Finding Arthur (25 page)

Éoganán had other advantages. He had been born and brought up in Dalriada while Aedan, the son of a Pictish princess, was an outsider
from far off Manau. However Éoganán’s most important advantage was that, like the late king Conall and unlike Aedan, he was a Christian sympathizer and so could depend upon the support of Columba-Crimthann and his monks. This was to be the first time religion played a significant part in the selection of a king of the Scots.

When Duncan gave his support to Éoganán he brought the house of Comgall with him and created a “dream ticket” that split the support of the house of Gabhran and weakened Aedan. Aedan, however, while something of an outsider was also a wily politician, and had doubtless cultivated support in Dalriada during Conall’s reign. Aedan was far from finished.

In the late 560s the chiefs of Angus, based on the island of Islay, and the chiefs of Lorne, based on the island of Seil, rose in rebellion against Conall after he tried to impose Christianity in the outer isles. Their opposition to Conall and his Christian impositions made these chiefs natural allies of Aedan, who was, after all, a man of the Old Way. In later years Aedan and Columba, pragmatic political power-mongers both, would find ways, if not to work together, then at least not to work against each other, although they were lifelong enemies. It is likely that Aedan supported the rebel chiefs when they came out against Conall and the Christian party and that this guaranteed him their support and the support of the people of the Old Way when Aedan came to contest the throne.

Aedan had other advantages too. He came to the contest fresh from victory at the Battle of Arderydd, with a battle-hardened army at his back and with Strathclyde as an ally. He also had by his side his fifteen-year-old son, the martial wonder of the age, Arthur.

Dalriada-Argyll in the early 570s was riven between the two royal houses of Comgall and Gabhran, and between the Old Way of the druids and Columba-Crimthann’s new, militant Christianity. When Conall died the slight consensus that had kept Dalriada from the abyss of civil war evaporated.

As a politician first and a soldier second, it is likely that Aedan tried to take the throne by civil means to begin with, instructing his supporters to debate with their opponents, offer bribes, and promise favors—the usual political activity that surrounded the choice of a new
king. However, it must quickly have become clear to Aedan that no peaceful resolution was possible, because this time, for the first time, the matter of religion was a major factor.

Columba-Crimthann rallied his Christians in favor of Éoganán and Duncan and against Aedan. Aedan retaliated by accusing Columba-Crimthann of being a fool and a liar and by calling upon forty-seven druids to curse him.

This was an effective tactic. Columba-Crimthann’s Christians may have ignored a Druid Wall at the Battle of Cul Drebne, but this had been in the heat of battle. In his quieter moments, Columba-Crimthann still believed in the existence of “Pagan” spirits and so the curses of Aedan’s druids probably had some effect upon him. But whatever effect they had, they were not enough to stop him interfering in the race for the throne. So influential was Columba-Crimthann in his opposition to Aedan that Aedan tried to have him assassinated.

The second book of Adamnan’s
Life of Columba
is entitled “Miracles of Power,” although it is really only a fictional compilation of magic tricks Adamnan attributed to Columba-Crimthann. In this second book Adamnan writes of a man named Ioan Mac Conall Mac Donald of Aedan’s house of Gabhran, who raided the lands of Colman, one of Columba-Crimthann’s supporters, on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula. Of course, this is Adamnan’s account, and Adamnan was a supporter of Columba-Crimthann, and so Ioan is described as “an evil man who persecuted good men.”

On his third raid Columba-Crimthann chased Ioan away; probably with curses, because, as Adamnan says, shortly afterward Ioan drowned at sea as “predicted” by Columba-Crimthann: “Again the saint was proved right.”
⁸
It is more likely that Ioan simply drowned and that Adamnan jumped on this fact and used it when he came to enhance his pretense that Columba-Crimthann had magical powers.

At about the time of Ioan’s death, circa 568 to 570, Columba-Crimthann and Conall, king of the Scots, were attempting to expand Christian influence north and west by recruiting men like Colman who, in exchange for patronage and land, were prepared to pay tithes to Columba-Crimthann. As I understand Adamnan, Ioan and Colman were engaged in the Hebridean equivalent of a “range war.” It was
probably Conall’s promotion of the likes of Colman that led to the revolt of the chiefs of Angus on Islay and Lorne on Seil, in the north and west of Argyll.

