History of the Anglo-Scottish Wars of the 16th-17th century.
“BY the end of the Dark Ages, Scotland, or most of our Scotland, was a kingdom. By the High Middle Ages, she had become a nation, and towards the end of the thirteenth century she was on the verge of a willing and friendly union with her neighbour nation, that for a hundred years had been at peace with her, an apparent friend. Then a child queen died: and Scotland, for the next three hundred years, had to fight a war for mere national existence, and that against enormously heavy odds. Nevertheless, by the end of the Middle Ages, by the years between the fall of the Eastern Empire and the discovery of the New World, she was, miraculously, still a nation, with her native culture vigorous and vital, and a status in the general affairs of Europe out of proportion to her little size.
I have elsewhere attempted to give some account of two hundred and seventeen years of that long war. This book takes up the story at a point where it still had eighty-three years of its course to run, or ninety if one counts to its full close, the crowning of James King of Scots as King of England. But the end of it was not the end of war, for fifteen years after Flodden begins another, that for two centuries and a third thereafter made ‘blood and fire and pillars of smoke’ in Scotland, ‘the horsemen mounting, the flashing sword, and the spear’ for the star called Wormwood had fallen into her waters, and the strife of men in arms within their own country, that bursts out at least once in a lifetime through those years, is only the surface of a deeper conflict, that did not end when the clans went down at Drummossie.”