Chapter 12

The Irish had not made their environment or their natures, and no power on earth could change them. Over greater England had swept the Romans, the Jutes, the Saxons, the Angles, the Norsemen, and the Normans. All found lodgment and all went to the making of England. Well, one might say, it had been for Ireland if she had developed that assimilating power which made her successive conquerors in process of time the feeders of her greatness, but the Irish would not and could not. Instead, they developed the pride of race that no momentary defeat could down. They became inured to battle and dreamt of battle when the peace of an hour was given them. When the four kings of Ireland were feasted in Dublin by King Richard II. of England, an English chronicler remarked, "Never were men of ruder manners"; but neither the silken array and golden glitter of Richard's peripatetic court nor the brave display of his thousand knights and thirty thousand archers filled them with longing for the one or fear of the other. They went back to their Irish hills and plains and fastnesses as obstinately Irish as ever.

They fought well at home, if unfortunately, the wonder being that they continued to fight. The heavens and the earth seemed combined against them.

II.--THE FIGHTING RACE ABROAD.

We next see Irish soldiers fighting abroad. The blood they had shed so freely for the Stuarts at the Boyne, at Athlone, at Aughrim, at Limerick was in vain. The king of France, if he sent armies to Ireland, demanded Irish troops in return. The transports that brought the French regiments over in May, 1690, took back over five thousand officers and men from Ireland, who formed the first Irish Brigade in the service of France. This, remember, was before the battle of the Boyne. The men were formed on their arrival in France into three regiments, those of Mountcashel, O'Brien, and Dillon, named after their commanders, and were sent to Savoy. The French aid to James in Ireland helped best in giving confidence to the raw Irish levies, but it was more than offset by the German troops brought over by William. The weakness, indecision, or worse, of James before Derry, his chicken-hearted failure to overwhelm Schomberg when he lay at his mercy before the arrival of William, ruined his chances. Remember that the Irish army, if defeated at the Boyne, was not broken, and was strong enough, when pursued by William, to repulse him with 500 killed and 1,000 wounded and to compel him to raise the siege of Limerick. The dash and skill of Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, backed by Irish desperation, won the day. The French troops sailed home after William's retreat. In the next year's campaign occurred the crowning disasters of the war, but in any other country or with any other people than the English the terms of capitulation at Limerick, which were formulated by Ginkel and showed a soldier's respect for a brave and still powerful foe, would have ushered in an era of peace.

The Irish soldiers' distrust of the conquerors was shown in the fact that, since the stipulations allowed the free departure of the garrison with honors of war, 19,059 officers and men took service with France, and sailed in October, 1691, on the French fleet, which by the irony of fate had arrived in the Shannon too late, on the very day after the signing of the treaty of Limerick. Never in the whole course of the history of nations has more hideous treachery been shown than in the immediate breaking of that treaty; and dearly has England paid for it ever since, although, for the hundred years that followed, Ireland sank to the very depths under the penal laws, with her trade ruined, her lands stolen, her religion persecuted, and all education and enlightenment forbidden by abominable, drastic laws.

If, as has been computed, 450,000 Irish fought and died in the service of France between 1690 and 1745, a further 30,000 are to be added down to 1793. A French writer estimates the whole Irish contingent at 750,000, but, for a roster of seekers of glory from an impoverished people, the more reasonable half-million should surely suffice.

Long would be the story to follow the fighting fortunes of the Irish Brigades. Officered by Irish gentlemen and drilled to perfection, they soon came to hold in the French service the esteem that later was given to Irish regiments in the service of England. King Louis welcomed them heartily and paid them a higher wage than his native soldiers. No duty was too arduous or too dangerous for the Irish Brigades. Seldom were they left to rust in idleness. Europe was a caldron of wars of high ambitions.

