When source material is hard to acquire combing the beach
for everything and anything becomes second nature. Whilst on the hunt for
information about the first siege of Limerick in 1690, a Google search turned
up
Kingdom Overthrown; Ireland and the
Battle for Europe 1688-1691 by Gerard Fitzgibbon. The price was not
excessive (in fact I think I got it for less than a tenner). I had seen it
before but ignored it as another general history book but more of that shortly.
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| Jacobite musketeer in French cut uniform. photo copyright Barry Hilton |
It arrived just in time for me to pack for a business trip
to Oman where I rarely do anything apart from work and write. A cursory flick
through told me I was either going to love it or hate it. The writer is a
journalist and this is I believe, his first book. Its scope is broad and
extends beyond a narrative of the war to provide a brief but very easily
understood backcloth to Irish history from the Plantagenets till 1688.
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| Holding Adam Murray's sword at St Columbs, Derry |
The style is easy and informative. It tells the story
without any real bias and in a way that I found very light on the brain. By
that I mean the pages raced by and I didn’t need to drink four gin and tonics
at the end of every session because I was so desiccated by the content. He has
chosen to colour the dramatis personae rather than have them remain the two-dimensional
cardboard cut-outs which haunt most books of this type. Before detailing the
many pros and a few pretty minor cons, I finished 395 pages in five days whilst
pulling a full shift at work, coping with the customary JL and going to the
gym, Why, do I say this? As a benchmark, it took me weeks to get through John
Childs wonderful
The Williamite Wars in Ireland
1688-1691 which is well written and a favourite go-to source book.
Fitzgibbon manages to tell the tale of an extremely complex situation with
scores of main characters and well over one hundred walk-on parts in a way that
does not make you feel your head is full of marshmallows.
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| Drybridge Ford, Drogheda - Where William crossed the Boyne - precise time and tide . Copyright B.Hilton |
As an example, King James comes to life as a disillusioned,
disappointed, neurotic and conspiracy theory obsessed ditherer. William is cast
as a highly stressed, unable to relax, closed, introverted workaholic who
probably dodged every party invitation he rarely received. Tyrconnell comes
across as an intelligent, cunning, opportunistic, resourceful, energetic and
intimidating corporate executive whose overindulgence gets the better of him,
eventually. It is undoubtedly interpretive but in an engaging and provoking
way. I am sure many of his character sketches will be pretty near the mark
(we’ll never find out) and for the first time in all of my reading on this war (which has been ongoing for over 25 years) I actually recognized the protagonists
as not just names on a page but real human beings with dispositions, feelings
and behaviours easily found in the modern neurotic world we live in. The story is
actually, a ripper and re-reading it in one doze reinforced my preoccupation
with the period. Even though you know the end of the story it still read like a
novel.
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| The walls of English Town, Limerick. Copyright Barry Hilton |
Fitzgibbon has used a slightly pulp-fiction style to make
the battle scenes come alive – lots of flying shrapnel, blood smells, choking
smoke and sulphurous fumes mixed in with the urine and excrement but actually,
that works. He has stopped short of too much dialogue and thankfully avoided a
lot of bear traps he could have set himself around the oft trotted out quotes
and mis quotes. The best action descriptions are those around the magnificent
Jacobite defence of Limerick in 1690 and the fall of Athlone in 1691. Did I
know and forget that the celebrated Sergeant Custume was a Scot? I remember
pausing with the humous and kebeh at that paragraph and thinking.. I need to check that
out. More surprising was that I felt genuine empathy for many characters even
unlikely ones such as Tyrconnell and Ginkel.
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| Attibrassil Bridge, Aughrim - Jacobite right flank hinge. Copyright Barry Hilton |
The things I liked less are pretty excusable. Fitzgibbon is
a good writer but not a military historian. He does not really understand or
apply well, the military terminology of the period. He babbles on about rifles here
and there, infantrymen are always wearing boots, he occasionally mixes Horse
with Foot and gets numbers muddled a bit but this is minor stuff. He has
clearly plundered many of the sources that period-obsessives reference and
welded them together into a pacey narrative. John Stevens journal which I read
again recently is frequently the spine of Fitzgibbon’s story line and many of
Stevens’ incidents appear in a 21
st century idiom.
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| Crom Castle - besieged twice by the Jacobites in 1689. Copyright Barry Hilton |
Some of the descriptions
are a bit modern and those jar a little for being somewhat laddish and
trivial amidst the general body of fine and well crafted writing. He has a bit of a fixation with
swooping condors as a metaphor too and there are one or two other red-top type
turns of phrase which actually just made me smile.
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| Jacobite infantry march to war. Copyright Barry Hilton |
Perhaps the worst offence is his (or his publisher’s) very
poor choice of cover art - John Mulvany’s Battle of Aughrim with its SYW style
uniforms. That would I am sure put a few potential customers off as it is a
lazy decision and could imply that between the dust covers the content is also
somewhat off target. The internal illos are safe if hackneyed. Nothing any of
us will not have seen before.
That said, This book was a great read. I finished it at 0700
waiting for the flight back to London and wrote this review over breakfast and
Iraq simultaneously. As a detailed, entertaining overview of a vital and
painful piece of our history I thoroughly commend it.
