Flag of Sweden cross pattée. Other historians claim that the Swedish flag was blue with a white cross before 1420, and became blue with a golden cross only during the early reign King Gustav I, who deposed King Christian II in 1521. The exact age of the Swedish flag is not known, but the oldest recorded pictures of a blue cloth with a yellow cross date from the early 16th century, during the reign of King Gustav I. The first legal description of the flag was made in a royal warrant of 19 April 1562 as "yellow in a cross fashioned on blue".
Cross-border flag for Ireland Cross-border flag for Ireland There is no cross-border flag universally accepted as representing both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. This can be a problem in contexts where a body organised on an all-island basis needs to be represented by a flag in an international context. The island is politically divided into the Republic of Ireland (a sovereign state comprising 26 of Ireland's 32 traditional counties) and Northern Ireland (comprising the remaining 6 counties in the north-east of Ireland, and a part of the United Kingdom), but all-island organisations are common. Examples include the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the