All the King’s Men, page 5
This was not the case in Ireland. Within a month of landing at Kinsale, in March 1689, James II had taken control of virtually the whole island, bar a few pockets of resistance in Ulster at Enniskillen and Londonderry. The siege of the latter – costing the defenders, many of whom were Apprentice Boys, 8,000 lives – lasted 105 days and was finally raised by a force under General Percy Kirke on 10 August. Three days later, the Duke of Schomberg landed near Bangor with William’s main army of 14,000 Dutch, English and Danish troops. The weakness of this hastily assembled force, however, was clear for all to see. ‘Although there were regiments of men,’ noted a historian of the early British Army, ‘there was no army. There was no organization, no field-administration, in fact none of that fitness for immediate active service to be found even at that time in continental armies … Many of the regiments consisted of recruits so raw that they were not even in uniform, while some had not yet been furnished with their arms.’10
Fortunately Schomberg’s Dutch and Danish regiments were of better quality, and in the first month he managed to capture Carrickfergus, Belfast and Dundalk. But a combination of bad weather, inadequate supplies and sickness caused him to suspend hostilities for the winter. By February 1690, 5,600 of his soldiers, most of them English, had died of dysentery or fever.
The opportunity was there for James to sweep the ailing Protestants out of Ireland. But, if anything, the Catholic army was in an even worse condition. Even after the arrival of 6,000 French troops in March 1690, bringing his total numbers up to 35,000, James was woefully underequipped. His commander Tyrconnell complained that the army was short of 20,000 firearms and that two thirds of the men had never fired a shot because of insufficient powder. The English Jacobite John Stevens noted the men had ‘neither beds nor so much straw to lie on’,
or any thing to cover them during the whole winter, and even their clothes were worn to rags, inasmuch that many could scarce hide their nakedness in the daytime, and abundance of them were barefoot or at least so near it that their wretched shoes and stockings could scarce be made to hang on their feet and legs … To add to their suffering the allowance of meat and corn was so small that men rather starved than live upon it.11
Yet the arrival of French troops raised the stakes for William, and in June 1690, convinced that ‘nothing worthwhile would be done’ unless he was there to do it, he arrived in Ireland to take personal control of his army, leaving the government in the hands of Mary and a council of nine, one of whom was the Earl of Marlborough, back from Flanders and now commander-in-chief in England.12 William still did not entirely trust Marlborough – despite his recent success in Flanders – and was unsure how he would perform if he were to face his former patron in the field. One of James’s senior commanders, moreover, was the Duke of Berwick, his illegitimate son by Marlborough’s sister.
According to a contemporary account, William joined his army of 37,000 in camp at Loughbrickland on 22 June, a ‘dry and Windy’ day ‘which made the Dust very Troublesome’, and at once inspected each regiment. ‘This pleased the Soldiers mightily, and the King never lay out of the Camp during his stay in Ireland.’ Like all good commanders, William was quick to form a bond of trust and mutual respect with his soldiers so that they were always willing to do his bidding, no matter how hard or how dangerous the task he set them. He also knew the vital importance of reconnaissance, and lost no time sending out ‘Major General Scravenmore with Five Hundred Horse, to discover the Ways, and observe the Enemy’.13
William himself went out scouting the following day, and on his return to camp refused to sign a paper for the purchase of wine and other produce for his mess because ‘he was dissatisfied that all things for his Soldiers were not ready as desired, And with some heat protested, that he would rather drink Water than his Men should want.’ He was constantly in the saddle, ‘observed the Country as he Rid along, and ordered the manner of Encamping himself’.14 This attention to detail is almost a prerequisite for a successful general, and a trait shared by many of Britain’s best commanders.
