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The Boyne, 1690Developments in military organisation and weapons which had taken place since Cromwell's time were reflected in this Jacobite army, a force that shared a common background with William's British regiments, although the French officers who came with J ames and D' A vaux tried to give it something of the complexion of their own great military machine.The mounted men included two types that are new to this narrative, dragoons and mounted grenadiers. Dragoons, who had already figured both in the English civil war-when they acted mostly as skirmishers-and in a minor degree in the warfare of the Confederation in Ireland, but who were not numerous before the end of the seventeenth century, were mounted infantry. Montecuculi, the seventeenth-century imperialist general, said that they were 'infantry to whom horses have been given to enable them to move more rapidly'. They were armed with muskets or carbines and pistols, and a few bore halberds. They used their small horses· to carry them where their service was needed, but they fought on foot. Mounted grenadiers were quite new, although the weapon from which they and the foot grenadiers took their name was not. In one form or another the 'hand granadoe' was as old as gunpowder. It was a small, hollow cast iron sphere which was filled with gunpowder; the filling hole was stopped by a wooden plug which had an aperture for a length of slow match. Ignited and thrown, the grenade fragmented when the burning match reached and exploded the charge. Horse grenadiers appeared in England in 1683, when a troop was added to each of the existing troops of the Life Guard, and in Ireland in the year following; they were classed with dragoons and were intended, like them, to act as mobile infantry. The cavalry proper, or horse regiments, continued to be armed with swords, pistols and carbines. They formed for attack in line in three ranks. Cavalry had, in this period, largely given up the movement called the caracole, which consisted of an advance, a discharge of pistols and a wheeling away, and had learnt to charge home with the sword, using the weight of their horses-as the Normans of five centuries before had used it-to increase the shock of their attack. The lancer and the rider who handled his horseman's staff in the sixteenth-century fashion had alike disappeared from the Irish scene. The history of the Battle of the Boyne, 1690 continues here Taken from Irish Battles by G.A. Hayes-McCoy, published by Appletree Press. Further reading: A Little History of Ireland by Martin Wallace with illustrations by Ian McCullough. Click here for more information on the book. Previous instalments of 'the Battle of the Boyne': Part 1 | Part 2 | Further instalments of 'the Battle of the Boyne': Part 4 |
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