HISTORY OF THE IRISH BRIGADES

IN

THE SERVICE OF FRANCE.

BOOK I.

THE HISTORY OF THE IRISH BRIGADES IN THE SERVICE OF FRANCE dates its origin from the war between Great Britain and Ireland occasioned by the change of dynasty in those islands, which commenced with the British Revolution of 1688, and was not accomplished till the acquiescence of Ireland in the results of that Revolution, by the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. In Great Britain, it was but natural that such a change of dynasty should have occurred. At a period when theological differences of opinion had such a considerable influence on the politics of Europe in general, and of Great Britain and Ireland in particular, the reigning Sovereign of the 2 Protestant kingdoms of England and Scotland, James II., had deserted the Protestant for the Catholic faith, and, through the birth of a male heir, was likely to establish a Catholic dynasty over those 2 Protestant nations; who could hardly be expected to acknowledge a Catholic Monarch, but for the expectation, existing previous to that birth, of his being succeeded, in the course of a few years, by a race of Protestant Princes. In an age when the boundaries between the monarchical and the other branches of the constitution had not been determined with sufficient accuracy, that Monarch had also considered himself justified in exercising powers, which, whatever may have been their defensibility on the score of precedent, were felt to be incompatible with the state of intellectual and political advancement at which Great Britain had then arrived. Under such circumstances, the applications of the disaffected English and Scotch for assistance against King James were addressed to William, Prince of Orange, and Stadtholder of the Dutch republic, who, besides being the nephew of James, was married to that Monarch's eldest daughter, the Princess Mary, and was thus the next Protestant Prince interested in the succession to the sceptre of these islands. William, who, in consequence of the birth of a son to James in June, 1688, would, if a revolution did not occur, be debarred of that share in the royal succession to which he had long looked forward, and who, as a Dutch patriot, wished to add the resources of James's dominions to the great League of Augsburg, privately entered into, some time before, by the principal states of the Continent against the overgrown power of Louis XIV., was necessarily glad to avail himself of the invitations he received to invade England. He accordingly equipped such a fleet and army in Holland as he judged to be sufficient for the success of his enterprise, when supported by such a state of religious and political feeling in his favour as he knew to exist in Great

B

Britain, and landed without opposition, November 15th, 1688,* at Torbay, in Devonshire. James, though too long deceived respecting the real destination of the Dutch armament, by the treachery of his minister, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, had, nevertheless, assembled a force, that, if well affected towards him, would have been much more than sufficient to overpower the invaders. But, incapacitated from defending his crown by a defection so general as even to include his own daughter Anne, afterwards Queen Anne, and not altogether without reasons to be mindful of the fate of his father, King Charles L., it was soon judged requisite for him to send off his Queen and infant son privately to France. After having been turned out of his own palace at Whitehall, and for some time a prisoner under a Dutch guard, the King likewise considered it necessary for him to escape from England, and seek in France the protection of his cousin-german, Louis XIV. Early in the following year, 1689, the flight of James, notwithstanding his proposal, in writing, from France, to return, summon a Parliament, and endeavour, in a regular way, to adjust matters between himself and his subjects, was voted in England by a Convention, assembled under William's auspices, to have been an "abdication" of the Crown. The royal dignity, thus pronounced to have been abdicated by James, against his public protest to the contrary, was conferred upon the Prince and Princess of Orange, with the executive power to be vested in the Prince. The Crown of Scotland, still a separate one from the Crown of England, was, in the spring of the same year, also transferred from James (as James VII.) to his son-in-law and daughter; so that, with the exception of a brave, though comparatively unimportant, opposition in favour of the deposed Monarch, maintained in a corner of Scotland amongst the Highlanders, the Dutch Prince became the de facto Sovereign of the 2 Protestant kingdoms of Great Britain.

But, while England and Scotland considered themselves justified in preferring William as their Sovereign to James, in Ireland, the great mass of the population, or those of Milesian, and Anglo-Norman, or Old English descent, thought that they were at least as well entitled to retain James for their Sovereign, as the English and Scotch had been to reject him. On strictly constitutional grounds, or, viewing the Monarchy, in the 3 kingdoms, not as elective, but hereditary, the Irish, in adhering to James, regarded themselves as loyalists, and looked upon the English and Scotch, for deposing him, as rebels. If, by a recognized axiom of British law," the King can do no wrong"-anything deemed so being chargeable upon his Ministers, as evil counsellors, and to be visited with punishment, not of HIM, but of them, in order to deter others from acting similarly ought not such a course of ministeria impeachment and chastisement have been adopted, with respect to whatever had been objectionable in the government of James, instead of expelling HIM from the throne! to say nothing of his sox, the Prince of Wales, who, as an

