Cromwell Bombards Drogheda, Ireland,1649
Battle of the Boyne 1690.
Following defeat of Catholic forces in Ireland by Oliver Cromwell and his generals during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639-1651), Ireland was occupied by garrison units of the New Model Army to assure Protestant ascendancy. The Restoration Army saw more Catholic officers promoted by Charles II and still more by James II, but this only raised the old fears of civil and religious war in England and Scotland. The main fear was of possible invasion in support of absolute monarchy by a royal and Catholic army from Ireland. Such fears were greatly exacerbated by England’s move away from conflict with the Calvinist United Provinces during the three Anglo-Dutch Wars toward sustained conflict with “His Catholic Majesty,” Louis XIV of France. The Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) and so-called Glorious Revolution that deposed James and crowned William III ushered in a violent new phase of conflict in Irish history between Jacobites (supporters of James II) and Williamites (supporters of William III),with consequences that echo in Ireland to the present day. The Williamite War of 1689-1691, sometimes known as the Jacobite War, was a war of succession in England and an international war for or against France for most non-Irish participants. But it was a civil war in Ireland. James and William each brought regular regiments and heavily international armies to fight in Ireland. Each side was then reinforced by local Irish forces, mainly along sectarian lines. Several sizeable and wholly independent Irish armies also fought, for reasons entirely their own. And everywhere in the Irish countryside there operated rapparees, or guerillas and bandits. As in other peripheral theaters of the Nine Years’ War, the lack of more than a few large towns in Ireland and the absence of modern “trace italienne” fortifications and defensive artillery-which so dominated warfare in Flanders and the Rhineland-made the Irish war primarily one of raids and ambushes.
Starting in January 1689, the Irish Jacobite and governor of Ireland, the Earl of Tyrconnel, raised 40,000 Irish troops by warrant. James II was carried by a fleet of 22 French sail to land in Kinsale, County Cork, on March 14/24, 1689. He was accompanied by troops of his small and inexperienced exile army, a contingent of French officers, and a good deal more French money and munitions. The exile force of English, Scots, and Irish loyalists was officered mainly by Catholics such as James’ bastard son, the Duke of Berwick, and Patrick Sarsfield. The Jacobite cause in Ireland enjoyed much popular support outside Dublin, even if James himself was only interested in Ireland as a base for retaking power in England. The initial landing was followed by French regular reinforcements and another 2,000-3,000 loyalist volunteers from France, all of whom landed during and after a naval battle fought off Bantry Bay (May 1/11, 1689). James’ exile regiments and Tyrconnel’s Irish troops were, for the most part, poorly equipped: some Irish units had only pikes instead of muskets, musketeers were chronically short of powder, and almost none had uniforms. Four French regiments that fought in Ireland for James in 1690 were professional and substantial units. They helped train Irish volunteers, but never to a fully professional level. Along with one German and another Walloon regiment paid for and provided by Louis XIV-in exchange for three Irish regiments sent to the Continent to fight for France-the foreign contingent of the Jacobite army in 1690 comprised over 6,600 well-trained professional soldiers. This core was surrounded by an additional 30,000 exiles and native Irish. Some exile units were reasonably professional. Most local recruits were enthusiastic but lacked modern weapons or proper training. These problems forced Jacobite generals to avoid set-piece battles where ill-trained infantry was at a great disadvantage when facing skilled and disciplined professionals. Instead, they moved to a policy of scorched earth as early as the autumn of 1689. Thereafter, they mostly conducted defensive sieges where poor but well-protected and highly motivated infantry stood a better chance of inflicting serious damage on a professional enemy. Jacobite cavalry was much better equipped, trained, and commanded than the infantry. The artillery was weak to non-existent in most cases, with most available big guns left and lost in isolated garrisons instead of being concentrated into a usable artillery train for the mobile forces. In addition to qualitative disadvantages among the infantry and artillery, the Jacobite army lost its initial numerical advantage to the large international army ultimately brought over by William during 1690.
