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The Flag That Failed: Flags for Great Britain

I'm standing on the cobbles in front of Holyrood House in Edinburgh, where on the night of 26 March 1603 Sir Robert Carey galloped up with eagerly awaited news. He had ridden straight from London where, two days before at three o'clock in the morning, Queen Elizabeth had died. It was the event that everyone in England had long been dreading. But an hour or so after Elizabeth's death, James VI of Scotland was proclaimed her successor, James I of England. Here in Edinburgh the news was received with rapture. Elizabeth had disobligingly proved very un-Tudor in her longevity and it had been a long wait for James. Now he set off quickly to claim his new and much richer crown in England. After just eight days to prepare and to pack, he left Holyrood on 4th April 1603.

Ten years later, William Shakespeare and his collaborator, John Fletcher, looked back on this pivotal, unprecedented moment when James had succeeded Elizabeth. For the first time in history, the whole island of Britain was now under one rule (something that even the Romans had failed to achieve) and everybody knew that with James as King of England and King of Scotland a new political world had been born. But it wasn't clear how things were going to change.

In the final scene of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII, Archbishop Cranmer predicts that James will 'make new nations':

Cranmer: Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,

His honour and the greatness of his name

Shall be, and make new nations.

(Henry VIII, 5.5.50-2)

But making a new nation turned out to be very difficult. For much of the previous three hundred years England and Scotland had been at war, they had very different political and legal systems, a different established church, different currencies and a long history of intense dislike and deep suspicion. James's central ambition was to make these two very foreign countries into one new state, Great Britain, and I'm about to look at one of the fascinating ways that he tried to make this personal dream into a public reality.

I'm in the National Library of Scotland and the Keeper of Manuscripts is unfolding a set of flag designs made around 1604. They are on a piece of paper about the size of a large placemat and six flags are flying. They look a bit like pictures in a child's colouring book, all outlined very simply in ink and then brightly coloured in. There are six variations on how you combine two crosses in red, white and blue, with some (quite difficult to read) seventeenth century writing on them.

These are the earliest designs for James's new British flag. Each design seems to capture what James optimistically, if rather naively, called `this happy marriage'. They are strikingly straightforward visual propaganda. Here, they say, are not two nations, but one; no longer England and Scotland, but now Britain. You can almost hear the 'hurrah'.

In some ways, it wasn't a bad time for an ambitious project of nation-building. The Treaty of Union that James proposed in 1604 followed half a century of unbroken peace between Scotland and England (give or take the usual Border skirmishings) and there was a growing sense that England and Scotland shared a common language and above all a common Protestant faith. Professor John Morrill of the University of Cambridge:

'Initially James goes for an all out push for union: political union, an economic union, a religious union. But very quickly he sees the scale of the opposition is too great and so he backs off and he goes for what he calls the `union of hearts and minds'. The problem was the English would always prefer to create common institutions covering the whole of the island, so there will be one parliament, there will be one system of law, there will be one church. What the Scots would much prefer is a federal structure in which both countries retain independent institutions but they co-ordinate, they work together, you bring some mechanisms in which increase cooperation. In a sense the Scots would always prefer devolution to integration. They would always like to have their law and their particular style of Protestantism protected.'

The full union that James dreamed of was impossible without parliamentary legislation and the English parliament was having none of it. But some things James could alter without parliament. He issued a new �1 coin and called it the 'Unite'. He changed his title to 'King of Great Britain', some of his supporters even urged that he should call himself 'Emperor of Great Britain' but he didn't go that far. He did though begin his great project to create a new version of the Bible in English that would be used in both kingdoms. And he set about designing a new British flag.

Yet despite this intense royal propaganda for full union, Shakespeare evades the question of Britain. In King Lear, Shakespeare draws on a little-known play in which a mythical King of Britain breaks up his united realm with devastating consequences. But in Shakespeare's version, the word 'Britain' does not appear once. Shakespeare, like everybody else, must have known James's views. So what is going on? Shakespeare scholar, Jonathan Bate:

'Shakespeare always keeps his own cards very close to his chest. One of the things that makes his plays so endlessly open to new interpretations and performances in new cultural contexts is the fact that they set up big questions about politics, the state, the relationship between the individual and the state, between the present and the past. They don't propose answers, they are not propaganda. You can look at some of the other dramatic works of the period, for instance the court masques written specifically for King James by Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson and they are overtly propagandistic, celebrating the triumphs of Britannia. Shakespeare doesn't do that, he is too subtle a writer for that, but there is no doubt that we can see him cutting his cloth according to the concerns of the new King. I think the thing to remember about King James is that he loves debates. He sees himself as a real intellectual King. So the fact that Shakespeare's plays present questions, political, philosophical, but don't actually give propagandistic answers. In a way I think James would have found that very attractive.'

