Then, when Foster expected his force to be in the clear, the point was suddenly driving into the exposed flank of a formation of morioned and buffcoated Lowlander infantry. Had the ordered troops been prepared and expecting the calvary, their langues de boeuf and poleaxes could have wrought gory havoc on Foster’s squadron, but struck by surprise at flank and rear, they panicked and broke. Heedless of their lairds’ commands and verbal abuse, they fled in any direction that took them from the path of those dripping broadswords and the soot-blackened men who bore them. Some fled to the rear areas to spread a measure of their mindless terror among the troops not yet committed, some careened into the rear of units already engaging the English line, but the bulk of the two thousand Lowlanders pelted to their right, straight into the flank of the Papal landesknechten, already hard-pressed at their van by Northumbrian infantry.
Confused by the buffcoats and morions—which also happened to be the attire of the troops they faced—the European mercenaries faced about and had already cut down several hundred of the Lowlanders before their officers and the surviving lairds could bring the butchery to an end and form the flanks and rear to repel Foster’s squadron.
That squadron was, however, down to a little more than half its initial strength, and even had they been at full, reinforced strength, it would have required a royal order for Foster to put them at that glittering hedge of fifteen-foot pikes and the hard-eyed professional soldiers behind it. Rather, he halted his command long enough for pistols to be hastily recharged, then wheeled them into pursuit of the now fully broken Highlanders, with the Welsh pikewall moving forward in his wake.
Ruthlessly, the horsemen cut down or pistoled the slower Scots and the few brave enough or stupid enough to turn and make a stand. The rest they chased all the way back to where the baggage wagons had been drawn up into a fortified square, and drew off only when musketfire had emptied several saddles.
Finding the way back blocked by a hastily formed line of pikemen, Foster led his troopers far over to his left and onto a heath-grown hillock to survey the best means of extricating his remaining force, only to find that he could see little, due to a thickening fog that had commenced to settle over the battlefield. But what glimpses he could espy convinced him that something was wrong, terribly wrong.
The English lines had been drawn up at the beginning of the battle with their backs to a small rill which bisected the plain; but in the raging battle below, the opposing lines appeared to be drawn up at right angles to that stream, the Scottish right and the English left engaged almost at the very site on which the English had camped the night previous.
A bigger shock came when he noted that the pale, cloud-enshrouded glow of the sun was westering. What had happened to the day?
The pikemen who had barred his return to his own lines were abruptly faced about and led trotting off into the fog, but he did not remount this much-reduced command. The troopers were as exhausted as the foam-streaked horses, many were wounded, and few had enough remaining powder to recharge their pistols. He could think of no way in which two hundred-odd tired and pain-racked men on as many plodding horses and with only use-dulled broadswords for armament could effect any favorable outcome in the hellishness beneath the swirling opacity of the fog.
The remaining hours of light were spent in rest and repair of weapons and equipment, bandaging wounds and sharing out water and powder, rubbing down the trembling horses with handfuls of vegetation and slow walking of the animals to cool them gradually. With the fall of darkness, he remounted them and led them a long, circuitous swing among the hillocks, then over the plain to where he thought the baggage train and camp lay.
When they appeared among the scattered tents before the stout wagon fort, muskets were leveled and swivel-guns brought to bear before his spotted horse was recognized. A Welsh officer of foot Foster vaguely remembered as Howard ap Somethingorother hobbled from among the wagons, leaning heavily on a broken pikestaff, his face drawn and wan under the dirty, bloody bandages swathing his head.