Irish Brigades Abroad E-Book

Stephen McGarry

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 499

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Irish Brigades Abroad examines the complete history of the Irish regiments in France, Spain, Austria and beyond. Covering the period from King James II's reign of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1685, until the disbandment of the Irish Brigades in France and Spain, this book looks at the origins, formation, recruitment and the exploits of the Irish regiments, including their long years of campaigning from the War of the Grand Alliance in 1688 right through to the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. What emerges is a picture of the old-fashioned virtues of honour, chivalry, integrity and loyalty, of adventure and sacrifice in the name of a greater cause.

Leseprobe

In memory of my father

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1. The Recruitment of the Irish Regiments Abroad

2. The Character of the Brigade

3. The Jacobite War (1689–91)

4. The Flight of the Wild Geese (1691)

5. The Day We Beat the Germans at Cremona

6. The First Jacobite Rising (1715)

7. The Battle of Fontenoy (1745)

8. The Second Jacobite Rising (1745)

9. The Decline of Charles Edward Stuart

10. The Waning Jacobite Cause

11. Lieutenant General Thomas Lally’s Expedition to India

12. The War of American Independence (1775–83)

13. The French Revolution (1789)

14. The United Irishmen and France

15. Napoleon’s Irish Legion (1803–15)

16. Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

From the time of King James II’s reign over the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, swashbuckling young Irishmen achieved great success and fought with distinction in most of the major battles in Europe and beyond. The prospects for the ordinary Catholic in Ireland in the eighteenth century were bleak and, perhaps not unlike modern emigrants, the best and brightest were often forced away. Many of those who left saw the undertaking of military service on the Continent as only a temporary condition. While contemporary Irish emigrants might look to Australia or Canada in search of a better life, during the eighteenth century the Irish turned to France and Spain, countries with well-established Irish communities. This book will look at how they fared, from the War of the Grand Alliance in 1688 right through to the Napoleonic Wars. What emerges is a picture of honour, chivalry and integrity, of self-sacrifice and, above all, of great adventure.

Irish troops displayed these qualities numerous times, such as when they volunteered to cover the retreat of the French army against the Germans in 1735; or their near-suicidal attack launched to capture George II’s son, HRH the Duke of Cumberland, during the Battle of Lafelt. When Napoleon’s Irish Legion proudly marched through the French town of Verdun, the legion band played ‘Saint Patrick’s Day in the Morning’, aware that there were captured British POWs billeted in the town. One must also not forget their plan to rescue the French queen, Marie Antoinette, during the French Revolution, or the epic musketry duel fought during the famous Battle of Malplaquet between two Irish regiments, one in the French and the other in the British army. The Battle of Fontenoy (1745) was their highest battle honour, when six Irish regiments in the French army were largely responsible for breaking a British infantry advance and secured victory.

The formation of the Irish Brigade of France began with an exchange of nearly 6,000 French for Irish troops during the Jacobite War (1689–91), which became Mountcashel’s Irish Brigade. The Irish supported the Catholic king, James II, in the war, which was fought in Ireland. James had been deposed and fought to regain his crown against the Protestant king, William of Orange, who had usurped him during the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Conflict in eighteenth-century Europe was generally along religious lines and the Jacobite War was no exception. The Protestant countries of England, Holland and Prussia (including Catholic Austria and Portugal) were frequently at war with the Catholic countries of France and Spain. The war’s repercussions resonated deeply in Northern Ireland, particularly during ‘The Troubles’ in the twentieth century, and are still felt today. Some sections of the Protestant Unionist community annually commemorate their victory over the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne, fought over 300 years previously.

After the Jacobite War, the Irish army withdrew to France. This exodus became known romantically as the ‘Flight of the Wild Geese’, and spearheaded Irish migration to the Continent. The term the Wild Geese evoked the migratory flight of the birds in autumn and was used on ships’ manifests for the secret transport of Irish recruits to armies overseas. The Irish followed James II, who had been forced into exile in France, and were known as Jacobites, from Jacobus (the Latin form of James). The Treaty of Limerick (1691) guaranteed Catholic rights after the war but these rights were removed by the Penal Laws. Catholics turned to military service abroad, which offered an escape and was frequently the launching pad into successful careers in government or in business. Land forfeitures by 1700 left only one-sixth of land in Catholic hands and the Irish took up the Jacobite cause in the hope that they would regain their rights and lands with a Stuart Restoration.

Irish migration to the Continent dates back to the golden age of the Irish Church (AD 600–800). In this period, Irish missionaries were credited with re-establishing Christianity following the collapse of the Roman Empire that had brought Europe into the Dark Ages. Ireland had remained independent of Roman rule and escaped the ravages that occurred after the Empire’s collapse, due in part to its geographical remoteness on the periphery of Western Europe. The country had been a rebellious and troublesome colony since the twelfth-century English conquest and military links with the Continent were established after failed Irish rebellions. Many fled to France and Spain where they were perceived as soldiers of conscience, having similarities to the earlier crusaders. They adhered to their Catholic religion despite pressure to convert to Protestantism, preferring to serve abroad under arms and in so doing forfeiting their estates at home.

Irish military service in Spain dates from the Flight of the Earls in 1607, when Gaelic chieftains Owen Roe O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell settled in Spain.1 They established the Tyrone and Tyrconnell regiments but both were disbanded by the close of the seventeenth century. The Irish Brigade of Spain comprised the regiments of O’Mahony, Crofton, Fitzharris, Bourkes, Castlear, MacAuliffe and Comerford. In 1709 these were re-formed into the regiments of Hibernia, Ultonia (Ulster) and Irlanda who remained in Spanish service until 1818. The Irish had always capitalised on the shared Milesian origins between the peoples of Ireland and Spain, which they used to their full advantage to gain privileges at court or for support for their cause. The Milesians were the early Celtic people who invaded, settled and ruled Ireland in the first millennium BC. The Irish also owed allegiance to the House of Stuart, as they believed the Stuarts were descended from the old Milesian kings of Ireland.

