The comprehensive defeat of the Jacobite Irish in the Williamite conflict, a component within the pan-European Nine Years' War, prevented the exiled James II from regaining his English throne, ended realistic prospects of a Stuart restoration and partially secured the new regime of King William III and Queen Mary created by the Glorious Revolution. The principal events - the Siege of Londonderry, the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim, and the two Sieges and Treaty of Limerick - have subsequently become totems around which opposing constructions of Irish history have been erected. Childs argues that the struggle was typical of the late-seventeenth century, principally decided by economic resources and attrition in which the 'small war' comprising patrols, raids, occupation of captured regions by small garrisons, police actions against irregulars and attacks on supply lines was more significant in determining the outcome than the set-piece battles and sieges.
This book is an account of the war that consumed Ireland from 1688 to 1691, the echoes of which can be heard to this day. This book is a military historian's view of that war. It describes the major battles and sieges of Carrickfergus, Charlemont and Athlone.
With over 60,000 combatants, the Battle of the Boyne, which took place on 1 July 1690 was the largest battle ever fought on Irish soil, and has long been regarded as the pivotal event of the Williamite War. But despite the Boyne's celebrated place in Irish protestant folklore, the critical engagement of the campaign was to take place the following year outside the village of Aughrim, in County Galway. Here the outnumbered and outgunned Jacobites, their backs to the wall, faced the Williamite army in a battle that was to decide the course of Irish, and indeed European history. In the first major history of the battle in forty years, Michael McNally brings vividly to life the personalities and events of the bloodiest day in Irish history. Placing the battle firmly in the context of the wider campaign, and of early modern European power politics, he uses evocative eyewitness testimony to reconstruct the events of that fateful encounter, and reveal just how close to defeat the Williamites came.
The climatic battle that brought the Irish phase of an international war to an end. The consequences and outcomes of the conflict still echo down the centuries till today.
Between James' accession in February 1685 and flight in December 1688 the British Armies increased four fold (the English, Scots and Irish Armies were still separate institutions and were to remain so until the early 18th Century, in the case of the Scots, and the early 19th Century in the case of the Irish); from a small force of little more than ceremonial and policing use to a fully-fledged Army with all of its necessary supporting arms and services. Respected historian Correlli Barnett wrote: "It might well be said that if the British royal standing army was in fact founded at one given time, it was between 1685 and 1688, and that James II was the army's creator." James himself said his Army had "...the reputation of being the best paid, the best equipped and the most sightly troops of any in Europe." At the time there were political complaints about illegality of a "new standing Army" with a "new Cromwellian military dictatorship" (and on a point of law a standing army was still illegal), in 1689 the new King, William III, kept James' Army in being and within a few years it was to become the Army which led the victories at Blenheim and elsewhere of the Great Duke of Marlborough, who had himself been a General in James' Army. It has been said that amongst William's reasons for accepting the British Crowns was a fear that the British Army would serve in alliance with Louis XIV against him. Despite this, James' part in the creation of the British Army is often deliberately overlooked or ignored. The political aspects of James' reign, and thus of the Army, are well covered in numerous works but this book looks at the creation of the enlarged Armies of England, Scotland and Ireland - their uniforms and flags, organization and weapons, their drill and their strength, their pay and their Staff. Researched primarily from contemporary documents and manuscripts, including those in the rarely accessed Royal Library at Royal Archives at Windsor, it will go a long way to restoring these years, and the last Stuart King, to their true importance in the creation of the British Army.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an era of continuity as well as change. Though properly portrayed as the era of 'Protestant Ascendancy' it embraces two phases - the eighteenth century when that ascendancy was at its peak; and the nineteenth century when the Protestant elite sustained a determined rear-guard defence in the face of the emergence of modern Catholic nationalism. Employing a chronology that is not bound by traditional datelines, this volume moves beyond the familiar political narrative to engage with the economy, society, population, emigration, religion, language, state formation, culture, art and architecture, and the Irish abroad. It provides new and original interpretations of a critical phase in the emergence of a modern Ireland that, while focused firmly on the island and its traditions, moves beyond the nationalist narrative of the twentieth century to provide a history of late early modern Ireland for the twenty-first century.
The product of forty years of research by one of the foremost historians of Jacobitism, this book is a comprehensive revision of Professor Szechi’s popular 1994 survey of the Jacobite movement in the British Isles and Europe. Like the first edition, it is undergraduate-friendly, providing an enhanced chronology, a convenient introduction to the historiography and a narrative of the history of Jacobitism, alongside topics specifically designed to engage student interest. This includes Jacobitism as a uniting force among the pirates of the Caribbean and as a key element in sustaining Irish peasant resistance to English colonial rule. As the only comprehensive introduction to the field, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in early modern British and European politics.
The comprehensive defeat of the Jacobite Irish in the Williamite conflict, a component within the pan-European Nine Years' War, prevented the exiled James II from regaining his English throne, ended realistic prospects of a Stuart restoration and partially secured the new regime of King William III and Queen Mary created by the Glorious Revolution. The principal events - the Siege of Londonderry, the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim, and the two Sieges and Treaty of Limerick - have subsequently become totems around which opposing constructions of Irish history have been erected. John Childs, one of the foremost authorities on warfare in Early Modern Britain and Europe, cuts through myth and the accumulations of three centuries to present a balanced, detailed narrative and chronology of the campaigns. He argues that the struggle was typical of the late seventeenth-century, principally decided by economic resources and attrition in which the 'small war' comprising patrols, raids, occupation of captured regions by small garrisons, police actions against irregulars and attacks on supply lines was more significant in determining the outcome than the set piece battles and sieges.
The Protestant war cry of 'No Surrender!' was first used in 1689 by the Mayor of Londonderry as James II's army laid siege to the city for 105 days, during which half the city's population died. There were many acts of courage, from the heroic death of Captain Browning to the anonymous, apprentice boys who played signal roles in the defence of the city. The book examines how the Jacobites might have achieved success, and the far reaching impact of the siege as a crucial event in the second British civil war. This is a military study of one of the most iconic episodes in Irish history, based on contemporary accounts, official records of the day, and published works on the siege. With an understanding of seventeenth-century warfare, especially siegecraft, the author probes many of the myths that have grown up around the siege and sets it in its proper context. Its ramifications for the consequent history of Ireland cannot be over emphasised.
