To this letter the Spaniard replied—
“Sir,—I received your Excellency’s letter of to-day’s date, and regarding the trench which has been opened as you say to attack the city of Gibraltar, I hereby answer, that what has been done has been on our own ground, to fortify those places where our batteries might be of good service, and as there belongs nothing to that fortress beyond its fortifications, as appears by the very treaties your Excellency alludes to; and your Excellency having taken possession of the towers within our jurisdiction, your Excellency may be fully assured that unless they are immediately abandoned I will act in the manner your Excellency insinuates to me, acquainting you at the same time that for besieging the fortress works less distant will be constructed, as you will learn in due time.
“Count das Torres.
“Campo de Gibraltar, February 22nd 1727.”
This truculent answer clearly meant war, and so Clayton understood it; but anxious to do nothing to precipitate hostilities, he contented himself for the moment with firing one shot over the battery as an intimation that work must cease. For an hour he held his hand: then, as the Spaniards wholly disregarded the warning, his guns opened upon them. Thus commenced the second of the series of sieges in which British troops have successfully defended Gibraltar against heavy, sometimes well-nigh overwhelming odds. The first, begun a few months after our capture of the Rock, lasted from October, 1704, to April, 1705; the second continued from the 22nd of February till the 23rd of June, 1727; the third, or Great Siege, lasted nearly four years, from the 16th of July, 1779, to the 5th of February, 1783.
In 1727, the Spaniards attacked from the land side only; their navy took no part in the operations, which were exclusively directed against the North Front and the defences of the Rock from the extremity of the old Mole to Willis’s Battery. At the beginning of the siege the garrison had only sixty guns in position, the heaviest being 32-prs., and as “most of the ordnance was old and worn out, more casualties occurred from the bursting of guns than from the enemy’s fire.”[69] The Spaniards, on the other hand, brought into action ninety-two guns and seventy-two mortars, many of them the best and most modern of their day. De las Torres lost no time in opening his trenches. During the night of February 22nd-23rd five battalions of infantry, a brigade of engineers, and a thousand peasants started work on the first parallel, which ran from the Devil’s Tower on the eastern beach along the base of the Rock to the inundation. Next night two thousand of the enemy were moved northwards into ground dead to the guns of the batteries, but not to those of two British men-of-war which, under cover of the darkness, had anchored off the east of the isthmus connecting the fortress with the mainland, or, in other words, the neutral ground. As soon as it was light the sailors brought their guns to bear upon these troops, raking their ranks from end to end, while from the top of the Rock the soldiers hurled down upon the Spaniards live shell, hand-grenades, and stones. The enemy retreated in confusion and with great loss, but de las Torres, after driving away the men-of-war by an overwhelming artillery fire, threw up batteries so completely commanding the anchorage on the east of the isthmus that further flanking attacks of this nature became impossible. Under a heavy cannonade from the garrison, the Spaniards worked without intermission, and in spite of heavy and continuous rain which flooded their trenches and produced much sickness among their men, gradually completed and unmasked many formidable batteries, some of which were within a hundred yards of the Rock.
Throughout the month of March, before further reinforcements began to arrive from England and Minorca, the British troops suffered greatly from fatigue. The guards and piquets were very heavy, absorbing a daily average of 1200 rank and file, and a thousand men were constantly occupied in mounting guns and strengthening the defences. These working parties were commanded by officers of the line, who were struck off all other duty and received half a crown a-day extra pay. The men also drew sixpence a-day extra, and “were assisted by the Jews, who were employed in taking ammunition to the batteries and clearing the ditch of the rubbish beaten down from the upper works by the enemy’s shot; these unfortunate Israelites received no pay, and for some time were utterly useless, being paralysed with terror when under fire.”[70] Some of them, perhaps to revenge themselves for this forced labour, joined in a conspiracy among the “undesirable” element in the civil population to open the gates to the enemy. The plot was discovered, and punished in the rigorous fashion of the day—two Moors, the chief agents of the Spaniards, were put to death, and after their bodies had been flayed the skins were nailed to the gates of the fortress as an object lesson on the penalties of unsuccessful treachery.