Harried by William’s superior force, James withdrew his smaller Catholic army of 25,000 men back over the River Boyne, the only effective line of defence before Dublin, ‘the old Rubicon of the Pale, and the frontier of the corn country’.15 His French allies wanted him to burn Dublin and retreat behind the Shannon, but James thought the Boyne a formidable barrier and was determined ‘not to be walked out of Ireland without having at least one blow for it’.16 Yet his army was heavily outnumbered and poor in quality. A quarter of his infantry carried pikes and the rest outdated matchlocks; William’s regiments were mostly armed with the latest flintlocks and plug bayonets. On the other hand, the 7,000 French infantry under James’s command were of excellent quality, as were his 5,000 horsemen.
When William reached the Boyne on 30 June, he found James’s men defending the bridge at Drogheda and the position ‘not only difficult but almost impracticable’.17 Yet he knew from local spies that the Boyne was tidal and could be forded upstream of Drogheda at certain times and places. While reconnoitring the main ford at Oldbridge, in the afternoon of 30 June, he and his escort of Dutch Guards were fired on by a Jacobite cannon. The first shot killed two horses and a rider; the second, according to an eyewitness, ‘grazed the Bank of the River, and in the rising slanted upon the King’s Right Shoulder, took out a piece of his Coat and tore the Skin and Flesh’.18 The eyewitness added:
My Lord Congingsby seeing his Majesty struck, Rid up and put his Handkerchief upon the place; his Majesty took very little notice of it, but rid on about Forty Yards farther, return’d the way he came, the Enemies Cannon firing on us all the while, killed two of his Guards and several Horses, which made the King give Order for his Horse to draw a little backwards.
Having changed his coat and had his wound dressed, William called a council of war, where it was ‘resolved to pass the River the next Day’. The only dissenting voice was the experienced Duke of Schomberg, but William’s determination to fight won him over.
The plan was for a three-pronged assault: a right flanking move over the ford at Rosnaree, followed by simultaneous attacks across the fords between Oldbridge and Drybridge. The Rosnaree assault was launched first, at 6 a.m. on 1 July, and drew a disproportionate response from James, who dispatched two thirds of his army to meet it. William, in turn, sent reinforcements to this sector, leaving just half his army for the frontal attack. He need not have worried. So difficult was the terrain in the western sector – intersected by bogs, ditches and ravines – that few of the combatants actually came to grips. The battle would be decided around Oldbridge, where 8,000 Jacobites were up against twice that number of Williamites.
At 10 a.m., after English artillery had softened up the Jacobite defenders, William’s elite Dutch Guards stormed the ford and took the village of Oldbridge. Irish infantry counter-attacked, but were beaten back by platoon volleys from flintlock muskets. Meanwhile Huguenot regiments – Protestant refugees from Louis XIV’s religious persecution – had crossed 100 yards to the left of the Dutch Guards. As the two forces moved forward they were attacked by Jacobite cavalry, who emerged from dead ground as if by magic. Attacking with ‘unspeakable bravery’, the Irishmen broke through the Huguenots, who lacked bayonets, killing the Duke of Schomberg in the process. But the Dutch held firm. Rowland Davies, chaplain to one of William’s cavalry regiments, recalled:
At the first push the front rank only fired and then fell on their faces, loading their muskets again as they lay on the ground; at the next charge they fired a volley of three ranks; then, at the next, … the two rear ranks drew up in two platoons and flanked the enemy across, and the rest, screwing their swords into their muskets, received the charge with all imaginable bravery and in a minute dismounted them all.19
By now, more of William’s infantry had crossed further downstream, as had the king himself with 2,000 cavalry on the extreme left of his front. Having struggled with difficulty through mud left by the receding tide – which bogged down his horse and forced him to dismount – William led his cavalry in a charge up Donore Hill. But it was met by Jacobite cavalry and his lead regiment, the Inniskilling Horse, ‘deserted him at the first charge, and carried with them a Dutch regiment that sustained them’. Eventually William rallied his Blue Troop of Dutch Guards, and ‘with them he charged in person and routed the enemy’.20