The Irish regiments fought through the war in Flanders. At Landen, July 29, 1693, the French under the duke of Luxembourg defeated the English under William III. with a slaughter of 10,473 men, losing 8,000 men themselves. In the retreat, Ginkel, William's general in the Irish campaign, was almost drowned in the river Greete. The Irish Royal Regiment of Footguards, that of Dorrington, was the first corps to break through the English intrenchments, its gallant leader, Colonel Barrett, falling as he headed the charge. Here also was stricken Lieutenant-Colonel Nugent of Sheldon's Irish Regiment. Here also fell--saddest loss of all--Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, brave, resourceful, a true unfaltering-soldier and lover of his country. The legend of his life blood flowing before his eyes and his utterance, "Would it had been shed for Ireland", may and should be true, although he lived three days after the battle. Would, indeed, it had been shed for Ireland--after such a day!

It was in 1703 that the celebrated defence of Cremona lifted Irish renown to great heights throughout Europe. There were but 600 Irish troopers all told in that long day's work, and from the break of day till nightfall they held at bay Prince Eugene's army of 10,000 men. The two battalions of Bourke and Dillon were surprised at early morn to learn that the Austrians--and there were Irish officers among them--were in the town. Major O'Mahony and his men ran from their beds to the gates, and neither the foes without nor the foes within could make them budge. Terribly they suffered under concentrated attacks, but a withering fire from the Irish met every assault. It was nightfall before relief came, and then the sons of Ireland who had held Cremona for the French were acclaimed by all, but of their 600 they had lost nearly 350. Small wonder that the honor list that day was long. In Bourke's battalion the specially distinguished were Captains Wauchop, Plunkett, Donnellan, MacAuliffe, Carrin, Power, Nugent, and Ivers; in Dillon's, Major O'Mahony, Captains Dillon, Lynch, MacDonough, and Magee, and Lieutenants Dillon and Gibbon, John Bourke and Thomas Dillon. Major O'Mahony was sent to Paris to carry the news of the victory to the king, who presented him with a purse of 1,000 louis d'or, a pension of 1,000 livres, and the brevet of colonel.

So the history proceeds, the Irish regiments lost in the array of the French forces, but showing here and there a glint of charging bayonets, captured trenches, and gushes of Irish blood. In 1703 the brigade regiments fought in Italy and Germany under the Duc de Vendome. We hear of the regiments of Berwick, Bourke, Dillon, Galmoy, and Fitzgerald vigorously engaged. In Germany the story is of Sheldon's Horse and two battalions of the regiments of Dorrington and Clare. At the first battle of Blenheim, September 20, 1703, the regiment of Clare lost one of its colors, rallied, charged with the bayonet and recovered it, taking two colors from the enemy. This was a French victory. Not so the great battle of Blenheim, August, 1704, when Marlborough and Prince Eugene severely defeated the French and Bavarians. Three Irish battalions shared in the disaster. In 1705 at Cassano in Italy an Irish regiment, finding itself badly galled by artillery fire from the opposite bank of the Adda, declared they could stand it no longer, and thereupon jumped in, swam the river, and captured the battery. In 1705 Colonel O'Mahony of Cremona fame distinguished himself in Spain. In the next year at the battle of Ramillies, in which Marlborough with the Dutch defeated the French under Villeroi, Lord Clare's regiment captured the colors of the English Churchill regiment and of the Scottish regiment in the Dutch service. In the same year and the next, the Irish Brigade fought many battles in Spain. One cannot pursue the details of the engagements. Regiments ever decimated were ever recruited by the "Wild Geese" from Ireland--the adventurous Catholic youth of the country who sought congenial outlet for their love of adventure and glory. Many Irish also joined the French army after deserting from the English forces in Flanders.

