St Andrew, Apostle of the Scots

During the last ten to fifteen years, major events both political and cultural have been staged on St Andrews Day. In 1996, with much pomp and ceremony, the Stone of Destiny was returned to Scotland 700 years after its removal, an act which even ten years ago, would have been thought inconceivable. The Stone was piped across the border, and taken to Edinburgh Castle on St Andrews Day. On St Andrews Day 1998, the Museum of Scotland was opened to the public, with much celebration. Most other European nations acquired their national museums in the nineteenth century; Scotland's national museum, was delivered in the late twentieth century on St Andrews Day. Today, St Andrews Day 1999, the Queen came to Scotland again to open the newly restored Great Hall of Stirling Castle, which stands as a symbol of the power, style and status of Renaissance Scotland. Built by James IV, this was one of the most magnificent royal halls in Christendom. Abandoned when James VI went south in 1603, it was later occupied, subdivided and changed beyond recognition by the army, and when it was vacated by them in 1964, a decision was taken by the Department of Ancient Monuments (now Historic Scotland) to begin a restoration back to its original fifteenth century form. It has taken 35 years, and one of the young apprentices who started in 1964 is now the Master of Works, with all of his working life spent on the Great Hall. It has been the biggest, longest and costliest restoration work in Scotland during the late 20th century, and it is entirely appropriate that such a magnificent work should be presented to the public on this important day. Who knows what great events may be planned for future St Andrews days, but it is good to see such cognisance given to St Andrews Day now.

The Biblical Andrew, the disciple of Christ, is mentioned in all four Gospels of the New Testament, and also in the Acts of the Apostles. Andrew was the son of Jonah or John, born in Bethsaida of Galilee, and the brother of Simon Peter. Both were fishermen, and lived in the same house at Capernum. From the Gospel of John chapter 1, 35-40, we learn that Andrew was a disciple of John the Baptist, whose testimony led him to follow Jesus. Andrew was first to recognise Jesus as the Messiah, and hastened to introduce his brother Peter to Him. Thereafter, the two brothers were disciples of Christ, and gave up all things to follow Him. He was chosen as one of the twelve Disciples. Where he is mentioned in the Gospels, he is always listed with Peter, James and John as being one of the four main disciples. It was he, before the miraculous feeding of the 5000, who found the boy with the five loaves and two fishes.

The details are very scanty, but as one of the twelve Disciples, Andrew was very close to Jesus Christ during his public life, and was present at the Last Supper, saw the risen Lord, witnessed the Ascension, shared in the gifts of Pentecost, and helped establish the Christian faith thereafter. There are conflicting views on where St Andrew preached the Gospel, and the early church fathers variously claim that he preached in Scythia, Epirus, Hellas and Achaia. It is generally agreed that he was put to death in Patrae, in Achaia, which is on the north of the Peloponnesian peninsula in present day Greece. He was crucified on the orders of the Roman Governor Aegeas, on a Saltire cross, and bound, not nailed, in order to prolong his suffering. His martyrdom took place during the reign of Nero, on 30 November, AD 60, when he must have been a very old man.

St Andrews' relics were translated from Patrae to Constantinople in the fourth century by the Emperor Constantine. When a further translation of the bones was planned, legend has it that a monk was warned of this in a dream by an angel, who told him to remove them "to the ends of the earth" to keep them safe. The monk was Regulus or Rule, who according to some sources, brought a tooth, an arm bone, a kneecap and some fingers. However, most sources have Regulus or Rule shipwrecked on the coast of Fife at Kilryment, now St Andrews, at some time in the eighth century. The legend of Rule or Regulus was strong, and the eleventh century tower of St Rule, the earliest Roman church in St Andrews, still sits extant in the Cathedral grounds, and alongside the ruins of the contemporary Culdee Church of St Mary of the Rock. Historians now think that the Culdee and Roman churches in St Andrews co-existed together for centuries, and the Roman took precedence, when the foundations for the great cathedral were laid in 1160. There is also a strong possibility that the relics of St Andrew came to St Andrews courtesy of Acca, Bishop of Hexham, in about 733AD. The Cathedral of St Andrew at Hexham still stands intact. Bishop Acca was working with St Wilfrid who founded the Abbey at Hexham and dedicated it to St Andrew, whilst his second abbey at Ripon was dedicated to St Andrew's brother, St Peter.

