"Hast thou not herde, Lord Howard bold, As thou hast sailed by day and by night, Of a Scottish rover on the seas? Men call hym Sir Andrewe Barton, Knyte?
"He is brasse within and steel withoute, With bemes on his toppe-castle strong, And eighteen piece of ordnaunce He carries on each side along.
"And he hath a pinnace derely dight, St. Andrew's cross yat is his guide; His pinnace bereth nine score men And fifteen cannons on each side.
"Were ye twenty ships and he but one, I swear by kirk, and bower and hall, He would overcome them every one If once his bemes they do down fall."
Sir Andrew was the last of the freebooters, as the rise of the navy of Henry VIII., and the union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland by James I. under one crown, put an end to these reprisals by the subjects of the one nation on the other; yet, as we shall see, it was the remnants of these very rivalries thus engendered between the single cross flags of St. Andrew and St. George which led to these national Jacks of the two nations being afterwards joined together to form one flag.
St. Andrew is also venerated by the Russians as a national saint, their tradition being that it was through the Apostle St. Andrew that the gospel of Christianity had been brought to their people. Their highest order of knighthood, created by Peter the Great, in 1698, is the Order of St. Andrew, and the national flag of Russia, borne by all their people and on their imperial navy, is the St. Andrew's cross. It is also used on the masthead of their war vessels to indicate the rank of an admiral.
It will be remembered that the Russians have transposed the colours of the banner of St. George from a red cross on a white ground, as on the English Jack, to be on theirs a white cross on a red ground. So also they have transposed the colours on their St. Andrew's flag to be a blue cross on a white ground instead of a white cross on a blue ground as on the Scottish flag.