Looking at our flag designs, you can see the intractable politics of union being played out in graphic form. All the designs stumble on the one key problem facing James's project: how do you combine two kingdoms, but allow each to retain equal status? Crudely put, which national cross gets to be on top, St George or St Andrew's, and does size matter?

If you've never seen a Union Jack, it is surprisingly difficult to come up with an even-handed solution to this particular problem.

The six designs I'm looking at now tackle it in different ways. Two of them put the Scottish cross unequivocally on top of the English cross, but they make it much smaller. In two other designs, the English cross hogs most of the flag, but a smaller, Scottish cross gets the coveted 'pole position' in the upper left-hand corner. So these four proposals all offer the same compromise, the English cross is bigger, but the Scottish cross holds the position of honour.

The last two are, I think, much more ingenious. One has four small Scottish crosses, white on blue, filling each of the quarters around a large red English cross. The last design is perhaps the simplest of all. It just quietly sets the two crosses side by side, fifty fifty, English to the left, Scottish to the right. It might seem to be the obvious solution but it is, I think, clunkingly ugly. Perhaps inevitably it was the one that the Earl of Nottingham, as Earl Marshal, recommended to the King and in a note that he wrote on the drawing itself, he tells us why: 'In my poor opinion,' he writes, 'this will be the most fittest, for this is like man and wife without blemish one to other.' But in heraldic terms, there's still a problem here, because in this 17th-century flag couple, England is very much the man, on the privileged position on the inside of the flag. Scotland, the wife, relegated to the outside. The matrimonial metaphor was very much in the air. James himself used it with evident relish when addressing the English parliament in 1604:

'What God has conjoined, then let no man separate. I am the husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife. . . I hope therefore no man will be so unreasonable as to think that I that am a Christian king under the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wives.'

But he was of course married to two wives, Scotland and England, and they were never going to agree, which is why the flag issue is so telling. The Scots wanted absolute parity, the English wanted acknowledgement of their longer history, their greater resources and (in their eyes) their inherent pre-eminence. Neither side would give way.

Shakespeare's early history plays written under Elizabeth had taken a very pro-Tudor line, presenting the queen's view of what England was, and the court rewarded him. And eventually he did produce a 'British' play for James. Jonathan Bate again:

'Shakespeare's most overt engagement with this British question is the play called Cymbeline King of Britain. Set during the time of the Roman Empire when Julius Caesar has landed in Britain and the British tribes are having to pay tribute to Rome, it is a play about British identity, about what it is to be British and to fight against a powerful European Empire. Obviously to some extent ancient Rome there is standing in for the modern Roman Catholic lands, dominated by Spain. King James had been very concerned to bring peace to Europe, to reconcile the Roman and the Protestant nations and what seems to happen in Cymbeline is by the end of the play you get a reconciliation between the Roman Empire and this new British kingdom and there is a lot of language associated with the idea of the King of Britain bringing peace, that in some senses the King of Britain is able to put an end to the divisions that have wracked Europe and this is exactly the role in which James saw himself.'

The play concludes with a victorious Britain and a chastened Rome, a fiction entirely of Shakespeare's creation, and ironically it ends with Cymbeline calling for the hoisting of a British flag:

Cymbeline: . . . let

A Roman and a British ensign wave

Friendly together.

(Cymbeline 5.5.477-9)

The audiences of course would all have known that the very idea of a 'British ensign' was still acrimonious and unresolved.

By the time Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline in 1610, the English parliament had killed James's union project stone dead. It would be another hundred years before the formal Act of Union united Scotland and England into one state of Great Britain.

James eventually decided not to use any of the six designs we have been looking at and opted instead for a much simpler solution with the English cross of St George superimposed on the Scottish cross of St Andrew. Needless to say, the Scots immediately protested and an unofficial Scottish version with the cross of St Andrew supreme quickly began to be used on Scottish ships.

Eventually the puzzle of how to design a union flag would be solved. But it took a very long time and the arguments that lay behind it, arguments first tackled 400 years ago in that drawing of six simple combinations of crosses, have never truly gone away. As I stand here, beside St Giles Cathedral in the heart of Edinburgh, I can see at least three blue and white saltires flying, the old Scottish flag of St Andrew and yet there is not a Union Jack to be seen anywhere.

Shakespeare quotations are taken from:

Henry VIII (London: Penguin, 2006). ISBN-13: 978-0-141-01740-2

Cymbeline (London: Penguin, 2005). ISBN-13: 978-0-14-070742-7