub built over his bones. And a country that lost so many in one afternoon it’s still mourning them five hundred years later, in a tune too sad to play out loud.

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