It was, however, at Fontenoy, May 11, 1745, that the Irish Brigade rendered their most signal service to France. The English under the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II., with 55,000 men including a large German and Dutch auxiliary, met the French under Marshal Saxe, and in the presence of the French king Louis XV., near Tournai in Belgium. Saxe had 40,000 men in action and 24,000 around Tournai, which town was the objective of the English advance. Among the troops on the field were the six Irish regiments of Clare, Dillon, Bulkeley, Roth, Berwick, and Lally, all under Charles O'Brien, Viscount Clare, afterwards Marshal Thomond of France. After fierce cannonading on both sides and a check to the allies on their right and left, a great column of English veterans advanced on the French centre, breaking through with sheer force. They had thus reached high ground when some cannonading halted them. It was at this moment of gravest peril to the French that the Irish regiments with unshotted guns charged headlong up the slope on their ancient enemies, crying, "Remember Limerick and British Faith!" The great English column, already roughly handled by the cannon, broke and fled in wild disorder before that irresistible onslaught, and France had won a priceless victory, but the six Irish regiments lost one-third of their gallant men by a single volley as they followed their steel into the English lines.

When Charles Edward, the Stuart Pretender, landed in Scotland in 1745, he was followed by a small French force, including 500 Irishmen from the Brigade. Colonel John O'Sullivan was much relied on by the prince in his extraordinary campaign. Sir Thomas Sheridan also distinguished himself. There were 475 Irish at the battle of Culloden, that foredoomed defeat of the Stuart cause, and two days later a score of Irish officers were among those who surrendered at Inverness.

In Spain at the beginning of the 18th century there were hundreds of Irish officers in the military service, and eight Irish regiments. Among the officers were thirteen Kellys, thirteen Burkes, and four Sheas. It seemed that Ireland had soldiers for the world. Don Patricio, Don Miguel, Don Carlos, Don Tadeo took the place of Patrick, Michael, Charles, and Thadeus. O'Hart gives a list of sixty descendants of the "Wild Geese" in places of honor in Spain. General Prim was a descendant of the Princes of Inisnage in Kilkenny. An O'Donnell was Duke of Tetuan and field marshal of Spain. Ambrose O'Higgins, born in county Meath, Ireland, was the foremost Spanish soldier in Chile and Peru; Admiral Patricio Lynch was one of its most distinguished sailors; and James McKenna its greatest military engineer. The son of O'Higgins was foremost among those who fought for Chilean independence and gained it, and one of his ablest lieutenants was Colonel Charles Patrick O'Madden of Maryland.

In Austria the Irish soldiers were particularly welcome. They count forty-one field-marshals, major-generals, generals of cavalry, and masters of ordnance of Irish birth in the Austrian service. O'Callaghan relates that on March 17, 1766, His Excellency Count Mahony (son of the O'Mahony of Cremona), ambassador from Spain to the court of Vienna, gave a grand entertainment in honor of St. Patrick, to which he invited all persons of condition who were of Irish descent. Among many others, there were present Count Lacy, President of the Council at War, the generals O'Donnell, McGuire, O'Kelly, Browne, Plunkett, and MacElligot, four chiefs of the Grand Cross, two governors, several knights military, six staff officers, and four privy councillors, with the principal officers of State. All wore Patrick's crosses in honor of the Irish nation, as did the whole court that day. Emperor Francis I. said: "The more Irish officers in the Austrian service the better; bravery will not be wanting; our troops will always be well disciplined." The Austrian O'Reillys and Taaffes were famous. It was the dragoon regiment of Count O'Reilly that by a splendid charge saved the remnant of the Austrian army at Austerlitz.

In the American war of the Revolution, General Charles Geoghegan of the Irish Brigade made the campaigns of Rochambeau and Lafayette. He received the order of the Cincinnati from Washington and was ever proud of it. Lieutenant General O'Moran also served in America. He was afterwards executed in the French Revolution, for the "Brigade" remained royalist to the end. General Arthur Dillon, who served in the Brigade, was also guillotined in 1794, crying, "_Vive le roi!_" At the foot of the scaffold a woman, probably Mme. Hébert, also condemned, stood beside him. The executioner told her to mount the steps. "Oh, Monsieur Dillon," she said, "pray go first." "Anything to oblige a lady," he answered gaily, and so faced his God.

Lord Macaulay, commenting upon these things and deploring the policies that brought them about, says with great significance:

"There were Irish Catholics of great ability, but they were to be found everywhere except in Ireland--at Versailles, at St. Ildefonso, in the armies of Frederic, in the armies of Maria Theresa. One exile (Lord Clare) became a marshal of France, another (General Wall) became Prime Minister of Spain.... Scattered all over Europe were to be found brave Irish generals, dexterous Irish diplomatists, Irish counts, Irish barons, Irish knights of St. Louis and St. Leopold, of the White Eagle, and of the Golden Fleece, who if they remained in the house of bondage, could not have been ensigns of marching regiments or freemen of petty corporations."

The old Irish brigades ended with the French monarchy. Battalions of the regiments of Dillon and Walsh were with the French fleet in the West Indies at Grenada and St. Eustache, also at Savannah, and under Rochambeau at Yorktown, but, except as to the officers, the surviving regiments of Berwick, Dillon, and Walsh were largely French. With the better times under Grattan's Parliament in Ireland, the soldier emigration to France had all but ceased. The Irish Volunteers of 1782 numbered 100,000 men, of whom an appreciable proportion were Catholics. Many Irish went into the English army and navy, but there was another stream of fighting emigrants, that which flocked to the standard of revolt against England in America, of which much was to be heard thereafter.

In the American colonies before the Revolution there were thousands of descendants of the Catholic Irish who had settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania during the seventeenth century, as well as hardy Irish Presbyterians from Ulster, who came in great multitudes during the first half of the eighteenth century. They had suffered persecution in Ireland for conscience sake from their fellow-Protestants. In Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas they constituted entire communities. The emigration of the Catholic or purely Celtic Irish to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was often compulsory. At any rate, after the middle of the eighteenth century it was large and became continuous--a true drift. Catholics and Presbyterians alike brought hostility to the English government with them, and their voices fed the storm of discontent. The Irish schoolmasters, of whom there were hundreds, were especially efficient in this. They came in every ship to the colonies. They had no love for England, for they had experienced in Ireland the tyranny of English law, and they would be more than human if they did not imbue the minds of the American children under their care with their own hatred of oppression and wrong and English domination. The log schoolhouse of the Irish teacher became the nursery of revolution. They were a very important factor, therefore, in the making of the Revolution, and many of them took an active part as soldiers in the field.

The Irish, both Catholics and Protestants, poured into the patriot ranks once the standard of revolt was raised in 1775. The Pennsylvania line, which General Lee called "the line of Ireland," was almost entirely Irish, and the rosters of several of the Maryland and Virginia regiments contain a remarkably large proportion of Irish names, in some cases running as high as 60 per cent. It is computed that the Irish furnished not less than a third of the whole American forces. A common cause blotted out all old religious prejudices between Irishmen in the American service. It was John Sullivan, of New Hampshire, son of a Limerick schoolmaster, who began the revolt by seizing the fort of William and Mary and its storehouses filled with that powder which charged the guns at Bunker Hill in the following year. It was Captain Jeremiah O'Brien, with his brothers, who made the first sea attack on the British off Machias, Maine, in May, 1775, an engagement which Fenimore Cooper calls "the Lexington of the Seas." There were fifteen Celtic Irish names among the Minute Men at the Battle of Lexington. Colonel Barrett, who commanded at Concord, was Irish. There were 258 Celtic Irish names on the rosters of the American forces at the battle of Bunker Hill. John Sullivan had been made a major-general, thereafter to be a notable figure in the war at Princeton, Trenton, Newport, and in his Indian campaign. The Connecticut line was thick with Irish names. Around Washington himself was a circle of brilliant Irishmen: Adjutant-General Edward Hand leading his rifles, Stephen Moylan his dragoons, General Henry Knox and Colonel Proctor at the head of his artillery, John Dunlop his body-guard, Andrew Lewis his brigadier-general, Ephraim Elaine his quartermaster, all of Irish birth or ancestry. Commodore John Barry, born in Wexford in 1739 and bred to the sea, was a ship captain in his early twenties, trading from Philadelphia. When the Continental Congress met, he at once volunteered, and was given command of the _Lexington_, the first American ship to capture a British war vessel. Later, after gallant fighting on sea and land, he was given command of the U.S. frigate _Alliance_, in which he crossed the Atlantic to France, and fought and captured in a rattling battle two British warships, the _Atlanta_ and the _Trepasay_. He was the Father of the American navy, holding captain's certificate No. 1, signed by Washington himself--the highest rank then issued.