Of all the Wild Geese who went to the Continent, those who went to France were the most successful and contributed most both militarily and politically during the period. France eclipsed Spain as their preferred destination, due to the ease of migration to France and Flanders from Ireland. ‘The Flight of the Wild Geese’ in 1691 also reinforced links in France over Spain, as ‘the overwhelming majority of Jacobites in France were Irishmen in the service of France.’2 France assisted Ireland in the Jacobite War, and the French king, Louis XIV maintained James in Saint Germain, Paris which encouraged his followers to settle there. The Irish Brigades were the Jacobite army-in-waiting and were central to any plots for a Catholic Restoration. Paris became ‘the chief centre of the various plots and conspiracies to restore the Stuarts, whose efforts to regain the ancestral throne found their most zealous supporters in the exiled nobility and gentry of Ireland’.4 France was used by the Irish as a platform for invading the British Isles. The Channel ports were the preferred embarkation point due to the short run across, and the Irish regiments were frequently stationed there and threatened British national security. In 1728, Charles Forman, the English pamphleteer, observed:

As long as there is a body of Irish Roman Catholic troops abroad, the chevalier [James III] will always make some figure in Europe by the credit they give him; and be considered as a prince that has a brave and well-disciplined army of veterans at his services; though he wants that opportunity to employ them at present, which he expects time and fortune will favour him with … they [the Irish] are British subjects and speak the same language with us, and are consequently the fittest troops to invade us with.3

The Irish regiments of France went through many changes in their history. The French formed a unit known as the Irish Brigade, comprising the Irish infantry regiments, for practical, cultural and linguistic reasons. The sole Irish cavalry regiment of Fitzjames’ served alongside other French cavalry regiments.4 In 1690, Mountcashel’s Irish Brigade in France comprised the regiments of Dillon’s, Clare’s, Mountcashel’s and Dorrington’s. Shortly afterwards these were joined by Sheldon’s horse, Albemarles’, Galmoy’s and Bourke’s. When the French army was re-organised in 1715 only five Irish regiments remained: Clare’s, Dillon’s, Dorrington’s, Lee’s and Nugent’s (later Fitzjames). In 1744, Lally’s was formed along with the Scottish Royal Ecossais (Royal Scots) to support the Stuart claim. Lally’s and Fitzjames’ horse were disbanded in 1762, followed by the Scottish regiments. In 1775, the Brigade was reduced to three regiments – Berwick’s, Walsh’s and Dillon’s – all of whom were disbanded after the French Revolution.

Irish soldiers were also active in other parts of Europe. For nearly forty years (from 1792 to 1833) a sixty-strong Irish bodyguard served the Italian Duke of Parma, and in the early 1700s, Irish officers comprised 8 per cent of the officer corps in Bavaria, in present-day Germany.5 In Russia, several Irish officers served Catherine the Great’s court, including Cornelius O’Rourke from Co. Leitrim, who rose to the rank of general. His son, Major-General Joseph O’Rourke, led an army that drove Napoleon out of Russia. Field-Marshal Peter de Lacy from Limerick took a leading role in reforming the Russian army, and his son Maurice de Lacy also attained a marshal rank in Austria. Irish military service in Austria began during the Thirty Years War in the 1600s, where they rose to the highest positions in the military and political life of the country. Additionally, twenty-five Irishmen received the Austrian army’s most prestigious military decoration – the Order of Maria Therese – founded in 1757 to reward officers for exceptional acts of bravery.6

Austria was an ally of England until 1756, and was often at war with France and Spain, resulting in Irishmen opposing each other on the battlefield. Many Irish Catholic families preferred to serve in Austria (rather than in France or Spain) as advancement was based more on individual merit than to noble birth. In the 1690s, the first Irish regiment was formed from Irish soldiers who were imprisoned on the Isle of Wight during the Jacobite War. This regiment never saw action and many deserted, probably seeing service in the Austrian Imperial army as better than rotting in an off-shore prison. A second regiment was also raised from Irish prisoners, but was disbanded shortly afterwards due to sustaining heavy losses from illness. The Irish regiments in Austria did not remain in service for long. England had applied diplomatic pressure on their Austrian ally for their disbandment, as they distrusted Irish Catholics serving in the armies of their allies.

Catholic Ireland was effectively a nation in exile after ‘The Flight of the Wild Geese’. Patrick Sarsfield’s intention when leaving Limerick with the Irish army was to ‘make another Ireland in the armies of the great King of France’.7 The Irish established close-knit communities in Europe and brought their music, culture, books and religious relics with them.8 The Gaelic order entered into a period of decline from the 1607 Flight of the Earls and the subsequent departure of many of the Gaelic nobility. The county lost much of its Gaelic culture and identity in its wake as the Gaelic nobility were patrons to roaming scribes, bards and musicians. From then on, key aspects of Irish culture were being forged in Europe. The first book printed using Irish character type was printed on the Continent. The Franciscans in Leuven, Belgium were so concerned that whole swathes of Irish history were being wiped out entirely due to the English conquest that they undertook their great work, The Annals of Ireland of the Four Masters, which recorded key aspects of Irish history up to the year 1616.

J.C. O’Callaghan’s History of the Irish Brigades in the Service of France (1870) has remained the standard work on the Irish Brigades.9 O’Callaghan undertook his book to restore the nation’s honour as he was so incensed at Voltaire, who wrote: ‘The Irish whom we have seen to be such good soldiers in France and Spain have always fought badly at home. There are some nations that are made to be enslaved by others.’10 To complete his work, an effort that took him twenty-five years, O’Callaghan trawled through the dusty archives in France and Spain. Previous to this, no history of the Irish Brigades had been written, partly due to the vast amount of research involved.11 In 1837 an English writer in The Gentleman’s Magazine observed this and wrote:

The Irish Brigade in France, a body of which I regret that no history exists, for the achievements of the various regiments of which it was composed, would well deserve a special narrative nor were those in the Spanish service less distinguished. A gentleman, Captain O’Kelly, now or lately who had been living in La Reole, in the south of France, had collected material for a history of the corps, as he told me some years ago, but what has prevented their publication I know not what.12

The famous French writer Voltaire believed the House of Stuart was cursed. The first of the Stuarts, James I, was assassinated and his son was killed at the age of 29, fighting the English. Mary Queen of Scots was executed, as was Charles I, and his grandson James II was also driven from his throne. His son, ‘James III’, and grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, devoted their lives to regaining the crowns of their ancestors until their hopes were ultimately dashed at Culloden in the Scottish Jacobite Rising of 1745 – commonly referred to as the ’45’. Thereafter, with all hope of a Stuart Restoration fading, the Irish Brigades were deployed elsewhere. The Irish regiments served in the Seven Years War in Canada, and in Europe, in India, and alongside General Washington in the American War of Independence. The French Irish Brigade was disbanded during the French Revolution but Napoleon reestablished them as La Légion Irlandaise to spearhead an invasion in Ireland. This corps was disbanded in 1815, after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The Spanish Irish Brigade were stood down three years later, formally drawing to a close Irish military involvement in Europe.