Facing imminent defeat, James proposed a last-ditch attack by the main body of his troops on the force that had crossed at Rosnaree. But the ground was unfavourable and soon the Jacobite army had begun a panicked retreat towards Duleek, where the Dublin road crosses the River Nanny. ‘Our foot being unable to march as they did,’ recorded Davies, ‘we could not come up to fight again, but, on the night coming on, we were forced to let them go; but had we engaged half an hour sooner, or the day held half an hour longer, we had certainly destroyed that army.’21
In truth the pursuit was half-hearted in the face of a disciplined French rearguard, and more damage was caused to James II’s army by panic-stricken cavalry trampling their own infantry at the Duleek bottleneck than by enemy action. Even so, more than 1,000 Jacobites were killed, many shot ‘like hares amongst the corn’, with a further 2,000 wounded; William’s army lost 500 killed and a similar number wounded.22
In contrast to William’s inspirational, if tactically questionable, leadership at the forefront of his troops, James was conspicuous by his absence from the fighting. Nor was he generous in defeat, complaining to Lady Tyrconnell in Dublin that his Irish troops had run away. ‘I see,’ she replied acerbically, ‘you have preceded them yourself, your Majesty.’23
By the time William entered Dublin in triumph on 6 July, James was already back in France, never to return. Yet William’s failure to prevent the escape of three quarters of the Catholic army from the Boyne meant the war dragged on for another year. It began with a setback for William when an attempt to storm the stronghold of Limerick was bloodily repulsed in late August. Matters improved in the autumn, however, when Marlborough led a successful amphibious expedition – his first independent command – that captured the key Jacobite ports of Cork and Kinsale. But Jacobite resistance in Ireland continued on into 1691 and ended only with defeat at the battle of Aughrim on 12 July, the capitulation of Galway in the same month and the final surrender of Limerick on 3 October. Though less well known than the Boyne, Aughrim was a much more decisive battle, with the numerically superior Jacobites suffering more than 7,000 fatalities, ‘lying most of them by the Ditches where they were shot, and the rest … like a great flock of sheep scattered up and down the country for almost four miles round’.24
Though not present at Aughrim, Marlborough had hoped that his earlier successes at Cork and Kinsale would be rewarded with the office of master-general of the Ordnance, left vacant by Schomberg’s death. But it went instead to the civilian Henry Sidney and Marlborough was to receive no other tangible recognition for his services. Instead he was sent back to the Low Countries in May 1691 to command the British Contingent in the war against the French, a campaign that ended badly in September when the Allied rearguard was badly mauled near Grammont before Marlborough could intervene.
William III won his victories in Ireland during a period of significant military change. For much of Charles II’s reign, the standard infantry weapon had been the smoothbore, muzzle-loading matchlock musket. It used a spring-operated firing system so that when the trigger was pressed the cock holding the burning match was allowed to fall on thus a pan of priming powder, thus igniting the charge. But the matchlock had a number of drawbacks. It was slow to load, clumsy to operate and at the mercy of the elements; between shots, moreover, the musketeer was vulnerable to cavalry attack unless protected by pikemen.
The solution to the first problem was the introduction of a new, lighter musket with a more robust firing system – the flintlock – that produced sparks by striking a flint against a steel plate above the pan. A form of flintlock had been available since the early seventeenth century; but it was more expensive than the matchlock and, by the time of the English Civil War, had been issued only to elite troops like the Life Guards or those fusilier regiments (named after fusil, the French word for the flintlock mechanism) whose job it was to protect powder stores and artillery trains.