It was in the eighth century that St Andrew became associated with the fortunes of Scotland, when King Angus McFergus (731-761 AD) with an army of Picts and Scots opposed an invading army of the Angles of Northumbria under their leader Athelston. The armies were lined up near Haddington, and on the night before the battle, St Andrew appeared to King Angus in a dream, promising his army victory. Before the battle began, a huge white saltire cross appeared in clouds against the blue of the sky, and a voice from heaven urged the Picts and Scots to 'conquer in this sign'. The place thereafter was known as Athelstaneford, and there is now a small visitor centre dedicated to explaining this story of the Scottish flag.

The x-shaped St Andrews cross, known as 'the saltire' from the French origin of the word, and also from the Latin crux decussata is thus said to date from the eighth century. However, there is no physical evidence of it surviving before its depiction on the seal of the Bishop of St Andrews in 1279. Nevertheless, the seal of the Guardians of the Realm of Scotland, in 1286, after the death of Alexander III, depicts St Andrew crucified.

The cult of St Andrew was very important in bringing Scotland into the governance of the Roman Catholic church, and moving it away from the more loosely structured native Celtic and Irish churches. The Roman Catholic church in medieval times was rigidly hierarchical, and governed by the Pope, the successor of St Peter, the brother of Andrew. The authority of the Pope, and the Catholic church, was judged to come from Christ's pronouncement, 'Thou art Peter, and on this Rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it'. Peter and his successors were given the keys of heaven, to bind and loosen, and the Popes accrued great temporal and territorial powers as well. It was very advantageous for a small country like Scotland to have St Peter's brother as their saint and protector, and the Scots, when threatened by English invasion, took every opportunity to remind the Pope of this connection. As early as 1174, the great Pope Alexander III proclaimed Scotland to be a 'filia specialis', a 'special daughter' of the Holy See, and his successors confirmed this special status, when both York and Canterbury made moves to draw the bishoprics of St Andrews and Glasgow under their control.

When Edward I was looking to the Pope to legalise his conquest of Scotland in 1298, Boniface VIII in his bull of 1299 Scimus, filii - 'We know, my son', was able to write to him with the information that 'By God's gift, the Scottish kingdom was, by means of the venerated relics of St Andrew, converted to the unity of the Catholic faith' and that Edward ought to leave it alone. Successive Popes needed constant reminders of this, and when the Scottish nobles and clergy wrote to the Pope in 1320, they said:

Our Lord Jesus Christ, after His passion and resurrection, called the Scots to His most holy faith among the very first, even though they were settled at the outer-most ends of the earth. Nor would He confirm them in that faith save by the most gentle Andrew, first of the Apostles by calling, brother of the Blessed Peter, whom he wished always to be their patron. The holy fathers, your predecessors, mindful of those events, have bestowed many favours and privileges on the Scottish realm and people, as being the special concern of St Peter's brother.'

This diplomatic letter, which we know as the Declaration of Arbroath, was one of a long line of reminders sent to Rome in an effort to free the Scottish church and people from the claims of the English, and it is during the period of the War of Independence that St Andrew emerges as the national saint of Scotland.

According to William Wallace's biographer, Blind Harry, Wallace had a strange and supernatural experience in Monkton Church near Ayr in 1297, where he was visited by an old man, who took him up on a high mountain, and showed him Scotland, burning from end to end. The old man gave him a sword, then a beautiful woman, clothed in light descended, and with a sapphire made the sign of the cross on Wallace's face. She then gave him red and green wands, and a great book of brass, silver and gold, which he tried so hard to read, that he woke up. The dream was interpreted as follows: the old man was St Andrew, giving Wallace the sword with which to liberate Scotland. The beautiful woman was the Blessed Virgin Mary, and her green rod the rod of governance; the red rod signifying the blood Wallace had to shed in the cause. The marking of the Saltire on his face was the gift of St Andrew and Mary both. The brass silver and gold book, was the book of Scotland's history. Thus Wallace was being invested, and given his mission from heaven.

When King Robert the Bruce delivered the victory of Bannockburn in June 1314, the victory was attributed to God and St Andrew by the Scotichronicon, although it was the relics of Saints Columba and Fillan that Bruce had carried into the field of Bannockburn. In 1318, St Andrew's Cathedral, which was begun in 1160, was consecrated in a service of national thanksgiving 'for the notable victory granted to the Scottish people by the blessed Andrew'. By 1350, the Saltire cross was being used on the Scottish coinage and an Act of Parliament in 1385 decreed that every man in the Scottish army should wear the Saltire cross. The Saltire prevailed as the banner of Scotland.

