Though the story of the Scottish Jacobite armies, especially the Highlanders, is well known, King James II's Irish Army and its struggle against King William is relatively obscure, especially in England.

When James II come to the throne in 1685, the small Irish Army was as effective as the rest of his forces. The Lord Deputy, the Bari of Ormonde, had maintained a constant interest in the troops, and endeavoured to ensure that they would be reliable both militarily and politically by excluding all Catholics and Dissenters. In 1685 the Irish Army consisted of 3 regiments of horse and 7 of foot, a total of 5,500 men. The officers were mainly of English stock.

But under James' new Lord Deputy, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, there was a drastic change of policy. With increasing rapidity, Protestants were replaced by Catholics. At first this applied primarily to the rank and file, with the result that by the end of September 16K out of a paper establishment of 7,485 privates, 5,043 were Catholics. Though the replacement of the officers was more gradual, by 1688 the majority were Catholic.

This drastic upheaval had dire effects on the efficiency of the Irish forces. Though some of the officers had had Continental experience, in such units as Richard Hamilton's Irish Regiment (such as Patrick Sarsfield and Justin McCarthy) the rest, mostly members of the old aristocracy, had little or none. The rank and file, after (in Irish terms) a relatively long period of peace, were almost entirely without military experience. As a result there was a marked deterioration in both efficiency and discipline.

Early in 1688 James' demand for troops to bolster his position led to selected Irish troops (10 per company) being sent to England, and in September Tyronnell ordered 3 regiments of foot and 1 of dragoons to be sent to Chester and Liverpool. The foot included King James' Irish Guards, who made a good impression on observers as "tall sprightly young men, their clothes also very fresh and fashionably made, each man having a frock to keep him clean." The remainder were much less impressive, and their indiscipline led to some outbreaks of rioting and looting.

After the collapse of James' cause in England, the Irish regiments there were disbanded; some were interned in the Isle of Wight, (a number of whom subsequently escaped to France). Others shipped over for foreign service in Germany also eventually found their way home. At least 1,200 marched in a body for Chester and Liverpool, and obtained shipping home, though a number of officers remained in England as Jacobite activists.

Although a majority of the Irish troops eventually got back to Ireland by one means or another, Tyrconnell, loyal to James but faced with threats both from the Protestants (mainly in Ulster) and the Williamite forces in England, was faced with the formidable task of rapidly expanding what was now the Irish-Jacobite Army.

He attempted to deal with the problem by the wholesale distribution of commissions to raise new regiments (for a total of 20,000 men in December). By the end of January 1689, he had issued commissions for 38 regiments of foot, 4 regiments of dragoons and 2 of horse (40,000 men in all). Virtually all were Catholics. Such an expansion would have been difficult enough if ample money, arms and supplies had been available, but all were lacking. A French officer noted great enthusiasm amongst the recruits, but no pay or uniforms. Only about half of the levies could be armed, half with muskets or worm-eaten pikes, the remainder with a variety of "weapons", ranging from scythes to nails on pointed sticks! The lack of pay and supplies meant that the new recruits, often the equivalent of feudal levies, were supported (in so far as they were supported at all) by the resources of their own officers, and looting and cattle stealing were rife. A possibly biased Protestant source wrote that the soldiers had already plundered, slaughtered and destroyed as much "as would, right managed, have fed an army of 40,000 for a whole year. These depredations were one reason that the Protestant communities armed themselves.

French Aid

Despite the chaotic condition of his forces, Tyrconnell was able to assert his authority over the bulk of Ireland outside the enclaves of Derry and Enniskillen. But for any permanent security, and if the Irish-Jacobite Army was to become an effective force, French aid on a massive scale was essential.

This seemed about to be fulfilled on March 12th with the arrival of a French fleet carrying arms and supplies, a number of French officers under Lt. General Rosen, some Jacobite officers including Patrick Sarsfield and the Duke of Berwick, and, of more dubious value, King James II.

Ultimately fatal differences in aims and objectives among (be Jacobites soon began to be apparent. The King and his Anglo-Irish and English supporters saw Ireland principally as a stepping-stone, and a possible source of manpower, on the road to recovering Scotland and England. They were not particularly interested in purely Irish affairs. The French regarded the Irish War as a useful sideshow drawing off Williamite resources from the main struggle in the Low Countries, and were only prepared to invest enough resources to maintain the struggle, rather than bring about a decision. The native Irish, so for as they had any clear objective, saw the war as part of the age-old struggle to free Goeldom from the English oppressor.

On April 30th a second French convoy brought between 1,300 and 3,000 assorted Irish, Scottish and English Jacobite troops who had been formed in France, further supplies of arms, ammunition and money, and more French officers and engineers. They found an increasingly chaotic military situation. Tyrconnell had given his newly commissioned colonels a free hand in raising their commands. In theory a foot regiment consisted of 13 companies each of 62 men, (800 in all), but in practice there was considerable variation. Regiments with as many as 35, 40 or 50 companies are recorded, one consequence of which was that a large number of unsuitable officers were appointed. Tyrconnell was forced to try and "organise" his forces, and met with some success, temporarily disbanding some of his excess troops. A new paper establishment for the Irish Army was drawn up, calling for a force of 7 regiments of horse, 7 of dragoons and 35 of foot (plus the 7 old toot regiments of the Irish Army). Each foot regiment was to have 13 companies, apart from the Guards, who were to have 26. The Army was intended to total 35,000 men.

