James embarks for France-William enters Dublin-The French devastate Teignmouth-William's march to Limerick-Siege of Limerick-The siege raised-William goes to EnglandParliament-War supply-England and Continental Politics-William leaves for Holland -Congress at the Hague-Mons capitulates to the French-Vacant sees in England filled up-Plot of Preston and Ashton-Treason laws-Marlborough in Flanders-Limerick surrenders to Ginkell-Treaty of Limerick. KING JAMES, "in compliance with the advice of all his friends, resolved to go for France, and try to do something more effectual on that side, than he could hope from so shattered and disheartened a body of men as now remained in Ireland." "Request of friends" is the apology for the foolish actions of the weak king as well as of the vain scribbler. On the 3rd of July James quitted Dublin with all speed, about five in the morning; left two troops of horse at Bray, to defend the bridge there against any pursuers; rode over the Wicklow mountains, and baited near Arklow; "mended his pace" when four French officers maintained that the enemy was not far behind; and never stopped till 114 WILLIAM ENTERS DUBLIN. [1690. he got to Duncannon about sunrise. His attendants found a merchant ship at Passage. The captain was persuaded to take James on board in the evening. They sailed for Kinsale; and the next day the royal fugitive was secure in a French frigate, and was landed safely at Brest.* James repaired to St. Germains, where "his Most Christian Majesty came to see him; and in general terms promised all imaginable kindness and support." The sanguine exile having abandoned Ireland, had his ready scheme for invading England, "now naked and ungarnished of troops." Louis received the project coldly; and, finally, would have nothing to do with the affair; although James magnanimously offered to go with a fleet, either with or without an army, for he was sure "his own sailors would never fight against one under whom they so often had conquered."+ His Most Christian Majesty pretended illness when his brother of England came to pester him with his new demands for ships and troops. "The court of France could not forbear speaking great disrespect, even in his own hearing; which the queen seemed much more sensible of than he did." The courtiers of Versailles could guess at the truth; although "the few English courtiers who stayed with the queen in France, to justify the flight of their king, did not spare calumniating the Irish." They averred that "the Irish abandoned their prince, and left him exposed to the enemy;" and this version of the cause of James's return was so believed by the uninformed, that the Irish who had been refugees in France since the days of Cromwell, "durst not walk abroad or appear in the streets, the people were so exasperated against them." § On the day that James fled from Dublin, the citizens had to apprehend two sorts of danger. The forces of James, scattered about the vicinity, pressed by hunger, might return and rifle the town. The lowest of the Dublin populace, in a pretended zeal for religion, threatened to burn and plunder the houses of the Papists. The city was saved from these calamities chiefly by the firmness of captain Robert Fitzgerald. On the 3rd, the camp of William on the Boyne was broken up. On the 4th, the Dutch guards took possession of Dublin Castle. On the 5th, the head-quarters of the king were at Ferns; and on the 6th, being Sunday, he rode to Dublin, and in the cathedral of St. Patrick returned thanks to God for the success of his arms. William, however, continued to sleep in his camp. On the 8th, "his Majesty in person viewed and took a general muster of all the army, and was fourteen hours on horseback; only for one quarter he did alight to eat and drink." The news of the disgrace of Beachy Head had reached Ireland on the 10th, when the king, contemplating a return to England, resolved to secure Waterford, as the most important harbour of the Eastern coast. On the 11th of August the army was on its march. Rowland Davies records how, in defiance of the royal proclamation, the troops "robbed and pillaged all the road along." Execution followed execution. On the 14th, on the march to Carlow, as we passed, two of the Enniskillen dragoons hung by the wayside, with papers on their breasts exposing their crime; and thereby our march was very regular, without any such excursions or pillaging "Life of James II." Own Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 402. Dartmouth's note in Burnet, vol. iv. p. 100. Harris, p. 273. + Dalrymple. Rowland Davies, p. 126. 1690.] THE FRENCH DEVASTATE TEIGNMOUTH. 115 as before." * On the 21st, Waterford was in possession of William's troops, the garrison having capitulated. The king then determined to return to Dublin, with the view of embarking for England. With a French fleet in the Channel, there was now greater danger to be met on the English shores, than in the resistance which continued to be made in Ireland. The forces which had been scattered on the 1st of July had gathered around Limerick, and were prepared to defend that city. Officers and soldiers, without orders from their superiors, without a leader, all flocked to Limerick, "as if they had been all guided thither by some secret instinct of nature."