Battles for the Three Kingdoms E-Book

John Barratt

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

The Battle of the Boyne in 1690 was the culmination of the ferocious struggle between two kings, James II and William III. This book makes use of research and sources, including eyewitness accounts, to analyse the opposing forces, their strategy, tactics and conduct of the war and the reasons for its eventual outcome.

Leseprobe

BATTLES

FOR THE

THREE

KINGDOMS

BATTLES

FOR THE

THREE

KINGDOMS

THE CAMPAIGNS FOR

ENGLAND, SCOTLANDAND IRELAND 1689—92

JOHN BARRATT

First published in 2007

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved© John Barratt, 2007, 2013

The right of John Barratt to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9598 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

List of Maps

Preface

Chronology

1.

Introduction

2.

Warfare in the Late Seventeenth Century

3.

The Rival Armies

4.

Jacobite High Tide

5.

The Braes of Killiecrankie

6.

Stalemate in Ireland

7.

The End of the Highland Army

8.

The Road to the Boyne

9.

The Irish Recovery

10.

The War at Sea

11.

The Bloody Field

12.

The Flight of the Wild Geese

13.

La Hogue

14.

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

List of Maps

1.

Ireland, 1689–91

2.

The Siege of Derry, 1689

3.

Scotland, 1689–90

4.

Killiecrankie, 27 July 1689

5.

Dunkeld, 21 August 1689

6.

Cromdale, 1 May 1690

7.

The Boyne

8.

Barfleur and La Hogue, 1692

9.

Aughrim, 12 July 1691

10.

La Hogue, 23–24 May 1692

Preface

The literature on the Jacobite movement and the later attempts of the exiled House of Stuart to regain its British thrones is extensive. The ’45 Rebellion is one of the most popular, and frequently over-romanticised, episodes in British history, and the earlier ’15 and ’19 Rebellions have attracted their share of interest.

Much less well known as a whole is the first serious Jacobite attempt to reverse the verdict of the Revolution of 1688. For the next three years both Scotland and Ireland were the scene of bitter and prolonged fighting, while England was the target of invasion attempts and Jacobite conspiracy. Some incidents of the war, notably the siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland, and the encounter at Killiecrankie in Scotland, have secure places in British history, and, in the cases of the first two, still arouse strongly partisan feelings.

The war as a whole, however, is much less well known, particularly in England. So much so, in fact, that no universally accepted name for it has emerged, and it is variously known – among other titles – as the War of the British Succession; in Ireland as the War of the Two Kings, or the Williamite War; and, in its wider European context, as the War of the League of Augsburg and the Eight Years’ War. After some thought, I have opted for none of these, and as this book is primarily a military study of the conflict as it affected the British Isles, I have called it the War of the Three Kingdoms.

As always, thanks are due to a number of institutions and individuals. The Sydney Jones Library of the University of Liverpool provided much of the basic material used in researching this book, while the unrivalled resources of the British Library contain much contemporary material. The staff at Sutton provided much useful advice, not least in settling on the title of the book!

As this is primarily a military study, I have, with some relief, minimised discussion of the political and religious events leading up to the 1688 Revolution and the Settlement that followed. The debate over such questions as the exact motivations of James II and William of Orange in their actions that precipitated the Revolution remains heated, even after more than three hundred years. Published as I was completing this book was the magisterial study Revolution, by Tim Harris, which I would warmly recommend to anyone wishing to delve further into the murky but fascinating politics of 1688 and its aftermath.

John BarrattHenllan2006

Chronology

1685

6 February

Death of Charles II, succeeded by his brother as James II

16 July

Battle of Sedgemoor

1688

10 June

Birth of Prince of Wales

5 November

William of Orange lands at Torbay

10 December

Failure of James II’s first attempt to flee to France

23 December

James II’s second attempt to escape to France successful

1689

January–February

English convention declares James to have abdicated. William and Mary accept the English throne

12 March

James II lands in Ireland

14 March

Hamilton routs Ulster Protestants at ‘Break of Dromore’