William had difficulty raising an English army to oppose James in Ireland. He was still reassembling the British establishment following James’ dissolution of the Army in November and December 1689. Moreover, Parliament had already agreed to send an English expeditionary force of 10,000 men to fight in Flanders. It would take many months for William to raise new levies and hire enough foreign mercenaries to both control England and invade Ireland. In the interim, Williamite loyalists in Ireland began to organize. Several regiments of cavalry, dragoon, and infantry militia were raised from the Ulster Protestant population, totaling about 9,000 men. These units attacked into and secured control of western Ulster, holing up at Londonderry and Enniskillen. After taking Dublin in March 1689, James moved quickly against these two Protestant garrisons holding out against Tyrconnel in Ulster. He invested Londonderry in July. The town had been abandoned earlier by two English battalions and most regular officers, who crossed the water back to England. But the Protestant militia formed a garrison of nearly 8,000 that decided to stay and fight. James had only 4,000 men with which to oppose them, so he settled down to starve the city into submission, counting on some 30,000 refugees who had swollen the population to quickly eat through the town’s food supply. The siege lasted 105 days, until a Williamite relief force of three battalions broke through a boom blocking access to the city. At Enniskillen the local Protestant garrison was more aggressive. Its members launched raids into Tyrconnel territory and resisted Sarsfield’s effort to dislodge them, inflicting over 1,500 casualties in an ambush effected in August. Meanwhile, Graf von Schomberg and a largely mercenary force of 6,600 had landed at Belfast. These men were primarily Huguenots and Dutch, with a smattering of English from William’s new levies. Another 16,000 followed over the rest of the year, raising the Williamite army to 30,000 men at the onset of winter.
Schomberg moved out of Belfast to assault Carrickfergus, which resisted for a week. The fall of that town and of Newry opened the road to Dublin, which French officers advised James to burn and abandon in an escalation of Jacobite scorched-earth practices. Tyrconnel argued instead that James should stand and fight. James reluctantly agreed. The Jacobite army marched north, to where Schomberg had ineptly encamped over a bog near Dundalk. Over the next several months, the old German refused to fight, resisting any and all provocations made by James and Tyrconnel from their nearby lines. Instead, Schomberg stayed in the camp. Unfortunately, nearly 6,000 of his men died as a result before the end of November, not from skirmishes or battle-there was no significant field battle in Ireland during 1689-but from swamp-borne diseases, hunger, and cold. James had wisely withdrawn from the site in early October as his own troops began to grow ill. The Williamite dead were replaced over the winter months by fresh troops brought in from England, Denmark, and the United Provinces. Unhappy with Schomberg’s performance, William determined to lead his forces in Ireland personally, to quickly and decisively end the war of succession with James. He landed at Carrickfergus on June 14/24, 1690. He was accompanied by Marlborough, the Earl of Athlone and other Dutch generals, and 15,000 men borne across the Irish Sea by a fleet of 300 ships. This deployment included most available English troops from the newly raised levies, a sizeable contingent of Danish troops, and a hard core of experienced Dutch cavalry, dragoons, and infantry. For the campaign of 1690, William had 35,000 effectives, in addition to 15,000 Irish Protestant militia and thousands more support troops. He also had a Navy that swarmed around the Irish coasts looking for renegade privateers and attempting to block French reinforcements. James received reinforcements, too: French regulars, Germans, and Walloons, over 6,600 in all. However, to obtain even this small number of fine French troops, James was compelled to send 5,000 Irish to serve in France. With these adjustments to the numbers on either side, the table was set for the decisive battle of the Williamite War. That was fought at the Boyne on July 1/11, 1690.
Following William’s victory and the withdrawal of the Jacobite army from the Boyne, James fled to Dublin and thence, on a French man-of-war, returned to exile in France. William arrived in Dublin on July 5/15th, a day after James fled. Surviving Jacobites and their French allies had in the meantime retreated to Limerick. William followed only slowly. By the time he arrived there five weeks later, the Jacobite army had partly recovered and was prepared to fight. The reason for his slow march appears to have been concern over the defeat suffered by the Allied navies at Beachy Head (June 30/July 10, 1690), which briefly threatened to isolate him in Ireland. Even worse news for William later arrived from the battlefield at Fleurus (July 1/11, 1690), where the Allies suffered a serious loss. But William decided to finish the bloody work he had started in Ireland, and initiated a siege of the 14,000 Jacobite troops crowded inside Limerick. The French had by that time withdrawn to Galway, preparatory to leaving Ireland entirely. Not everything went William’s way: on August 12/22, his siege train was intercepted by a force under Sarsfield, well before the guns reached the Williamite investment lines around Limerick. A direct assault assayed against the determined Jacobite garrison cost William about 2,000 casualties. Its failure, along with the shortage of powder and shot that resulted from Sarsfield’s capture of much of the Williamite artillery train, persuaded him to lift the siege in early September. While these events were underway, the French evacuated their regiments by sea from Galway, as the Grand Monarque correctly concluded that James’ cause was lost and there was no point wasting good troops pursuing it further.
The Jacobites still held the ports of Cork and Kinsale, through which some private and French supplies of war matériel reached them. Marlborough devised a plan of attack to close these ports. He landed with 5,000 men near Cork on September 21/October 1, and took both ports from the land by the end of October. Each army went into winter quarters, though raids and small ambushes continued. A “dirty war” in the countryside between Catholic rapparees and Protestant militia ensued. This was one of the few examples remaining in Europe-outside the religious motivations of Orthodox Cossacks who so hated Catholic Poles that they would not accept autonomy or make peace from the 1640s to the 1670s, and the cruel dragonnades of Louis XIV-where the smoldering embers of the old wars of religion were still capable of being fanned into flames that burned out whole communities through atrocity and persecution. The presence of unpaid foreign mercenaries did not help. Danish troops, among others, earned a sordid reputation for thievery and atrocity. The main reason for continuation of fighting was William and his Ulster Protestants allies’ insistence on seizure of the estates of Jacobite rebels, lands then parceled out to reward Williamite fighters. A separate, private army of 10,000 “Ulster Gaels” also fought in the north without recognizing Jacobite command. Against Danish and other Williamite probes in force, Sarsfield held a line along the Shannon through the winter of 1690-1691. When Tyrconnel returned from a diplomatic and military mission to Paris, he insisted on assuming overall command. New French money and some matériel aid arrived in April and May, but Louis XIV would not again commit French troops to Ireland. Divisions at the top of the Jacobite command split the army into quarrelsome factions even as the Williamites advanced, under command of a trusted Dutch subordinate, Lieutenant-General Godard van Ginkel. The Williamite advance on Limerick was greatly frustrated by the operations of Irish irregulars, or rapparees. Of their actions, Ginkel bitterly complained in a dispatch: “The enemy are burning all before us, and the Rapparees are so great a number that we can find neither forage nor cover, which hinders much our march.”
Hindered or not, his Williamite army of 20,000 hard, professional troops closed and took half of Athlone on June 20/30, 1691. The Jacobites still held the other half of the town, after burning the only bridge over the Shannon. Ginkel was able to cross the river via a ford and took the whole town ten days later. Some 21,000 Jacobite infantry, cavalry, and dragoons fell back from Athlone to Aughrim, where they dug in. Despite occupying good defensive positions, they were crushed in a sharp fight at Aughrim (July 12/22, 1691). The battle turned into a complete rout, during and after which Jacobite prisoners and stragglers were massacred. About some 7,000 Jacobite troops, along with their commander, St. Ruth, and 400 irreplaceable officers were killed. The independent army of Ulster Gaels saw what was coming for the Jacobites after Aughrim and itself quickly reached terms with Ginkel. Galway surrendered in a day, the fight gone out of its garrison and townsfolk. Sligo soon fell, leaving just Limerick holding out. Ginkel cautiously approached Limerick, finally investing it on August 25th/September 4th. Thus began a lethargic siege marked mainly by protracted negotiations about the fate of the defending Jacobite troops and their allies. Terms were at last agreed in Treaty of Limerick (October 3/13, 1691). Over the next several months, 19,000 Jacobites (the “Wild Geese”) were allowed to leave for France with their armaments and families. There, the men served James II until 1697, when they were absorbed into all-Irish regiments formally in service to Louis XIV. Those few who chose instead to remain in Ireland were nominally sworn into William’s service, then quickly disbanded. This military settlement in Ireland was followed by passage of punitive anti-Catholic laws that aimed to reduce Gaelic Irish to permanent servile status, more comparable to the serfs of Russia than to other peasant populations of western Europe. In 1691, the defeat of the last forces in Ireland openly loyal to James ensured an English military occupation under a remade Irish establishment army. It also guaranteed the political, economic, and social ascendancy of a Protestant master class across that island kingdom. The administrative headquarters of the new regime was located in Dublin Castle, but ultimate authority was exercised by Westminster. Lingering Jacobite ambitions, loyalties, and intrigue roiled Irish politics and national life throughout the first half of the 18th century, as they also did in Scotland, but large-scale warfare in Ireland was over.
Suggested Reading: Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey, eds., A Military History of Ireland (1996); F. G. James, Ireland in the Empire: 1688-1770 (1973).
