Common offences that came before the courts-martial included cursing, which was punishable by a fine; communicating with the enemy or surrendering a town, castle or fort without cause, which were punishable by death; striking an officer or drawing a sword on an officer, which were both punishable by death; mutinous assemblies – death; murder, theft and robbery (to a value above 12d.), rape, “unnaturall abuses” – death; failing to report for duty fully armed – severe reprimand; selling, losing, pawning or gambling away your weapons were punishable by imprisonment or by a sentence at the discretion of the court; extorting food or money from the locals, or stealing a plough horse, livestock or other goods from the locals – death; wandering away or straggling behind the column – death; wandering over a mile away from camp without permission – death; drawing a sword without an order – death; abusing or frightening the landlord of a pub or hostel – death; burning a house or barn – death; spoiling crops or ships that might be of use to the army – death; charging the enemy and retreating “before they come to handy-strokes” was punishable by death to every tenth man with the rest being demoted; failing to report discontented mutinous types amongst the ranks or failing to prevent “private fights” – death; drunkenness, disorder in army quarters or defrauding soldiers of pay led to the perpetrator being cashiered or thrown out of the army, which was the worst imaginable outcome for those many officers with no imaginations; and embezzling victuals or ammunition – death.
The courts-martial had a pleasing range of penalties. Riding the wooden horse was a punishment designed to be extremely uncomfortable on the nether regions. The wooden horse consisted of a plank positioned on its side and supported by a frame. The edge of the plank could be rounded or sharpened, depending on how kind the person supervising the punishment was. The plank was just high enough that the feet of the punished could not touch the ground. Weights could be tied to the heels to increase discomfort. Sometimes the soldier also had to wear cans around his neck, especially in offences involving drink. A soldier could reasonably predict if he was likely to be sentenced to the wooden horse. The sensible defendant would appear in court having padded his trousers in preparation. However, we know the Cromwellians were perverse puritans, so it is probable that when a soldier arrived in court with a voluminous arse, he would be given an alternative punishment such as having his heels tied to his neck for an hour.
Another punishment was to run the gauntlet, which involved running between two lines of soldiers from your own company who would beat you with cudgels. It was always wise to try to be on good terms with your comrades in the hope that they wouldn’t hit you too hard. Of course, you might not want to brain your comrade when it was his turn because you never knew the day when you would be running the gauntlet yourself. Sometimes, for added interest, you might be made run the gauntlet with your hands tied behind your back.
A popular punishment was to wear a sign around your neck in a public place, detailing your offence. Unfortunately, the signage usually came with a combination of other punishments. You might be tied to the gallows with a noose around your neck, standing on tiptoe for a few hours to prevent strangulation. You might have cold water poured down your sleeves for being drunk. This happened to Edward Sparrow on 3 January 1652. He had a quart of cold water poured down each sleeve after a notable drinking session. I imagine Edward wasn’t appealing the sentence because he got off relatively lightly. For swearing you might have had your tongue bored through with a red-hot iron, after it was pulled out with a pliers.
There were also sentences in the form of fines, dismissal from the army, death, demotion, whippings of varying numbers of lashes, and having to publicly confess your guilt to the offended party.
From the transcripts of the courts-martial we have a record of the punishments meted out. However, we know nothing of the defendants other than their names and their alleged offences and punishments. My favorite penalty is the death sentence where it could be applied to anyone who broke out of prison while awaiting execution. Also, murder and manslaughter were both capital offences, punishable by death. This is what Lieutenant Colonel Primiron Rochfort discovered when he was found not guilty of the murder of a man called Turner after mounting a fantastic defence. The court eventually decided Turner died from blows to his head after the fact so Primiron was found guilty of manslaughter. Before he could high-five his legal team, Primiron was immediately sentenced to death for the lesser offence. Sadly, no one is called Primiron any more.
So it’s clear that the life of a soldier, and some of those who came into contact with him, was not always a bed of roses. Sometimes flora other than roses was involved. For example, John Holland, who was found guilty of stealing onions from Francis Welden’s garden, was ordered to be whipped through his regiment the following Wednesday with a “rope of onions or other garden stuffe” about his neck. His happiness with the punishment was short-lived because he also received thirty lashes. William McNally was ordered to return a stolen cow to Art Toole. But Humphrey Morley was tied neck and heels for stealing a pair of silk stockings. Maybe he had worn them and laddered them, so he couldn’t return them.
Francis Quince was found guilty of conveying away Nathaniel Winsley, a soldier, and gaoled until such a time as he could produce Winsley and his horse and arms, or produce anyone else with a horse and arms to take his place. On the same day, Murtogh Cullen and his wife were tried for harbouring Donogh O’Derg and his wife. They were found guilty by a vote of the court and sentenced to death. But the court showed leniency and allowed the couple to draw lots to see who would hang and who should go free. (Imagine, sometimes officers, like the aforementioned Sands, didn’t attend court or left early. What were they thinking?) Murtogh won the lottery. However, his wife was pregnant so she got a reprieve until the child was born. Then she was hanged.