24 March

James enters Dublin

27 March

Hamilton fails to take Coleraine

Mid-April

Dundee begins Scottish Jacobite rising

15 April

Ulster Protestants defeated at Clady and Lifford

17 April

James II fired on from walls of Derry; siege begins

1 May

Battle of Bantry Bay

11 May

William and Mary accept Scottish throne

13 June

Duke of Gordon surrenders Edinburgh Castle to Williamites

27 July

Jacobite victory at Killiecrankie; Dundee killed

31 July

Siege of Derry raised; Hamilton defeated at Newtownbutler

13 August

Schomberg and Williamite forces land at Bangor Bay

21 August

Highland army defeated at Dunkeld

7 September

Schomberg’s advance halts at Dundalk

Early October

Schomberg withdraws to Lisburn; James pulls back to Dublin

1690

1 May

Scottish Jacobites routed at Cromdale

14 June

William III lands at Carrickfergus

30 June

French naval victory at Battle of Beachy Head

1 July

Battle of the Boyne

4 July

James II quits Ireland for France

7 August

William commences operations against Limerick

12 August

Sarsfield captures William’s siege train at Ballyneety

27 August

Williamite assault on Limerick repulsed

29 August

Siege of Limerick raised

29 September

Marlborough takes Cork

15 October

Marlborough takes Kinsale

1691

9 May

St Ruhe takes command of Irish army

8 June

Ginkel takes Ballymore

19 June

Ginkel begins siege of Athlone

30 June

Fall of Athlone

12 July

Jacobites defeated at Battle of Aughrim

21 July

Galway surrenders

25 August

Second siege of Limerick begins

14 September

Surrender of Sligo

3 October

Limerick surrenders; Treaty of Limerick ends war in Ireland

1692

13 February

Massacre of Glencoe

19 May

Battle of Barfleur

23–24 May

French fleet destroyed at La Hogue; end of James II’s invasion plans

1701

16 September

Death of James II

ONE

Introduction

When James II succeeded to the British thrones in February 1685 following the death of his brother, Charles II, he seemed as secure in his inheritance as any monarch in Europe. Yet, in less than four years he would be a dethroned exile, overthrown by the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and poised to engulf the British Isles in bloody civil war in an effort to regain his crown.

There were always those who doubted James’s ability. In his earlier career, fighting in exile in the service of France and Spain, James had been an energetic and apparently courageous soldier, although always in a relatively junior capacity, and had displayed similar bravery of a passive kind as a fleet commander against the Dutch.

James’s instincts were always authoritarian, with compulsion the first resort, as demonstrated when he was given responsibility for suppressing the Protestant Covenanters in Scotland. Indeed, religion was the key motive in most of James’s actions and in his eventual fall. Converted to Catholicism during his exile, James fervently embraced his religion, and this was a major cause for the widespread opposition that the prospect of his succeeding to the throne created.

In the end, the strong grip that Charles II had established in his later years, and the support of the dominant Anglican–Tory interests, were enough to secure James’s accession with little opposition, and indeed with some enthusiasm, although conditional on his working within the existing political and religious framework. Yet within less than a year, encouraged by the easy defeat of the rebellions of Monmouth and the Duke of Argyll, James would be embarking on a collision course with increasing numbers of his subjects.

Nobody ever credited James with great intelligence. A cold and generally humourless man, he lacked the cleverness and wit of his elder brother. The Duke of Buckingham said of the brothers: ‘the king could see things if he would; the duke [of York] would see things if he could.’ Catherine Sedley, one of the numerous, usually remarkably ugly, mistresses kept by James in contradiction to his strong devoutness, commented: ‘we are none of us handsome, and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it’, while Charles himself feared that ‘my brother will lose his kingdom by his bigotry and his soul for a lot of ugly trollops’.1

With haste sharpened by his advancing years, James attempted to push through policies favouring his Catholic co-religionists. As they comprised only 2 per cent of the English population, otherwise predominantly anti-papist Protestants, a collision was virtually inevitable, and James’s readiness to ignore or override existing legislation and Parliament in order to gain his ends led to growing alarm.

