HARMAN MURTAGH and DIARMUID MURTAGH
Four Courts Press
€45
ISBN 9781801511216
Reviewed by David Murphy
The Williamite Wars (1688–91) were a seminal series of events in Irish history and they have been the focus of much historical writing in the centuries since. It would be true to say that the Battle of the Boyne (1690) was the Irish equivalent of the American Civil War battle at Gettysburg (1863) in terms of its magnitude and impact, and that it has a similar sense of historic enormity within Irish history and cultural memory. The defeat of the Jacobite army was a watershed moment that set the future trajectory of Irish history and marked yet another reverse for the Catholic cause. Thousands of words have been written on that conflict, on particular battles and personalities, and even on the armies involved. None of these works has achieved the level of forensic detail of this volume. This book represents the definitive history of the Irish Jacobite army and, in the realm of Irish military history, it is hard to believe that a more important book will be published this year.
The Irish Jacobite army represents the published output of decades of research by Harman and Diarmuid Murtagh, followed by an intense and stringent writing process. Both names will be well known to those interested in Irish military history in general, and to members of the Military History Society of Ireland in particular. Harman Murtagh has published widely on the Williamite Wars in book and journal form, and was a consultant during the development of the Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre. It would be difficult to find scholars more deeply immersed in the history and sources of that period in Irish history.
The army of James II in Ireland, usually referred to as the Irish Jacobite army, was the main force in opposition to William III’s military expedition. As such, it has been addressed to some degree by many scholars in the past. These treatments have ranged from John Child’s discussion of the Irish Jacobite army in The Williamite Wars in Ireland, 1688–91 (2008) to Micheal McNally’s precise summary in his Battle of the Boyne, 1690: the Irish campaign for the English Crown (2005). In the context of this book, it is safe to say that no other authors have deconstructed the Irish Jacobite army in the same level of detail.
This book is hugely ambitious in its remit, and it has managed to examine its subject in both width and depth, while also supplying the wider context. It serves as a model of how military organisations can be examined in an intelligent and useful way. For many, military history is seen as the study of badges and buttons, and as the pastime of ‘rivet-counters’ who like to discuss the merits of various Second World War tanks. As a subdiscipline, military history is, of course, much more. Apart from its operational aspects, military history is the study of the most negative and destructive elements in human society and politics. War has a profoundly negative impact on humanity and, as a result, it is a phenomenon that needs to be studied. At its most useful, military history analyses the root causes of conflict and the motivations of the main belligerents, and that purpose is implicit in this book.
This volume has a wealth of detail on the organisation of the Irish Jacobite army, but embedded within this are higher conceptual discussions on the quality and motivation of troops, the personalities of commanders and the conduct of an army on campaign. The noted strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz introduced us to the concepts of the ‘Nature and Character of War’ in his seminal work on strategy, On war (1832). The character of war, Clausewitz argued, is changeable and is formed by a combination of political, social and technological factors. But the fundamental nature of war, a murderous combination of human emotion, violence, change and uncertainty, remains the same. The Murtaghs capture this sense and set it in the context of the seventeenth century. Within the violence and political chaos of the Williamite Wars lie many of the elements that are eternal to the nature of war. Ultimately, the contest between James II and William of Orange was a political power struggle in which both sides sought international support, assembled a team of élites and then tried to control elements of the population for mass support. As an incidence of political collapse and subsequent conflict, it holds many useful lessons for us today.
The Irish Jacobite army is organised in thirteen chapters and runs to over 400 pages. Some of these chapters are devoted to discussing the wider context of the war, while others outline the organisation of various elements of the Irish Jacobite army. These include chapters on the organisation and composition of the army’s infantry, cavalry, artillery and engineer units and also the command staff. As we might expect, these chapters discuss issues such as recruitment, training, equipment and uniform. But these discussions go much deeper and there is an examination of diverse subjects such as rates of desertion, discipline issues, the ‘camp-follower’ contingent, food and rations, and the supply of cavalry and artillery horses. In the changing character of seventeenth-century warfare, the role of both artillery and engineers was becoming more prominent, and the Murtaghs discuss this growing level of professionalisation as these elements were incorporated into the army. The discussion of the command staff is particularly interesting, with defined sections on specific commanders such as Patrick Sarsfield and the Marquis de Saint-Ruth, analysing their respective merits and qualities as commanders. Collectively, these chapters dismiss the often superficial assessment of the Irish Jacobite army as some form of enthusiastic but largely amateur military organisation. This book would suggest that James II’s army was formed along the standard lines of Continental armies of the time and that its commanders were well aware of emerging military trends.
