The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  James left St Germain on 15 February and sailed from Brest the following day. He landed at Kinsale on 12 March 1689 and Tyrconnel joined him at Cork on the 14th. The King greeted Tyrconnel warmly, breaking with usual protocol by embracing him with open arms, appointing him to a dukedom and allowing him to sit to his right at table with the Duke of Berwick sitting to the monarch’s left. There was widespread jubilation in Ireland at James’s arrival, the first English king to set foot in Ireland since Richard II, though this was to prove short-lived. It was reported that the Irish celebrated the King’s arrival at Kinsale in ‘rude and barbarous manner, by bagpipes, dancing, throwing their mantles under his horse’s feet, making a garland of a cabbage stump’.25 However, the success of the Jacobite mission in Ireland was compromised from the beginning by the divided objectives of its leaders. Tyrconnel’s aim was to secure Ireland under Catholic government with James as king. This was a more realistic policy but one which would seriously hamper the task of regaining England and Scotland because of the likely effect this would have in hardening Protestant resistance in the other kingdoms and weakening any support for a policy of toleration. James, however, anticipated that his Irish sojourn would be a mere staging post on a triumphal military progress that would take him next to Scotland, where, he was encouraged to believe by Melfort, an army of twenty-five thousand was ready to join him, and from there to England and a final confrontation with his treacherous son-in-law William. James even entertained pie-in-the-sky notions that the war might become part of an international Catholic crusade, hopes that were doused by the failure of either the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor (both allies of William) to endorse his plan.

  The French ambassador, D’Avaux, took a dim view of James’s leadership in Ireland. He reported that James often changed his mind and rarely settled on what the ambassador considered the best course of action. There were also concerns about the strength and effectiveness of the military force that James had in Ireland. Tyrconnel had managed to raise an army of forty-five thousand but these men were untrained and very poorly equipped, with the majority armed only with spikes on sticks. The English Jacobite John Stevens recorded that ‘most of them had never fired a musket in their lives’. As they were ‘people used only to follow and converse with cows’, it was, he said, hard to make them ‘sensible of the duty of a soldier or be brought to handle their arms aright’ and ‘to make many of them understand the common words of command, much less to obey them’. They would ‘follow none but their own leaders, many of them men as rude, as ignorant, and as far from understanding any of the rules of discipline as themselves’.26 James issued new coinage to provide funds to equip his forces, the so-called ‘gun money’, made from melted-down old brass cannons and to become practically worthless after the battle of the Boyne.

  A new Irish Parliament was called on 7 May and, thanks to the management of Tyrconnel, most of its members were Catholics and only five or six Protestants. About two-thirds of members were Old English and the remainder Gaelic Irish. James, however, had chosen to attempt to break the resistance of the Protestants of Londonderry, rather than prepare for Parliament’s opening. The Jacobites’ victory over Protestant forces at Dromore gave them control of most of east Ulster, and in the wake of their advance northwards many Protestants fled towards Derry as a last resort. The Jacobites were jubilant at their successes so far but, aware that William was preparing a force to relieve the city to embark from Liverpool, James himself considered turning back at this news but was brought back after pleading from the Duke of Berwick, who reported that the English fleet had not yet appeared. Surely the sight of the King outside the walls of Derry would be enough to make the besieged inhabitants surrender? Certainly the signs were good for the Jacobite forces. Their cavalry had routed a force of Protestant foot soldiers led out by Robert Lundy, the military governor of the city and a veteran of siege warfare in Tangier, who had attempted a pre-emptive strike against their besiegers. Lundy was deeply pessimistic about the chances of defending the city, with its thin defensive walls, against a properly equipped siege train, and had advised the commanders of the reinforcements from England that it was not worth disembarking their regiments. Indeed, when James approached the city walls with the French commander, Conrad de Rosen, on 18 April, peace terms had already been concluded between the Jacobite force led by Richard Hamilton and the city’s inhabitants. Consequently James’s appearance outside Derry seemed to be a breach of these negotiations. Troops stationed in the church bastion let out a volley of musket and cannon fire ‘proclaiming defence and hostilities, with the triumphant shout of “No Surrender”’. One of James’s aides-de-camp, a Captain Troy, was cut down by the hail of shot and killed at the King’s side. Not only was Derry no longer ready to capitulate but its inhabitants would resist the Jacobite besiegers for a further 105 days until relieved by Williamite forces.