•The days of the month in this word are generally even arcending to the present or new style, in opposition to the old style, used by British writers at the Lume of the Revit on, and long after, or till 172

*“Whereas, “ eiserves His "the laws of England assert, that the King enn de ne wning, and make his Ministers only accouzitive, in das case the King aloe was przistei, and the evil Counselors rewaniai "

The unserereleas and indecent sectarian foton, as to James's alleged son not having been bis actual son, was devased and d somited, as it onerred to be, by tish Sex 2 aziztation, at the end of Book II

infant, had unquestionably done "no wrong!" If popular election, instead of hereditary right, were to decide the possession of the royal dignity, on what principle were the Irish, as a distinct nation, or with a distinct Parliament as well as the English and Scotch, to be precluded from electing James, when the English and Scotch claimed a right to elect William? If the English and the Scotch, as Protestants, objected to James for their King, as a Catholic, and adopted William, as a Protestant, the Irish, as Catholics, did not see why they should not prefer James for their King, as a Catholic, and reject William, as a Protestant. Finally, if, on account of the general faults of James's administration in Great Britain, the English and Scotch conferred the Sovereignty of their respective countries on William, as expecting to be better governed by him than they were, or could be, by his predecessor, the Irish, from a contrast of their improved political condition, under James's administration, with the previous oppression they had endured, under the "ascendancy" of the Cromwellian, Whig, or Revolution party of which William was the head, had every reason to anticipate, that his Sovereignty in Ireland would lead to a renewal, if not an increase, of the grievances they had so long and so recently felt; and were consequently so far justified in believing, that both the present and future hope of good government, for the Irish nation at large, would depend upon its support of James, and its rejection of William. James, during his short reign over the 3 kingdoms, or from February, 1685, to December, 1688, had laid the foundations for ruling Ireland in a manner more adapted to gain the affections, and improve the condition, of the nation at large, thau any other British Sovereign had ever done. Indeed, a comparison of what James was able to do, with what his writings attest his intention of doing, for Ireland, shows his plans for its government to have been so much more suitable to the comprehensive views acted on in the 19th century, than the exclusive theories of his English and Anglo-Irish contemporaries, and the subsequent representatives of such exclusiveness, that the mass of the Irish nation, in his time, could have adopted no other course, consistent either with a sense of gratitude or self-interest, but that of espousing his cause, in opposition to the Revolution. The Catholic religion, previous to his reign, so persecuted or discountenanced in Ireland, met with that official protection and respect under his government, which the followers of every system of belief, forming the creed of a nation, consider it entitled to receive from the civil power. The Prelacy had access personally, or by letter, to the King, and had liberal pensions assigned them, from the Treasury of Ireland. Members of the Bar, of that religion, were placed in the highest judicial and other appointments, connected with their profession. Catholics were likewise elevated to the Privy Council of Ireland. The Corporations, of which the recently-planted Cromwellian oligarchy, and its partizans, would have made a mere sectarian monopoly, were so remodelled by the royal orders, that no member of the community, for whose benefit such institutions were originally intended, could be excluded from their privileges, by any mere theological test. The re-organization of the Army of Ireland, in which, under the same Cromwellian "ascendancy," during the preceding reign, there had been considerable jobbing or corruption, was committed to the political head, for many years, of the national religion, the celebrated Colonel Richard Talbot, who was elevated to the Peerage by the title of Earl of Tyrconnell, and likewise