Map of Britain and Ireland.

The Irish Brigade’s exploits and triumphs have been largely forgotten. On a quick scan through a general study on Irish history, one can be hard pressed to find a reference to the Battle of Fontenoy or to the Wild Geese at all. Irish Brigades Abroad covers some of these missing pages of Irish history. I am grateful to the assistance I was given around the various battlefields and libraries here and abroad, particularly the services of the National Library and the Research Library in Pearse Street, Dublin. In their well-stocked reservoirs, scarcely any book was unavailable, no matter how old or how long out of print, whether this was the beautiful (slightly battered) leather-bound copy of Marshal de Saxe’s Memoirs from 1757, to the little pamphlet signed by the English historian Francis Skrine on a lecture he gave on the Irish Brigades to the Irish Literary Society in London, in 1921. I recalled the achievements of my compatriots with pride but regret that conditions prevented them remaining at home where they could have prospered. As we approach the 2015 bicentenary of the ending of Irish military service in France, I hope you enjoy reading about these brave Irishmen and I hope I have done them some justice.

Stephen McGarry, Dublin, 2013.

1

THE RECRUITMENT OF THE IRISH REGIMENTS ABROAD

Eighteenth-century Ireland had harsh Penal Laws, which limited opportunities for Catholics at home and forced many to turn to military service abroad. The Penal Code prevented Catholics from carrying arms, then a matter of personal honour and protection. They also had to sell their horse to a Protestant for £5; a horse was a forerunner of the performance car today and was a status symbol at the time. Mixed marriages were forbidden. Catholics were deprived of the vote and were banned from the professions and from educating their children, although in many cases this was impossible to enforce, as Catholic hedge schools sprang up and children were sent to the Continent to further their studies.

The Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery 1704 was the most important single statute and was cleverly designed to break the power of Catholic families. The Act directed that when a landowner died, his land was to be divided equally (or gavelled) between all his sons to break up the estate. To ensure the eldest son inherited the estate intact, Catholics sent their younger sons abroad. Some entered the priesthood while others joined the Irish Brigade. The eldest son was also required to convert to Protestantism to inherit his family’s estate, or would otherwise forfeit it.1 ‘The estimated fall in Catholic landownership decreased from 14 per cent in 1700 to 5 per cent in 1780 but this was not due to more Catholics losing their lands to Protestants, but to Catholics becoming Protestants to retain their land.’2 In some families, to ensure estates remained in the family, a system existed for generations whereby the eldest son was brought up a Protestant and the other sons as Catholics. The younger sons were typically sent to France and joined the Irish Brigade. Far from suppressing Jacobitism, these laws assisted in pushing the sons of the gentry to France and into the army of James III, ‘the Pretender’.

Ownership of land was the basis of wealth, social standing and power, as landlords received income through rent and gained respect in their community. Irish people have always had a special attachment to their land and passing it down to subsequent generations was always of paramount concern. The Wild Geese lost their ancestral estates by leaving and many cherished hopes of getting their estates back. Charles O’Brien, the 6th Lord Clare, Marshal of France and military governor of Languedoc, lost 80,000 acres but kept an exact rent roll, which he would find useful when his estates (he hoped) were restored.3 He also maintained close links with his native County Clare and ‘knew all the private affairs of the local landed gentlemen as if he had lived among them’.4 The flamboyant Chevalier Charles Wogan from Kildare was governor of La Mancha province (outside Madrid), made famous by Cervante’s early seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote. Walsh wanted to return home and claimed that even after achieving fame and fortune abroad he ‘should have a better estate at home than ever his [Don Quixote’s] fathers enjoyed and a tomb too where no man of honour may be ashamed to lie’.5 As late as 1786, the authorities in Ireland were alarmed when they learned that Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman, a captain in the French Irish Brigade, was collecting portfolios of confiscated Catholic estates dating from the time of Cromwell with a view to restoring them to their Catholic owners.6

Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman (1732–1809) was a native Irish speaker who came from a prominent Gaelic aristocratic family from Castletown, Co. Clare. He was educated in the Irish College in Paris and joined the Irish Brigade and was knighted by Louis XVI. He married into the French aristocracy and inherited vast vineyards in Burgundy. The colourful O’Gorman was a noted antiquarian and genealogist. He produced pedigrees by studying medieval Gaelic genealogical manuscripts (such as the Great Book of Lecan and the Four Masters) for many Irish gentry officers on the Continent who needed proofs of their nobility for advancement in society or in the army. O’Gorman lost his estate in Burgundy in the turmoil of the French Revolution and returned to Ireland to retire. In 1785 he arranged for the transfer from the Irish College in Paris of the fourteenth-century Irish-language Book of Ballymote and the Book of Lecan to the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin where they still remain.

In the eighteenth century, the economic power and prestige of many once prominent Catholic families had been virtually wiped out. In 1739, a pamphleteer declared that ‘there are not twenty Papists in Ireland who possess each £1,000 a year in land’. Thirty years later in 1772, the Viceroy Lord Townsend noted that ‘the laws against popery have so far operated that at this day there is no popish family remaining of any great weight from landed property.’7 Their decline was also highlighted in the 1770s by Arthur Young’s Tour of Ireland: ‘The lineal descendents of great families, men possessed of vast property are now to be found all over the kingdom, working as cottiers’,8 although even with their land and wealth gone this ‘underground gentry’ were still held in high esteem by the local people. The wealth of the chief of the O’Connor clan from Roscommon (a direct descendent of the eleventh-century King of Connaught), Young stated, were ‘formerly so great, are reduced to three or four hundred pounds a year, the family having fared in the revolutions of so many ages much worse than the O’Neils and O’Briens. The common people pay him the greatest respect, and send him presents of cattle … they consider him as the prince of a people involved in one common ruin.’9 In 1790 the French consul to Ireland, Charles Coquebert de Montbret, mirrored Young’s observations and ‘was astonished to find on visiting Ireland that even French army families like Dillon and Lally were mere tenant farmers on Kirwan’s estate at Cregg in Galway, while the Mullays were simply ‘peasants’.10

The ordinary Catholic farm labourer lived a precarious existence, being exposed to bad harvests which led to several Irish famines in the eighteenth century. A soldier’s life could be an attractive (but dangerous) option as one could lose life or limb – or both. Migration was always a complex social issue; some joined yearning for adventure or to escape family pressures or the law. Others joined the French and Spanish army to help liberate Ireland from British rule. Recruits received a cash bounty on joining and were paid around the same rate as a labourer. In many cases, uncles or other family members brought other relatives over into the Irish regiments.