The troubles continued with Columba-Crimthann “excommunicating those men who persecuted churches, in particular the sons of Conall Mac [Donald]”; these were the brothers of Ioan, the lately drowned Aedan supporter. It is however unlikely that the sons of Conall were excommunicated, because it is unlikely they were Christians in the first place. Supporters of Aedan they were almost certainly men of the Old Way.

In any event, what follows is what I believe happened in the early 570s. When it became clear that Conall the king did not have long to live, the supporters of the two most likely contenders for the throne started to jockey for position. On one side was the house of Comgall, whose candidate was Éoganán, Aedan’s half-brother. Éoganán had the support of Duncan, the son of Conall the late king, and of Columba-Crimthann and his Christian churchmen. On the other side was the house of Gabhran, represented by Aedan and the rebellious chiefs of Islay and Seil, all men who favored the Old Way.

When the curses of his druids failed to stop Columba-Crimthann, Aedan took steps to have him killed. Adamnan says someone called Lám Dess and his fellow conspirators sailed to the unidentified island of Hinba and there lay in wait for Columba-Crimthann to assassinate him. When Columba-Crimthann and his monks arrived Lám Dess confronted him and then tried to kill him with a spear.

Now, at the devil’s prompting a man from the band of these men of evil attacked St. Columba with a spear, meaning to kill him. To prevent this one of the brethren, called Findlúgan, stepped between them, ready to die instead of the saint. As it happened he was wearing St. Columba’s cowl and miraculously this garment acted like a strong, impenetrable, breastplate that could not be pierced, however sharp the spear … The man wearing this protection was untouched and unharmed. But the wretched man, whose name means “Right Hand,” thought he had pierced the saint with his spear and made off.
⁹

When Adamnan says these “men of evil” were of “the royal lineage of
Cenél nGabráin
[
sic
]”—that is, of Aedan’s house—he makes plain that the “devil” in this matter was Aedan himself.
¹⁰
The name Adamnan gave to the would-be assassin, Lám Dess or Right Hand, is a definite hint that this man was acting on behalf of someone else—that is, as someone else’s right-hand man. This someone else was almost certainly Aedan.

Much of what Adamnan writes are lies gauged to deceive people, but, I believe, there is some truth behind this story and that there really was an attempt upon the life of Columba-Crimthann. Columba-Crimthann appears to have known he was in danger, and, just as Saddam Hussein used doubles to avoid assassination; it seems Columba-Crimthann used Findlúgan as a human shield. This caused Lám Dess to make his unsuccessful attack upon Findlúgan, thinking he was attacking Columba-Crimthann. The stuff about the miraculous cowl that acted like a breastplate is obviously untrue and simply designed to mislead the most gullible people. It is more likely that Findlúgan was a decoy and that he was given Columba-Crimthann’s cowl to wear to draw the assassins to him. It appears Findlúgan was no fool and that he decided to wear a breastplate too. It also seems likely that Columba-Crimthann was tipped-off.

Lám Dess was killed a year later fighting on the unidentified Long Island. Of course, as almost always, Adamnan says Columba-Crimthann predicted the time of Lám Dess’s death precisely. We do not need to take this seriously—Columba-Crimthann did not have the gift of foresight and Adamnan had the gift of hindsight.

Ioan and Colman fought small-scale fights. Chiefs, like the chiefs of Angus of Islay and Lorne of Seil, fought middling battles. Full-scale civil war had not yet broken out. This had only been avoided when Conall brought in Christian mercenaries from Ireland to quell the revolt of the chiefs of Angus and Lorne, of Islay and Seil.

Despite Adamnan’s efforts to disguise the truth, a careful reading of his über-biased
Life of St. Columba
reveals what really happened at this time. Adamnan could get away with writing about miracles, but facts were a different matter. Adamnan’s problem was that he was writing within 100 years of Columba-Crimthann’s death—a
time when, through the oral tradition, people still knew something of what had actually happened—and so he was somewhat limited in the lies he could tell. He could invent as many miracles as he liked, no one could gainsay him there; he could “airbrush” out of history much that did not suit his book, which was a lot; and he could put a positive Columba-Crimthann-spin on everything else, but he could not mess too much with the big hard facts of history, one of which was that Columba-Crimthann opposed Aedan becoming king.

