A Cloud, a Complaint and a Paint Chip: How Scotland's Saltire Got Its Shape and Its Blue
Julio Song · · 11 min read
On 18 February 2003, a committee of the Scottish Parliament sat down to settle a question about a flag that had flown for centuries. What colour is it? The convener proposed that MSPs "accept that Pantone 300 is the correct colour of azure blue for the saltire". The motion came from a petition by a retired accountant who had kept at it for three years.
That sounds like a small question for so old a flag. The white cross of Saint Andrew has stood for Scotland since at least 1286, and for most of that time nobody agreed on the blue. Its origin story has a date problem. Its most famous appearance, inside the Union Flag, set off a formal complaint to the king within months. And its sibling, the red lion of the royal banner, is a flag you are not, strictly speaking, allowed to fly.
A cross in the clouds over East Lothian
The best-known version goes like this. In 832, a joint army of Picts and Scots under King Angus faced a larger Northumbrian force near Athelstaneford, four miles north-east of Haddington. The night before the battle, Angus prayed. Saint Andrew appeared to him in a dream and promised victory. The next morning, clouds formed a broad white diagonal cross against a bright blue sky. Both armies read it as an omen, the outnumbered side won, and the saltire became Scotland's flag.
It's a lovely story. It also falls apart on the dates.
The enemy commander in the legend is Athelstan. The trouble is that Athelstan wasn't born until 895, more than sixty years after the battle. He went on to become the first King of England, and at Brunanburh in 937 he beat a joint Scottish and Viking army. So the one Athelstan everybody knows won his big fight against the Scots, which is the opposite of what the legend needs.
Older tellings don't even agree on the date. Walter Bower's Scotichronicon, written in the 1440s, names the Pictish king as Unust and puts the miracle in 761. The Flag Institute puts it bluntly: the flag's exact origins "are lost in myth and legend".
None of this has stopped Athelstaneford from owning the story. A restored doocot, a dovecote originally built in 1583, now houses a Flag Heritage Centre with a short audio-visual show, and a saltire flies on a pole beside the memorial in front of the church. If you visit, you're standing at the birthplace of a legend, not of a flag. Both are worth the trip.
What the paperwork says
Strip away the clouds and the record gets thinner, but it gets solid.
The earliest known use of the saltire as a symbol of Scotland itself is on the seal of the Guardians of Scotland in 1286. The Guardians ran the kingdom while Scotland had no king, and they put Saint Andrew on their seal. That's a seal, not a flag, but it shows the cross already stood for the country.
A century later, the cross turns into a uniform. In 1385, as Scottish and French troops prepared to fight the English, an ordinance required that "every man French and Scots shall have a sign before and behind, namely a white St Andrew's Cross". There was a practical footnote. If a soldier's coat was already white, he wore the cross on a patch of black cloth so it would still show.
That order says nothing about blue. The cross mattered, and the background didn't.
The colours took longer to settle than you'd guess:
- The first certain saltire flag, from 1503, had a red field, not a blue one.
- In 1512, the Lord High Treasurer's accounts record blue bunting for a ship's banner.
- The first certain picture of a white saltire on blue, the flag as you'd know it, is in Sir David Lindsay's armorial of about 1542.
- In 1672, the Lord Lyon recorded the arms as "Azur a cross of St Andrew Argent", heraldic language for a silver (white) cross on blue.
"Azure" in heraldry names a colour family, not a shade. That detail sat quietly in the register for over three hundred years before it caused trouble.
Twice divided: the 1606 row over the Union Flag
Long before anybody argued about the blue, Scots had a sharper grievance. It started when their flag got layered under someone else's.
James VI of Scotland also ruled England as James I. Two kingdoms shared one king, and their ships kept bickering at sea about whose flag ranked higher. On 12 April 1606, James issued a proclamation to end it. Ships of both nations would fly the crosses of Saint George and Saint Andrew "joined together" at the maintop, and each nation kept its own single cross at the foretop.
The design James's heralds produced placed the red cross of Saint George on top of the white saltire. To an English eye, that was a sensible way to merge two symbols. To a Scottish shipmaster, it looked like his cross had been crossed out.
The masters of Scottish ships complained to the Privy Council in Edinburgh, and on 7 August 1606 the Council wrote to the king on their behalf. The letter survives, and its spelling is half the fun. The new flag, the councillors wrote, "is verie prejudiciall to the fredome and dignitie of this Estate" and would bring reproach on Scotland wherever it flew abroad. The core objection was geometric:
"the Scottis Croce, callit Sanctandrois Croce, is twyse divydit, and the Inglishe Croce, callit Sanct George, drawne through the Scottis Croce, which is thereby obscurit, and no token nor mark to be seene of the Scottis armes."
Look at the Union Flag today and you'll see their point. The red cross runs straight through the white saltire and splits it into four pieces. The councillors warned that the design would "breid some heit and miscontentment" between the king's subjects, and added that Scottish sailors would not accept it "as it is set down."