James’s long-term plans remain the subject of debate. Was he aiming at a British version of the absolute monarchies that were a feature of contemporary Europe, or was he following the narrower plan of emancipating his Catholic co-religionists, with the hope that their greater prominence would be followed by increasing numbers of conversions among the rest of the population?

There were grounds for concern because of his known authoritarian tendencies, and still more due to his steady expansion of his regular army, where commissions were now granted to Catholics, although even by 1688 only about 10 per cent of the officers were of that faith.

Alarm grew when James’s activities in his kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland were observed. In Scotland, where the proportion of Catholics was similar to that in England, James tested out his pro-Catholic policies before applying them in England, but encountered so much opposition, especially from the Presbyterian section of the community, that by 1688, even before the Revolution in England, royal government had almost broken down.

In Ireland James began with the advantage of 97 per cent of the population being Catholic. But the social and political situation was complex. There was a complicated divide between the ‘new’ settlers (those who had arrived in the post-Reformation period, and particularly during the Cromwellian Settlement of the 1650s), the ‘Old English’ (descendants of the pre-Reformation settlers, who had remained Catholic), and the ‘native’ Irish or ‘Gaels’. The remaining 3 per cent of the population were Protestant, of whom the most hostile to James and his plans were the mainly Scottish Presbyterians of Ulster.

Prominent in Catholic Ireland was Richard Talbot. Born in 1630, Talbot was an ‘Old English’ Catholic who fought against Cromwell, narrowly escaping from the massacre at Drogheda in 1649. A close friend of James in exile and procurer of his mistresses, Talbot was described by Bishop Burnet as ‘a man who had much cunning, and had the secrets both of his master’s pleasures and of his religion’.2 Talbot opposed the Restoration Land Settlement which left the ‘New English’ settlers in possession of most of their recent territorial gains, and became regarded as the principal spokesman of the ‘Old English’.

Talbot prospered both financially and in influence under James, who, in 1685, created him Earl of Tyrconnel, and two years later appointed him Lord Deputy, with the task of expediting his Catholicisation programme, particularly in the Irish army. In 1685 nearly all the troops were Protestant; a year later 67 per cent of the privates were Catholic, along with 40 per cent of the officers. As a result, increasing numbers of alarmed Protestants fled to England.

Matters came to a head from the spring of 1688. James, like his brother before him, had accepted financial subsidies from King Louis XIV of France. He had been unhappy with Louis’s insatiable ambition to expand French influence in Europe, and attempted to remain neutral in the contest between Louis and his principal adversary, the Protestant William, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands and James’s son-in-law by marriage to his daughter Mary. However, popular opinion in England regarded James as a virtual French puppet.

In 1686 Emperor Leopold of Austria and a number of other European states, including the Netherlands, had formed the League of Augsburg, pledged to resist further French expansion. Two years later, Louis invaded the Palatinate, ostensibly in support of the claims to the territory of his sister-in-law, the Duchess of Orleans. By 1688 French troops were launching devastating raids deep into Imperial territory. The League of Augsburg was activated, and Europe was once more at war.

William of Orange, the moving force behind the League, and Louis’s inveterate foe, was an unattractive man. Cold, cynical and suspicious by nature, William reserved any warmth for his female mistresses and male lovers; and for his troops, who regarded him with enthusiasm despite William’s uninspiring military record.

From the opening of hostilities, William’s overriding aim was to bring England into the war on the side of the League. This was clearly unlikely while James was on the throne, and, as early as April 1688, William was considering a landing in England if he could be assured of sufficient support there to overthrow or neutralise James. Matters in England were brought to a head by two events. First, the strength of popular opposition to James’s policies was demonstrated by the acquittal of the seven bishops, tried for their refusal to endorse the King’s latest Declaration of Indulgence suspending all anti-Catholic legislation. Secondly, on 10 June James’s queen, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son. Attempts were made to suggest that the new Prince of Wales had been ‘planted’, but in reality there could be no doubt that James now had a male heir, who would be brought up a Roman Catholic and supplant as heir to the throne his two Protestant half-sisters, Mary and Anne. Instead of a temporary religious aberration under James, the king’s opponents were now faced with the prospect of a Roman Catholic dynasty stretching into the future.