casei & Lermalami Under his insrection, a Cromwellians, or the sons of Cromwellans were comised as persoas, whose prize pies Laving occasioned the overthrow of the Monarthy, and brought King Charles I to the block, were not to be trusted by his son, King James; and beddes, at a cian whom the King occsidered he had reason to susJess of being tainted with the disaffection of Monmouth's and Argyle's Such we intrrecticos ipina izelf, in England and Sortland abruses as those of men, physically inadequate to the service for which they were desizzed having teen enrolled among the privates, and even of certain Protestans Lords servants having been provided for as officers, were ervised Instead of the former, a superior or native Irish soldiery, remarkable for their stature, were introduced: instead of the latter, a more trustworthy and respectable class of cfflers, mostly drawn from the best old families in the country, that had suffered so much by the meres of the Puritans in Great Britain and Ireland against the Crown. Notwithstanding the opposition to be expected in England, from the general hatred there of the Irish, it was also the King's intention, from the year 1687, to at least considerably modify the injustice of the Acts of Settlement and Explanation; through which, after the restoration of Motarsty, in the person of his brother, King Charles II, several thousands of the Irish Catholle proprietary, of Milesian, Anglo-Norman, or Old English descent, who had fought for royalty, at honie and abroad, against the Parliamentarian or Cromwellian rebels, were nevertheless rained, by the transfer of their lands to those rebels Previous, therefore, to the Revolution, these unjust Acts in Ireland were already, to use the words of a Williamite writer, "doomed in every coffee-house;" a sentence afterwards carried into effect, by their total repeal in 1689. In short, from the post of Viceroy of Ireland, conferred on the Earl of Tyrconnell, down to the lowest situation in the power of James to bestow, never were the Irish so favoured and promoted, in every capacity, by a British Sovereign, as they were by that Monarch While, from the success of James's cause, they consequently had everything to hope, they were not less convinced, by their experience of the same spirit of national and religious hostility to them which afterwards violated the Treaty of Limerick, and enacted the Penal Code, that, from James's fall, they would also have everything to fear. These circumstances naturally rendered the Irish so unanimous in the King's favour, that he had more reason to rely for his "restoration" on them, than on all the rest of his subjects. Between the period of his escaping from England to France, in January, 1689, and that of his disembarking from Brest, at Kinsale, in March, the issuing of commissions by the Earl of Tyrconnell to the nobility and gentry of the island, for raising troops in the royal cause, was responded to, by no less than 100,000 men coming forward, to take arms in the King's defence. But this abundance of men, for the formation of an army in Ireland, was accompanied with a want of almost all the other means for equipping and maintaining a regular force. By the results of the long Parliamentarian or Cromwellian war from 1641 to 1653, Ireland, only about 35 years before the Prince of Orange's invasion of England, had been reduced to the most frightful state of misery and depopulation. By the transfer, after the Restoration, in 1660, of so much of the landed property of the older Irish or royalists to the Crom

The Irish, as Lord Macaulay correctly observes, were considered "foreigners" in England; "and of all foreigners," he adds, "they were the most hated.”

wellians, and by other circumstances connected with that transfer, the Anglo-Protestant "ascendancy," thus established in Ireland, were rendered so superior in wealth-as well from the rent of land, and the emoluments of office, as from the profits of business-that when, on the prospect of a war in Ireland, in consequence of the Revolution in Great Britain, as many of the members of that "ascendancy" as could get away to England and Scotland removed there with their money and plate, Ireland was left almost entirely destitute of the circulating medium requisite for the payment of an army. Nor were the Irish loyalists less deficient in such other military necessaries as muskets, cannon, &c.; partly through the policy of the English government, that as few arms and as little ammunition as possible should be kept in Ireland; and partly owing to the unlucky circumstance, of some thousands of the best equipped portion of the Irish army, who were sent over to James in England previous to William's invasion, having been detained there by the latter, on the success of his enterprise; and thus lost to their country, when it stood in the greatest need of their assistance.

For the supply of so many discouraging wants, the Irish were therefore obliged to have recourse to their Sovereign's ally, Louis XIV. But, on account of the political and military situation of France with reference to its neighbours, the Irish were disappointed of anything like the assistance that was necessary to support the contest in which they engaged. From the commencement of Louis's reign, but particularly from his attack on the Dutch Republic, in 1672, that Monarch's general policy had been such, as to make the principal powers of the Continent finally consider him a common enemy; against whom it was necessary to combine, either for the purpose of avenging past injuries, or of averting future insults, and encroachments. With this view, under the pretext of making arrangements for a war upon the Turks, a great confederacy against France, called the League of Augsburg, was secretly entered upon there, by the representatives of several of those states, in 1686; and such was the general animosity of the Continental powers, of all religions, to Louis, that, from 1686 to 1688, the adhesions to this alliance continued to increase, till it embraced the Emperor of Germany, the Electors of Saxony, Bavaria, and Brandenburg, the Elector Palatine, the Circles of Suabia and Franconia, the Kings of Spain and Sweden, the Dutch Republic, the Duke of Savoy, and Pope Innocent XI. The political and military soul of this secret confederacy against the French Monarch was the Prince of Orange. As Stadtholder, or first magistrate of his native country, William was interested in the formation of such a League, on account of the injuries which Holland had suffered, and the dangers she had to apprehend, from the unscrupulous ambition and formidable power of France. On personal grounds, he could not forgive the sequestration of his Principality of Orange, in the south of France, and the insulting refusal of redress for that injury, by the French government. As a Protestant, he was naturally indignant at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, and the violent persecution directed against the Protestants of France (including the inhabitants of his own Principality of Orange), for the extinction of Protestantism, in that kingdom.* Nor

"The Revocation of the Edict of Nantz," says Mr. O'Conor, "was a proceeding even more oppressive than the Penal Code in Ireland. It suppressed all the privileges granted by Henry IV. and Louis XIII; inhibited the exercise of the Protestant religion; enjoined the banishment of all its Ministers within 15 days;