The Union Jack
In 1606, three years after James I became King of both Scotland and England, a new flag was invented to celebrate the union of the two monarchies. It was to be used solely at sea. A royal decree proclaimed that Britain’s ships ‘shall beare in their Mainetoppe the Red Crosse, commonly called St Georges Crosse, and the White Crosse, commonly called St Andrewes Crosse, joyned together according to a forme made by our Heralds’.
The square blue cross of St Andrew was used as a background with a white border separating the blue bits from the red, as required by the rules of heraldry. The third element of the flag, the red diagonal cross of St Patrick, was added in 1801 after the Act of Union with Ireland. The Welsh flag does not feature in the design at all because Wales was considered to be a principality of England.
The flag was not used during Cromwell’s time as Lord Protector because a new design incorporating the St George and St Andrew crosses, together with a golden harp and Cromwell’s white lion on a black shield, was introduced. The original version was reinstated after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The term ‘Jack’ may derive from protective jerkins known as ‘jacks’ or ‘jacques’ which sometimes bore saints’ emblems, although there is also a theory that it refers to King James whose name in Latin is ‘Jacobus’.
The Union Jack became an emblem of the Empire. More than a hundred nations, colonies, dominions or protectorates have included it on their flags at one time or another. Today it can be seen on the flags of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tuvalu and Hawaii.
The creation of a parliament gave back to Scotland some of the sovereignty it had lost in 1707, but tensions with England remained. In 2008 the Scottish National Party, which advocates complete independence for Scotland, secured enough votes to form the minority administration of the Scottish Executive. Meanwhile voices in England were beginning to say that it was unfair for Scotland to return MPs to Westminster who then had a say in English affairs, while the House of Commons had no jurisdiction over most internal issues relating to Scotland. Their concerns were framed in a question that had been asked in the House of Commons thirty years before. ‘For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable Members tolerate,’ asked the MP, Tam Dalyell, ‘Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on British politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?’
The question stands unanswered. When the Chancellor of Scotland, James Ogilvy, Earl of Seafield, signed the Act of Union in 1707 he remarked wistfully: ‘There’s ane end of ane auld song.’ Two hundred years later echoes of the old song can still be heard in Scotland: perhaps his lordship spoke too soon.
In 1886 the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, introduced a bill to the House of Commons proposing Home Rule for Ireland. It was defeated. Gladstone’s failure to solve the problems of Britain’s relationship with Ireland would lead directly to the bitter troubles of the twentieth century.
‘My mission,’ said William Gladstone when he first became Prime Minister in 1868, ‘is to pacify Ireland.’ Gladstone was the political colossus of the Victorian Age. He was Prime Minister four times. Although he started his career as a Conservative he graduated to become the greatest Liberal leader of the nineteenth century, a constant advocate of individual liberty and free trade. He was complex, energetic and determined and during his periods of office introduced or proposed an enormous amount of reforming legislation. His arguments were sometimes a bit difficult to follow, and he was prone to outbursts of rather histrionic moral indignation, but he loomed over the political scene of nineteenth-century Britain like a great headmaster trying to drum a sense of responsibility into his pupils. But he did not succeed in his mission towards Ireland. In this he was not alone.
The great invasions which affected the early development of Britain never got as far as Ireland. The Romans never settled there. The Vikings managed to establish a strong presence in the ninth and tenth centuries but never on the same scale as they did in England. Norman barons invaded the country in 1166 at the invitation of the Irish King of Leinster, Diarmuid MacMurrough, who enlisted their help in trying to win his throne back from his local enemies. Their success disturbed the King of England, Henry II, who was worried about a rival Norman power base being created close to his own territory. As a result, England gained control of much of the country after the Pope – in fact the only English Pope, Adrian IV – granted him permission to invade, ostensibly to sort out the abuses of the Irish Church. Henry was the first King of England to set foot in Ireland and in 1175 signed the Treaty of Windsor with the Irish leader, Rory O’Connor. O’Connor was recognised as High King on condition that he accepted Henry as his overlord. From this moment on English monarchs would always lay claim to Ireland. Their hold on the country weakened in the fourteenth century, mainly because they were preoccupied with wars in France, but the Tudor dynasty set about recapturing lands which their predecessors had lost. In 1494, Sir Edward Poyning, Henry VII’s Lord Deputy in Ireland, introduced an act which stated that the Irish Parliament was subservient to the English, and in 1541 Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland. By the end of the sixteenth century the English were beginning to send settlers over to Ireland to manage land which had been confiscated from their Irish owners. The deliberate Anglicisation of Ireland had begun.
At the end of the sixteenth century the Irish rebelled against their English masters. Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, led a nine years’ war against the forces of Elizabeth I. Her favourite, the Earl of Essex, failed completely to halt the rebels’ advance and it was not until the year she died, in 1603, that they were defeated. At the Battle of Kinsale the army of O’Neill and his Spanish allies was utterly destroyed, but in the peace that followed he and his fellow Irish nobles were not treated particularly harshly, although they did lose a substantial amount of land. Eventually in 1607, reduced and disaffected by the Protestant policies of the new English government, O’Neill and some of his companions fled the country. They never returned, and their country was left to the mercy of its English rulers.
Ireland was and is predominantly a Catholic country. The majority of its people never accepted the teachings of the Reformation. As a result, from the beginning of the seventeenth century until Catholic emancipation in 1829, the British ruled a country which they were bound to regard with suspicion and hostility. Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights had all established Protestantism and the Protestant succession on the English throne as fundamental principles of the nation’s constitution. But in the country which it governed across the Irish Sea most of the people believed in something else altogether. Despite all its eForts to settle Protestants on the land and to impose the Anglican Church upon its people, successive British governments failed to convert the majority of Irish to its religious views. In such circumstances, however enlightened in their individual attitudes or however scrupulous and fair they tried to be in their administration, they operated a system which was intrinsically unjust. At the same time, by encouraging and giving power to a minority of Protestants in order to maintain control, they created a society which was divided along sectarian lines. This was ‘the Irish problem’.
Injustice encourages different forces to combine against it. In 1798 it was a Protestant, Wolfe Tone, who persuaded the government of revolutionary France, the Directory, to organise a naval attack on Ireland. The French fleet was defeated and Tone was sentenced to be hanged. He died before his execution took place – possibly by committing suicide. Tone’s rebellion convinced the British