Adamnan is reduced to pretending that although Columba-Crimthann initially may have lent a tad towards the side of Éoganán, his god quickly put him right and told him he had to plump for Aedan. The most important implication of this nonsense was that this enabled Adamnan to claim that while Columba-Crimthann may have backed the wrong horse in the first place, Columba-Crimthann was still God’s chosen one.

Despite Columba-Crimthann’s spectacular political misjudgment, people were told that they could still rely on him to tell them what to do, because his god was always there to put him right; at least, according to Adamnan. People have believed this for centuries. In reality, Columba-Crimthann was simply determined to be on the winner’s side, whomever that might be. To paraphrase a Bill Clinton campaign trope, “It’s the power, stupid.”

This is how it happened according to Adamnan:

[Columba] saw one night in a mental trance an angel of the Lord sent to him. He had in his hand a glass book of the ordination of kings, which Columba received from him, and which at the angels bidding he began to read. In the book the command was given to him that he should ordain Aedan as king, which Columba refused to do because he held Aedan’s brother Éoganán in higher regard.

If the supernatural elements in this passage are disregarded it comes down to this—Columba-Crimthann supported Éoganán.

Whereupon the angels reached out and struck [Columba-Crimthann] with a whip, … Then the angel addressed him sternly: “Know then as a certain truth, I am sent to you by God with the glass book in order that you should ordain Aedan to the kingship … But if you refuse to obey this command, I shall strike you again. In this way the angel … appeared to St. Columba on three successive nights, each time having the same glass book, and each time making the same demand that he should ordain Aedan as king. [Columba-Crimthann] obeyed the word of the Lord.”
¹¹

If the supernatural elements in this passage are disregarded it comes down to this—Éoganán was Columba-Crimthann’s preferred candidate, but when it became clear that Aedan was likely to be the winner, Columba-Crimthann backtracked. Having backed the wrong horse, Columba-Crimthann had to repair his and his god’s credibility in the eyes of the people. He pretended that while he had made a mistake his god had corrected him, and that Aedan was his god’s chosen one after all. Columba-Crimthann knew that his power lay in his ability to convince people that he had a direct-line to “God” and that by taking the blame himself in this way he could keep his options open for the future.

The above and what follows is based on Christian sources, because the many other sources that were once extant have been lost or destroyed.

Now Columba-Crimthann had to curry favor with Aedan. According to Adamnan, “[Columba-Crimthann] sailed from Hinba to Iona, where Aedan had arrived at this time, and he ordained him king … he laid his hand on Aedan’s head and blessed him.”
¹²

This authorized version has Columba-Crimthann taking the initiative and boldly seeking out Aedan with a view to providing him with his blessing. However Cumméne, Adamnan’s predecessor as Columba-Crimthann’s hagiographer, says Columba-Crimthann was on Iona
when Aedan arrived
, which suggests that Columba-Crimthann was not quite so keen to see Aedan as Adamnan suggests.

It seems to me more likely that having all but secured his throne at Delgon, Aedan was traveling about his new kingdom, making himself
known to the local chiefs, rewarding and penalizing as he went, until he got to Iona where he found Columba-Crimthann.

Cumméne and Adamnan agree that Columba gave Aedan his blessing on Iona. There are no independent witnesses to this event but I do not doubt it took place. If this blessing had mattered to Aedan it is likely it would have occurred in public, in front of the people of Dunadd. I do not believe that whatever ritual Columba performed on Iona was important to Aedan. This rite of ordination has been held up as the first time a king of the Scots was made king according to Christian practices, but it was nothing of the kind. This ordination was not the historical “big deal” that almost every writer on the matter has said it was. Aedan became king according to the Old Ways at Dunadd. That was what was important: that and the fact that militarily Aedan had the whip hand.

Columba-Crimthann’s performance on Iona was just that, a performance, the purpose of which was to allow Columba-Crimthann and his followers to bruit it about that he, Columba-Crimthann, was a king-maker. Aedan probably went along with it because to him it would have been mere ritual and because he was interested in doing a deal.