Major Elliot was found guilty of keeping oats from his men. He was also found guilty of neglect of his duty of provisioning his troops, and not calling the quartermaster’s attention to the same. He was found guilty of detaining his soldiers’ pay; guilty of giving them passes to go to England without the commander’s leave; guilty of selling Lieutenant Brumwell’s horse to another soldier; and guilty of detaining his men’s cloths. While he was found not guilty in a matter involving a cow, the court noted that he didn’t seem to tolerate cursing or mutinous mutterings amongst the soldiers. Two days later he was sentenced to death. No, not really. I am only joking. Because he was an officer, he was dismissed from the army rather than executed.
John Rice, found guilty of theft, was to be hanged because he had been condemned for theft before. Obviously, he wasn’t an officer. His accomplices Philip Boggis and Charles Baker were to be whipped from the castle gate to the gallows and to receive forty lashes. Jane Backwell was sentenced to be whipped from the gallows to her own house, and there to get thirty-nine lashes. I assume, because she was a woman, she was entitled to one less lash than the men.
John Walker confessed to a charge and was sentenced to be taken to the gallows with a rope round his neck, where he was made stand on tiptoe to contemplate the twenty lashes he would receive that evening. This is an early example of psychological torture. Thomas Seaton was imprisoned for being up at an “unseasonable” time of night: a particularly heinous crime. I am sure Cromwell must have wondered what the world was coming to when four hundred weight of cheese was stolen. We don’t know if the thief was ever caught.
However, the entire country breathed a collective sigh of relief when the New Model Army finally went back to England in 1653, allowing us to get back to our normal lawlessness. Whatever his other atrocities, I blame Cromwell for bringing the law to Ireland.
Battle Dresses
It is impossible to know how many Irish women served as soldiers in the past because those who did disguised themselves as men. You might think that surely everyone could tell the men from the women. But if I had been an officer commanding a platoon of giggling
curvy soldiers, regularly checking their face powder rather than their gunpowder, I would repress my concerns as long as they showed a bit of gumption in a fray. Besides, men in those days wore more face powder than the women, and their wigs were even bigger and blonder.
We do know of one Irish woman who was a brave soldier. Christian Davies (c.1667–1739), from Dublin, had her life story published posthumously in 1740 as The Life and Adventures of Mrs Christian Davies. The book was attributed to Daniel Defoe but it may not have been him because he was dead at the time of publication.
Following a failed youthful relationship, Davies moved in with her aunt who was an innkeeper. She inherited the inn in 1688 when she was twenty-one. She then fell madly in love with the waiter, Richard Welsh. They married and had three children together. In 1692 Welsh vanished. Davies was frantic because she really loved her waiter. She discovered that he had been press-ganged into the British Army for the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), which was also known as the War of the Grand Alliance, the War of the Palatine Succession or the War of the League of Augsburg. The army were aware that many potential soldiers, either male or female, were not attracted to the idea of standing in neat rows waiting politely for the opposing side to take their turn to shoot at their brightly coloured uniforms. This is why they introduced the more persuasive recruitment device of press-ganging. “The press”, or hitting the potential recruit over the head after getting him drunk in a tavern, and then dragging him away unconscious to the ranks, was the favoured technique of the navy, but it did occasionally happen in the army.
In order to find her husband, Davies could have dressed as a man and hung around the local tavern waiting to be pressed. Instead, having suitably disguised herself in trousers, she travelled to the nearest most active part of the Nine Years’ War in search of her missing husband.
Davies enlisted in a company of foot soldiers that was fighting in Flanders. She was wounded at Landen in 1693. While recovering from her wounds, she courted the daughter of a local burgher to enhance her cover. She was so convincing that she was involved in a duel over the fair maiden. She returned to Dublin without finding her beloved Richard when peace broke out in 1697.
Happily, war broke out again in 1701 in the form of the War of the Spanish Succession, which was a great opportunity for fighting soldiers because it involved almost every country in Europe and lasted for thirteen years. It was fought over subtle balances of power in Europe which would not have been of concern to anyone on the ground doing the fighting or looking for their husbands.
Back in trousers, Davis rejoined the army in 1702 and fought her way around Europe. In 1704 she was wounded in the hip at Schellenberg in Liechtenstein. Medicine was not so sophisticated back then that the operating army “surgeon” was qualified enough to notice that she wasn’t a man while treating her hip wound.
She recovered and fought in the Battle of Blenheim in August 1704, in which she at last – oh, happy day – found her Richard. He had not been as loyal as his devoted wife. He had taken up with a Dutch woman, despairing of ever seeing Christian again after just twelve years apart. Davies sliced off the Dutch girlfriend’s nose and got her husband back.
She fought on with Richard until 1706 when part of her skull was blown away. “Surgery” had advanced since her previous operation because, this time, her gender was revealed. Feminists would undoubtedly argue it was because the surgeon found brain matter in her skull. She was dismissed from the service but continued as a camp follower to be with her husband. She carried food, water and orders through the lines as the cannon balls whizzed around her cracked head. Richard was killed at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709. Christian was devastated. She immediately married Hugh Jones but he was killed at the siege of St Venant within a year.