There were also limited opportunities for the sons of Catholic gentry families. They could enter the Catholic Church, become a medical doctor (one of the few professions open to Catholics), or join an Irish regiment on the Continent. All three options necessitated leaving Ireland and all were expensive. Catholics were prevented from entering Trinity College Dublin until 1793 and as there was no seminary (until 1795) students had to train on the Continent. By contrast, the choices of their Protestant counterparts were wider; they could take a degree in Trinity; be called to the Bar; purchase a commission in the British army or navy or buy a seat in Parliament.11

For the Catholic gentry, an army career was attractive as entry into the officer class improved the family’s social standing in their communities. The cash-strapped family, reduced to middlemen or tenants on their ancestral estates, could restore some of their former status, dignity and pride, by having a son serving as an officer on the Continent. Many were sent to France to acquire and cultivate the gentlemanly skills necessary for advancement in life: ‘In terms of prestige, the finest career for the younger son of a Catholic landowner was that of a French officer.’12 The sole cavalry regiment of Fitzjames’ horse was the most prestigious; Dillon’s was also highly prized as it was known for speaking the best French.

The younger son who was training to be an officer still had to be supplemented with money sent from home.13 Officers could only afford to marry at the rank of captain, which yielded £100 a year but promotion was slow.14 Officer cadets sometimes served as common soldiers until a commission became available. The Liberator Daniel O’Connell’s uncle, Captain Maurice O’Connell and Captain Richard Hennessy of Cognac fame, served in the ranks for several years before their promised cadetships were procured.15

A career could be forged in the French Marine Royale for those with the right connections. A naval ensign or midshipman could rise in five years to lieutenant and then captain a small frigate. The more ambitious might even rise to the coveted rank of capitaine de vaisseau, commanding one of the three-deck battleships of the line.16 John MacNamara from Co. Clare rose to vice-admiral and commander of the port of Rochefort. His aggressive naval tactics helped to ensure one of the few French naval victories during the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1745, he commanded the Invincible and successfully engaged four British ships of the line in a sustained sea-fight and beat them off.17 Another kinsman, Count Henry MacNamara, commanded the French navy in the Indian Ocean. During the French Revolution, he was denounced as a foreign aristocrat and assassinated by revolutionary soldiers of the French garrison in the Ile de France, in modern-day Mauritius.18

Service in the Spanish navy, the Armada Española, was not as highly regarded as the French navy although it provided good promotional prospects for those with ambition. Captain O’Donnell, a nephew of Hugh O’Donnell the Earl of Tyrone, captained a man-of-war in the Spanish Mediterranean Fleet before being killed at the Battle of Taragonna in 1642 during the Thirty Years War.19 In the 1750s, Daniel O’Kuoney from Co. Clare rose to the rank of admiral in the Spanish navy.20 Enrique MacDonnell captained a Spanish man-of-war at the Battle of Trafalgar and also rose to admiral.21

The Irish even ventured into Catherine the Great’s Imperial Russian navy, which had embarked on a series of expansion plans to rival its European neighbours in the 1800s and sought Irish acumen in building up her fleet. Several Irishmen became admirals and went on to enjoy illustrious careers there, such as Admirals Lacy, Kennedy, Tate and O’Dwyer, along with Commodore Cronin and Rear-Admiral O’Brien.22

The Irish not only served within their own Irish regiments, as thousands of footloose Irish swordsmen were scattered in various regiments throughout the Continent. In 1813, after the French defeat at the Battle of Nivelle during the Peninsular War, an English officer walking among the wounded French soldiers came across a dying officer of an elite French light infantry Chasseur regiment, who called out to him in English. He discovered that the officer was an Irishman, who asked him to pass some papers:

If you are an English officer, you can give me comfort in my dying hour. Yesterday I had a son, we were in the same regiment, and fought side by side; twice he saved my life by turning aside the bayonet that had threatened it and when at last I fell, he tried to bear me to a place of safety, but at the moment, the enemy bore down upon our ranks, and I was separated in the mêlée from my gallant boy. Should he be a prisoner in your army, for the sake of humanity, endeavour to discover his destination, and convey to him these papers.23

The English officer sought out the man’s son among the French prisoners of war but found out that he had sadly died of his wounds the previous day.

Miles Byrne, who served in Napoleon’s Irish Legion, also recalled the career of Dubliner Chevalier Murphy, who left his job as a clerk in Thomas Street, Dublin and emigrated to France. He joined a regular French regiment of the line and rose up through the officer ranks, was decorated with the Legion of Honour before rising to inspector general in the French army.24

British trade policies maintained Ireland as an economic backwater, reliant on England, on the pretence she might break away and ally herself to either Catholic Spain or France. English Navigation Acts placed embargos on French and Spanish imports, which only boosted smuggling and made it more lucrative for the Irish. Many notable Catholic families, such as the O’Sullivans, Gooths and O’Connells of Co. Kerry sustained themselves through some of the leanest years of penal times through this contraband trade; one of the O’Connell’s quipped that ‘their faith, their education, their wine and their clothing were equally contraband.’25

The well-established trading routes running from Galway and Limerick along the southern and western seaboards to the French centres of Bordeaux and La Rochelle had been brisk since the Middle Ages.26 Illicit trade resulted in French wines, silks and tobacco being smuggled into Ireland, and counterfeit money, pirated copies of books, untaxed wool, salted pork and beef, butter and Wild Geese recruits smuggled out. This cargo was carried by handy, especially fitted-out armed sloops and cutters, which plied the coasts of Rush in Co. Dublin, Kerry, Clare and Galway. Privately owned armed vessels (known as privateers) operated under licence by carrying lettres de marque, legitimising the taking of enemy ships as prizes in wartime. A former officer of Dillon’s Regiment, Luke Ryan from Rush, the famous captain of the Black Prince, was commissioned as a privateer carrying French lettres de marque in the American War of Independence.27 Ryan was credited with the capture of ‘more vessels belonging to Great Britain than any other single vessel during the war.’28 In many cases, smuggling was combined with wrecking as ships with unknown colours sailed along the Kerry coasts at their own peril as wreckers would tie a lantern to the neck of a horse and set the horse out to graze. From a distance the light rising and falling was similar to a light in a distant ship, which had the effect of steering the ship onto the rocks, and then wreckers would steal whatever booty was onboard.

