Born Fighting (11 page)

Walker’s
True Account
, and the personal glory he brought unto himself in England at the expense of others, created immediate anger in Ulster, particularly among the Scottish Presbyterians. His memoir failed to mention the services of even one Presbyterian minister during the siege. Nor did it credit the audacious combat leadership of such fighters as Col. Adam Murray, who had led so many excursions outside the city walls and had been the first to coin the phrase “No Surrender.” Walker’s book was soon followed by a rebuttal called
Narrative
, written by John Mackenzie, a Presbyterian minister who also was at the siege. Mackenzie claimed among other things that Walker had exaggerated his military credentials and that he had never even held the post of joint governor at all.

This rift fell rather cleanly along both ethnic and religious lines. For the Presbyterian Scots who stayed in Ulster, the insults at the hands of the principally English Anglicans would burn for more than a century.
⁶²
For those who eventually left Northern Ireland to settle in America, the slighting of their contributions at the Londonderry siege would become simply one more piece of evidence that it was time to move on. And they brought with them a far greater antipathy toward the English hierarchy than they ever could have felt toward the ordinary Irish.

The reason, in both cases, was the same. Although ethnic labels overlapped here and there, the predominantly English Anglicans in Ireland intended to remain politically and culturally superior, regardless of whether the Irish Catholics and the principally Scottish “dissenters” outnumbered them. As Foster succinctly put it, the Presbyterian position in Ireland “was not much more enviable than that of the Catholics; the Established Church remained the fountain of privilege in Ireland, more closely linked than ever to the Church of England and the possessors of land. In return, membership gave exclusive rights to political power.”
⁶³

Although defeated—or, more accurately, outlasted—at Derry, James II continued his campaigns in Ireland. At the same time, William III focused on fighting the French on the European mainland. As winter passed, bickering broke out between James and his French advisers. But in the spring of 1690 the French provided James with significant reinforcements, forcing William to pay closer attention to the Irish flank. Belatedly—and dangerously—William decided to personally face James in Ireland. In a reflection of Europe’s complicated loyalties of this period, William assembled an eclectic army of 36,000 Ulster Scots, Irish, English, Dutch, French Huguenots, Germans, and Danes to fight against James’s equally diverse army of about 30,000 Irish, French Catholics, Germans, and Walloons. William then crossed the Irish Sea with his force, bringing with him forty pieces of heavy artillery, some so large they required a pulling team of a dozen horses. He landed at Carrickfergus, east of Belfast, on June 14, and after a brief ceremony there and another in the Ulster capital, he and his soldiers headed south.

William was taking a great military risk by dividing his forces so completely between Ireland to England’s west and the Continent to its east, placing him at the very strategic disadvantage that Louis XIV had longed for when first deciding to help James. Further, by deploying so much of his army outside of England, William had left the country vulnerable to direct invasion from France. This possibility was not out of the question. On the Continent, the French soon attacked a depleted English army at Fleurus, defeating it. At sea the French navy soundly defeated a combined British and Dutch fleet at Beachy Head, giving the French at least temporary control of the English Channel.

William needed a quick and decisive battle in his effort to face down James. He would not be disappointed. And he would be heading back to England less than a month after he landed at Carrickfergus.

From Belfast, William’s army moved southward toward Newry. James, positioned a dozen miles farther south on key terrain at Dundalk, sent a reconnaissance patrol of mounted dragoons forward to gain information on the strength of the English. The patrol clashed with an advance guard of several hundred English infantrymen and dragoons, losing a number of soldiers as well as their commanding officer. The returning soldiers warned the deposed king of the large size of the advancing force. James immediately withdrew from Dundalk and set up defensive positions twenty miles farther south, on the southern bank of the River Boyne near Drogheda. Now William would have to cross the river with an entire army in order to attack.