She retired from the military life in 1712. She visited Queen Anne in London, who awarded her a pension of a shilling a day for life for her services. Davies returned to Dublin to open a pie and beer house, which was a brilliant idea that we would welcome even today. Between her pension and pie sales she was comfortably off and content, but she married an alcoholic soldier who squandered all of her money. She became less and less “respectable” for a female soldier with a hole in her head and hip. When she died she was given a three-volley salute over her grave.
A Late Developer
You can become a soldier by accident, especially when war breaks out around you. Today, age will usually excuse you from service but this wasn’t the case in the past. Tragically, nowadays, many people will spend their entire lives in office jobs without ever realising that they have a talent for fighting.
Ambrose Higgins (1720–1801), arguably Ireland’s most successful person ever, became a military sensation relatively late in life. His is also a story of incongruous paternal love, extremely well hidden but definitely present in the end, thus proving that even soldiers have emotions.
Ambrose Higgins was born in Meath in 1720. He was the son of minor gentry who, in the fashion typical of most minor gentry, had fallen on hard times. He joined the British Army for the practical purpose of having a career, but, because promotion was slower than he liked or thought he deserved, and there were no worthwhile fights, he resigned his commission and emigrated to Spain.
Spain was then, as now, a popular destination for Irish emigrants. Higgins was to be educated by an uncle who was a Jesuit. But he didn’t like the religious life and settled instead in Cadiz as a bank clerk. Five years later, his younger brother William left Spain to become the president of Asunción.65 Higgins thought he had lost his mind, so he followed him to talk him into coming back. He failed and ended up staying in South America working as a peddler before setting up a business in Lima in Peru.
When he was forty he returned to Spain to try to get an official government appointment in South America. While he was ambitious for glory and fame, the only job he was offered was as a draughtsman to John Garland, a fellow Irishman who was an engineer. He took the post because he had lost money in speculative business and was in debt. He sailed to Buenos Aires in 1763, and set out on the long trek across the Argentine Pampas, arriving in Mendoza in June at the beginning of winter. While crossing the Cordillera he almost froze to death in the snow. In fact, one of his three porters did die. This experience gave him a business idea.
He persuaded the Captain General of Santiago de Chile to allow him to build a series of travel shelters across the Andes. Higgins proposed brick structures with sloping roofs to allow the snow to slide off. The mule drivers who regularly crossed the mountains agreed to provide the materials free of charge. Thus, he is credited with introducing the postal system between Argentina and Chile. At last Higgins had come to the positive attention of the authorities.
Higgins, who was suffering badly from the cold, retired to Spain in 1766 but returned to South America with a commission to write a report on Chile. In the middle of his report writing there was a major uprising of the Araucanian Indians in southern Chile. At forty-nine years of age he was made a captain of dragoons, and with his mounted infantry he impressively subdued the rebels. Higgins, suddenly discovering that he was a brilliant soldier, went on the offensive.
However, he was generous and humane in victory. He invited 200 Indian chiefs, the Captain General of Santiago de Chile, the Bishop of Conceptión, who was one of the most powerful churchmen in South America, and numerous officials to conferences with Indians that he organised. He advocated trade with the Indians, and resisted suggestions that they be annihilated or deliberately turned into alcoholics like many of their North American counterparts.
In 1773 he was invited to Lima to meet the Viceroy, Manuel de Amat. Higgins instantly liked Amat, and Amat liked Higgins. By 1789, Amat had promoted him to the rank of field marshal. During this period he had an ongoing feud with the Bishop of Conceptión. The Bishop liked to pompously progress through Indian territory to show off both himself and his high office to the Indians. Higgins o
ffered to provide him with an armed escort. But the Bishop refused. When the Bishop was inevitably captured, his own Indian retinue offered to play a game of hockey: if they won, the Bishop would be released; if they lost, he would be killed. They lost. But they immediately suggested that they play the best of three, to which their opponents sportingly agreed. Disappointingly for Higgins, when the Bishop’s Indians won the next two games, the Bishop was released.
On 28 January 1787, Higgins was appointed governor, president and captain general of Chile, and effectively ran the country for the next eight years. The laws that he introduced on taking office prohibited pigs roaming the streets, put a stop to people doing their washing in rivers upstream of other people and banned throwing the clothes of those who died of infectious diseases into the streets. He ordered that men had to be faithful to their wives, and refrain from brawling, carrying arms and swearing in public. Beggars had to join the army within three days or leave the city; holy-week penitents couldn’t flog themselves in public. He changed his name to O’Higgins, and rebuilt the city of Osorno in southern Chile. On 26 May 1788 O’Higgins was given the title Marqués de Osorno.
He sent his nephew, Demetrio, to Ireland to attain a fake genealogy showing his descent from Sean O’Higgins, Baron of Ballingarry, thereby making him one of the first celebrities to trace his ancestry in Ireland, fake or otherwise. This document was sent to the Spanish court, entitling him to become Don Ambrosio O’Higgins, Barón de Vallenar – the Spanish translation of Ballingarry, I assume. The Creole landowners, who were the biggest snobs on the planet at that time, hated the parvenu.
Poet, Madman, Scoundrel Page 9