Obviously, there is much discussion of how these various branches of the Irish Jacobite army would be deployed in a tactical sense, and the Murtaghs do an excellent job of explaining how seventeenth-century armies operated on the battlefield. In some ways, however, it is the examination of the wider ‘war and society’ themes that are more interesting. Within this discussion, the social and political systems, and how these affected the various participants within the army, are effectively unpacked. Chapter 12, ‘Backgrounds and Beliefs’, examines the composition of the officer class, the background and formation of this cohort and their motivations and beliefs. In 1962 Karl Demeter published his seminal volume The German officer-corps in society and state, 1650–1945, in which he outlined a new series of methodologies for examining military officer groups and their interaction with the mechanisms of society and state. Demeter’s work served as an inspiration for a new phase of research on military officer cohorts, their motivations and their qualities as leaders. The published output on this subject has included the classic work by John Keegan, The mask of command (1987), Roger R. Reese’s Red commanders: a social history of the Soviet army officer corps, 1918–1991 (2005) and the more recent work by Evan Wilson, A social history of British naval officers, 1775–1815 (2017), among many others. We are often slow in Ireland to recognise new historiographical trends and it is refreshing to see these methodologies being applied to the officer class of the Irish Jacobite army.
There is also discussion of the French connection, with Chapter 9 being devoted to the significant level of support provided by Louis XIV to James II’s army in Ireland. For Louis, the campaign in Ireland represented an interesting and potentially useful adjunct to his wider European strategy and his campaign against Britain. This chapter outlines the French involvement and the senior figures within that, while discussing the difficult question of securing lines of communication to facilitate resupply from France. For Louis, this was a question of whether he could engage in ‘power projection’ into Ireland. In the long term, the activities of the British Royal Navy, combined with the impact of wider Bourbon strategic decisions, would impede the flow of further men, matériel and money to Ireland. This chapter is based on an interesting selection of sources, including published contemporary material such as the three-volume Franco-Irish correspondence, December 1688–February 1692 edited by Sheila Mulloy (Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin, 1983–4). One cannot help but feel that further engagement with the substantial body of material in French archives on this subject, in particular the archives at the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes, could have expanded the remit of this chapter considerably.
Nevertheless, this is a very complete and scholarly study that examines the largest formation of Irish soldiers to see battle prior to the twentieth century, and it does so in impressive and granular detail. To some extent it also throws down a historical gauntlet: could these methodologies not be applied to other Irish military formations? Kjeld Hald Galster’s Danish troops in the Williamite army in Ireland, 1689–91 (2012) examined a distinct cohort within that army, but a comprehensive study of the Williamite army, based on a similar format to that used by the Murtaghs, must surely now be needed. There are various other forces that campaigned in Ireland, as well as Irish forces that served abroad, that would benefit from a similar treatment. These could include Oliver Cromwell’s army during his campaign in Ireland in 1649 and the Irish regiments in French service in the eighteenth century. In recent months there has been discussion about the redevelopment of the Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre and its possible incorporation into a wider national park, associated with other significant sites in the Boyne Valley. Surely this is an ideal opportunity to develop a new definitive history of the battle, perhaps in the form of an ‘official’ history? In the development of official history series, Ireland is behind best practice across the EU.
Any new project focusing on the Battle of the Boyne could also employ the methodologies of conflict archaeology, to re-examine the key sites of action and perhaps find some of the graves of the dead of the battle, which are estimated to be around 2,000 in number. Similar conflict archaeology work at the battlefield of Waterloo has not only redefined our understanding of that battle but has also recently discovered some of the dead, who had lain in forgotten graves for over 200 years.
In itself, the Murtaghs’ Irish Jacobite army offers us a new and definitive account of a crucially important Irish military formation, and as such it is hugely to be welcomed. In a wider sense, the methodologies employed in developing this book offer many ideas that could be used in a new and wider reinterpretation of Ireland’s military history.
David Murphy is the director of the MA in Military History and Strategic Studies at Maynooth University.