However, reaching this ideal was a different matter. A newly arrived English Jacobite, John Stevens, wrote "what our army either was or might be made is very hard to give an account of. The common computation was incredible, for most reckoned the whole notion, every poor country fellow having armed himself with a skiene as they call it, or a dagger or a ropery like a half-pike." Many of the recruits had a tendency to desert as soon as they were taken away from their own locality for "they will follow none but their own leaders, many of them men as rude, as ignorant and as for from understanding any of the rules of discipline as themselves." There was still a great shortage of equipment, many of the muskets sent from France were of poor quality, and others seized from Protestants were obsolete or faulty. Nearly all of the armourers in Ireland were Protestant, and until more arrived from France or could be trained, the situation would be critical. The desperate position is illustrated by the fact that one regiment sent that summer to Derry had a total of only 7 muskets. The Jacobite artillery train was equally deficient, consisting of 12 cannon of various calibres, and 6 mortars, 4 of which were out of order.

Uniforms

The question of uniforms is somewhat obscure. The intention was to clothe the Irish Army in the some style as the old Army of James II, (which the Jacobites regarded it as a continuation of). This meant red coats, with appropriate regimental facings and black felt hate. Certainly the wearing of a red coat was regarded as a matter of pride among the Irish soldiers, and the units later sent to France to part of an exchange deal for French regulars mutinied when offered French grey rather than British red. Some units in Ireland certainly did receive uniforms, at the first siege of Limerick some advancing Williamite "redcoats" were mistaken for retreating Irish troops. It also seems likely that the King's Guards wore their traditional uniform of red faced with blue, but it is clear that possibly the majority of the Army never received their red costs, and had to make do with civilian dress or perhaps the disliked French grey.

The weaknesses of the Irish Army were illustrated by the operations of the summer of 1689 against Derry and Enniskillen. The Protestants did not prove formidable in the field, and contrary to popular belief, Deny and Enniskillen were saved more by the ineptitude and lack of equipment of the attackers rather than by the efforts of the besieged. The Jacobite forces laying siege to Derry lacked adequate siege guns (and skill in using them) entrenching tools, and suffered heavily from sickness and desertion. There was continual friction between the French and Irish (as well as language difficulties) and the French Navy completely failed to make any effort to disrupt Williamite communications with England.

The story at Enniskillen was similar, and Justin McCarthy's defeat at Newtonbutler on July 31st served to confirm the complete failure of the Jacobite threat to Ulster.

When the main Williamite forces under General Schomberg, including a high proportion of veterans and professional Dutch and Danish soldiers disembarked at Belfast in August, the state of the Jacobite Army was as deplorable as ever. None of the foot regiments were up to strength, some totalling as few as 200 men. Lt. General van Rosen (C-in-C under James) said that he in reality put only about 7,000 men in the field, one third of then unarmed, and with only an average of four rounds available for each musket. In an effort to meet the crisis (and which can in practice have only worsened the chaos) all Catholics between 16 and 60 were to arm themselves. In the event the Jacobite cause was saved as much by Schomberg's hesitency so by their own endeavours. The end of the campaigning season saw the armies in a state of stalemate around Dundalk.

For no very apparent reason the Jacobite leadership regarded the indecisive autumn campaign as a great success, and Irish morale rose considerably. This false optimism led to many of the Irish officers spending the winter enjoying the pleasures of Dublin rather than training their men, who were described at this time so "most of them very raw and undisciplined, and the generality almost naked, or at least very ragged and ill-shod:' The horse were generally good, but too few. 

Some of the Jacobite leadership made efforts to remedy the situation; James himself took an active, if highly unselective, interest in military affairs, and Tyrconnell asked the French for tents, shirts, uniform cloth and "40,000 coarse hats". He also requested 10 tons of steel, as gunfounders had now been established in Dublin and Kilkenny, producing firelocks, as match was unobtainable. Though something was achieved, the new French Lt. General, Lauzan, arriving in March described the situation in Dublin as "a chaos equal to that in Genesis before the creation of the world". He brought with him 5 regiments from the French Army, totalling 6,000 men. Three of the units were made up of Frenchmen, Biron, Bouilly, Chemersulk; one was Walloon, Tirlon; and one, Zurlsuben, a mixture of Swiss and German ex-P.O.Ws. In return James was required to send to France 5 Irish regiments, totalling 5,387 men, under Justin McCarthy. No Jacobites were supposed to have sent their best troops, but may well have evaded this condition, for the French were horrified by the condition of the new arrivals, "without shirts, without shoes, most of them without hats, shockingly ditty and generally speaking, devoured by vermin." Re-organised into three regiments, this unpromising material were to prove excellent soldiers, and were the foundation of the famous Irish Brigade.