  James retreated to Dublin in the rain. His speech at the opening of the Irish Parliament promised relief for those who had suffered as a result of the Act of Settlement but stopped short of promising outright repeal. The Parliament passed acts which acknowledged James as rightful sovereign and condemned the Revolution in England as an usurpation. However, further acts struck out for the Irish Parliament’s independence. One declared that the English Parliament could not legislate for Ireland. James registered his disapproval of an attempt to have Poyning’s Law (by which all laws considered by the Irish Parliament had first to be approved by the English Privy Council) repealed. The Parliament was prepared to offer the King a generous financial settlement of £20,000 a month for thirteen months, on condition that the Act of Settlement should be repealed. On 22 June the Parliament voted to repeal the Act, going far beyond what James had been prepared to promise Tyrconnel in 1687, and provoking another fit of nosebleeds from the King. James’s obvious displeasure did not slow down the Parliament in voting an act of attainder against twenty thousand Protestants: those who had declared for William of Orange, those who had left Ireland since the arrival of William in England and those who had crossed the Irish sea before the Dutch invasion. This summary death sentence placed on the heads of so many Protestants undercut the King’s offer liberty of conscience in the Irish Toleration Act passed at the same time.

  Far from getting the pliant Parliament that he had wished, James had summoned a body that was determined to put Irish Catholic interests first and those of their British monarch second. The resolutions of the ‘Patriot Parliament’, as it came to be known, and the plight of Ulster Protestants, heightened the already intense fear of popery in Scotland and England. After the defiance of the inhabitants of Derry and the recklessness of his Irish Parliament, further bad news was to come which effectively crushed James’s hopes of a Jacobite counter-revolution in Scotland. Claverhouse had raised the standard for James in his northern kingdom and, together with Scottish loyalists and an Irish Gaelic contingent from the Isle of Rathlin, had laid siege to the fortress at Blair Atholl. On 27 July Claverhouse defeated the Williamite force sent to raise the siege, under the command of Hugh Mackay, at the battle of Killiecrankie. However, Killiecrankie was a Pyrrhic victory. Claverhouse used traditional Highland fighting techniques, such as the Highland charge, and the steep terrain, to decimate his Williamite opponents, inflicting over two thousand casualties on them. Mackay gave a good description of what the Highland charge entailed: ‘They come on slowly till they be within distance of firing, which because they keep no rank or file, doth ordinarily little harm. When their fire is over, they throw away their firelocks, and everyone drawing a long broadsword, with his terge [target, a light shield] (such as have them) on his left hand, they fall a running toward the enemy.’27 Mackay recorded in his journal that the Highlanders were of ‘such quick motion’ that they were upon and in among the Williamite musketeers before they had a chance to use their second line of defence, the cumbersome plug bayonets that could be fixed only after firing. Lochiel reported that as the Highlanders engaged in hand to hand com
bat with the Williamite soldiers, a deathly hush seemed to come across the battlefield: ‘nothing was heard … but the sullen and hollow clashes of broadswords, with the dismal groans and cries of dying and wounded men’. Killiecrankie was the last battle in which the famous two-handed Scottish broadsword, the claymore, was used. It left its heavy marks upon the Williamite dead, with many ‘officers and soldiers … cut down through the skull and neck, to the very breasts; others had skulls cut off above the ears. Some had both their bodies and cross belts cut through at one blow; pikes and small swords were cut like willows.’28