All this changed in the mid-1670s, when a new type of soldier – the grenadier – was introduced to the English Army. Armed with flintlock muskets and an early form of hand grenade – its name derived from the Spanish for ‘pomegranate’, the fruit it resembled – the grenadiers were originally a select band in each company, though they were soon given a company of their own and would stand in battle on the right of the regiment’s line. They wore crownless mitre caps, instead of wide-brimmed tricorne hats, enabling them to sling their muskets across their backs, and leaving both hands free to light and throw their grenades. They were especially effective during assaults on fortifications, as described by the famous military song ‘The British Grenadiers’:
When’er we are commanded to storm the palisades
Our leaders march with fuses and we with hand grenades
We throw them from the glacis, about our enemies’ ears
Sing tow row, row, row, row, the British Grenadiers25
Inevitably there were accidents. During the siege of Maastricht, a Private Donald McBane was in the act of throwing his grenade when it exploded in his hands, ‘killing several about me, and blew me over the palisades; burnt my clothes so that the skin came off me’. He fell among ‘Murray’s Company of Grenadiers, flayed like an old dead horse from head to foot’, and had to be ‘cast into the water to put out the fire about me’.26
But overall these new troops were a great success, and the raising of the first grenadier companies coincided with the introduction of a weapon that, with the flintlock, would complete the transformation of the musketeer from a lumbering, vulnerable and ineffective soldier to something resembling the all-purpose infantryman that still exists in the British Army today. The weapon was the bayonet,* a removable spearhead that instantly converted the musketeer into a pikeman and enabled him to defend himself when his musket was unloaded. The first version, issued exclusively to grenadiers, was the ‘plug’ bayonet, which attached inside the muzzle and made firing impossible. But it was replaced in the early 1690s by the ‘socket’ bayonet, which allowed the gun to fire by fitting around the muzzle. At the same time the use of the bayonet spread from the elite grenadiers to the other line companies, so that by 1697 the proportion of pikes to muskets had fallen from 1:3 to 1:4, with the majority of musketeers carrying the socket bayonet. The pike disappeared altogether during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), and thereafter all foot soldiers were equipped with the flintlock musket and socket bayonet. A modified version of the flintlock – dubbed the ‘Brown Bess’ after the colour of its stock – would become the British Army’s standard infantry musket until it was superseded by first the percussion musket, then the rifle, in the mid-nineteenth century.27
The performance of the flintlock was further improved in the early 1690s by the replacement of bandoliers and powder horns with made-up paper cartridges, and by reducing the size of the musket-ball from 12 balls to a pound of lead, to 16 smaller ones. Prior to this a musket was loaded by pouring a finely calculated charge of powder into the barrel from a flask, followed by the heavy lead ball or shot, and finally the wad to keep the ball in place; the contents were then firmly rammed home with a rod. All this took time, and few infantrymen could fire more than one shot a minute. The new cartridges – containing powder and one-ounce ball – and a simplified loading drill made it possible to more than double the rate of fire (with a good infantryman managing two to three shots a minute). What they could not do, however, was appreciably alter the effective range of a musket, which remained at 75–100 yards.28
Nevertheless, the improvements made possible a drastic change in infantry tactics. Before them a typical infantry battalion – the largest permanent tactical and administrative formation that existed – was made up of seven companies of a hundred men, with each company consisting of two thirds musketeers and one third pikemen. In battle they formed a line with the pikemen in the centre, five ranks deep, and six ranks of musketeers on either flank. The pikemen gave protection against cavalry attack, while the musketeers were more offensively minded and fired volleys by rank. Such tactics had changed little since the heyday of the great Swedish general King Gustavus Adolphus in the 1630s.29 But with the improvement in their weapons making them less vulnerable to cavalry attack, the English infantry were able to fight three ranks deep, the first rank kneeling, with only a gap of a few paces between battalions or regiments so the line was almost continuous. Volleys were delivered not by ranks but by platoons of thirty to forty men (or three to a company), with a battalion line subdivided into eighteen equal platoons, and half the elite grenadier company on each flank. The platoons were assigned to separate ‘firings’ of six platoons each, spread equally along the line, so that the effect was a constant, rolling fire.
A battalion would advance until it was within 100 yards of its foe, and preferably closer. On the colonel’s order ‘First Firing, Take Care!’, the six platoons of the first firing and the whole of the first rank would prepare to fire. The first rank knelt while the remaining two ranks of the first-firing platoons manoeuvred into close order and ‘locked’. This meant they pointed their left shoulder towards their target, and placed their left foot close behind the rear-facing right foot of the man in front. That way all three ranks had a clear field of fire and friendly-fire accidents were avoided – something that could not be said for the French Army, whose soldiers lined up one behind the other, forcing the middle rank to stoop when a battalion volley was ordered.