William’s forces, hot in pursuit, closed on Drogheda. As they positioned themselves along the northern bank of the Boyne, they learned that James’s army was spread along a front of several miles between Drogheda and Slane Bridge to its west. Surveying their positions, William himself decided on the battle plan, frustrating his field marshal, the vastly experienced, eighty-year-old duke of Schomberg. But the king was also battle tested, having fought many campaigns in Europe. Indeed, although he was known as grim and humorless and had been sickly all his life, William seemed to come alive on the battlefield.

Never viewed as a battlefield genius, William’s evenness under fire nonetheless inspired loyalty. He was also a man largely without bias. In matters of government he aligned himself with Catholic and Protestant alike, and did not care to dawdle in the usual royal schemes of jealousies and petty revenge. Many of his soldiers, including the crack Dutch Blue Guards, who would carry much of the fight at the Boyne, were Catholic. Other Dutch units were heavily manned by exiled French Huguenots. Their service in the battle would cause William to allow many Huguenots to migrate to Ulster, where in the following decades they became active in the linen industry. His composure in the face of death became apparent soon after arriving at the Boyne, when an Irish marksman saw him riding in front of his men in full regalia and shot him in the shoulder. The undeterred William had his wound treated, then remounted his horse and continued to prepare his battle plan.

It was historic irony that these two accidental kings would meet in this remote place called the Boyne. James had been crowned because his brother left no direct heirs and was flawed by his obsession with returning all things Catholic to a nation that had abandoned Catholicism. William was a casual Calvinist at best, never very concerned about the domestic politics of the nation he now ruled, who himself would die childless and whose great passion was to deny Louis XIV his dream of French dominance of Europe. And neither of them cared, really, about things Irish—James wishing eventually to do away with Irish traditions and replace them with English teachings, the Dutch-born William obsessed with continental Europe. And yet each of them had bet his right to the throne on this showdown.

William’s scheme of maneuver was simple. His main forces would pound James’s positions with his heavy artillery, then conduct a frontal assault, crossing the river and marching directly into them. At the same time, a cavalry unit under Marshal Schomberg’s son Meinhard would move upstream to the west and turn the left flank of James’s army at Slane Bridge, creating so much chaos behind James’s front lines that his army would be forced to retreat in disarray.

Just before dawn the English heavy artillery began firing on James’s positions, and after several barrages the assault began. As the Dutch Blue Guards waded up to their armpits directly into the heart of James’s defenses, an Irish cavalry unit under Richard Hamilton forced them back in some of the heaviest fighting of the day. The battle ebbed and flowed along the riverbank and in the water. The duke of Schomberg, seeing the Blue Guards stagger, decided to rally them. Moving forward from the riverbank, the duke took charge of the assault and was soon killed, later found with a bullet in his throat and two saber gashes on his head.

The enigmatic Reverend George Walker, whose presence at the Boyne has never been fully explained—whether soldier, minister, or observer—was also killed during the assault. King William, upon hearing that Walker had fallen, is reported to have asked incredulously, “What took him there?” Others reported that Walker had been coming to the aid of the wounded Schomberg. Some maintained that he had raised troops for the battle, but there are no records supporting that claim.

As the frontal assault ebbed and flowed, Meinhard Schomberg’s cavalry force managed to turn James’s left flank, guaranteeing William’s victory. James had anticipated the move and sent an Irish regiment of dragoons under Neill O’Neill, a nephew of Tyrconnell, to stop them. But O’Neill was quickly killed, causing the Irish under his command to retreat. Lauzun, the French commander, tried to fill the gap with a fresh contingent of French troops and Irish cavalry, but this left only Irish foot soldiers along the riverbank to defend against William’s persistent frontal assault. The assault broke through the lines, and soon James and his army were in full retreat.

Victory assured, William made no effort to pursue James’s army or to capture James himself. Instead, he made a triumphal march into Dublin, establishing the validity of his own regency, and then immediately returned to England. James, humiliated, left for France three days after the battle, complaining bitterly of Irish cowardice at the Boyne. He would never return. And although the Irish continued their rebellion for another year, the matter of William III’s succession to the British throne was forever settled.

