CHAPTER VII
William’s Assault on Limerick Repulsed with Slaughter—Heroism of the Irish Women—Irish Humanity to the English Wounded
WILLIAM was not discouraged by the loss of his siege material. He found that two of the cannon captured by Sarsfield had failed to explode. Some heavy pieces, with mortars, also reached him, within a few days, from Waterford, and these, with the ordnance he had brought with him from Dublin, made a formidable array of breach-producing engines. The siege, accordingly, was vigorously pressed, as against the Irishtown and King’s Island, but hardly any demonstration was made against the Clare section, connected with Limerick by Thomond bridge, probably because of the loss of the pontoon train.
The Irish soldiery and the citizens of Limerick, encouraged by De Boisseleau, Berwick, and Sarsfield, had made considerable improvement in the defences of Limerick before William came up, and, even after his arrival, continued to repair the breaches made in the walls by his cannon. Their batteries vigorously replied to those of the enemy, although much inferior in number and weight of metal, and the Williamites suffered quite heavy losses in officers and rank and file. The Irish leaders had sent many non-combatants to the safer side of the Shannon, but most of the women refused to leave and worked at the earthworks like the men. Many of them were killed by the English fire while so occupied.
At last, on the morning of August 27, the Williamite engineers declared the breach in the neighborhood of St. John’s Gate and the Black Battery on the south side of the town practicable. Some authorities say it was twelve yards wide, and others, including Thomas Davis, one of Ireland’s most accurate writers, six perches, which would make quite a difference. Five hundred British grenadiers, drawn from the right flank companies of the line regiments, as was then and for long afterward the custom, constituted the forlorn hope. Their immediate reserves were a battalion of the Blue Dutch Guards—the heroes of the Boyne—and the regiments of Douglas, Stuart, Meath, Lisburn, and Brandenburg. The whole army stood ready to support these picked troops. The signal, three cannon shots, was given from Cromwell’s Fort, where William witnessed the operation, at 3.30 P.M. Story tells us the day was torrid. The orders to the stormers were to seize the Irish counterscarp—the exterior slope of the ditch—and maintain it. The assault was delivered with great spirit, the grenadiers leaping out of their trenches, advancing at a run, firing their pieces and throwing their hand grenades among the Irish in the works. The attack was fierce and sudden—almost in the nature of a surprise—but the Irish met it boldly, for, says Chaplain Story, in his thrilling narrative of the event, “they had their guns all ready and discharged great and small shot on us as fast as ‘twas possible. Our men were not behind them in either, so that, in less than two minutes, the noise was so terrible that one would have thought the very skies ready to rent in sunder. This was seconded with dust, smoke, and all the terrors the art of man could invent to ruin and undo one another; and, to make it more uneasie, the day itself was so excessive hot to the bystanders, and much more, sure, in all respects to those upon action. Captain Carlile, of my Lord Drogheda’s regiment, ran on with his grenadiers to the counterscarp, and tho’ he received two wounds between that and the trenches, yet he went forward and commanded his men to throw in their grenades, but in the leaping into the dry ditch below the counterscarp an Irishman below shot him dead. Lieutenant Barton, however, encouraged the men and they got upon the counterscarp, and all the rest of the grenadiers were as ready as they.”
It would seem that, at this point of the attack, some of the Irish soldiers began to draw off and made for the breach, which the Williamites entered with them. Half of the Drogheda regiment and some others actually got into the town. The city seemed nearly won, as the supports came up promptly to the assistance of their comrades. But the Irish troops rallied immediately and fell vehemently on their pursuers. These, in their turn, retreated from the breach, “but some were shot, some were taken, and some came out again, but very few without being wounded.” The Williamite chaplain thus describes the outcome, still preserving his tone of contemptuous hatred of the brave Irish soldiery: “The Irish then ventured (sic) upon the breach again, and from the walls and every place so pestered us upon the counterscarp, that after nigh three hours resisting bullets, stones (broken bottles from the very women, who boldly stood in the breach and were nearer our men than their own), and whatever ways could be thought on to destroy us, our ammunition being spent, it was judged safest to return to our trenches! When the work was at the hottest, the Brandenburg regiment (who behaved themselves very well) were got upon the Black Battery, where the enemies’ powder happened to take fire and blew up a great many of them, the men, fagots, stones, and what not flying into the air with a most terrible noise.... From half an hour after three, until after seven, there was one continued fire of both great and small shot, without any intermission; in so much that the smoke that went from the town reached in one continued cloud to the top of a mountain [Keeper Hill, most likely] at least six miles off. When our men drew off, some were brought up dead, and some without a leg; others wanted arms, and some were blind with powder; especially a great many of the poor Brandenburgers looked like furies, with the misfortune of gunpowder.... The king [William] stood nigh Cromwell’s Fort all the time, and the business being over, he went to his camp very much concerned, as, indeed, was the whole army; for you might have seen a mixture of anger and sorrow in every bodie’s countenance. The Irish had two small field-pieces planted in the King’s Island, which flankt their own counterscarp, and in our attack did us no small damage, as did, also, two guns more that they had planted within the town, opposite to the breach and charged with cartridge shot.
“We lost, at least, five hundred on the spot, and had a thousand more wounded, as I understood by the surgeons of our hospitals, who are the properest judges. The Irish lost a great many by our cannon and other ways, but it can not be supposed that their loss should be equal to ours, since it is a much easier thing to defend walls than ’tis by plain strength to force people from them, and one man within has the advantage of four without.”
