battle of the Boyne

The Battle of the Boyne ( ga, Cath na Bóinne ) was a battle in 1690 between the forces of the deposed King James II of England and Ireland, VII of Scotland, and those of King William III who, with his wife Queen Mary II (his cousin and James's daughter), had acceded to the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1689. The battle took place across the River Boyne close to the town of Drogheda in the Kingdom of Ireland, modern-day Republic of Ireland, and resulted in a victory for William. This turned the tide in James's failed attempt to regain the British crown and ultimately aided in ensuring the continued Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.

The battle took place on 1 July 1690 O.S. William's forces defeated James's army, which consisted mostly of raw recruits. Although the Williamite War in Ireland continued until the signing of the Treaty of Limerick in October 1691, James fled to France after the Boyne, never to return.

Background

The battle was a major encounter in James's attempt to regain the thrones of England and Scotland, resulting from the Invitation to William and William's wife, Mary, from the 'immortal seven' English peers to take the throne to defend Protestantism. But the conflict had broader and deeper European geopolitical roots, of the League of Augsburg and the Grand Alliance against the expansionist ambitions of Catholic Louis XIV of France, or of the House of Bourbon against the House of Habsburg. If the battle is seen as part of the War of the Grand Alliance, Pope Alexander VIII was an ally of William and an enemy to James; the Papal States were part of the Grand Alliance with a shared hostility to the Catholic Louis XIV of France, who at the time was attempting to establish dominance in Europe and to whom James was an ally.

The previous year William had sent the Duke of Schomberg to take charge of the Irish campaign. He was a 75-year-old professional soldier who had accompanied William during the Glorious Revolution. He brought an army of 20,000 men, which arrived at Bangor. Under his command, affairs had remained static and very little had been accomplished, partly because the English troops suffered severely from fever and the army's move south was blocked by Jacobite forces; both sides camped for the winter.

In an Irish context, the war was a sectarian and ethnic conflict, in many ways a re-run of the Irish Confederate Wars of 50 years earlier. For the Jacobites, the war was fought for Irish sovereignty, religious tolerance for Catholicism, and land ownership. The Catholic upper classes had lost or had been forced to exchange almost all their lands after Cromwell's conquest, as well as the right to hold public office, practise their religion, and sit in the Irish Parliament. To these ends, under Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnel, they had raised an army to restore James II after the Glorious Revolution. By 1690, they controlled all of Ireland except for Derry and Enniskillen.

The majority of Irish people were Jacobites and supported James II due to his 1687 Declaration of Indulgence or, as it is also known, the Declaration for the Liberty of Conscience, that granted religious freedom to all denominations in England and Scotland and also due to James II's promise to the Irish Parliament of an eventual right to self-determination.

Conversely, for the Williamites in Ireland, the war was about maintaining Protestant rule in Ireland. They feared for their lives and their property if James and his Catholic supporters were to rule Ireland, nor did they trust the promise of tolerance, seeing the Declaration of Indulgence as a ploy to re-establish Catholicism as the sole state religion. James had already antagonised English protestants with his actions. In particular, they dreaded a repeat of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, which had been marked by widespread killing. For these reasons, Protestants fought ''en masse'' for William of Orange. Many Williamite troops at the Boyne, including their very effective irregular cavalry, were Ulster Protestants, who called themselves " Enniskilliners" and were referred to by contemporaries as " Scots-Irish". These "Enniskilliners" were mostly the descendants of Anglo-Scottish border reivers; large numbers of these reivers had settled around Enniskillen in County Fermanagh.

Commanders

The opposing armies in the battle were led by the Roman Catholic king James II of England (VII of Scotland) and Ireland and, opposing him, his nephew and son-in-law, the Protestant king William III ("William of Orange") who had deposed James the previous year. James's supporters controlled much of Ireland and the Irish Parliament. James also enjoyed the support of his cousin, Louis XIV, who did not want to see a hostile monarch on the throne of England. Louis sent 6,000 French troops to Ireland to support the Irish Jacobites. William was already Stadtholder of the Netherlands and was able to call on Dutch and allied troops from Europe as well as England and Scotland.

James was a seasoned officer who had proved his bravery when fighting in Europe, notably at the Battle of the Dunes. However, recent historians have suggested that he was prone to panicking under pressure and making rash decisions, which it has been suggested may have been due to poor health associated with the Stuart line.

William, although a seasoned commander, had yet to win a major battle. William's success against the French had been reliant upon tactical manoeuvres and good diplomacy rather than force. His diplomacy had assembled the League of Augsburg, a multi-national coalition formed to resist French aggression in Europe. From William's point of view, his taking power in England and the ensuing campaign in Ireland was just another front in the war against France in general, and Louis XIV in particular.

James II's subordinate commanders were Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, who was Lord Deputy of Ireland and James's most powerful supporter in Ireland; and the French general Lauzun. William's commander-in-chief was the Duke of Schomberg. Born in Heidelberg, Germany, Schomberg had fought for a few different countries and had formerly been a Marshal of France, but, being a Huguenot, was compelled to leave France in 1685 because of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Armies

The Williamite army at the Boyne was about 36,000 strong, composed of troops from many countries;The Battle of the Boyne Teachers Notes & Resources – Secondary Level
(PDF) Office of Public Works (Ireland), (undated, retrieved 9 March 2017) Only around half of them were British. Around 20,000 troops had been in Ireland since 1689, commanded by Schomberg. William himself had landed in Carrickfergus on 14 June O.S. He met Schomberg at nearby Whitehouse, and then proceeded south through Belfast. Loughbrickland was the rallying point of the scattered divisions of the army. He arrived there with another 16,000 in June 1690. On 30 June O.S. William had reached the top of a hill near the southern border of County Louth.

William's troops were generally far better trained and equipped than James's. The best Williamite infantry were from Denmark (7000) and the Netherlands (6000), professional soldiers equipped with the latest flintlock muskets. The Danish infantry was commanded by General Ernst von Tettau. There was also a large (3000) contingent of French Huguenot troops fighting with the Williamites. William did not yet have a high opinion of his English and Scottish troops, with the exception of the Ulster Protestant "skirmishers" who had held Derry in the previous year; the English and Scottish troops were felt at this stage to be politically unreliable, since James had been their legitimate monarch up to a year before. Moreover, they had only been raised recently and had seen little action.

James’s flag was erected at the town of Donore, on the opposite side of the river Boyne. The Jacobites were 23,500 strong. James had several regiments of French troops, but most of his manpower was provided by Irish Catholics, with some English and Scottish Jacobites also present. The Jacobites' Irish cavalry, who were recruited from among the dispossessed Irish gentry, proved themselves to be high-calibre troops during the course of the battle. However, the Irish infantry, predominantly peasants who had been pressed into service, were not trained soldiers. They had been hastily trained, poorly equipped, and only a minority of them had functional muskets. In fact, some of them carried only farm implements such as scythes at the Boyne. Furthermore, the Jacobite infantry who actually had firearms were all equipped with the obsolete matchlock musket. The French and Irish troops wore a white rallying mark, as a compliment to the Bourbons and to distinguish them from the Williamites.

The battle

William sailed from Hoylake in Merseyside, landing at Carrickfergus, County Antrim on 14 June O.S. and marched south, intending to take Dublin. He was heard to remark that "the place was worth fighting for". James chose to place his line of defence on the River Boyne, around from Dublin. The Williamites reached the Boyne on 29 June. The day before the battle, William himself had a narrow escape when he was wounded in the shoulder by Jacobite artillery while surveying the fords over which his troops would cross the Boyne.

The battle itself was fought on 1 July O.S. (11th N.S.), for control of a ford on the Boyne near Drogheda, about north-west of the hamlet of Oldbridge (and about west-north-west of the modern Boyne River Bridge). As a diversionary tactic, William sent about a quarter of his men under the cover of morning mist to cross the river at Roughgrange, about west of Donore and about south-west of Oldbridge. The Duke of Schomberg's son, Meinhardt, led this crossing, which a small force of Irish dragoons in picquet under Neil O'Neill unsuccessfully opposed. James thought that he might be outflanked and sent a large part of his army, including his best French troops along with most of his artillery, to counter this move. What neither side had realised was that there was a deep, swampy ravine

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