When James IV died at Flodden in 1513, he left behind a one-year-old heir and a country that would spend the next decade and a half being managed by other people's ambitions. Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, served briefly as regent before remarriage cost her the role. By 1525 her young son was effectively the captive of Angus, her estranged stepfather-husband to her own boy, who ruled in James's name. Margaret tried diplomacy, tried persuasion, and finally tried force. In 1526 she convinced John Stewart, the Earl of Lennox, and Archbishop James Beaton to raise an army. Ten thousand men marched east from Stirling. The plan was simple enough: take Edinburgh, take James, and end Angus's regency before it consumed her son entirely.

Angus moved faster than Margaret had hoped. He sent James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran, ahead with 2,500 men to delay the march by any means available. Arran did the sensible thing - he climbed Pace Hill, the ridge overlooking Linlithgow and the River Avon, and waited. Lennox arrived with four times the manpower but found the ground had been chosen against him. Downstream the river was uncrossable. So his scouts rode upstream and found a ford near Manuel Convent. Lennox forced a crossing there and swung wide to hit Arran's flank, but Arran pivoted his line southward along the ridge and met the assault on his own terms. The Lennox men climbed through bog water and uphill, weighted with mail and exhausted before the fighting even began.

Arran's outnumbered force nearly broke. They were close to losing the ridge when reinforcements arrived from Edinburgh under Angus himself, followed by the reluctant teenage king who had been hauled along to legitimise whatever happened. The Lennox army collapsed. Men died on the ridge and along the riverbank in numbers the chroniclers never quite settled on. The Earl of Glencairn was taken prisoner. Lennox himself was wounded, surrendered to his enemies - and then was murdered by James Hamilton of Finnart, an act outside the rules of war that scandalised even a Scotland accustomed to political killing. A cairn at the entrance to the Kettilstoun estate still marks the spot where it happened.

Margaret's gambit failed at Linlithgow Bridge, but the timeline she had set in motion did not. James remained under Angus's control for two more years. Then in 1528, aged sixteen, the young king slipped out of Edinburgh and rode to his mother at Stirling. He assumed personal rule, stripped Angus of his lands, and drove him into English exile. He reigned for fourteen more years before dying at thirty in 1542 - just days after his daughter Mary was born at Linlithgow Palace, the same palace that had overlooked the battle that nearly freed him. Historic Scotland added the battlefield to the national Inventory of Historic Battlefields in 2009. The bridge itself is long gone. The ridge and the ford remain.