The British were also concerned about the high number of priests training on the Continent, many of whom had strong Jacobite sympathies and were suspected of being implicated in recruitment. The clergy in Ireland were an influential force and they promoted service in the countries of France and Spain, advocating that by serving in Catholic armies they were remaining faithful to their Catholic faith. Nicholas Taaffe addressed a petition to Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis of Austria, claiming that he was forced to leave Ireland

Because he was afraid that his descendants pressed by the Penal Laws would not resist the temptation of becoming Protestants. He therefore took refuge to a Catholic country where his ancestors were well known by the military services they had rendered at different intervals to the House of Austria. He had abandoned his relations and his estate and the rank and liberty he had in his country to prevent his descendants from deserting a religion to which their Imperial Majesties so fervently adhered: he did not repent of having acted thus, but it would be a great grief to him if before his death he had not the consolation to see he had not ruined his family.29

There were around thirty Irish Colleges on the Continent from the sixteenth century and the largest and most influential one was the Irish College in Paris. The colleges not only trained the clergy, they also acted as unofficial embassies by liaising with the authorities at home and also educated the Brigade’s children. They lobbied foreign courts and provided genealogical pedigrees and certificates of marriage and baptisms. In return, the Irish regiments financially supported the colleges, through bursaries and gifts, and many soldiers submitted a portion of their wages to them. They also supported the Irish language by teaching priests Irish, as they were required to be proficient in the language when they returned to their Irish-speaking parishes. The presence of Irish clergy choosing to remain on the Continent and bringing extended family members over through the uncle–nephew axis further fortified links between Ireland and the Continent.

Ambitious Irish parents groomed their children for emigration to France from a young age. It was quite typical for a 12-year-old child to be sent to an Irish college abroad and from there he might enter the priesthood or join an Irish regiment as an officer cadet.30 After a few years’ army service, an officer might venture into business. Irishmen could claim French nationality subject to ten years’ satisfactory military service and they were given similar rights in Spain.31 Naturalisation was an important privilege as it gave the recipient licence to engage in the lucrative French and Spanish colonial trade. An officer’s Irish background was deemed by some to be politically neutral and with his linguistic skills he was ideally positioned to trade with the British Empire and the continental powers, especially with the opportunities presented in the New World. Many Irish trading families became successful and established themselves in the trading ports of Cadiz, Dunkirk, La Rochelle and Ostende, and elsewhere. They channelled trade into Catholic hands back home in Ireland and also used their wealth for political purposes and funded Bonnie Prince Charlie’s expedition to Scotland in the ’45’.

The bogeyman of the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland for much of the eighteenth century was the Pope and the Catholic king, James III. The French Irish Brigade in particular ‘remained the focal point of Catholic fantasies and Protestant alarms’.32 The Protestants feared an invasion by these troops and the risk of losing their rights and lands to Catholics should James III claim the throne. In the early eighteenth century, France maintained 250,000 troops in wartime and in peacetime a standing army of 120,000.33 When Britain was at war with France, the authorities in Ireland tried to prevent recruitment to the French armies, and in peacetime there was no great need for high numbers anyway. At the same time, they were keen to remove idle swordsmen from the countryside where it was feared they might question the political status quo and join the illegal militant Whiteboys; even worse, they might even get the landlord’s daughter ‘into trouble’. They were especially keen on seeing the back of those young bucks from dispossessed Catholic gentry families, who still held great sway with the local people. They recognised that not one in twenty returned, but despite this they were aware that those leaving might yet return as an invader.

Recruitment into the Irish Brigade of France peaked in the 1720s. For example, Dillon’s Regiment received 800 recruits from Ireland when it was stationed in the northern French town of Sedan in 1729.34 Dublin Castle frequently exaggerated the numbers recruited, which only increased hysteria, when even seasonal workers travelling to England were suspected of joining the ‘Pretender’, James III. This fear became so great that recruiting for the Irish regiments abroad became a capital offence. Prior to the Scottish Jacobite Rising of 1715, Joseph Sullivan, an Irishman in the French army, was hanged for paying two English soldiers to abjure their oath to George I and join the ‘Pretender’. Irishmen were recruited into the Irish regiments abroad with the promise that they would be home within a year to expel the English. In 1715, the authorities arrested and hanged some of the 150 men who had gathered on the north Dublin Hill of Howth to board a ship to bring them to France. In 1726, Captain Moses Newland from Co. Carlow was publicly hanged in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin for recruiting 200 men to join the Irish Brigade in Spain.

The British applied diplomatic pressure on France and Spain, calling for the disbandment of the Irish Brigades. This was stepped up in times of threat to Britain’s national security. Protestant alarm often resulted in a knee-jerk reaction with additional anti-Catholic laws passed upon invasion scares. After Irish success at the Battle of Fontenoy, a law was passed preventing those serving in France or Spain from holding property in Ireland and military service in France was made a treasonable offence in 1756. Many officers and their families were very concerned and were reluctant to return home on leave. Some officers sought legal advice before they proceeded to set foot in Ireland, and Richard Hennessy gave this as a reason for leaving the army, before founding his cognac distillery.35

There has always been controversy surrounding the numbers of Irishmen who served on the Continent. By 1762, as many as 450,000 Irishmen died in the service of France, according to the Irish Brigade’s chaplain, Abbé MacGeoghegan. Chevalier Richard Gaydon recorded that Dillon’s lost over 6,000 men by 1738; applying this figure over the other Irish regiments in France, this suggests 40,000 casualties overall. In the same period, Sir Charles Wogan claimed 120,000 Irishmen died for France. However, it is difficult to estimate the numbers who served abroad, with the exception of the well-documented migrations of the Flight of the Wild Geese in 1690.36 Recruitment into the Irish regiments in France numbered around 1,000 per year in the 1720s and 1730s, and tapered off thereafter.37 A recent study suggested that just under 25,000 Irish-born rank and file served in the French Irish Brigade from 1690 to 1791.38 Although these numbers exclude officers and the sons of Irishmen born in France who served, they nevertheless appear surprisingly low, considering they include Mountcashel’s Brigade and Sarsfield’s Wild Geese. Collectively, up to 50,000 Irish-born officers and men may have served in the armies of Spain, France and Austria, from 1690 through to the disbandment of Spain’s Irish Brigade in 1818. By including the sons and grandsons of Irish-born soldiers these figures could be doubled. It is impossible to calculate how many died in service, but we can safely assume that many did not die in their beds.