Although the Reformation dispensed with the honour of the saints, Christ's apostles have always been important in the Scottish church, and the present day Church of Scotland publications group is known as the Saint Andrew Press. Even the Covenanters had the Saltire prominent on their banners, and regarded the St Andrew Cross as the true and unblemished cross. This is graphically demonstrated in the Thrissels Banner of 1640, an acrostic flag prepared by Thomas Cunningham, Comptroller of the Scottish Staple at Campvere in the Netherlands. By 1640, many attempts had been made to join the St George's Cross to St Andrews Cross, and reading up and down the arms of the Saltire on this banner, read:

When only Thrissels king our faithful steward born
St Andrews cross enjoyed by trueth's plantation

Along the George Cross arms, the legend reads:
But since the doubel cross of Britain's chief was worn
Worldings did ever cross our peace and Reformation

There are many strands of the story of St Andrew which can be examined, but there is one in particular that should be considered here, and that is the establishment of St Andrews as the premier ecclesiastical site in Scotland. Mention has been made of Regulus and Acca of Hexham, and also the legendary battle of Angus McFergus. Although all of these play their part, there are more important forces at work in the creation and establishment of St Andrews, and that is the part played by St Margaret of Scotland and her consort Malcolm Canmore in promoting, and making accessible, St Andrews as a place of pilgrimage. The Queen's ferry, established by Margaret to get pilgrims safely across the Forth to mainland Fife and to St Andrews, is commemorated today in the villages of North and South Queensferry. It was, according to her biographer, one of her priorities. When Margaret became Queen in 1069, there were no mainstream Roman ecclesiastical traditions in Scotland. She had to bring monks from Canterbury to establish the Benedictine monastery here in Dunfermline. The first Bishop of St Andrews had died only a decade earlier, in 1055. Margaret's own confessor, Turgot, became the fifth bishop of St Andrews in 1107, and it was Margaret's sons and grandsons who founded and built up the great abbeys of Scotland in the twelfth century. Margaret's devotion to, and promotion of the cult of St Andrew, gave the church in Scotland on her day and after, an international dimension, and an almost direct link to the person of Christ. St Margaret's canonisation in 1250 reinforced and strengthened that position.

This is no place to speculate on what might have been, but it is very hard to imagine how St Andrews could have flourished without the help of St Margaret, and the well traversed route across the Forth stopping at the Chapel of St James in North Queensferry, the great abbey of Dunfermline, travelling past the friary at Lochleven and so on to St Andrews. Thanks to its promotion by St Margaret, the shrine of St Andrews became one of the great important European shrines, as important for Scotland as Campostella is for St James and Spain. As Spain had no reformation in religion, Campostella has never relinquished the economic benefits.

The town of St Andrews, good although it is for golf and the University, has singularly failed to do any honour to St Andrew by way of interpretation. The autobiographical poem, Brand the Builder, by the late Dr Tom Scott, speaks about the neglect of St Andrews Cathedral in very bitter terms. His people were stonemasons, and they felt the neglect keenly:

And yonder, down by the pends whaur time has done
Havoc on the auld town waas, is Scotland's Shame.
Hame noo for the daws, the doos and the craws
The jaggy ruins o' whit wes in its time
Europe's grandest Cathedral, no even York,
Milan nor Rheims nor Köln surpassin it -
There oor culture, oor Renaissance fell
And we, St Andreans, aa oor folk fell wi' it
Ither lands their peerless buildings vaunt
And Scotland's, her incomparible ruins
O whit a wound is there for aa to see!
Whaur stood aa Scotland's culture shrined in stane

This great lament stands as a sober reflection on the state of St Andrews which, although written in the 1960s, is still valid today. There have been no modern works celebrating St Andrew himself, either in poetry or in paint, nor is there anything as fine as Walter Awlson's and Virginia Colley's interpretations of St Margaret, which hang in Abbot House.

One notable work worth mentioning, is the church opera, 'The Passion of St Andrew' written in 1992, in Scots, by Dr Jamie Reid Baxter with music by Daffyd Bulloch. It is set in a monastery in the north of Scotland, on St Andrews Day, 1559, just before the cataclysm of the Scottish Reformation sweeps away the old religion. The monks perform a passion play of St Andrew, and the mass is celebrated for the very last time, in the darkness of the November day. The monks sing:

We feel the chill o' daith strike this land doun
Winter's scythe is sweepan Scotland's sky'

Then, there's the 'Ite, Missa Est' - the mass is ended, to which the set response is Deo gratias - thanks be to God. They then sing a very moving hymn in praise of the November weather: