August 2004 Newsletter
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IN TIGHTS - THE BATTLE OF THE BOYNE 1690
On a warm and sunny summer afternoon, I am walking across the River
Boyne at Oldbridge, County Louth, when I chance upon an old codger
taking his hound for a stroll. We strike up a conversation, about
a ruined shell of a house just up the way. He tells me it used to
belong to a fellow known as "Pope" Heaney on account of
his having been a Guard to the Pope during the Great War. He says
it's a funny thing to have a Papal Guard living so close to the
obelisk they erected for William the Orange in 1732. But then one
evening in June 1923, some Republicans arrived and took "Pope"
Heaney away for the night and when he got back next day, the obelisk
was no more. "That's where they had the big battle", the
old fellow tells me, pointing to a field nearby. "Up in ta
bog beyant". It's always strange getting to grips with battlefields.
Looking out across the quiet meadowy banks of the Boyne, sparrows
twittering in the hawthorn bushes, yellow buttercups swaying in
the grass, thinking so, hmmmm, this is where it all happened, musket
shot, blinding smoke, clash of swords, screams of agony, red blood
seeping into the soil.But, for me, the peace and the birdsong hit
the spot. A moment for contemplation.
The Battle of the Boyne was indeed a monumental scrap. It took place
at Oldbridge on the banks of the Boyne outside Drogheda on July
1st 1690 (July 12th if you follow the new calendar, as the drum-banging
marching bands of Ulster's Loyalists are wont to do). The armies
were led by King Billy, then William, Prince of Orange and King
of Britain, and James Stuart, the deposed King of England, Scotland,
Ireland and Wales. This battle was a showdown between two enormous
spiritual beliefs competing for the domination of Christian Europe,
Catholicism and Protestantism. That's one way of looking at it.
Another is that a bunch of closely related beardless monarchs with
multi-coloured frocks, high-heeled shoes, skimpy tights and long,
girly hair down to their belly-buttons just didn't like each other.
A BIT ABOUT KING JAMES ...
Born in October 1633, James Stuart was the second son of King Charles
I and his French wife, Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV, the
fun-loving Bourbon monarch who brought France out of its religious
civil wars only to be assassinated by a fanatical schoolteacher
in May 1610. Educated and raised as a Protestant during the hard
times of England's Civil War, James was just 16 years old when Cromwell's
Republicans captured his shy, egotistical father and axed his head
off at Whitehall in January 1649. James fled to Catholic France
to join his elder brother Charles Stuart and the other Royalist
leaders, and there they remained for the duration of Cromwell's
Interregnum.
Following the collapse of Cromwell's Republic in 1660, James's 30
year old brother was installed as King Charles II. He was quite
a sound chap, Charles II, a Protestant by name but an enlightened
reveller, randy Casanova and all-round cultural party animal by
nature. Unfortunately he didn't have any sons so, on his death in
1685, the kingdom fell to James, a rather serious fellow who'd by
now fallen passionately in love with all things Catholic. This created
a tricky situation. England had been to-ing and fro-ing 'twixt Catholicism
and Protestantism since the 1530s when Henry VIII told the Pope
to get stuffed and married Anne Boleyn. By the time Charles II took
to the throne, most Englishmen felt that being a Prod was better
than being a Catholic.
So when 52 year old James ascended that same throne in February
1685 and started babbling about bringing the suppressed Catholics
back into the mainstream, discontent arose among the higher ranks
once again. To begin with, most people thought James would come
to. He had proved himself a capable admiral of the British fleet
when, as the Duke of York, he oversaw an expansion programme that
was to make Britain the most formidable naval power in the world
for the next 250 years.
When his fleet captured the port of New Amsterdam from the Dutch,
the port was renamed New York in his honour. And he was, after all,
the brother of Charles II, as popular a king as there has ever been
in England's turbulent history. During his first parliament in 1685,
James was given more money to play with than any English sovereign
had received since Queen Elizabeth the previous century. And when
Charles II's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, attempted to
take the throne by force that summer, nobody supported the rebellion.
(James had his handsome 36-year-old nephew swiftly executed at the
Tower of London). I guess the English people were hoping James would
kick back and take his brother's calm and flexible approach to being
king of the castle. James had different ideas. He was convinced
Catholicism was the way to go and, moreover, felt the only means
of protecting the realm from another Cromwell style revolution was
to establish a hardcore authoritarian regime. He began appointing
loyal Catholics to high positions in the army, local government
and civil service; when his Protestant parliament objected, he told
them all to sod off.
In January 1687, he dismissed the leading Protestants from his Court
and appointed the deeply unpopular Earl of Tyrconnell - a Catholic
- Lord Deputy of Ireland. A few months later, he kicked all the
Prods out of Oxford University and turned it into a Catholic institution.
In April, advised by the Cork-born Quaker leader William Penn, he
shocked the nation by suspending the Penal Laws that had kept Catholics
in check since Elizabeth's clampdown over a hundred years earlier.
James was on a roll. He dissolved his gob-smacked parliament and
then called for a new one, making sure that there was good loyal
Catholic candidates spread across the length and breadth of the
country. Within less than 30 months, it looked like the 150-year
struggle to eliminate Catholicism from the British Isles had come
to nowt. The Protestants were in a terrible pickle. For a while
they consoled themselves with the fact that James's two daughters
by his first marriage, Anne and Mary, were good Prods and the latter,
heiress to the throne, was married to a thoroughly good Prod from
the Netherlands called William. But then James's new wife, a French
Catholic called Mary of Modena, got a tubby belly and James was
suddenly running around in great heart talking of how this time
it'd surely be a boy and a Catholic boy at that and how, at long
last, the re-catholicisation of the British Isles was nearing completion.
Things were looking drastic for the Protestants. And then, as so
often happens, the pendulum began to swing the other way. James
pushed it too far. He locked up seven Anglican bishops in the Tower
of London because they'd refused to stand up in front of their congregations
and tell everyone Catholicism was a thoroughly Good Thing and should
never have been suppressed. When the courts acquitted the Bishops
and the public went on a celebratory rampage, the Prods realised
James's pro-Catholic antics were going down like a lead balloon
(or an Annesley) with a lot of people. The Queen dutifully delivered
a bouncing baby boy on 10th June 1688 and christened him James Edward
Stuart. Figuring that this hairless heir to the throne was going
to be humming the Te Deum Laudamus in Latin before he could walk,
the Prods decided it was time to take action. It might be over the
top to have two revolutions in the space of fifty years but, hey,
would Britain have been called 'Great' if they hadn't assassinated
the occasional monarch here and there? On 30th June 1688, the day
the Bishops were acquitted, a group of seven men - military officers,
aristocrats, politicians and bishops - sent an invitation across
the Channel to the Netherlands and cordially invited William of
Orange and his wife Mary Stuart (James's tall and beautiful eldest
daughter) to cross the Channel and take the throne. William replied
that he'd love to. Would the autumn suit?
A BIT ABOUT KING BILLY ...
It is perhaps a measure of just how unpopular James had become that
the leading men of his kingdom settled on a short, asthmatic, bisexual,
hunch-backed 48 year old Dutchman named Billy as the solution to
their woes. But there you have it, it takes all sorts and Billy
was certainly a very good soldier. More importantly, he was a Prod
and a staunch, well-connected Prod at that.
Born in November 1650 a week after his father, William II of Orange,
the Stadholder of Holland, died of smallpox, his mother was Mary
Stuart, daughter of King Charles I of Britain and thus a sister
of Charles II and the above-named James II. The fact Billy went
on to marry his Uncle James's daughter, another Mary Stuart, in
1677 is indicative of just how incestuous the European Royalty were
in these strange old days. At the age of 22, Calvinist - educated
Billy was appointed head of the Netherlands and entrusted with the
task of strengthening Dutch Protestant resistance to the expansionist
aims of Louis XIV's Catholic France. Billy had a gift for languages
- Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish and Latin - and he had
a gift for command. Within less than a decade he'd kicked the French
out of his country, made peace with Charles II's Britain and secured
a Grand Alliance with the major European Protestant powers. The
Dutch Parliament liked his style. When, come 1689, he told them
of his plan to take the throne of Britain from his Catholic uncle
/ father-in-law, they whooped with joy and granted him plenty enough
ships and soldiers to do the job. THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION When James
got wind that Billy and his Orangemen were on their way across the
Channel, he sat up straight and panicked, running around like a
wild thing trying to patch things up. He made Oxford Protestant
again, reappointed Prods to prominent positions in his court, the
army, the civil service, cancelled commissions, called off the election,
apologised for his erratic behaviour, said he'd been having a hard
time, kind of tricky getting it right when your father's executed
when you were only sweet 16, any chance of a second chance, my Friends,
my Countrymen ... no, it was too late.
King Billy landed at Torbay in Devon in mid November 1688 and immediately
advanced on London, emboldened by the news of pro-Dutch uprisings
breaking out across the English Midlands. John Churchill (later
the Duke of Marlborough) and Princess Anne were among those defecting
from James's court to join the Williamite retinue. To keep it brief,
James didn't stand a chance. Billy allowed him to 'escape' to France
a few nights before Christmas 1688 and take some time out with his
first cousin, Louis XIV, at the brand new palace of Versailles.
On 13th Feb 1689, the Bill of Rights confirmed the abdication of
King James II and the accession of King William and Queen Mary.
For the record, this event is known as the Glorious Revolution.
THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN IRELAND But our James wasn't a quitter.
In March 1689, he landed on the south coast of Ireland with a large
Franco-Irish army and a cunning plan. His mission was to oust the
Protestant settlers brought into the country by Cromwell fifty years
earlier and restore the lands to the original Catholic owners. The
idea was, get rid of the settlers and all Ireland, good Catholics
that they were, would surely rise to join James and depose Dutch
Billy from the throne. James and his army did quite well for a while
and then they didn't do very well at all. Their failure to capture
the Protestant strongholds of Londonderry and Enniskillen prompted
Billy to send a highly disciplined army of Danish and Dutch mercenaries
across the sea to Belfast Lough under the command of the very able
80 year old General Schomberg in the spring of 1690.
On Sunday June 28th, James's 25,000-strong army of Catholics (known
as the Jacobites) crossed the River Boyne and set up camp in a field
and James set up his HQ in the Church on Donore Hill. A few days
later, Billy himself arrived in the neighbourhood with 36,000 well-equipped,
experienced Protestant soldiers (known as the Williamites) and came
to a halt in the hills and glens around the ancient Cistercian HQ
of Mellifont Abbey. The setting for the battle couldn't have been
more suitable if they tried. The Boyne Valley has been pivotal to
Irish history from the word go. This golden triangle is where our
ancient pagan forefathers constructed the burial chambers of Newgrange,
Dowth and Knowth. 2000 years later, the High Kings selected the
Hill of Tara as the site of Ireland's Royal Palace. In the 5th century,
Saint Paddy figured that if Christianity was to get off the ground
in Ireland, Royal Meath would have to be won and so he made a beeline
for the Hill of Slane and there lit the Paschal Fire. In 1142 AD,
the Cistercian monks chose Mellifont as their base camp for the
introduction of community monasticism into Ireland. And now, 550
years on, the Kings of Europe were meeting in the Boyne Valley to
decide the spiritual fate of their kingdoms. With nearly 70,000
men preparing to kill one another in hand-to-hand combat, the two
commanders honourably decided there must be some form of uniform
to distinguish the two teams as it were. Billy's boys were to wear
sprigs of green leaves in their cloaks; James's were to wear white
pieces of paper of the French White Cockade style. The teams took
positions on either side of the River Boyne and regarded one another.
This being a European conflict, the forces consisted of Irish, English,
Welsh, Dutch, French Huguenots, French Catholics, Belgian, Swiss,
Danes, Prussians, Bavarians and Flemish Walloons. I assume the babble
was only ferocious. Badges on, chaps? All set? Jolly good. On my
command, unleash Hell. Chaaaaaaarge! As it happened, Billy scored
the winning goal when he split his army in two and sent a decoy
force of 10,000 men to Rossnaree, near Slane. Watching from the
south side of the river, James figured the entire battleground must
be shifting up the way and duly sent the bulk of his army off to
see what was going on. Not missing a beat, Billy whipped out his
trump card - 26,000 more soldiers hiding in a wooded ravine beneath
Mellifont, known ever since as King William's Glen - who crossed
the river at Oldbridge at low tide, tip-toed up behind the Jacobites
and yelled out "Boo!" Caught off guard and stuck in a
bog, James's forces were forced to retreat, fighting a rearguard
action all the way to Duleek. The casualties weren't high by the
standards of the day - Billy lost 500 men, James about 1500. (Compare
that to the 9000 who died at the decisive battle of Aughrim, County
Galway, a year later). Nonetheless, counting the corpses that littered
the Boyne Valley at day's end, Billy couldn't have been sure
that victory was his. For one thing, the Jacobites had managed to
kill his commander, General Schomberg, as he crossed the main ford
at Oldbridge. And they'd nearly managed to whack Billy himself,
nicked him in the shoulder while he was on a pre-battle recce mission.
What sealed it though was James taking a long look at the entire
situation, deciding sod this for a game of soldiers, bailing south
to Waterford and hopping a ship to France a few days later, where
Louis XIV said "there, there, me boy" and gave him an
annual pension of a million livres. AND NOBODY LIVED HAPPILY EVER
AFTER Billy and Mary ruled Britain for the remainder of the 17th
century. Young Mary, whom Billy truly loved, died of small pox in
late December 1694 without providing a son and heir. Billy spent
the last years of his life engaged in a European conflict against
the increasingly ambitious Sun King, Louis XIV of France. When Louis
inherited the Spanish Empire in 1698, Billy found himself at the
head of an international coalition determined to bring France to
its knees. He never got the chance to prove his worth. While testing
a new horse in London's Richmond Park, he slipped and broke his
collar-bone. Confined to bed he caught a chill and died, aged 52,
at Kensington Palace on 19th March 1702. In the absence of any children,
he was succeeded by his 37-year-old sister-in-law, the Protestant
Princess Anne, James's younger daughter, last of the Stuart dynasty.
James had died in France 6 months earlier, a despondent and deeply
confused 68-year-old man, unable to comprehend why Britain and his
own daughters had betrayed him. The thing is, like his headless
father before him, James was 100% convinced he'd been divinely appointed
to the throne by God, that he was God's agent on earth. So he couldn't
figure out why God had let that throne be taken from him. At any
rate, he never returned to the British Isles and that was the end
of the Jacobite cause in the British Isles ... well, until his son,
James Edward Stuart, the "Old Pretender" made a grab for
the throne in 1715, and then there was the grandson, Bonnie Prince
Charlie, who took a shot in 1745 ... but that's another story. TB©
until this time next month...
Best Wishes,
Conor B & Turtle.