The Irish Catholic gentry contributed around 100 officers yearly to the armies of Europe. At any one time, there were around 525 Irish officers serving on the Continent in the eighteenth-century; 500 in France and Spain and 25 in Austria.39 The Irish would have exerted significant political influence, especially concerning any plans for an invasion of Ireland and a Catholic restoration of James. It was not surprising that the British authorities were alarmed. Putting this figure into perspective there were 2,000 commissions in the British army in the 1750s. Irish Catholics were not permitted to serve as officers or as private soldiers in the British army. However, even if Catholics had been allowed to join the officer ranks in the British army, they would have had to compete with Scottish, English and Irish Protestant families. Another important fact was that commissions in the British army had to be purchased. These would have been out of reach of cash-strapped families of Catholic gentry trying to keep their head above water and it would have been unlikely that they would have procured 500 commissions. On the Continent, commissions were not only purchased; kinship or recommendations also acquired them. This system was exploited well by Catholic gentry families in Cork and Kerry, who received commissions through the mediation of better-connected relatives. Even if Catholic gentlemen had been permitted to join the British army, opportunities would still have been better on the Continent.40

Wild Geese recruits came primarily from the south-western counties of Clare, Tipperary, Cork and Waterford. Recruiting sergeants developed various means to recruit young men to serve abroad, ranging from bribery to corruption to press-ganging. Some recruits were plied with drink, and were attracted by the flashy uniforms and stories of adventure and glory. The instant gratification of receiving a cash bounty when signing up quickly sealed the deal for many. Irish Catholics in the British armed forces, where military service was harsh with frequent floggings for minor misdemeanours such as tardiness, drunkenness and insubordination, were also recruited into the brigades among captured prisoners of war. The historian J.C. O’Callaghan tended to over-emphasise Irish recruitment from the British army, claiming that many had enlisted to gain passage to the Continent, to join the Irish Brigade of France.

Irish officers with good local connections back home in Ireland were also particularly valued on recruitment missions.41 Irish recruits were especially valuable as they helped to preserve the Brigade’s Irish ethos, now that foreigners increasingly filled the ranks. In 1745, due to high Irish losses after Fontenoy, Captain McDonough and Captain O’Brien were sent to their native Clare and recruited a couple of hundred men to fill up the ranks. The Irish Brigade’s commander, Lord Clare, was delighted and wrote proudly to McDonough from Paris:

With your assistance and O’Brien’s the ranks are near filled up; the Brigade is now in a high state of discipline, and as fine a body of fellows as ever stepped on parade; I would not give up the command of them for any honours that could be conferred on me, it would delight you to hear another Irish shout from the Brigade.42

MacDonough subsequently married a local girl on this recruiting mission, and was permitted to remain in Ireland. He was one of the few Wild Geese to die in his native land and lies buried in the old graveyard in Killelagh in Doolin, Co. Clare.

The whole nature of recruiting changed during the eighteenth century. In 1726, the French army began regular medical examinations for recruits and as many as one-third were rejected as being medically unfit. In 1750, Lord Clare as Inspector of Recruiting implemented regulations on recruitment following the hanging of several Irish recruiting officers in London and Dover. Recruiting sergeants were stationed in Calais ‘to enlist none but handsome men, not under 5 feet 2 inches in height, well limbed and at least 35 years of age.’43 Spain, although an ally of France, competed for Irish recruits. The Spanish Embassy in London at times walked a fine diplomatic line: acting as recruiting agents while also maintaining cordial diplomatic relations with the British authorities; but recruitment into the Spanish army was at best irregular.

However, from the 1750s onwards the Irish contingent in France and Spain declined steadily in the ranks and plummeted dramatically in a generation. Out of a regimental strength of 3,742 men in 1729: 71 per cent were Irish, this reduced to 67 per cent in 1737 and only 5 per cent in 1776.44 A controle of Fitzjames’ horse in 1737 showed that 80 per cent were Irish-born.45 New recruits raised after heavy Irish losses from the battles of Fontenoy and Lafelt were mainly non-Irish and changed the whole character of the corps. Irishmen formed the minority in the ranks thereafter due to disease, battle casualties and losses through natural wastage. Post-1747, mainly Belgian Walloons, Dutchmen, Germans, Flemish and Frenchmen filled the ranks, officered by Irishmen. Daniel O’Connor wrote home in 1756 declaring: ‘in asking a survey of the state of things here I look upon myself as in a society of foreigners, perhaps there is not a tenth part of us Irish and our national enthusiasm is no more.’46 According to the muster rolls of the Annuaire militaire of 1793 nearly all officers in the French Irish Brigade were Irishmen.47

It also did not help that the difficulties in transporting recruits overseas made it easier and cheaper to recruit from other countries sharing land borders with France and Spain. Service in the Irish Brigade of Spain had also lost some of its prestige, with poor promotion prospects, high desertion rates, bad food and irregular pay. The Irish regiments served all over Spain, North Africa and in Spanish America which made it difficult for the Irish to establish connections in a particular area. In 1740, the Spanish Irish Brigade mustered around 2,700 men. The Irish officer contingent numbered 200, and in the ranks numbered just 65 men as most recruits were Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Despite this, in common with their compatriots in the French service, the Irish regiments in Spain were still officered by Irishmen or sons of Irishmen.