General Richard Montgomery, the brave and able soldier who fell at Quebec as he charged the heights, was an Irishman. General George Clinton, son of an Irishman, was a brigadier-general, governor of New York and twice Vice-President of the United States. Fifty-seven officers of New York regiments in the Revolution were Irish, and a large number of the officers in the Southern regiments of the line, as well as of the militia, were native Irish or of Irish descent. The rosters of the enlisted Irishmen of the New York regiments run into the thousands. Hundreds of Irish soldiers suffered in the prison ships of New York, the horrors of which served so conspicuously to stimulate American determination to carry the war to the only rightful conclusion. Washington always recognized America's debt to the Irish. "St. Patrick" he made the watchword in the patriot lines the night before the English evacuated Boston forever on the memorable 17th of March, 1776. After the war he was made, with his own consent, an honorary member of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. Major-General Richard Butler and his four brothers, all officers, and Brigadier-Generals John Armstrong, William Irvine, William Thompson, James Smith, and Griffith Rutherford all fought with distinction. All of these officers were Irish-born. It was in truth an Irish war, so far as Irish sentiment and whole-hearted service could make it. The record of Irish soldiers' names alone would fill volumes.

The thirst of the Irish race for the glory of war is shown in the large enlistments in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and since, in the English army and navy. Grattan, in pleading for Ireland, claimed that a large percentage of the British forces were Irish. Wolfe Tone avers that there were 210 Irishmen out of 220 in the crew of a British frigate that overhauled his ship on its way to America. Bonaparte had in his armies an Irish Legion that did good service in Holland, Spain, Portugal, and Germany. Marshal Clarke, Duke of Feltre, French Minister of War in 1809, was Irish. Up and down the Spanish Peninsula, Irish blood was shed in abundance in the armies of Wellington. Never was more brilliant fighting done than that which stands to Irish credit from the lines of Torres Vedras to Badajos and Toulouse. Of the Waterloo campaign volumes have been written in praise of Irish valor. As Maxwell says in his _Tales of Waterloo_:--"The victors of Marengo and Austerlitz reeled before the charge of the Connaught Rangers." Wellington himself was Irish, as in the later wars of England Lord Gough, Lord Wolseley, Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener, and General French came from Ireland. The Irish soldiers in the English service by a pitiful irony of fate helped materially to fasten the chains of English domination on the peoples of India in a long series of wars.

In America, the War of 1812 once more gave opportunity to the Fighting Race. The commanding figure of the war, which opened so inauspiciously for the United States, was General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans, and afterwards twice elected President of the United States. "Old Hickory", as he came to be lovingly called, was proud of his Irish father, and sympathized with the national longings of the Irish people. He was a splendid soldier, and his defeat of the English general, Pakenham, on January 8, 1815, which meant the control of the mouths of the Mississippi, as well as safeguarding the city of New Orleans, reflected the highest credit on his skill and unflagging energy. The English had superior numbers, between 8,000 and 9,000 men, against a scant 6,000 under Jackson, and their force was made up of veterans of the European wars. In command of the left of his line Jackson placed the gallant general William Carroll, born in Philadelphia, but of Irish blood, who was afterwards twice governor of Tennessee. The British general made the mistake of despising the soldier value of his enemy, yet before evening of that day he saw his artillery silenced and his lines broken, as he died of a wound on the field. The battle was actually fought after the signing of the treaty of peace at Ghent; it annihilated British pretensions in this part of the world, anyway.