Mr. Story acknowledges fifty-nine officers of the English regiments engaged killed and wounded. Fifteen died upon the ground and several afterward of their injuries. “The Grenadiers are not here included,” continues the English annalist, “and they had the hottest service; nor are there any of the foreigners, who lost full as many as the English.”
We have quoted this English authority, prejudiced though he was, because the testimony of an eye-witness is much more valuable than the allegations of writers who give their information at second hand. We may add, however, that all Irish historians have declared that the Black Battery was mined for such an emergency as destroyed the Brandenburg regiment, and some of them assert that Sarsfield, in person, fired the mine. As he was the Ajax of the campaign, on the Irish side, it seems quite natural that every extraordinary feat of skill or valor should have been credited to him. His own merits made him the idol of his people, and he was farther endeared to them, as being the son of Anna O’More, daughter of the famous organizer of the Irish insurrection of 1641. On the paternal side, he was of Norman stock. His father had been a member of the Irish House of Commons, and was proscribed and exiled because he had sided with the patriots in the Parliamentary wars. General Sarsfield—the rank he held at the first siege of Limerick—had seen hot service on the Continent, during the early part of his career, and commanded a regiment of the royal cavalry at the battle of Sedgemoor, where the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth met with his fatal defeat at the hands of Lord Feversham. In stature, he was tall—considerably over six feet—fair and strikingly handsome. His flowing wig—in the queer fashion of the period—fell in massive ringlets over the corselet of a cuirassier, and, in the rush of battle, he must have been the counterpart of Murat, Napoleon’s “Emperor of Dragoons.” Irish poets have called him “headlong Sarsfield.” “Long-headed Sarsfield” would have been a better sobriquet, for, had his advice been taken by his royal master and the generals sent by the latter to command over him, Ireland would never have bowed her head to the yoke of William. Even the most envenomed of English historians against the adherents of King James—including Lord Macaulay—do ample justice to the courage, talents, and virtues of Patrick Sarsfield.
The heroic women of Limerick, who fought and bled in the breach, are complimented by Chaplain Story, as we have seen, at the expense of their countrymen, but the glorious military record of the Irish race in the wars of Europe and of this continent, since that period, would make any defence of the conduct of the heroes of Limerick-breach superfluous. The women, too, deserve immortal honor; because, in defence of their country and hearthstones, they dared the storm of war, and “stalked with Minerva’s step where Mars might quake to tread.”
The Irish loss in killed and wounded was about four hundred. Many lives, on both sides, were lost by sickness—dysentery and enteric fever chiefly—during this siege. A conservative estimate places William’s loss, by wounds and sickness, at 5,000, and the Irish at 3,000.
The day after his bloody repulse, King William sent a flag of truce to De Boisseleau asking the privilege of burying his dead. After consultation with Berwick and Sarsfield, the French governor refused the request, as he suspected a ruse of some kind behind it. All the dead were buried by the Irish as quickly as possible, because the heat was intense, and, aside from feelings of humanity, they dreaded a plague from the decomposition of the corpses left above ground. We are informed by the late Mr. A. M. Sullivan, M.P., in his admirable “Story of Ireland,” that, during the pursuit by the Irish of King William’s men from the breach to their trenches, the temporary hospital established by the king for his wounded caught fire. The Irish troops immediately paused in their fierce pursuit, and devoted themselves to saving their helpless foes in the hospital, who, otherwise, must have perished miserably in the flames.
King William, after carefully considering the situation, and taking counsel with his chief officers, decided that there was no hope of capturing Limerick that year. Therefore, he declared the siege raised—that is, abandoned—and, on August 30th, the entire Williamite army drew off from before Limerick, posting strong rear-guards at points of vantage, so as to baffle pursuit. The king, leaving Baron De Ginkel in command, retired to Waterford. There he embarked for England, bidding Ireland what proved to be an eternal farewell. Although this gloomy monarch was not quite as ferocious as some of his contemporaries, and was a marked improvement on Cromwell, Ireton, and Ludlow in Ireland, he is charged by careful Irish historians—like McGee, O’Callaghan, and Sullivan—with having, like his lieutenant, General Douglas, permitted many outrages on the people, both in person and property, on his march from Dublin to Limerick. Making due allowance for the difficulty of restraining a mercenary army, filled with hatred of the people they moved among, from committing excesses, it is regrettable that the martial renown of William of Orange is sullied by this charge of cruelty in Ireland, as, afterward, in connection with the foul massacre of the Macdonalds of Glencoe in Scotland. Brave men are rarely cruel, but we fear, in these instances, William was an exception to the rule.
The story of the first defence of Limerick, in the Williamite war, reads like a chapter from a military romance, and yet it was, indeed, a stern and bloody reality. It was, in truth, a magnificent defence against a powerful foe, not surpassed even by that of Saragossa against the French. Limerick, like Saragossa, was defended by the citizens, men and women, quite as much as by the soldiery. All took equal risks, as in the case of Londonderry. The latter was also a brilliant defence—more, however, in the matter of splendid endurance than in hand-to-hand conflict. Londonderry wears the crown for fortitude and tenacity—Limerick and Saragossa for heroic prowess and matchless courage.