The elements during the siege were strongly in favour of the British, for such deluges of rain fell in April that the Spaniards’ trenches again became untenable and their cover was destroyed. Until the damage could be made good the opening of the great bombardment was necessarily postponed, and during the respite two battalions arrived from home on the 7th of April, and a fortnight later four transports, escorted by the Sole Bay, brought five hundred troops, detachments from the corps stationed in Minorca. How many men the Royal Irish contributed is not known; but as Cosby, their colonel, was in command of the whole contingent, it is natural to suppose that the regiment was largely represented. England’s command of the sea enabled her to reinforce at will, and in the beginning of May two more battalions reached Gibraltar from home, raising the strength of the garrison to about 5500 non-commissioned officers and men. With them came Lord Portmore, the Governor, who was on leave when the siege began: though quite an old man he had refused to plead his age and infirmities as an excuse for evading his duty, and now returned to take his share in the defence. As soon as the Spaniards had finished their batteries and mounted their guns, they opened a tremendous artillery fire, which was kept up for fourteen days without intermission. During every hour of this time seven hundred projectiles were hurled against our works, and to use the words of an eyewitness, “we seemed to live in flames.... Attempts feeble in comparison to the resistless storm of shot and shell that tore over the walls of the fortress, were made to check this murderous fire in vain, guns were everywhere dismounted, and as quickly as they were replaced were again destroyed. In vain the men with dauntless courage threw themselves upon the ramparts and worked to repair the shattered parapets, the heavy shot tore away whole tons of earth and buried the guns beneath the ruins. Butts filled with sand and bound with fascines were heaped together as some covering from the artillery, but they were no sooner in position than they were swept away.”[71]
The strain of this bombardment, said to have been greater than any recorded in the previous history of artillery, proved more than the Spanish ordnance could stand. By the 20th of May the brass guns began to droop at the muzzle, the iron guns to burst, and ammunition to run short. Gradually the enemy’s fire died down, and when there were but nineteen pieces left in action against them the British restored their shattered works, and mounting thirteen new guns and more than a hundred mortars poured upon the Spaniards a storm of projectiles almost equalling that which had scourged the defenders of the Rock. By dint of tremendous exertions a hundred guns were placed in position at the beginning of June, and then the tables were turned, for this mass of ordnance opened upon the Spaniards with such a crash that not a single gun was able to reply; the trenches became a heap of ruins; the parapets of the batteries took fire, and the magazines blew up. The first day’s cannonade drove the enemy from their forts, and gradually the whole line of works was completely knocked to pieces. On the 23rd of June the news reached Gibraltar that a suspension of hostilities had been arranged between the Governments of England and Spain: all fighting then ceased; the soldiers had played their part, and it was now for the diplomatists to settle the differences between their respective countries. The British losses were remarkably small. Five officers were killed or wounded; in the other ranks 69 were killed; 49 died from wounds or disease, and 207 were wounded. It is not known how many of the XVIIIth were injured, as the casualties of the Minorca contingent are given as a whole. To the Spanish army, on the other hand, the siege proved very costly. Fifteen officers were killed, 42 wounded: of the other ranks 346 were killed, 1119 were wounded, and more than 5000 died of sickness or were permanently invalided by the hardships they had undergone. No less than 875 Spaniards deserted during the siege, some of whom surrendered to our piquets and brought much useful information to the Intelligence officers of the garrison.
When the siege was over, the detachment of the XVIIIth rejoined headquarters at Minorca, where the regiment remained until 1742. Nothing would have been known of the life of the Royal Irish during this period had not copies been preserved of a curious correspondence between Major Gillman, who was in command, and Major-General Armstrong, the Colonel of the regiment.[72] The officers were greatly disturbed at the quality of the recruits received from home, and Gillman in 1729 thus reports on a recently joined draft of sixteen men. “They are the worst I ever saw; two of them the officers would not draw for: one of them wanting above half of his right foot, the other having his backbone and ribs of both sides distorted in a prodigious manner, by which means he is an object of compassion, both of which are to be sent back to England at the expense of the person that recruited them.”