Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [70]
The weather was fine that spring, and also that summer. The harvest, though not especially good, was not ruined. And men said that it was thanks to Conall, son of Morna, nephew to the High King, who had influence with the gods.
THREE
PATRICK
AD 450
HIS FIRST VISIT had been inauspicious, and few of those who had sent him back imagined that he would achieve very much on the distant western island. Yet after his coming, everything was changed.
He left an account of his life; yet that account, being chiefly a confession of faith and a justification of his ministry, leaves many details of his life a mystery. The stories about him were numerous, but they were mostly inventions. The truth is that history knows neither the date of his mission, the names of the Irish rulers he encountered, nor even where, exactly, his ministry was based. All is uncertainty; all is conjecture.
But Saint Patrick existed. There is not a doubt of that. He was born a minor British aristocrat. As a boy, he was taken from near his home, somewhere in the western side of Britain, by an Irish raiding party. Kept on the island as a slave for some years, during which he mostly tended livestock, he managed to escape and find his way back across the sea to his parents. But by now he had already decided to follow the religious life. For a time he studied in Gaul; he may have visited Rome. He suggests that certain churchmen considered his learning to be below standard, no doubt because of his interrupted education. But there may be some irony in these statements, for his writings suggest a literary as well as a political sophistication. In due course he was sent, at his own request, as a missionary bishop to the western island where he had once been a slave.
Why did he want to return there? He states in his writings that he had a dream in which he heard the voices of the islanders calling to him, begging him to bring them the Gospel. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the record: accounts of supernatural visions and voices abound in the early Church, and have been recorded from time to time ever since. In Saint Patrick’s case, the experience was decisive. He begged to be given the thankless and possibly dangerous mission.
The traditional date of his arrival in Ireland, AD 432, is only a guess. It may be too early. But at some time during the decades that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, Bishop Patrick began his mission. He was by no means the first missionary to reach Irish shores: the Christian communities in Munster and Leinster had already been there for perhaps a generation or more. But he was probably the first missionary in the north if, as seems likely, his base of operations was near Armagh, in Ulster, where the king of the ancient Ulaid, bullied into a reduced territory by the mighty clan of Niall, liked the missionary bishop enough to give him his local protection.
Of Saint Patrick’s actual preaching, no reliable record remains. His famous sermon, in which he explained the mystery of the Holy Trinity by comparing it to a shamrock, is a delightful legend, but there is no evidence that he ever said such a thing. Equally, it may be added, no one can say with certainty that he did not. More can be inferred about Saint Patrick’s personality and missionary style. Humble himself, like all those who live the life of the spirit, as a bishop of the Holy Church he demanded and received the respect due to a Celtic prince. From his base in Ulster, he may have gone westwards and set up a second missionary front in Connacht. No doubt he was also in contact, from time to time, with his fellow Christians in the southern half of the island.
And did he, upon his travels, descend the ancient road that led across the Liffey at the Ford of Hurdles, and come to the little rath beside Dubh Linn? History can only say that the record, upon this point, is silent.
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