The Jacobite war in Ireland was bloody and long. It was an
inter-national war. William employed not just English but also Scottish,
Anglo-Irish, Dutch, German, Danish and even French (Huguenot) troops. Although
the mainstay of the Jacobite army was Irish Catholics, it did have some British
and French officers, and for the campaign of 1690 was supplemented by a
sizeable contingent of French, Germans and Walloons.
The Jacobite Army in Ireland
Little is known of the dress of the Jacobite troops. The
reconstructions are based on an entry in the ‘Journal of Captain John Stevens’
who gives details of the Irish army at Dundalk on the 19th of June 1690.
Stevens also gives details of the flags of the regiments he mentions. This
information, recorded in G. A Hayes-McCoy’s History of Irish Flags, has been
used to show the dress of the regiments of Irish Guards, of Lord Bellew, the
Lord Grand Prior, the Earl of Antrim, Gordon O’Neil, Lord Louth, and Colonel
Eustace. The construction of the flags aided by illustrations in Alan
Sapherson’s excellent William III at War in Scotland and Ireland 1689-91, and
by an article by Ernie Stewart in Gorget & Sash Vol. II, No. 2.
As part of the armed forces of King James II it seems likely
that Jacobite soldiers would have dressed similarly to their English and Scots
counterparts. I have chosen to show them equipped with ‘apostles’, but this was
the new cartouche box, so some supplied with these instead. C. S. Grant in From
Pike to Shot (W. R. G.) mentions a reference to St. Ruth bringing “enough
material with him in 1691 to make 20,000 uniforms. The colour of the material
was buff”. Whether the material was ever used is not known, nor is it
clear whether he brought any arms or equipment with him. It is known that only
the Grenadiers were supplied with the bayonet.
Red was likely to be the most popular colour, particularly
with units in service prior to the ‘Glorious Revolution’. The preference shown
by the troops of the Irish Brigade, later in French service, when they resisted
all attempts to put them into grey coats shows the preference felt for the
colour. Sapherson relates that the Enniskillen Williamites of Zachariah
Tiffin’s was a period of transition to regiments might have been Over were
“able to take enough red coats from dead and regiment captured Jacobites,
after an early engagement to uniform two of the Inniskilling companies”.
He goes on to say that they were unhappy when forced later to exchange these
for the grey coats the regiment was issued. Whilst the Jacobite coats may just
have been of a superior quality, it is also possible that the feelings held by
Tiffin’s men and the soldiers of the Irish Brigade were part of the equation in
the popular imagination that red coat meant regulars, whilst other colours were
worn by ‘militia’ Both Sapherson and Grant agree that later in the war many of
the Jacobites were wearing civilian clothing with a white ribbon or a piece
paper used to denote their allegiance. Grant further quotes a source commenting
on the army at the time of the arrival of St. Ruth, (May 1691) being
“dressed in rags”
THE REGIMENTS
The King’s Regt. of Irish Guards
This regiment consisted of 2 battalions, being of between 22
and 26 companies of 80 men strong. The red breeches and stockings just
guesswork in Williamite service) had similar arrangements. (The First Foot
Guards had blue breeches and stockings, the Coldstream Guards red.) If the
Irish Guards followed the practice of the 1st Foot Guards and the
‘Coldstreamer’ in dressing their drummers then the Irish Guards’ drummers
should wear the same uniform as the other regiments of Foot Guards (now are as
the rank and file, heavily decorated with silver lace. The Colour (flag)
depicted accords with the description in Stevens, however it is unusual for a
regimental Colour and may represent a sort of Royal Standard carried by the
Guards. If this is the case then the regiment’s own Colours may more closely
resemble those of Dorrington’s regiment. (The Guards became Dorrington’s after
the reorganisation of the Irish troops in French service after 1698.)
The Earl of Antrim’s Regt.
A single battalion. The flags of the regiment look to have
been part of the inspiration for the flags of the Irish Brigade units.
Lord Bellew’s Regt.
The stripes on the regiment’s flags are black and a colour
described as ‘filamot’, obviously a bastardisation of the French feuille morte,
or “dead leaf”. (A yellowish brown.) The same colour can be seen on
the flags and coat linings of Lord Louth’s Regiment. The red cross patée is
used to difference the Colonel’s Colour, being carried below the crown on the
top left corner of the flag. The motto is Tout d’en Haut’.
Gordon O’Neil’s Regt
The lining of the coat was white, though the cuffs were red.
The red cross patée was used, like Lord Bellew’s, at the top corner of the flag
nearest the staff to show the Colonel’s Colour. The lettering would be in gold.
Lord Louth’s Regt.
See the comments under Lord Bellew’s regarding filamot. The
Colonel’s Colour of this regiment was plain filamot with just the gold crown
and ‘Festina Lente’ motto. The other flags show the disputed versions of other
regimental Colours, the upper after Ernie Stewart, the lower after Alan
Sapherson
The Lord Grand Prior’s Regt.
The red and white lace shown is attributed by Stevens to the
regiment’s grenadiers; however, it is speculated that its possible use by the
drummers. The drummers did wear blue.
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In England, Crown and parliament would eventually reach an
understanding. Charles II came to the throne in 1660, when Cromwell’s body was
uprooted from its grave and hung on a pole in London by the jubilant Royalists.
In Ireland, the Catholic population once more began to sense that its lot might
be improved. At first, such hopes were scotched firmly: the king did indeed
restore a portion of the country’s landed Catholics to their estates, but more
than 80 per cent of Ireland’s land remained in Protestant hands. By 1685,
however, there was once again a Catholic monarch on the throne: James II,
younger son of the executed Charles I, who had been drawn to the old faith
while living in Royalist exile in France. His brother Charles II had
disapproved of James’s conversion and ordered that Mary and Anne, the two surviving
children of his first marriage, be raised as Protestants; in 1673, however,
James was permitted to marry a Catholic Italian noblewoman, Mary of Modena. So
when he succeeded Charles, James II was bringing about what must have seemed a
nightmare vision to English Protestants. The new monarch wrote that: ‘If
occasion were, I hope God would give me his grace to suffer death for the true
Catholic religion as well as banishment.’ There was no doubting his allegiance
to the old faith.
To watching Catholics, of course, James’s accession to the
throne represented dreams of renewed religious freedom. These sensations of
Catholic excitement and Protestant horror only increased when James began
instituting reforms: admitting Catholics to high government office, for
example, and suspending the laws that had discriminated against them. In his
Irish policies, to be sure, James proved to be as cautious as his brother had
been before him, and equally mindful of the dangers of opening the floodgates
of religious liberty. But stirrings could be felt nonetheless, in Ireland as in
England, and Protestant unease spread across the country. At first, this
discomfiture could be held in check: James and his consort were childless, and
it was assumed that his Protestant daughter Mary would in due course inherit
the throne, reintroducing reformed rule.
In 1688, however, Mary of Modena gave birth to a son. Now
the work of Henry VIII, Elizabeth and Cromwell seemed set to be overturned by a
new Catholic dynasty. For parliament, faith and liberty were indivisible – yet
here was England about to be pulled back under popish rule. The
Parliamentarians, therefore, began preparations for rebellion once again; and
this time they looked abroad for a leader. They turned to Holland – to Prince William
of Orange, who was both a leader of Protestant Europe and James’s own
son-in-law, having married his daughter Mary in 1677. William himself was
pragmatic: his reputation as fervent champion of Protestantism is by no means
deserved, because although Holland was ostensibly Calvinist in orientation, it
was a remarkably diverse and liberal society, with large populations of
Catholics and Jews.
This period in European history was dominated by a high
degree of tension and frequent conflict involving France on the one hand and on
the other a shifting Grand Alliance consisting of most of the other major
powers of central and western Europe. The coming conflict in Ireland, indeed,
was a sideshow, albeit an important one – a single component in a much larger continent-wide
struggle for power that would continue into the eighteenth century. To be sure,
it was partly religious in nature. By the middle of the seventeenth century the
Counter-Reformation was in full flood and the boundaries of Protestant Europe
had as a result been pushed back. The French revocation in 1685 of the Edict of
Nantes, which since 1598 had granted civil and religious liberties to
Protestants in that country, had caused several hundred thousand Huguenots to
flee to England, Holland and Protestant parts of Germany and Switzerland. Yet
in essence these were conflicts rooted not in religion – except in Britain and
Ireland – but rather in political rivalry. At this time, William’s Dutch lands
were under constant threat from rampant French armies to his south; an alliance
with England would bring the power of its army and navy to his aid – and
William would, as a result, hold the destiny of Ireland and England in his
hands.
So when the English parliament sought his aid against James,
William seized the opportunity. When it came to the point, indeed, the
so-called Glorious Revolution was effected without bloodshed and with
remarkable rapidity. A Dutch army landed in southwest England in November 1688;
by December, James had fled to France and his son-in-law William and daughter
Mary were on the throne. At once the scene shifted dramatically to Ireland,
where James’s supporters, the Jacobites, would shortly face the Williamites in
a bitter two-year struggle for supremacy. This would prove to be the last war
of a violent century and the final stand of Catholic Ireland against a
Protestant ascendancy. And it was a campaign shot through with irony: for the
Catholics were defending the rights of the legitimate King of England, Scotland
and Ireland, while the Protestants were fighting in the cause of a usurper.
The administration at Dublin Castle was in the hands of
James’s appointees – most of the rest of the undergraduates and Fellows of Trinity
College had fled Ireland in response to the new regime – and the Jacobites in
addition controlled virtually the whole of Ireland, with the exception of
pockets of resistance in Ulster. By any measure, therefore, the circumstances
must have appeared bright for James when, in March 1689, he sailed from France
and landed at Kinsale. He was in the company of the French ambassador and a
force of French troops – and awaiting him was an Irish army of forty-two
thousand men. He marched directly to Cork and from there to Dublin, cheered as
he went by crowds who sensed an opportunity to win back the lands that had been
confiscated almost forty years before. In Dublin, the Irish parliament declared
that its English counterpart could no longer legislate for Ireland: James
agreed to this measure but refused either to repeal the Act of Settlement or to
establish the Catholic Church in Ireland. James’s position was of course a
difficult one: he was obliged to please his Irish hosts, but did not want to do
so at the expense of provoking a watching English population. As a result of this
balancing act, however, his welcome in Ireland cooled substantially.
By now the Jacobite hold over Ireland had been strengthened
by further successes in Ulster, which had swept much of the province clean of
resistance. Such as remained was holed up at Enniskillen and especially at
Protestant Londonderry, which had proclaimed its loyalty to William and Mary
and shut its gates to James’s emissaries as early as December 1688. The crowded
city had remained obdurately resistant ever since, but in April 1689 James
himself resolved to travel north, confident that his presence would resolve
matters and win over the leaders. Instead, he was fired on from the ramparts
and forced to beat a mortifying retreat; and the siege of the city, which had
been closing since December, now began in earnest.
Few held out much hope that the city could survive a siege
of any duration: its fortifications had been built to withstand not modern
weaponry but the raids of the surrounding Gaelic Irish; and while Derry was
perched on a steep hill and surrounded almost entirely by easily defensible
river and marsh, it was also encircled beyond that by even higher ground, from
which the city was an easy target of enemy bombardment. Furthermore, it was by
now chronically overcrowded. Hunger and disease soon became a serious issue for
the population of some thirty thousand defenders and refugees; and it was
doubtless of little comfort that the surrounding Jacobite army, at the end of
its supply lines, had endured an uncomfortable winter and was now similarly
ravaged.
The besiegers also lacked the paraphernalia of modern
warfare: they possessed little ammunition and siege equipment, and it was clear
that they hoped Derry would be taken as a result of starvation and weakness
rather than by force. A boom had been laid downriver to prevent any Williamite
supply ships from coming to the city’s aid; and this measure worked well until
28 July, when, with conditions inside the walls now desperate, two ships did
succeed in breaking through the barrier and sailing up to the quays of Derry to
bring supplies to the defenders. Shortly afterwards, the 105-day siege was
lifted and the disconsolate Jacobite army began to straggle away. At the same
time the simultaneous siege of Enniskillen, which had pinned down Jacobite
forces across much of the midlands, was raised.
The Siege of Derry marks the apotheosis of the Ulster
Protestant tradition of defiance (‘No Surrender’) in the face of adversity. Quite
apart from this profound symbolic resonance, however, the event was of some
political significance too, for its duration and its ultimate failure had
significantly weakened James’s position in Ireland. This deterioration was
further signalled a few weeks later, when the first Williamite forces sailed
into Belfast Lough and took up quarters in Belfast. The winter to come
consisted of stalemate, but many more thousands of Williamite soldiers arrived
from England and Europe in the spring of 1690; and William himself arrived –
reluctantly, for he had no wish to be diverted towards distant Ireland – in
Belfast on 14 June with a force of fifteen thousand. On 30 June, the two kings
met on the banks of the river Boyne in County Meath: William at the head of thirty-five
thousand Danish, English, Huguenot and German soldiers, plus Ulster regiments;
James leading twenty-five thousand Irish and French troops.
The Battle of the Boyne of the following day, though it was
certainly not the great decisive engagement of Irish myth, has provided one
enduring image: that of William on a white charger, his vast force wholly
outnumbering, outgunning and outflanking the Jacobites. Afterwards James fled,
first to Dublin and then back to Kinsale: he didn’t stop, in fact, until he
reached France. His reputation was damaged fatally in the process; and in
addition, the Battle of the Boyne took on a practical significance that it
would have lacked had James stayed to fight another day: it delivered Dublin
and the province of Leinster to William. And yet the Boyne did not end Irish
hopes of recovering religious liberty and lost landholdings: the Jacobites had
been only scattered, not destroyed; and William would encounter a significant
reverse just over a month later, as his attempt to take Limerick by storm was
repelled by the city’s defenders. Shortly afterwards he sailed from Ireland,
leaving final victory to his lieutenants.
The war in Ireland ground on, in fact, for another year –
and the decisive battle was the bloodiest in Irish history. On 12 July 1691, at
Aughrim in County Galway, the Williamites faced another army of Irish and
French troops; each side fielded approximately twenty thousand men. The
Jacobites had previously retreated west across the Shannon out of weakness –
but now at Aughrim their leaders felt renewed confidence. Their situation was
strong, not least because the army was under the command of the French general
Charles Chalmont, Marquis de St Ruth, a name associated with the crushing of
the Protestants of France. The Jacobites also had the advantage of being
positioned on high ground and dug in amid the ruins of Aughrim Castle; any
Williamite advance would have to be made across flat fields that even in high
summer consisted of little more than bog. For St Ruth, moreover, this was holy
war. Addressing his army on the eve of battle, he declared that the Jacobites
were engaged in a battle for souls: ‘Stand to it therefore my dears, and bear
no longer the reproaches of the heretics who brand you with cowardice, and you may
be assured that King James will love and reward you, Louis the Great will
protect you, all good Catholics will applaud you, I myself will command you,
the church will pray for you, your posterity will bless you, God will make you
all saints and his holy mother will lay you in her bosom.’ As if to underline
this fact, a phalanx of priests moved through the ranks to offer Communion just
before battle commenced.
And, at first, fortune favoured the Jacobites: their enemy
advanced three times through waist-high waters, only to be repeatedly driven
back and slaughtered; many Williamite soldiers drowned in the bog. It seemed to
be a rout – yet at the crucial moment, the Jacobites were stymied by poor
planning and incompetence. Running short of ammunition, they discovered that
their reserve supply was of English design and incompatible with their
French-made muskets, so the tide turned once again. The Williamites now
advanced, and St Ruth – who still believed that victory was within his grasp –
was decapitated by a flying cannon-ball. Now his men were thrown into
confusion: their line broke, the enemy surged forward and the Jacobites were
hunted across the marshy fields. At the close of battle, seven thousand had
been killed: it was the biggest loss of life in any Irish battle, and the bulk
of the remaining Catholic elite lay among the dead. It was at this point that
the Catholic threat was extinguished for the next hundred years. Protestant
control had at last been achieved: by the end of the Williamite wars, only some
20 per cent of Irish land remained in Catholic hands. Yet for all that, a sense
of siege had not been wholly dissipated. It was necessary now to design a new
political order – one that would eliminate the Catholic threat and secure once
and for all a Protestant dominion in Ireland.
