A Swiss Soldier In Ireland, 1689–90

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Notes

 1. De Morsier, Journal, 87–105.

 2. Simms, ‘Schomberg at Dundalk, 1689’, 17.

 3. La Caillemotte was a younger son of Henry de Massue, 1st Marquis de Ruvigny (1605–89), diplomat and deputy of the Protestant churches in France; in effect the leading spokesman of the Huguenot community. He withdrew to England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. See Murtagh, ‘Huguenot Involvement in the Irish Jacobite War, 1689–91’, 226.

 4. De Morsier, Journal, 82.

 5. From The True-born Englishman. A Satyr (1700 [1701], 60). Quoted by Gwynn, ‘Government Policy towards Huguenot Immigration and Settlement’, 211.

 6. See Childs, The British Army of William III 1689–1702, 132–35; Ferguson, ‘The Organisation of King William's Army in Ireland 1689–92’, 70.

 7. William III's Top General, Armand-Fréderic, Vicomte de Schomberg or Herman von Schönberg (1615–90), was the son of a German Protestant father and an English mother and became a naturalised Frenchman in 1664. He subsequently got the coveted Marshal of France's baton from Louis XIV, but renounced his French allegiance after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His was a long career beginning with service at the siege of Rhineberg as a volunteer in the army of Frederick Henry Prince of Orange in 1633. He fought successively in the armies of the United Provinces, Sweden, France, Portugal, England, France, Brandenburg and the United Provinces. Villars, another of Louis XIV's select body of marshals, credited Schomberg with ‘good sense’ but accused him of ponderousness. Mémoires du Maréchal de Villars , 1, 32, 117, 118, 128. His biographers include Kazner, Leben Friedrichs von Schönburg; Glozier ‘The Ablest Soldier of His Age’. Marshal Schomberg 1615–1690.

 8. Glozier, The Ablest Soldier of His Age, 143.

 9. Garstin, ‘Some Extracts Relating to Ireland from the Journal of Gideon Bonnivert, 1690’; Dumont de Bostaquet, Mémoires, 219–55.

10. This rather contradicts the ballad The Boyne Water, ‘the hautboys played, drums they did beat and rattle and Lilli-bur-lero was the tune we played going down to battle’. Hume, ‘The Two Ballads on the Battle of the Boyne’, 14.

11. Stevens, The Journal of John Stevens, 140.

12. Petty, A Political Anatomy of Ireland.

13. Brown oatmeal soda bread is still commonly referred to as ‘brown cake’ in many parts of Ireland.

14. ‘The bugles, fifes, oboes, drums and salvoes of artillery produced such a harmony as hell itself could not rival.’ Voltaire, Candide, 25.

15. There were three Huguenot infantry regiments in Schomberg's army, led by La Mellonière, Cambon and La Caillemotte-Ruvigny. At the Boyne a Jacobite cavalry squadron would break La Caillemotte's regiment and mortally wound La Caillemotte himself in the chest. As he was carried off, La Caillemotte tried to rally his troops: ‘á la gloire mes enfants! á la gloire’ (to glory, boys! to glory).

16. ‘Bundles of small wood, two foot broad and four long, bound about the ends and middle, thrown into moats where there is water to facilitate the passage over to the wall’ See Anon., The New Method of Fortification as Practised by Monsieur de Vauban … Made English,13. Evidently the fascines were used on this occasion as makeshift gabions to build up fortifications quickly.

17. La Caillemotte was a flamboyant character who was reported to take unusually good care of his men: see Murtagh, ‘Huguenot Involvement in the Irish Jacobite War’, 226

18. Cf. Burton, History of the Kingdom of Ireland, 129–30: ‘… the Guns played furiously and made a great breach in the walls which the Irish seeing, and fearing our Men would enter, they got a great Number of cattle together, and drove them all as near the Top of the breach as they could force them to go, keeping themselves close behind them, several of the Cattle were killed by the Shot, and as they fell the Irish threw Earth, stones and Wood upon them.’

19. Hamstrung by shortages of horses, tents, and biscuit, Schomberg threaded through the Moyry Pass to reach Dundalk on 7/17 September 1689 where he found that his supply ships had been delayed by storms. Meanwhile James II, determined to ‘looke the enemie in the face’ encamped close by. Schomberg declined to engage the Irish, excusing himself to an increasingly agitated William III on 12/22 September 1689: ‘If we did not succeed, your Majesty's army would be lost without resource.’ Schomberg ‘won’ the logistical stand-off in that James broke camp first, on 7/17 October, and marched off south.