Other reasons can account for the decline in Irish numbers: ‘The Great Frost’ of 1739–40 which caused the subsequent famine wiped out nearly one-quarter of the Catholic population. The economy of Ireland improved steadily from the 1740s; wages rose and emigration to the American colonies was more attainable, and, though still expensive, the price of passage halved in the 1770s.48 After Charles Edward’s failure to restore the Stuart throne in the Scottish Rebellion in 1745, the chances of a Catholic Restoration retreated and military service abroad was no longer an attractive option. In 1762 Irish officers in the French service transported 334 Irish Newfoundlanders to France and proposed forming them into a new Irish corps – the Royal Marine Irlandaise, but only just over two dozen choose to enlist.49

By the 1780s an army career had lost much of its shine, as officers’ complaints of the time centred on ‘the fewness of promotion prospects and low salaries’.50 This was exacerbated in peacetime when regiments were reduced and officers were retained on a half-pay footing; in this environment, progression to senior rank could be slow and unsteady. The exploits of the Brigade were closely reported in the Dublin press. The Irish were used as crack troops and were often chosen for the most dangerous missions. In 1735, while campaigning in the War of the Polish Succession, General Dillon volunteered the Irish infantry regiments of France to cover the retreat of the French army against the Germans, which they successfully carried out when other French regiments had refused to undertake ‘so hot a service’.51 Perhaps the high casualty rates put potential recruits off, when other options were becoming available.

The number of Irishmen serving on the Continent tapered off when the Catholic-ban in the British army was lifted in the 1750s. During the American War of Independence, the British were keen to yield to Catholic demands, as they feared revolution in Ireland. This led to the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1782 being passed which dismantled some of the legal discrimination against Catholics.52 Several years later, the First Emancipation Act in 1793 lifted the ban which prevented Irish Catholics becoming officers in the British army. The British wanted to address Catholic grievances further and pressurised the Irish Parliament to allow them the vote and to enter Trinity, but these were met with resistance. However, they allowed Catholic recruitment when they needed manpower and especially when the regiments were posted far way. The British did not trust Irish soldiers serving in Europe as they had little allegiance to the British and when captured they frequently defected to the enemy. In 1705, a corps was formed in Lille in the French army from Irish deserters of the British army.53 In the 1750s French and Indian War, the British Commander in the Americas voiced concerns that most deserters were Irish, who had defected. During the American War of Independence, 350 Irish Catholics who formed part of the captured British garrison in St Eustatius in the West Indies joined the French Irish Brigade. The Duke of Wellington wrote in his despatches during the Napoleonic Wars that ‘the deserters from the British regiments are primarily Irishmen.’ It cost a great deal of money and effort to recruit, pay, train, dress, arm and equip a soldier, and to transport these troops long distances overseas. If this soldier ‘turned’, it represented a double blow, not to mention the disclosure of sensitive military intelligence to the enemy, which was a serious threat to success in any campaign.

Napoleon was gravely concerned at the prospect of Irishmen joining the British army, as he was keen to tap into this manpower himself. When the Catholic question was first raised he wrote to his Irish doctor Dr O’Meara from St Helena that he ‘would have given fifty millions to be assured, that it would not be granted for it would have entirely ruined my projects upon Ireland’.54 Due to the easing of the Penal Laws, 36,000 Irishmen served in the British army against France in the French Revolutionary Wars (1793–1801) and many fought in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). The Irish regiments in the British army ‘crowned themselves in glory’ in the Peninsular War. Napoleon’s Imperial Eagle was a prize on the battlefield and was irreverently referred to as ‘the cuckoo’ in the British army. In 1811, two Irishmen serving with the 87th (The Prince of Wales Own) Irish Regiment of Foot desperately scrambled and hacked their way through to take an Eagle during the Battle of Barossa, the first one taken by the British in the war. Ensign Edward Keogh was killed in this attempt; Sergeant Patrick Masterson, from Roscommon, bayoneted the eagle bearer, Frenchman Sous-Lieutenant Edme Gauillemin, and succeeded in snatching the Eagle, memorably quipping: ‘Bejabers Boys! I have the cuckoo!’55 Two years later, during the decisive Allied victory of the Battle of Vitoria, the same Irish regiment, the 87th Foot, took the baton of a Marshal of France from the French commander, Major-General Jourdan, which Wellington sent back to the Prince Regent, the future King George IV as a prized trophy.

It is somehow ironic that the Irish contributed directly to Napoleon’s downfall. Irishmen were over-represented within the ranks of the British army and under-represented in the officer class, reflecting the political status quo back in Ireland. For the ordinary Irish Catholic, joining the British army was an escape out of poverty as there were few other opportunities available in an undeveloped Irish economy. The ordinary redcoat in the British army was more often than not an Irishman. It has been estimated they comprised 40 per cent of Wellington’s army at Waterloo, where the 27th (Inniskilling’s) Foot, ordered to hold a strategic crossroads, were literally found dead in square there. For this action, Wellington praised them for saving his centre line at Waterloo.56 Indeed, the Irish foot soldier and the self-loading rifle were credited with the expansion and security of the British Empire. In 1829, when the Catholic Emancipation Bill was before the British House of Lords, the Duke of Wellington acknowledged that it was ‘mainly to the Irish Catholic that we [the British] owe our preeminence in our military career’.57 Irish Catholic recruitment in the British army lacked a political ideology, and was fuelled by economic necessity, and by a lack of opportunities at home, not unlike Irish service on the Continent. Yet an essential difference remained, best encapsulated by the historian Richard Holmes who recognised that ‘the uncomfortable fact remained that Ireland was a country under occupation by the very army in which Irishmen – officers and soldiers alike – played such an important role.’58 Irishmen serving in the British army and navy from the Seven Years War in 1756 right up to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 only maintained British bondage back home in Ireland by scuppering Franco-Irish designs for her liberation. England it seemed had the upper hand!

