It may be concluded from this narrative that the Irish of the eleventh century had no national flag common to the whole people. This, together with the fact that after the death of Brian no Irish king arose great enough to secure the allegiance of the whole nation, may explain why the Irish never developed a national flag as did the English and Scots. The red saltire on white ground which represents Ireland in the Union flag had only an ephemeral existence as a separate flag. Originating as the arms of the powerful Geraldines, who from the time of Henry II held the predominant position among those whose presence in Ireland was due to the efforts of the English sovereigns to subjugate that country, it is not to be expected that the native Irish should ever have taken kindly to a badge that could only remind them of their servitude to a race with whom they had little in common, and the attempt to father this emblem upon St Patrick (who, it may be remarked, is not entitled to a cross--since he was not a martyr) has evoked no response from the Irish themselves. The earliest evidence of the existence of the red saltire flag[135] known to the author occurs in a map of "Hirlandia" by John Goghe dated 1567 and now exhibited in the museum of the Public Record Office. The arms at the head of this map are the St George's cross impaled with the crowned harp, but the red saltire is prominent in the arms of the Earl of Kildare and the other Geraldine families placed over their respective spheres of influence. The red saltire flag is flown at the masthead of a ship, possibly an Irish pirate, which is engaged in action in the St George's Channel with another ship flying the St George's cross. The St George's flag flies upon Cornwall, Wales and Man, but the red saltire flag does not appear upon Ireland itself, though it is placed upon the adjacent Mulls of Galloway and Kintyre in Scotland. It is, however, to be found in the arms of Trinity College, Dublin (1591), in which the banners of St George and of this saltire surmount the turrets that flank the castle gateway. The Graydon MS. Flag Book of 1686 which belonged to Pepys does not contain this flag, but gives as the flag of Ireland (which, it may be noted, appears as an afterthought right at the end of the book) the green flag with St George's cross and the harp, illustrated in Plate X, fig. 3. The saltire flag is nevertheless given as "Pavillon d'Ierne" in the flag plates at the commencement of the _Neptune François_ of 1693, whence it was copied into later flag collections.