Michael McNally - Given
Ireland’s political history it has, over the intervening centuries,
become the norm when discussing the Williamite War, to cite the Siege
of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne – in 1689 and 1690
respectively – as being the turning points of the war. But these
assertions are based on the political considerations of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and fail to take into account the
military side of the conflict, after all it could be argued that the
importance of the Siege of Derry lies not in the defence of the city
itself but rather in the fact that it was here that King James II set
forward his proposals to simply blockade Derry whilst sending the
cream of his army to Scotland in order to unite with the forces of
James Graham, Viscount Dundee, and thus create a ‘second front’
which would have lain England open to invasion and compromised the
unstable Williamite government.
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| The Williamite Army Marches to War! From the collection of Barry Hilton |
It
was unclear exactly how the army would have been transported to
Scotland but the invasion was not to be, as Tyrconnel and the Irish
magnates refused to countenance the transfer of so many troops
overseas whilst positions such as Derry remained in enemy hands.
Throughout the war there were many engagements which, in the short
term at least, exercised an effect on the prosecution of the war –
the ‘Break of Dromore’, the Battle of Newtownbutler and the
Ballyneety Raid to cite just a few examples, but irrespective of any
partisanship there is only one engagement during the entire war that
can be viewed as being truly decisive. There is only one battle that
can be said to point directly to the end of the conflict; only one
battle upon whose outcome rested the future prosecution of the war, a
battle that was fought on the outskirts of the small Galway village
of Aughrim on the afternoon of Sunday 12th
July1691.
In
terms of the numbers of troops involved and the number of casualties
suffered by the combatants, Aughrim will always remain the largest
and by far the bloodiest battle in Irish history and given how the
battle ended it will also always remain one of the most controversial
of such, with the spectre of a perceived act of treachery by a number
of senior Irish officers hanging eternally over the history of the
battle.
The
purpose of this discussion is to examine the Battle of Aughrim and if
at all possible to ascertain as to whether the Jacobite defeat can
indeed be ascribed to avarice and treachery or – however tragic –
is simply the result of fate and the fortunes of war. To do this,
however, we need to first examine the conduct of the war itself and
to review the position of both armies at the beginning of the 1691
campaigning season and we will do that in the next installment.
We would like to thank Michael McNally for contributing to the League of Augsburg blog as a guest author. Most of our readers will recognize Mike as the author of Osprey's The Battle of the Boyne 1690: The Irish Campaign for the English Crown and The Battle of Aughrim 1691. Mike has other Osprey titles in other periods as well, but will have another title in the League of Augsburg period next year in October 2014... Ramilies 1706: Marlborough's Tactical Masterpiece from Osprey Publishing. All text in The Controversy of Defeat series is Copyright 2013 Michael McNally and used with kind permission.