The Battle of The Boyne, 1690 (part 12 of 14)

irelandseye.com recommends Firefox for browsing. Click this link for a non-affiliated click-thru to get Firefox.

The Boyne, 1690

The Jacobite resistance to this movement brought on the severest infantry fighting of the day. The Irish Guards, led by Major Arthur, and the Jacobite line battalions marched down to charge the Dutchmen and the French Protestants; they 'went on boldly till they came within a pike's length of the enemy, notwithstanding their perpetual fire'. Major Arthur 'ran the officer through the body that commanded the battalion he marched up to'. The Irish Guards lost 150 men killed and perhaps twice as many wounded; of the Dutch Guards 'there fell a hundred and upwards'.
Very soon the Irish cavalry came down to help their comrades on foot. They were led, among others, by Tyrconnell, an unhealthy man of sixty-was he the only Irish viceroy to appear sword in hand in the field?-and by King James's natural son, the Duke of Berwick, later to be a Marshal of France and the victor at Almanza, then a youth of twenty. When these horsemen joined in William's veterans were hard put to it to hold their ground. 'It was Tyrconnell's fortune to charge first the Blue Regiment of Foot Guards to the Prince of Orange [so the Jacobites named William], and he pierced through', an exploit which drew from William, who witnessed it from the further bank, the plaint, 'My poor Guards, my poor Guards, my poor Guards!' The horsemen profited by the situation of the moment which, with the waning of the pike and in the infancy of the bayonet, gave them a temporary superiority over the foot. Horses were fleet, loading slow, the fire of excited men uncertain; the Irish cavalry-probably as much for its horses as its horsemanship, for the light weight native animal of earlier times had given place to a charger of more substance-was already respected by its opponents; after this day's work it was to be feared. Solms's Dutch infantry, who had bayonets, faced the horsemen like the trained soldiers that they were. Their first rank only fired, and then the men fell on their faces and loaded their muskets as they lay-a difficult operation. When 'a choice squadron of the enemy, consisting most of officers' charged them, the first rank rose and fired again; then, when they had 'spent all their front fire' and the horsemen fell upon them, 'the two rear ranks drew up in two platoons and flanked the enemy across', while the rest fixed bayonets and defended themselves. Some infantry regiments that were without pikes carried with them what an eighteenthcentury military writer calls 'spars, or long pieces of wood stuck full of sharp spikes of wood or iron'. These were chevoux-dejrise, the 'Friesian horse' or 'Swedish feathers' with which, since the time of the Thirty Years War or earlier, foot soldiers had extemporised palisades as a protection against cavalry; they were, in fact, a military precedent of barbed wire. The Huguenots had neither pikes nor chevaux-dejrise and when Tyrconnell's and the other troopers fell on them they were unable to resist them. Caillemotte was mortally wounded; many men were killed. Schomberg, trying to rally among the houses at Oldbridge those with whom he had been exiled from France, was killed by an officer of the Life Guards; he was shot in the back of the neck.
The struggle at Oldbridge continued for more than two hours and was in progress for some time before crossings were made at the other fords. It was, said the Williamites, 'a very sharp fight' for which the Dutch Guards deserved 'immortal honour'; they 'did wonders' and were 'like angels'. But neither the Dutch nor the Huguenots nor the English were able to move far forward from the gardens and enclosures at the village until they were reinforced by additional troops who crossed the river further downstream. The defence, so far, remained unbroken .

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.

[ Back to top ]

[ Home | Features | Culture | History | Travel ]