Edward IV had been disappointed by James III of Scotland for years. A 1474 treaty had promised the marriage of Prince James of Scotland to Edward's daughter Cecily of York, with a forty-five year truce and a 20,000 mark dowry paid in annual instalments through Norham Castle. By 1480 the dowry was still being paid - the bonds and receipts survive - but border conflict had restarted. Eleven English ships were put on war-footing for Scotland in February 1481. Three Scottish raids hit England that year. Then in May 1482 Alexander, Duke of Albany, James III's exiled younger brother, landed at Southampton from France aboard a Scottish caravel called Michael, captained by James Douglas. Edward saw his opportunity. He hired Douglas and the ship on 9 May, called up his army on 10 May, and a month later at Fotheringhay Castle - the same Northamptonshire fortress where Mary, Queen of Scots would be executed a hundred and five years later - drew up a treaty by which Albany would, upon becoming king, cede Berwick to England, surrender Lochmaben Castle and lands across the southern Scottish dales, and break the alliance with France. Albany already had a wife, but agreed to marry Cecily if the Church could untangle him from Anne de la Tour. He signed himself King. Edward signed too. The invasion was set.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester was named commander on 12 June 1482, with John Elrington as war-treasurer and Francis Lovell among his officers. The army gathered at Alnwick equipped with 2,000 sheaves of arrows hauled north by 120 cart horses. They moved on Berwick. The town had been Scottish for twenty years - Margaret of Anjou had ceded it to James in 1461 as part of her deal for Lancastrian survival during the Wars of the Roses. The town surrendered to Gloucester by negotiation. The castle, held by Sir Patrick Hepburn, Lord Hailes, did not. Gloucester left a siege force and marched west. The Earl of Northumberland stayed near the border to burn Kirk Yetholm, Bemersyde, Morebattle, Roxburgh, Jedburgh, Ednam. Gloucester moved through Blackadder, where, according to a 1501 legal testimony, he and Albany ordered the great house and tower destroyed. A London merchant named George Cely wrote a wildly exaggerated newsletter home: 60,000 men in three battles, 44 Scottish towns and villages burnt, many lords slain. The numbers were wrong. The destruction was real.

Meanwhile James III had marched south to meet the invasion and got no further than Lauder Bridge, where his own nobles staged a coup. The exact events are unclear and the surviving chronicles disagree, but later accounts claim some of the king's favourites were hanged from the bridge - the architect Robert Cochrane, the merchant Thomas Preston, the tailor James Hommyll, the composer William Roger. James was carried back to Edinburgh on 22 July and held in Edinburgh Castle, where the Keeper Lord Darnley had secretly contracted with the king for his safety. Scotland now had three factions: Albany's people, the loyalists, and the Lauder mutineers. Queen Margaret of Denmark at Stirling Castle, with the prince, was a fourth power.

Richard's army entered Edinburgh in early August. Albany was not made king. James III was safe inside Edinburgh Castle and the new lords who had captured him at Lauder were not minded to hand him over. Once Scottish nobility understood what the Fotheringhay treaty actually said - that Albany had promised to cede a quarter of the country to England - support for him evaporated. On 2 August Albany signed a bond with the Earl of Argyll, Archbishop Scheves, Lord Avandale and the Bishop of Dunkeld, accepting pardon and restoration to his old estates. On 4 August Gloucester accepted a truce, an undertaking from the town of Edinburgh to repay the dowry advance, and withdrew. He had not achieved his ostensible mission, but he had a fallback. He left 1,700 men to assault Berwick Castle, beginning on 11 August. The castle fell after a fortnight's siege on 24 August 1482. Sir Patrick Hepburn surrendered. Edward IV wrote to Pope Sixtus IV explaining that the taking of Berwick was the chief advantage gained from the campaign. It was the last time Berwick changed hands.

Albany was made Lieutenant-General of Scotland in December 1482 to defend the border against English raids. Two months later he renewed his treason against his brother by signing a new treaty with Edward IV at Westminster, was forfeited by the Scottish Parliament in June 1483, and eventually died in exile after a final failed attempt at Scotland was defeated at the Battle of Lochmaben Fair. The phrase "I was a captain when Barwycke was wonne" became a stock English boast - the Eton headmaster William Horman put a Latin version in his 1519 phrasebook Vulgaria. Berwick-upon-Tweed has been in England ever since. The 24 August 1482 surrender of Berwick Castle to a besieging English army ended four centuries during which the town had changed hands more than a dozen times. Patrick Hepburn knew there was no relief coming because Scotland was fighting itself. The Scottish chronicles, written generations later by writers sympathetic to the Albany Stewarts, would soften the story and rebrand Albany as his brother's rescuer rather than the man who tried to sell a quarter of his country to England. The historian Norman Macdougall calls this rewriting "the Albany legend." Hall's English Chronicle of 1542 records Albany acting with duplicity - and concludes, strangely, by lamenting his eventual betrayal by James III, as if no chronicler could quite settle his account.