2

THE CHARACTER OF THE BRIGADE

The Irish regiments on the Continent had a great esprit de corps, and were a home away from home where family members brought others into the regiment. Many recruits had been sent abroad while they were still teenagers and they knew no other life; the regiment replaced family far away back home in Ireland. They were a close-knit community and tended to socialise and marry within their own circle, their offspring frequently continuing the family military tradition. The sons of serving soldiers joined the regiment alongside their fathers, sometimes from a very young age, where ‘officers and men formed a band of brothers and no friction ever occurred between the regiments. Each was a home for homeless exiles; and it was quite common to find three generations serving simultaneously.’1

The Irish had their own drinking-dens in garrison towns, where they must have cut a distinctive figure in their dashing red uniforms, in contrast to French regiments of the line who were mainly dressed in the traditional gris-mesle or light grey. They were a cosmopolitan corps as they comprised many different nationalities. By the 1750s, with the Irish rank and file dwindling, the Brigade’s Irish ethos was maintained by serving second- and third-generation Irishmen. Nationality was not just linked to place of birth but due to parentage; Colonel José O’Hare although born in France was ‘a national of the Kingdom of Ireland born in the Kingdom of France’.2 In the 1750s, the nationality of the French-born Spanish Prime Minister Ricardo Wall, an ex-officer of Hibernia’s Regiment of Spain, was also described as ‘of the Irish nation’.3

The Irish were popular, and Irish culture, music and dancing, were very much alive in the regiments. They played the Irish game of hurling and introduced the game to their French allies: ‘I stayed with Neil,’ wrote the Marquis de Lostanges, ‘who explained to me all the rules of your game of hurling.’4 Two years after the Battle of Fontenoy, soldiers of the Brigade played a game on the battlefield in honour of their fallen comrades. The Irish regiments were presided over by a patriarchal proprietor-colonel, his wife at times playing a matriarchal role. The widows of fallen soldiers received a pension or were given a licence to beg from the king.5 After long years of service, many entered the old soldiers’ home, Les Invalides, in Paris. Eoghan O’hAnnracháin has calculated that 2,500 Irishmen were admitted to the Invalides between Louis XIV’s reign in 1630 to the French Revolution in 1789. The old soldiers met in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and reminisced about their glory days in the Brigades. The Irish in France tended to retire to Cambrai, close to Flanders, where their friends and families in the Irish regiments were stationed. The Irish in Austria retired to Graz and Prague.6

It was prestigious for France to have foreign regiments in her service. By the 1750s, one-fifth of the French army comprised foreigners, spread over the foreign regiments of the Swiss, German, Italian, Irish and Belgian Walloons. Louis XV issued a royal decree, whereby commands in the Irish regiments were to be given in English, and the other foreign regiments were to use French, German and Italian. These English commands were, one supposes, interlaced with Irish and French. Research available indicates that the Irish language was widely spoken, as Richard Hennessy claimed to have learned a lot of his Irish while serving in the Brigade.7 Count Thomas Lally, the son of an Irishman and although born in France, roused the Brigade at Fontenoy with cries in Irish: ‘Cuimhnígí ar Luimneachis ar fheill na Sasananch!’ (‘Remember Limerick and Saxon perfidy!’) prior to their charge at Fontenoy.8 Many rank-and-file recruits emanated from remote Irish-speaking regions where they would only have spoken English as a second language, if at all.

The Irish language was always the language of the old Gaelic aristocracy but it had become the language of the poor at home in Ireland. However, it was spoken in the company of generals and emperors in palaces across the Continent. In a classic example of a faux pas, the celebrated Irish tenor Michael Kelly provided the following anecdote. In 1783, recently arriving from Ireland, he was in the company of Major-Generals Henry O’Donnell and James D’Alton, together with General Charles Kavanagh and Emperor Joseph II of Austria at the Imperial Summer Palace in Schonbrunn, Vienna. D’Alton was a native Irish speaker and mentioned that no other language was a better accompaniment to music than Irish, with the exception of Italian. Kavanagh then said something in Irish to Kelly, which Kelly did not understand. The Emperor turned to him and asked, did he not understand the language of his own country? Kelly replied: ‘Please, your Majesty, none but the lower of the Irish people speak Irish.’ The Emperor laughed loudly. Kelly immediately recognised he had put his foot in it and luckily the high-ranking Irish officers in his company did not overhear, or pretended not to.9

After Mountcashel’s Irish Brigade arrived in France in 1690 the Irish gained a reputation of being the crack troops of the Continental armies. The French Irish Brigade was the best fighting-unit of all the foreign regiments, and was considered one of the best in the French army as a whole. In terms of reputation, the Spanish Irish Brigade was not far behind them. ‘For the first half of the 18th century, France had the largest army in Europe, but its troops were poorly trained and had too many officers who owed their rank to patronage rather than personal skill.’10 This was in contrast to the culturally separated Irish Brigades who operated semi-independently within the larger, generally inefficient armies of France and Spain. This autonomy enabled them to organise themselves into efficient well-trained units as they controlled the promotions, based on merit, of their most capable officers below the rank of colonel.11

What were the attributes that made them successful soldiers? The Irish had traditionally been a hardy, proud, war-like people since Celtic times and they were by nature tribal and loyal to their Gaelic chieftains. They extended this sense of fidelity to the colonel-proprietor of the Irish regiments and to the Catholic King James. They were warmly called les oies sauvages (Wild Savages) and French mothers in Provence and Brittany were said to threaten their children for misbehaving by bringing them not to the bogeyman-but to les Irlandais. Those Irish troops who were demobbed out of the French army following the Peace of Ryswick (1698) joined the ranks of the Bavarian army and were accused of introducing ‘a spirit of brutality, gambling, drunkenness and pugnacity which had never before been seen in that army’.12 The French observed during the Jacobite War that none of the Irish musketeers was shorter than 5 feet 6 inches in height, with the grenadiers (heavy infantry) and pikemen being even taller. They recognised that, with proper training and leadership, they could be depended on to show courage, and their background of rural poverty helped them to withstand hardship and the rigours of military service.13 Twenty years earlier in 1669, France supported the Greeks against the Turks in the Cretan War. After the besieged city of Candia (modern-day Heraklion) fell into Turkish hands, the French commander, Marshal de Bellefonds regretted that his Italian troops were not replaced with ‘more solid and better trained’ Irish regiments, but he had not enough time to ship them from Flanders.14 It would have just been the kind of holy crusade the Irish would have relished.

Irish peasants worked the land, reared on a diet rich in potatoes, milk, bread and oats and ate more meat than the French. In the 1780s, Arthur Young observed that children in Ireland were better fed than in England, but walked bare foot and were dressed in rags. The Irish were physically fit, and stronger than the average Frenchman and were ‘taller than the English’.15 In 1798, French uniforms sent with General Humbert were too small for many of the Irish rebels. The ancient Celts were famous for their horsemanship and a mounted Irish trooper with Fitzjames’ Horse must have appeared a formidable sight to the average Frenchman.

The Irish further developed their military expertise built over years of campaigning. ‘The Irish soldiers’ knowledge and practice of military discipline along with their possession of a specific technical knowledge of artillery, engineering or sanitation meant that they were highly valued and they played a significant part in the reorganisation of antiquated continental armies.’16