Born in 1473, the birth of King James IV was foretold by a raging comet.  His father James III was infamous for his low-born favourites and it was alleged that  either a witch or soothsayer warned him against his own family.  A darker rumour said that he killed his brother, the Earl of Mar.  What is true is that his own son sided with his enemies at the Battle of Sauchieburn in 1488.  The king was assasinated and - as a mark of repentance King James IV wore an iron belt, to which he added weights each year.  Like his predecessors and successors, James was blessed with uncanny charisma.  A devotee of the hunt, pageants, the ideal of chivalry and advocate of crusading, he was at once an alchemist, a scientist, a warrior, a devout Christian, a serial partner of mistresses, a doctor, a dentist, an ally of France, brother in law of Henry VIII, and a fey and doomed ruler.

There were signs, as James walked a dangerous tightrope between the competing powers of France and England, that the powers of heaven (or at least the Otherworld) were against his stubborn determination to go to war with the southern nation.   His wife, HenryVIII's sister Margaret, dreamed of forthcoming disaster.  A few weeks before the campaign a ghostly, or perhaps saintly figure, appeared before the king and his court in the kirk of Linlithgow, warning him not to go to war.  Before the multitude the figure then vanished without a trace.  Soon afterwards at the Market Cross in the heart of Edinburgh there was a notorious event which became known as the Summons of Pluto.  At midnight a cry was heard and a ghostly voice was heard to name and summon countless nobles and common men to their doom in the forthcoming battle.  Undeterred, the king gathered his army from all parts of the nation and confidently marched south.  On the morning of his last mortal day the king's tent was marked by blood. Defeat and much worse was inevitable.

Nobody in Scotland could believe that the king was dead and the flower of every noble and common house in the nation was decimated.  Rumours of the king's survival flew across Europe, though he was seen no more.  His cousin, the Duke of Albany, came from France to take the reigns of the shattered kingdom.  Queen Margaret married the Earl of Angus and later claimed that her first husband survived Flodden for three years.  The Earl of Home in the borders betrayed his nation by taking English gold and was later executed for treason; one story says that his doom was sealed by the fact that he actually took the lamented king off the field of battle and  then later murdered him.  Scotland was almost mortally wounded and the scars ran deep in its psyche.  The memor of the wholescale loss of the great king and its youth - the 'Flowers of the Forst' - would never be forgotten.