  Yet this bloody victory had cost the Jacobites over a third of their forces, including their leader, Claverhouse, in the battle. The Highland charge had won them the fight but was highly costly in human terms. Most of the Highland troops were shot at a range of just fifty to one hundred yards, though, as Lochiel reported, the Highlanders, ‘with a wonderful resolution, kept up their own, as they were commanded’. Moreover, its usefulness as a tactic diminished with every passing year, as the rifles of the government forces got lighter, more accurate and more reliable, and the plug bayonet was replaced by the socket bayonet, which could be attached before firing.29

  Worse was to come the following month, when the Scottish Jacobites were routed at the battle of Dunkeld on 21 August 1689. The town of Dunkeld protected the Perthshire lowlands from Jacobite depredations and was defended by Cameronian Presbyterians. Cannon, taking over command of the Jacobite forces from Claverhouse, commanded from the rear, arousing clan fury at his lack of courage (though this was the position most professional military commanders adopted in order to better coordinate their forces). However, Cannon did little to effectively marshal the Jacobite artillery and, forced into house-to-house fighting, the Jacobite troops, accustomed to shock frontal assaults, fared badly. As the Glencoe poet recorded: ‘They were not accustomed to stand against a wall for protection, as was done at Dunkeld. The stalwart young men fell … felled by bullets fired by cowherds.’30 The Presbyterian defenders trapped Jacobite snipers in houses and set them aflame. By eleven in the morning the Jacobites were running out of ammunition and the soldiers retreated complaining that they could not fight against ‘mad and desperate men’ or ‘devils’.

  The prospects for James in Scotland looked dire, though for a time he was still being fed misinformation concerning his followers’ successes and failures. In Ireland, too, the tide appeared to be turning against him. The actions of the Catholic Parliament had strengthened resolve in the Protestant strongholds of Londonderry and Enniskillen. For his part, James was not prepared to see this as an all-out war between Protestants and Catholics, continuing to regard Ulster Protestants as his subjects, and he was horrified when the French commander Rosen issued a draconian edict to the men of Londonderry to capitulate or no quarter would be given when starvation forced them to submit.31 This attitude did not soften the outlook of the citizens who wrote to James that they questioned not ‘but your lands will be forfeited rather than ours, and confiscated into our possession, as recompense for this signal service to the crown of England and for the inexpressible toil and labour, expence of blood and treasure, pursuant to their sacred Majesties declaration to that purpose; a true copy whereof we herewith send you to convince you how little we fear your menaces’.32 By June, however, the defenders were in a dire state. The inhabitants were reduced to living on a diet of dogs, cats, mice, tallow, salted hides, horse blood and seaweed. (The one benefit of the beef-tallow diet was that it appeared to lead to constipation, a welcome relief from dysentery.) Even cannibalism was considered: ‘A certain fat Gentleman conceived himself in the greatest danger, and fancying several of the Garrison lookt on him with a greedy Eye, thought fit to hide himself for three days.’33 However, after much delay, on 28 July Colonel Percy Kirke’s relief force from England broke through the boom placed by the Jacobites across the River Foyle. The Jacobite forces, themselves ravaged by hunger and disease, left over the next few days.

  Worse news came soon after of the landing of a large Williamite army at Bangor in Ulster on 13 August, led by the veteran French commander the Duke of Schomberg. However, Schomberg’s forces were heavily depleted during their first six months in Ireland by disease: by February 1690 5674 out of 18,728 troops had died. News-sheets of the time reported that some of the soldiers were delirious with fever, a Colonel Hewett was reported to have shot himself in the head, a Captain Garet stabbed himself in the throat and a French Huguenot officer in Lisnegarvy (Lisburn) threw himself out of a third-storey window. The Reverend George Story, a chaplain to the army, recorded that the lack of adequate shoes had caused the toes or feet of some of the men to drop off from gangrene on the march towards Belfast. Schomberg himself was afflicted with the ‘flux’, or dysentery. The army also appeared to have been inadequately provisioned, and once they moved away from the fertile land around Bangor towards Dundalk, where they made camp, they found a land that had been deliberately laid waste by the enemy.