They didn't stop at complaining. The shipmasters drew up two new patterns they thought fair to both kingdoms and handed them to the Council. The Council left it to the Earl of Mar, who had heard the complaint in person, to put them before the king. Then the trail goes cold. Writing in 1897, the flag historian Hulme noted that those drafts "are not to be found, nor does it appear that any notice was taken of the complaint".
Some Scots took matters into their own hands. A Scottish version of the Union Flag, with Saint Andrew's cross laid over Saint George's, turns up on some Scottish vessels. Hulme found it illustrated in a book of sea flags published in 1701, though he knew of no other example.
The question came back one last time at the Union of 1707. The treaty left the design of the new kingdom's flag to Queen Anne, and the Queen decided to keep the existing design. The English cross stayed on top. It's still there.
That history explains a lot about how Scots treat the saltire on its own. When the cross got buried inside a shared flag, the standalone version became the place where Scotland's cross stayed whole.
Sky blue or navy? A centuries-long colour fight
Which brings us back to the blue, and to a problem the Union Flag made worse.
Flag makers working for the navy wanted dyes that wouldn't fade at sea, so they reached for dark blues. Saltires came out of the same workshops. Writers in 1925 suggested the flag had once been sky blue and that indigo took over because sailors needed a fast colour. Sir Herbert Maxwell grumbled that flag makers used "navy blue, which shows almost black against the sky."
The Lord Lyon, Scotland's heraldic authority, never liked it. In 1937, after a batch of coronation flags was returned, a flag maker asked the Admiralty for the correct blue. Lyon's answer was that the saltire should be azure, and Lyon and would not accept the "blue-black" of some Union Flags as azure on a coat of arms. In 1998 the Flag Institute recommended Pantone 300, noting the saltire's blue "should be lighter than the dark blue used in the Union Flag". For reference, the Flag Institute gives the Union Flag's blue as Pantone 280, a noticeably deeper shade.
So by the late 1990s you had a real mess. Some saltires were sky blue, some were close to navy, and plenty landed somewhere between. If you bought two from different shops, they wouldn't match.
A retired accountant takes it to Holyrood
The fix came from one persistent citizen. In 2000, George Reid, a retired accountant, petitioned the new Scottish Parliament to standardise the colour. MSPs first decided it wasn't a devolved matter, which meant they felt they had no power to act. Then the Lord Lyon suggested it fell within Holyrood's remit after all, and Reid filed again.
That second petition, PE512, reached the Education, Culture and Sport Committee on 18 February 2003. The record of the meeting shows how carefully the committee trod. The convener said the committee should not "try to restrict what flags are flown at football or rugby matches or anywhere else" and that the proposal "will be a voluntary code and will not be statutory." Michael Russell MSP admitted the recommendation would carry no legal force, "but it will be a pretty strong recommendation." The convener closed by thanking Mr Reid for his persistence.
And that's where Pantone 300 comes from. The Flag Institute now lists the flag as Pantone 300 blue and white, in proportions of 3:5. The shade is a medium, bright blue, clearly lighter than the Union Flag. One travel guide notes it "is becoming the standard", which is about as strong as a voluntary code gets.
Keep this in mind next time you see a crowd of saltires at Murrayfield or Hampden. The variety of blues in the stands isn't sloppiness. Parliament chose not to police it.
The Scottish flag you're not supposed to fly
The saltire belongs to everyone. Scotland's other famous flag doesn't.
The red lion rampant on gold is the Royal Banner of Scotland, and it's the personal banner of the monarch. Its official use is restricted to a small group of the Crown's representatives in Scotland, such as Lord Lieutenants and the Lord Lyon King of Arms. The legal backbone goes back to the Lyon King of Arms Act 1672, which made the Lyon Register "the true and unrepeallable rule of all Armes and Bearings in Scotland." Anyone using arms without right owed "One Hundred pounds money toties quoties to the Lyon," meaning every single time, and forfeited the goods that carried them.
So why do you see the lion all over football terraces? Blame a royal warrant from September 1934, issued for George V's Silver Jubilee. When an MP asked in 1936 whether ordinary citizens had the right to fly the flag, the Secretary of State for Scotland, Walter Elliot, quoted the warrant: "no official cognisance should be taken of the display of the lion rampant flag as a mark of loyalty". Pressed on whether anyone would be prosecuted, he declined to say more and suggested the MP study his answer.
That's a thoroughly British kind of legal settlement. The flag is restricted. Waving it is tolerated. Nobody wants to spell out where one ends and the other starts.
The flag Scots finished themselves
Put the pieces side by side and a pattern shows up. The legend gave the saltire a miracle but got the dates wrong. The Union Flag gave it a global audience but cut it in four, and the people who objected in 1606 got no answer. The royal lion carries the prestige, but the law fences it off.
The saltire on its own is the version Scots shaped from the ground up. Soldiers sewed it on their coats in 1385. Shipmasters protested for it in 1606. And in 2003, after a retired accountant spent three years filing petitions, a parliamentary committee gave it a colour you'll find in a swatch book. Pantone 300, voluntary, and still not enforced at the football.
Julio Song
Writer
Julio is a staff writer at FlagDB. He studied Mathematics at the University of Madrid and has a passion for vexillology.
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