Which king's death at Flodden in 1513 devastated Scotland?

James IV crossed into England in September 1513 to honour the Auld Alliance while Henry VIII was busy campaigning in France. On the 9th, near Branxton in Northumberland, he came down off a strong hilltop position to engage the Earl of Surrey's army, and that decision lost the battle.

The Scots had adopted the continental fashion for the eighteen-foot pike, which is devastating in a tight formation on level ground. Flodden offered neither: the slope was wet, the ground broken by a burn, and formations came apart on the way down. The English were carrying the bill - a shorter, heavier polearm with a hook - and once inside the pike points the fight was entirely one-sided.

James was killed, the last monarch anywhere in the British Isles to die in battle. What went down with him was a whole political generation: nine earls, fourteen lords of parliament, an archbishop who was also the king's son, and something in the region of ten thousand men. The heir was seventeen months old, so the country fell into the long regency and factional infighting that shaped the rest of the century.

It is worth saying what was lost. James IV was a genuine Renaissance prince - he granted a charter to the surgeons of Edinburgh, licensed the country's first printing press, built the Great Michael, then perhaps the largest warship in Europe, and spoke a good many languages, reportedly including Gaelic, which few of his successors bothered with. The lament composed for the dead, The Flowers of the Forest, is still played on the pipes and is still hard to sit through.