Allied Friction

In Dublin, friction between the Allies continued; the new supplies of arms brought by the French proved unsatifactory, whilst the high-handedness of Lauzan and his officers gained them much unpopularity. King James was still more interested in trying to obtain French naval support for an invasion of England than in preparing for the defence of Ireland.

Throughout the spring and early summer a steady buildup of his forces meant that when William III eventually took the field the result was a foregone conclusion. 'no outcome of the battle of the Boyne was never seriously in doubt. In fact, James and the Irish gave battle against the advice of the French, who wanted to abandon Dublin without a fight. On the day of battle the Irish horse fought well, but only the efforts of them and the French troops (who had been under orders not to take unecessary risks) saved the bulk of the look who, though escaping relatively unscathed, threw away large quantities of weapons.

The Boyne cost the Jacobites Dublin and most of S.E. Ireland. Another result was the hasty departure for Franco of King James, an act of desertion never forgiven by the Irish. ("James of the Dung" is a polite translation of his Gaelic nickname!)

After James had lefk the "Irish" (actor was of much more significance in the Jacobite Army. More than any desire to restore Stuart fortunes there was a wish among the Irish leaders to preserve their own position against the foreign invader. The successful defence of Athlone in August strengthened resistance, which was further stiffened when William laid siege to the main Jacobite stronghold at Limerick.

The Irish Army as a whole was in no better condition than before; of the 28 infantry regiments (15-20,000 men) in the Limerick garrison, only half were armed, but they proved formidable righting behind defence works (even though at least one regiment, MacMahon's was armed only with stones). However Berwick and Sarsfield's 3,500 horse operating outside the town proved highly effective, and Sarsfield's successful destruction of much of William's artillery train, coupled with bad weather and sickness, forced the Williamite forces to raise the siege. Particularly significant was that the French forces, spart from individual officers, played no part in the defence, for the French regiments had been withdrawn to Galway, the first stage of their return to France, from what was now regarded as a lost cause.

Tyrconnell and the main French force departed in September, leaving James' illegitimate son, the Duke of Berwick, in command. Though later to prove a brilliant general, Berwick at 20 was too young to control his commanders, especially the likes of Sarsfield, the erratically brilliant cavalry commander who has been described as "the Rommel of the Irish War."

Winter brought its customary stagnation, with the River Shannon forming a rough boundary between the two sides, It also saw increasing dissention among the Irish leadership, particularly between Berwick and Sarsfield, for, as a contemporary observed, "when the enemy gave them some respite their whole attention was to make war upon one another." But fortunately bad weather and the widespread activities of the "repartee" (guerillas verging on bandits loosely attached to the Jacobite forces) prevented any serious enemy movements.

In an effort to restore order, Tyrconnell was sent back to Ireland, followed in May by an experienced new French army commander, Lt. General St. Ruth. The defences of Athlone and Limerick were strengthened, and Sarsfield and his horse kept up pressure along the Shannon, but any more coherent Jacobite strategy was locking. Spring found the Irish Army still very short of all necessities.

St. Ruth brought with him another considerable convoy of arms, ammunition, clothing and food. He also attempted to re-organise the army, though its condition was still for from good when the advance of the Williamite forces under Glinkel forced it to take the field. The final disaster could not be long postponed.

Aughrim

Athlone fell in June, 1691, despite fierce resistance. Rejecting Sarsfield's preference for a defensive and guerilla strategy, St. Ruth elected to offer battle. The Irish Army had once more shown remarkable powers of recovery, and its last great battle (Aughrim, July 12th) it consisted of 37 infantry regiments, 11 of cavalry and 8 of dragoons (about 20,000 men in all). Irish morale was high, they not only held off the Williamite forces but made savagely effective counterattacks. Indeed, a Irish victory seemed not impossible until St. Ruth was killed, and, perhaps through treachery, a key position abandoned.

The Jacobites were routed, looting 7,000 men and great quantities of arms and ammunition.

Aughrim was the effective end of the war. Limerick was defended stubbornly, but only until the Irish were able to obtain terms which allowed some 12,000 men, plus their families, to depart for service in France.

Shortage of Resources

The Jacobite failure can be largely explained by their critical shortage of resources. Man-for-man the Irish soldier was a match for his opponent, but he lacked both the means to fight and any effective leadership. The House of Stuart lacked a figure able to take effective command, and without this the Irish-Jacobite cause fell victim to divided counsels and self-seeking French strategies.

Though Jacobite hopes from Ireland were at an end, the 12,000 exiled Irish soldiers were to untold one of the most famous chapters in the history of their notion. The epic story of the "Wild Geese" was about to begin.

Sources

Ellis, P.B. The Boyne Water 1976.
Iriah Sword (various issues)
Mclorry, P. The Siege of Derry 1986
McLaughlin, M.G. The Wild Geese 1980
Petrie Charits The Jacobite Movement 1960.
Simms, J.O. Jacobite Ireland 1969.