The outcome was the invitation three weeks later, by seven leading figures in the Church, aristocracy, army and navy, to William of Orange to land in England to settle affairs there – and, if as yet only tacitly, to overthrow James.

William landed at Torbay on 5 November with an army of 15,000 men. Although James could theoretically muster almost three times that number, after he had called in reinforcements from Ireland and Scotland, his regime literally fell apart. Shaken by the desertion of trusted officers such as John Churchill and the Duke of Grafton, James suffered something approaching mental collapse, and fell back on London virtually without striking a blow, disbanded his army, and attempted to follow his wife and son in flight to France. His first attempt ended in failure. Brought back to London, James briefly met his chief Scottish supporters, the Earl of Balcarres and John Graham, Earl of Claverhouse, recently created Viscount Dundee. A kinsman of the great Montrose, though with less of his military talent, Claverhouse had gained some notoriety for his ruthless suppression of Scottish Covenanters and was the natural choice to lead any Stuart counterrevolution in Scotland. He and Balcarres were sent back north to await instructions.

On 23 December, an embarrassment to his Dutch son-in-law, James was permitted to make a second, this time successful, escape attempt. In France he was warmly welcomed by Louis, and installed in the palace of Saint-Germain. In England and Scotland, James’s flight was presented as de facto abdication, and Conventions in both countries proclaimed William and Mary as joint monarchs in his stead.

William had achieved his immediate aim of bringing Britain into the League of Augsburg, and a declaration of war on France followed in May. In Scotland there was no immediate opposition to the change of regime, but in Ireland, after some apparent initial hesitancy and abortive negotiations with William via Richard Hamilton, an Irish officer taken in England who had been paroled to talk with Tyrconnel, the latter declared for James and began raising troops, and Hamilton joined him.

In England, once James’s stranded Irish troops had been rounded up, the new regime seemed shakily established, and there were hopes that James might accept the status quo and comfortable exile in France.

This at first seemed not unlikely; James still wanted to be king, but lacked the determination to attempt this, while the French courtiers were unimpressed with the prematurely aged and indecisive monarch. But, although his War Minister, Louvois, wanted to concentrate all efforts on the war in Europe, Louis had some personal regard for James, and both he and his Naval Minister, the Marquis de Seignelay, saw support for James in Ireland as a useful diversion of enemy resources, and as a way of perhaps eventually restoring him as a client monarch.

James proved reluctant to oblige. Tyrconnel in the end had to demand of the king whether ‘you can with honour continue where you are when you possess a kingdom of your own’,3 and assured him that he need remain in Ireland only for a short time to organise matters there, and could then return to France. The great French military engineer Vauban commented caustically to Louvois: ‘I have an idea that when a man plays his last stake he ought to play it himself or be on the spot. The king of England seems to be in this condition. His last stake is Ireland; it appears to me that he ought to go there.’4

In the end, pressure from Louis and a certain recovery of confidence on James’s part, tipped the scales. On 25 February 1689, seen off by Louis with the enigmatic comment ‘the best I can wish you is that we shall never see each other again’, James left Saint-Germain bound for the port of Brest and thence to Ireland. In his Irish kingdom, Tyrconnel’s troops were preparing to march on Ulster, where Protestant-held Derry and Enniskillen defied him. The War of the Three Kingdoms was about to begin.

TWO

Warfare in the Late SeventeenthCentury

Late-seventeenth-century Europe was overshadowed by the legacy of the Thirty Years War. Its terrible impact had led to a widespread desire to limit the effects of conflict.

This did not mean that no atrocities took place, whether carried out by unauthorised individuals, or as deliberate acts of policy – such as the notorious 1670s dragonnades by the troops of Louis XIV against the French Huguenots. But, overall, most governments and commanders made conscious efforts to moderate the effects of their military operations.

Warfare remained largely seasonal. Communications were, generally, fairly basic and bad weather quickly turned most roads into muddy quagmires, unusable for up to seven months of the year, while it was customary to lay up the largest warships for the winter.