  James, then, still had a chance of defending Ireland. His army of thirty-five thousand had been reinforced in the spring of 1689 by five to six thousand French troops, plus supplies of arms for the Irish troops. (Tyrconnel complained, however, that the weapons that the French had given them were too old and too few. He estimated that his army was short of twenty thousand firearms and that two-thirds of his soldiers never fired a shot because of lack of powder.) Given these conditions, John Stevens was forced to revise his opinions of the Irish troops. It was, he said, ‘really wonderful, and will perhaps to after ages seem incredible, that an army should be kept together above a year without any pay … And what is yet more to be admired, the men never mutinied nor were they guilty of any disorders more than what do often happen in those armies that are best paid.’ What was more remarkable was that these men had had

  neither beds nor so much as straw to lie on, or any thing to cover them during the whole winter, and even their clothes were worn to rags, insomuch that many could scarce hide their nakedness in the daytime, and abundance of them were barefoot or at least so near it that their wretched shoes and stockings could scarce be made to hang on their feet and legs, I have been astonished to think how they lived and much more that they should voluntarily choose to live so, when if they would have forsaken the service they might have been received by the enemy into good pay and want for nothing, But to add to their suffering the allowance of meat and corn was so small that men rather starved than lived upon it.34

  William recognised that Schomberg’s position and his advanced age (he was in his eighties) were threatening the success of the Williamite war effort and arrived to take control in person at Carrickfergus in June. The pressure was increased by the fact that William knew that a speedy conclusion to the civil wars in his kingdoms was necessary to convince his European allies to support him wholeheartedly in his offensive campaigns against Louis XIV on the Continent. Determined not to repeat the logistical errors of Schomberg’s expedition, William came with both a field bakery and a field hospital, artillery and fifteen tons of small coin. His force amounted to over sixteen thousand foot soldiers and nearly ten thousand cavalry, which, combined with Schomberg’s remaining troops and reinforcements from the Protestant Irish, gave him a field army of around thirty-five thousand. James’s French advisers were counselling him not to attempt to tackle this force head on but to retreat to the Jacobite strongholds in the west of Ireland, around the River Shannon, but James, as he had at Derry, ignored this advice and advanced to meet William at the River Boyne.

  The battle of the Boyne was fought on 1 July 1690. Historians remain divided over whether the site James chose to engage William was defensible. What does appear clear is that James mistook a move to cross the Boyne from the west by the Williamite cavalry, led by Schomberg’s son Meinhard, as the main assault, and directed the majority of his forces to the left of the battlefield to meet them, leaving a depleted remnant open to a frontal attack on Oldbridge village by the main Williamite forc
e. The Irish, in particular the cavalry, fought bravely for some three hours before the greater strength in numbers of the enemy, plus the morale boost of William’s personal presence at the forefront of the attack, began to tell. One French observer, Intendant D’Esgrigny, stated, ‘This is the sixth battle that I have seen, but I have never seen such a rout.’35 For their part, the French, under the command of the courtier Lauzun, followed to the letter their orders not to engage the enemy forces unless there was a reasonable chance of success. The French were in no doubt either that William’s troops were far better equipped and disciplined than the Irish they faced. Major General Boisseleau stated that in ‘all the movements which I saw the enemy make, they conducted themselves in a soldierly fashion, and their troops went bravely into the firing line. These savages here, who are unaccustomed to war, were taken completely by surprise, and terror soon took hold of them. The officers did no good and showed bad example. Such terror and such a rout were never heard of.’36 Indeed, without the presence of the disciplined French troops, protecting the Jacobite rear as they retreated, the carnage may have been even worse. As it was, the Jacobites who did not escape were shot, according to one observer, ‘like hares amongst the corn’,37 while William’s forces suffered only five hundred casualties (though these included Schomberg himself; William was grazed by a Jacobite cannon ball and had to ride among his troops to assure them that he was alive and well).