20. Schomberg did not push south after the Irish dispersed but continued to camp north of Dundalk for over another month, tied to slow overland carriage of supplies from Carrickfergus. No doubt the fact that Schomberg himself fell seriously ill from a chest infection also dissuaded him from pushing south. He was not the only sick man in camp. During the time the army lay near Dundalk, and during the subsequent evacuation and hospitalisation of the sick, some 6,000–8,000 wet, cold, badly clothed and hungry soldiers perished of disease; in other words, Schomberg lost at least a third of his army without firing a shot. James II's Memoirs describe with relish how ‘the enemies army was grievously afflicted with the countrys disease and so overrun with lice that vast numbers of them dyed; especially the English’. Adding to the miseries of dysentery and typhus, as the weather grew wetter and colder pneumonia and the associated ‘burning fever’ stalked the huts and tents. Orders to evacuate and march back through the Moyry Pass came too late for many; ‘All the rodes from Dundalk to Newry and Carlingford were next day full of nothing but dead men, who, even as the wagons jolted some of them died and were thrown off as fast’. Ferguson, ‘The Organisation of King William's Army in Ireland’, 67, 77–79; Carte Ms, Colonel Brewer to Thomas Wharton, 78, 260, 266, 277; Logan, ‘Pestilence in the Irish Wars’, 279–90; Story, An Impartial History of the Affairs of Ireland, 10, 14, 30, 35, 40.

21. Mortality was not as apocalyptic as De Morsier imagined: ‘Food shortage and foul weather caused raging sickness: The English died by the thousand. Nor did the colonels, captains and men of the French regiments escape. Many officers and soldiers died.’ De Bostaquet, Mémoires, 228. According to George Story, chaplain of the earl of Drogheda's regiment, who was at Dundalk, ‘we lost nigh one half of the men that we took over with us’, that is, about a third of the army overall if locally raised forces are included. The deaths happened in the camp, hospital ships and hospitals and in quarters: ‘most of the men being very weak before they left the camp, and marching in the cold and wet to come to those places, we had more that died when they came to quarters, than died in the camp’. Story, A True and Impartial History of the Most Material Occurrences, 38–39.

22. The word in the published text is ‘nombre’ (number), but this does not make sense in the context, and is probably a misreading of ‘nom’.

23. The isolated Jacobite strongpoint of Charlemont Fort lay some five miles south-west of Lough Neagh, overlooking the river Blackwater. On 12 March 1690 La Caillemotte led a detachment drawn from his own and St. John's regiment to burn down the bridge over the Blackwater at Charlemont ‘to prevent the Irish from making excursions in the night’. Lieut-Colonel Belcastel, La Caillemotte's second-in-command, was wounded during the raid. Story, A True and Impartial History, 56. The Irish garrison held out for another two months. Doherty, The Williamite War in Ireland, 104–05.

24. La Caillemotte's regiment took up winter quarters at Mountjoy Castle on the western shore of Lough Neagh and at Dungannon about eight miles to the south-west. See Anon., An Exact List of Their Majesties Forces Now in the Kingdom of Ireland and Where Quartered. Moneymore was about seven miles north-west of Mountjoy and not mentioned elsewhere as winter quarters. However, Jullien is probably correct to assume that De Morsier is referring to ‘Moneymore’ (mistakenly) as the regiment's winter quarters. De Morsier may have been one of a smaller detachment billeted in Moneymore.

25. This perfectly describes the pastoralist's byre house or ‘gable-hearth’ dwelling characteristic of the region lying to the north-west of ‘a line running from Glenarm to Galway’. Typically, the house would be built on a slope, the cattle occupying the lower end of the house away from the fire. The sleeping place was towards the hearth gable and the ‘outshot’ or projecting bed wing in a side-wall. The other type of peasant house was the house characterised by a central hearth. This plan did not lend itself to accommodating people and animals together and so was more characteristic of Leinster and Munster. See Evans, The Personality of Ireland, 54, 63. The flimsy partition between the animal and human living space is not noted elsewhere; perhaps what De Morsier saw was a wattle and daub wall. See Gailey, ‘Changes in Irish Rural Housing 1600–1900’, 91.

26. This was an English custom. See Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, 436. ‘Married women or maids held the pall at the funerals of their gender, while their menfolk carried the weight of the corpse.’ However, an image accompanying this quote shows unmarried (one can tell because their hair is loose) women carrying a coffin covered in a pall. My thanks to Clodagh Tait for this reference. Tait, an expert on early modern Irish funeral practices, found no evidence for this practice in Ireland. What De Morsier saw, evidently, was an import among the settler population.

27. De Morsier uses a term lieutenant réformé which has a similar meaning as the Spanish reformado, that is, an officer who has become surplus to the establishment, commonly because his regiment fell below strength and was ‘broken’ to be used to top up other units. The réformé served in the ranks on reduced pay, waiting for a new officer vacancy.

28. A British army private's daily pay, before deductions, amounted to 8d. Fortescue, The British Army 1783–1802, 6–7.

29. Hendrik Maastricht Count Solms-Braunfels, a kinsman of William III, commanded the Dutch ‘Blue’ Guards at the Boyne. He commanded the main body of Allied infantry at the battle of Steinkirk (1692) and ‘bore the blame for the errors committed on this occasion’. Burnet, History of His Own Times, 348. He would be mortally wounded at Neerwinden (or Landen) in 1693.

30. Jacobite artillery shot cut down twenty Dutch Horse Guardsmen. Bonnivert thought it was ‘madness to expose so many good men to the slaughter without need’. Garstin, ‘Journal of Gideon Bonnivert’, 20. One propagandist offers the curious explanation that William deliberately exposed his veteran Dutch troops as a form of battle inoculation, sending them back under cover when he was satisfied they would endure cannon fire: ‘Now I see my men will stand!’. Mullenaux, A True and Perfect Journal of the Affairs in Ireland, 5. Hop, reporting to the Dutch States-General, was probably closer to the mark; he thought William hoped to provoke the Jacobites into attacking.

31. It is generally thought that the Dutch Foot Guards Regiment had three battalions at the Boyne, but see Sapherson, William III at War: Scotland & Ireland 1689–1691, 3, 33.

32. This sudden change in tempo can be explained as follows: two armies faced each other across the ‘bend’ of the Boyne. William sent off a detachment to cross upstream and James II unexpectedly responded by sending off two-thirds of his army upstream. In turn, William sent off a second, larger, detachment to reinforce the first. This still left over half the Allied army of 36,000 at the main Oldbridge–Drybridge stretch of river, facing less than a third of the Franco-Irish army, or about 7,000 men. Having left it somewhat too late to cross at low tide William was now, presumably, worried about the first detachment and wanted to distract and pin down the Irish at Oldbridge.

33. Secretary at war in Ireland George Clarke also captures this moment of crisis:

The king was in a great deal of apprehension for them, there not being any hedge or ditch for them or any of our horse to support them, and I was so near His Majesty as to hear him say softly to himself, ‘My poor guards, my poor guards’, but when he saw them stand their ground and fire by platoons so that the horse were forced to run away in great disorder he breathed out as people used to after holding their breath upon a fright or suspense and said he had seen his guards do that which he had never seen foot do in his life. (Historical Manuscripts Commission: Leyborne Popham Ms, 273)

34. Most authorities blame what is nowadays called ‘friendly fire’. The envoy of the King of Denmark reported as follows: ‘In the confusion caused by this charge [he is referring to the Irish cavalry Guards pushing into Oldbridge village] the Duke of Schomberg who was recognised from his blue ribbon [the Order of the Garter] received two sabre wounds on the head at the same time that he was shot in the neck by the bullet … fired, as is presumed, by our own men, who were crossing the river and discharging their pieces as they advanced. The shot threw the duke from his horse. He fell on a very stony path and this doubtless contributed to hasten the poor man's death’. Jean Payen de la Foulernesse to Christian V 2/12 July 1690, in Barbé, Notes and Queries, 22.

35. Meinhard, Count Schomberg, a younger son of Marshal Schomberg, led a smallish detachment of cavalry, dragoons and infantry and crossed the Boyne upstream at Rosnaree ‘pour couper chemin aux ennemis’. More likely the object was not to envelop, or cut off, the Jacobites. Most contemporary sources claim that Menihard Schomberg had a narrowly defined task, ‘to try to cross the river Boine in various places and take the enemy in flank’ or ‘at least oblige them to decamp’. However, George Story, like De Morsier, gives him an altogether wider remit; to sweep right around and insert his force somewhere between Oldbridge/Donore and Duleek: in other words, between the Irish and their only line of retreat towards Dublin. Anon., A Relation of the Victory Obtained by the King in Ireland, 2; Anon., An Account of the Victory Obtained by the King in Ireland, 1; Story, A Continuation of the Impartial History, 21; Danaher and Simms, The Danish Force in Ireland 1690–1691, 62.

36. William III's secretary Huygens confirms this; he reports atrocities against civilians in Duleek, after the battle. Huygens, Journal, 298. William III made some attempts to enforce discipline; in Ardee the retreating Irish left some ‘sick, old, bed-ridden people, for murdering four of which in cold blood, a Scotch soldier and woman was here hanged’. Mullenaux, A Journal of the Three Months Royal Campaigns of His Majesty, 8.

37. They slept in the open fields near Duleek.

38. Probably Oxmanstown Green just to the north-west of the city. The main encampment was at Finglas about four miles to the north of Dublin.

39. ‘the country being very close, and full of hedges and ditches, the enemy had lined them to defend the approaches to the town’. Mullenaux, A Journal of the Three Months Royal Campaign, 22. The city of Limerick was shaped rather like an hourglass with the Englishtown on King's Island and the Irishtown to the south on the mainland. A single bridge linked the two towns. The Allied or Williamite trenches were dug towards the south-eastern corner of the Irishtown, to the corner tower also known as the ‘Black Tower’ or ‘Devil's Battery’. William's guns knocked a breach in the walls near here.

40. He means ‘counterscarp’ in the loose sense in which the word was used outside the engineering textbooks to include (working outward from the medieval walls) ditch, covered way and glacis. The main component of the counterscarp was the ‘covered way’ which was ‘a walk around the moat towards the country, having a foot place and a glacis for a parapet’. Anon., The New Method of Fortification as Practised by Monsieur de Vauban … Made English, 11. In the left background of the illustration can be seen a sentry marching along such a covered way. The covered way was ‘covered’ by a chest-high earth parapet, typically topped by a palisade in wartime, that sloped away gently to create the ‘glacis’ or open ground around the perimeter.

41. It is interesting how perceptions of the width of the gap depended on what side of the wall one stood. Inside, John Hamilton reckoned thirty men could march through, which was considered the minimum for a practicable breach. Outside, the Duke of Würtemburg-Neustadt, commander of the Danish contingent, thought the breach could not take sixteen men and that the covered way was ‘too close to the wall and they could give a lot of trouble to our men with stones’. In other words the attackers would find it difficult to consolidate their position. Kemmy and Walsh, The Old Limerick Journal Siege Edition, 97, 119.

42. There were somewhat fewer than 10,000 Jacobite soldiers in the city and a ‘considerable number’ had no firearms. Boisseleau, the Frenchman commanding the city, set four hundred unarmed men of Mac Mahon's regiment on the ramparts to throw rocks down on the attackers. Kemmy and Walsh, The Old Limerick Journal Siege Edition, 80.

43. The most concise account is to be found in a contemporaneous Dutch publication Yerlant Verlost en Hersteld translated in Kemmy and Walsh, The Old Limerick Journal Siege Edition, 141:

The king ordered the counterscarp to be attacked, and at three o'clock in the afternoon a party of grenadiers with the support of some other companies began the assault. They fought with such great courage that, having taken the counterscarp and a fort that the enemy had erected on the glacis of the wall, they did not halt there as was ordered, but instead followed the fleeing Irish through the breach into the city. The Irish stopped the attack with cannon-fire of grape shot, and confusion followed. The fighting lasted for three hours during which the Irish continued to bring in fresh troops …

44. He was lucky not to have been hospitalised. When pulling back from Limerick the Williamites ‘set fire to their camp, burning everything that they could not take away and the fire having taken hold of the hospital, many of the sick perished in the conflagration’. Gilbert, A Jacobite Narrative of the War of Ireland, 266. Lieutenant Stevens of the Grand Prior's Jacobite regiment saw three hundred charred bodies, many in heaps around the doors and windows. Stevens, Journal of John Stevens.

45. ‘My host was a Catholic and so did not speak English.’ The presence of monoglot Irish speakers suggests that Irish was still deeply entrenched as the vernacular of this and, probably, other Munster towns. Irish would remain the main vernacular of rural Munster, with the exception of North Tipperary, for another century.

46. This hardly does justice to Lauzun. Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Comte de Lauzun, was commander of the French expeditionary force and James's de facto second-in-command. Courtier, daredevil and playboy Lauzun was not a professional soldier. He was selected at the behest of James II's queen, Mary of Modena.

47. The Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, built by James Butler, Marquis of Ormond between 1680 and 1684.

48. Childs, The Nine Years War and the British Army 1688–1697, 172–75.