Fatal Rivalry Flodden, 1513: Henry VIII and James IV and the Decisive Battle for Renaissance Britain

James IV of Scotland, suspected of ordering the murder of his own father, ascended the throne at the age of fifteen. His marriage to a Tudor princess brought a tenuous peace with England after five centuries of war, but James's ambitions of becoming a great Renaissance prince collided with those of his brother-in-law Henry VIII. Their history-altering rivalry-political, ceremonial, and cultural-led, in 1513, to the bloodiest battle in British history. On Flodden Field James, through his own miscalculation, became the last king in Britain to fall in battle, thereby condemning most of his nobility to a similarly violent death and sealing his country's fate. Superbly researched and dramatically told, this first in-depth examination of the Battle of Flodden traces how a legacy of rivalry-marked by shifting alliances with kings, popes, and emperors-erupted into bloodshed and ushered in a new technological, economic, and geopolitical era.