In modern-day Ireland, the siege of Londonderry and William’s victory at the Boyne are still well celebrated among the Protestants in ceremonies that never fail to draw bile from the Catholics. But the centuries have brought with them a simplified, two-sided depiction of the fights—a view that did not exist in the decades immediately following these key events.

Those who choose to remember James’s Irish campaign and William’s response in simple religious terms ignore the complexities of the issues. James was hardly in Ireland as the champion of either Irish or Catholic causes, which is the reason the pope himself celebrated William’s victory at the Boyne as a repudiation of Louis XIV’s international ambitions.
⁶⁴
And the Orangemen who march in their parades on the anniversary of the Boyne as a celebration of Protestant unity against the Catholics ignore the deep divisions among Protestants themselves during this era. Ulster’s famous Orange Order was not even created until more than a hundred years later, in 1795, after the great Scots-Irish migration to America was completed.
⁶⁵

Unfortunately for the Ulster Scots, the victory over James did nothing to change Anglican dominance of Irish affairs. As Foster writes, Ireland remained “a kingdom containing a Protestant elite who had intermarried, established dynasties, stored up fortunes, built houses, colonized both the polite society and the political institutions of the capital, and defined themselves against the cultures of Catholicism and Dissent.”
⁶⁶
And the succession of Queen Anne not only continued this preeminence, but also through the Test Acts hardened it.

The eighteenth century dawned quietly in Europe and America, giving no hint of the political turbulence that would overtake its final twenty-five years. A steady evolution of democratic institutions would mark its decades, led principally by English, French, and colonial American theorists. What no one could have guessed in 1703 as Queen Anne’s government passed her Test Acts was that the hard-nosed, unyielding Presbyterian Scots of Ulster would themselves provide the denouement of this march toward individual freedoms—in America. For by 1828 their culture would have shaped the direction of a unique frontier-style democracy and also have given the new nation its first populist president.

After a hundred years of struggle, Ulster was no longer the swamp-laden wilderness that had greeted the first settlers when the Irish earls had fled to Spain. But the province still remained the ugly adopted stepchild of the British Isles. Ireland itself did not enjoy Scotland’s legal status as a kingdom and was headed for more turmoil as the Catholic Irish resisted further domination. Ulster had England’s eye, but it was not a formal colony in the sense of those now beginning to flourish in America. Its woolen and linen industries were frequently subjected to tariffs and restrictions placed on them from London. Few Ulster Scots owned land, and a Byzantine policy of “rack-renting” brought exponential increases in their payments to absentee landlords. Rack-renting caused a vicious circle where improvements they themselves made on the land raised the value of the property and thus their own rent. Additionally, a cycle of drought and deadly famine seemed endemic to the island’s geography.

Most important, the impact of Queen Anne’s Test Acts hit the “nonconformist” Protestant community even harder than it did the Catholics. Catholic priests were at least viewed by the government as “lawfully ordained, whereas dissenting ministers were ‘mere upstarts’ not in the line of apostolic succession.” In addition to negating the legal effect of their ministers, the acts’ removal of Presbyterians from local government caused both embarrassment and political chaos. As two examples, the entire Corporation of Belfast had to be immediately dismissed once the acts were passed, as were ten of Londonderry’s twelve aldermen.
⁶⁷

These realities urged upon the Ulster Scots a special kind of restlessness, and with it a pull toward the American colonies. Small groups had begun to migrate across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean from the time James II ascended the throne in 1685, scattering themselves from New Hampshire to South Carolina. But after 1715 the migrations assumed a powerful dynamic, growing in intensity and concentrating almost exclusively on the mountainous areas from central Pennsylvania to the Georgia border.

These later migrations were not the scattered, small-scale immigrations of the past. Rather, they became the movement and relocation of virtually an entire people. From their inception after 1715 until the American Revolution, at least 200,000 and as many as 400,000 would leave Ulster for America, almost all of them Dissenters and the great majority of them Presbyterians.
⁶⁸
Commentators who insist that economics played the principal role in this mass migration should ask themselves why, at this point in Ireland’s history, so few Anglicans and Catholics joined the exodus.