+ But, irregularly fortified, and its defence left to the Irish, it was considered as likely soon to fall. On his road to Dublin, on the 27th, more accurate intelligence from England had reached the king, and he determined to invest Limerick in person. The shameful discomfiture of the allied fleet at Beachy Head had not been followed up by the French so as to produce any results that should give serious alarm to William. On the 22nd of July, the French admiral, Tourville, was anchored in Torbay, with the fleet which had chased Torrington to the mouth of the Thames; and he had been reinforced, with a number of galleys, rowed by slaves. The whole fleet was employed to transport troops. The approach of danger had roused up the spirit of the July of 1588. The beacons are again blazing on the Devonshire hills. From every road in the interior the yeomen of the West are gathering on the coast, not shrinking from trying their strength against the veterans of France. Tourville loses faith in the assurances of the Stuart courtiers, that all England would be up to aid in his enterprise. All England is shouting "God bless king William and queen Mary." But Tourville will do something. He lands some troops at Teignmouth, which Burnet calls "a miserable village," but which the inhabitants represented as consisting of two towns, having three hundred houses. The people of Teignmouth obtained a brief for their losses; and in this document they say that "the French fleet, riding in Torbay, where all the forces of our county of Devon were drawn up to oppose their landing, several of their galleys drew off from their fleet, and made towards a weak unfortified place called Teignmouth, about seven miles to the eastward of Torbay." The narrative then continues to describe the ravages of these heroes:-" Coming very near, and having played the cannon of their galleys upon the town, and shot near two hundred great shot therein, to drive away the poor inhabitants, they landed about seven hundred of their men, and began to fire and plunder the towns of East and West Teignmouth, which consist of about three hundred houses; and in the space of three hours ransacked and plundered the said towns, and a village called Shaldon, lying on the other side of the river, and burnt and destroyed one hundred and sixteen houses, together with eleven ships and barks that were in the harbour. And to add sacrilege to their robbery and violence, they in a barbarous manner entered the two churches of the said towns, and in the most unchristian manner tore the Bibles and Common Prayer-books in pieces, scattering the leaves thereof about the streets, broke down the pulpits, Rowland Davies, p. 123. "Macarie Excidium." 116 WILLIAM'S MARCH TO LIMERICK. [1690. overthrew the Communion-tables, together with many other marks of a barbarous and enraged cruelty. And such goods and merchandises as they could not, or durst not, stay to carry away, for fear of our forces, which were marching to oppose them, they spoilt and destroyed, killing very many cattle and hogs, which they left dead in the streets." After these feats, Tourville sailed away to France; and left behind him an amount of indignation that was worth more for defence than even the troops of horse raised by the citizens of London. The brief of the "poor inhabitants" of the towns of East and West Teignmouth and Shaldon,-who "being in great part maintained by fishing, and their boats, nets, and other fishing-craft being plundered and consumed in the common flames," had lost, as they alleged, eleven thousand pounds-went through every parish from the Land's-end to the East, South, and North; and every penny that was dropped in the plate at the church door was accompanied with the pious hope that England might have strength from above to resist the Papists who burnt fishing-huts, and tore the Bible in pieces, and who would ravage this island as they had ravaged the Palatinate. On the 8th of August king William's main army was encamped at Cahirconlish, about six miles from Limerick. "As we came up," says Davies, "we saw houses in the country round on fire, which put the king into some concern." The earl of Portland had advanced with a large body of horse and foot within cannon-shot of the city; and in the evening of the 8th William himself viewed the position in which the strength of the Irish Catholics was now concentrated. The French general, Lauzun, had declared that the place could not resist the attack of the advancing army. With the pedantry that sometimes clings to military science as well as to other sciences, he trusted more to walls and moats, such as Vauban constructed on the French frontier, than to resolute hearts, by which Limerick only could be defended. He left the Irish to their fate. The Irish resolved to redeem the dishonour of the Boyne. They had an intrepid counsellor in Sarsfield, their general, who put his own resolute spirit into the twenty thousand defenders of the city. Lauzun and Tyrconnel had marched away to Galway, as the English advanced guard approached. As the setting sun flashed on the broad expanse of the Shannon, William would see an old town entirely surrounded by the main stream and a branch of the great river, and connected with another town by a single bridge. The town on the island, with its ancient castle built by king John on the bank of the stream, was known as the English town. The other was known as the Irish town. The eye of the tactician would quickly see the capacity for defence of this position, even though its walls were not of the most scientific construction. The English town was accessible only through the lower Irish town. The Shannon, in a season of wet, overflowed its flat margin. "The city of Limerick," says one at whom some may laugh as an authority, "lies, an' please your honour, in the middle of a devilish wet swampy country. **'Tis all cut through with drains and bogs." Thus naturally defended, a besieging army had many difficulties to encounter, and there could be no want of supplies to the Corporal Trim, in "Tristram Shandy." Sterne, says Lord Macaulay, was brought up at the knees of old soldiers of William." 1690.] SIEGE OF LIMERICK. 117 besiegers from the open country of Clare and Galway. The river approach from the sea was commanded at this time by a French squadron. William looked upon Limerick, and determined to commence the siege. On the 9th the main body of his army advanced. "When we came near the town, and found all the bridges within a mile of the city lined by the enemy, the king ordered a detachment of grenadiers to go down and clear them, which they immediately did, with all the bravery imaginable."* The peculiar missiles of the grenadiers thus employed, are called "new invented engines ;" and the Irishman of this period is represented as ready to give his one cow, if he could be safe" without these French and Dutch grenados." Before the night of the 9th, the Irish town, according to Davies, was invested "from river to river." The expression has reference to the remarkable curve of the Shannon in its course to the sea, before it reaches the island on which the English town was built. The river thus encloses, in the form of a horseshoe, a long and narrow tongue of land, but not insulated from the country on the southern bank. William's position was taken up partly on this space between the windings of the stream, and partly on the south bank, near the Irish town. For several days the siege was not actively prosecuted, for the battering train had not arrived. On the night of the 10th, Sarsfield, with about five hundred horse, passed out of Limerick, crossing the Shannon at Killaloe, with the object of intercepting the train of artillery and a supply of military stores and provisions, coming to the besiegers from Dublin. The convoy had arrived within eight miles of the English position. The ruined castle of Ballyneedy was at hand to offer a place of safety for the waggons and guns; but the escort was scattered about in the open plain, securely sleeping whilst a few sentinels watched. Sarsfield suddenly came down from the mountains; killed most of the too confident escort, the rest flying for their lives; loaded the guns to the muzzles, and half buried them; heaped up the barrels of powder around the guns, with a pile of waggons and stores; fired a train; and was safe in Limerick before the dawn. Part of the army was at Drumkeen, waiting for the heavy cannon, which were expected to be within three miles of them on the night of the 11th. "About three in the morning we were all awakened by the firing of two great cannon near us, which made our house shake, and all within it startle; and about an hour after were alarmed by a man that fled to us almost naked, who assured us that the enemy had fallen upon us, taken all our cannon, ammunition, and money, and cut off the guard."§ Sarsfield attributed great importance to the success of this daring enterprise; for he told a lieutenant who was taken prisoner, that if he had failed he should have given up all as lost, and have made his way to France. The loss of the cannon and stores was partially repaired by the arrival of two guns from Waterford. But that surprise was in some degree more fatal to the besiegers than in the actual havoc and loss. The success of the exploit gave new courage to those who resolved to defend their city against an army not greatly superior in numbers to themselves. The besiegers were proportionately depressed, for they knew that the materials for a bombardment were insufficient. On the night of the 17th the * Davies. Notes to the same, by Mr. Crofton Croker, "Macaria Excidium." § Davies's Journal, p. 136. |