Irish Army (1661–1801)

Following the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the late 12th century, large parts of Ireland came under the control of Anglo-Norman lords and the English Crown. This territory became the Lordship of Ireland and the kings of England claimed sovereignty over it as "lords of Ireland". The rest of the island—known as Gaelic Ireland—remained under the control of various native Irish kingdoms and chiefdoms. The English administration, the Anglo-Norman lords and the Irish chiefs each raised their own armies in times of war.

By the 15th century the area of direct English control had shrunk to an area called the Pale, and English rule came under further strain during the rebellion of Thomas FitzGerald, 10th Earl of Kildare in the 1530s.[7] The Fitzgerald family had traditionally been the leading Anglo-Irish lords in the country, serving as Lord Lieutenants. Their rebellion exposed the weakness of Henry VIII's forces in the Lordship, with the rebels securing large gains and besieging Dublin.

In 1542 the Kingdom of Ireland was formally established and Henry VIII of England became King of Ireland. The English then began establishing control over the island. It involved the policy of surrender and regrant, and the colonization of Irish land by Protestant settlers, largely from England. This sparked conflict with various Irish lordships, most notably the Desmond Rebellions and the Nine Years' War. This latter conflict ended in 1603 with English victory over the Irish armies and their Spanish allies. Following the Flight of the Earls (1607), all of Ireland came under the control of the English Crown and its government in Ireland.

The Royal Hospital Kilmainham was established in 1680 for the welfare of former soldiers.

In 1660 Charles was restored to the Irish throne. While the English New Model Army was quickly disbanded after the Restoration, Charles initially retained the large army still stationed in Ireland.[9] It numbered 5,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry, considerably bigger than it had been before the rebellion, and was the largest armed force available to Charles in the British Isles.[9] Many of its officers and men were, however, Cromwellian veterans of doubtful loyalty, and in 1661 Charles's newly appointed Viceroy, the Duke of Ormonde, began a process of reforming it.[9]

Ormonde's initial step in reorganisation was to raise a 1,200-strong regiment of Foot Guards in April 1662, quartered in Dublin.[10] The experienced Anglo-Irish soldier Sir William Flower was made lieutenant-colonel, while Ormonde's son Richard Butler, 1st Earl of Arran was gazetted colonel, with captaincy of a company.[10] To minimise Cromwellian influence, many of the rank and file were initially raised in England, with further recruits drawn from the ranks of the Irish “Independent Companies”.[11]

In 1672 the remainder of the Irish army was organised into six new regiments of foot, though this was primarily a paper-based exercise as other than the Guards they remained split up in small garrisons around the country.[3] While the Royal Hospital Kilmainham was built for the welfare of soldiers in 1680,[12] the rank and file remained generally poorly paid and equipped; a report of 1676 described the army as "in a most miserable condition".[13] All officers and men serving in Ireland were supposed to produce evidence of being Anglican Protestants, Catholic professional soldiers only being permitted to serve abroad.[14] The dismissal or resignation of former New Model Army veterans meant that many officers were inexperienced Anglo-Irish gentleman soldiers who often embezzled the funds sent by Dublin; by 1676 most men were on extended furlough as there was insufficient money to pay them, with the Foot Guards remaining the only effective unit of the army.[15]

By 1685 and the accession of Charles's Catholic brother James II, the establishment consisted of the Foot Guards; the Earl of Granard's Regiment, based in Roscommon, Longford and Westmeath; Viscount Mountjoy's, based in Tyrone, Armagh and Derry; Sir Thomas Newcomen's, based in Wexford, Tipperary, and King's County; Thomas Fairfax's, based in Antrim and Down; Justin McCarthy's, based in Cork; and Theodore Russell's, based in Galway, Clare and Queens County. There were also three regiments of cavalry; Ormonde's, Tyrconnell's and Ossory's. The Irish army's main duty remained internal security, although two companies of the Foot Guards were deployed as "sea-soldiers" during the Third Anglo-Dutch War: the cavalry's typical duties included escorting merchandise and bullion.[16] During the period there were fears of a revival of republicanism amongst Irish Protestants, and extra troops were stationed around Cork and Ulster. This strategy was broadly successful: at James's accession there was no equivalent Irish rising to the 1685 Monmouth and Argyll rebellions.[17]

Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell; appointed head of the army in Ireland by James II in 1685 and Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1687, he increased Catholic recruitment in an effort to create an establishment loyal to James

While recruitment of Catholics into the army had recommenced in the last years of Charles II's reign, James's newly appointed Commander-in-Chief, Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, wished to create a Catholic establishment loyal to James and conducted a purge of Protestant army officers, replacing many with Catholics.[18] He also began accelerating recruitment of Catholics into the rank and file, starting with the Foot Guards, giving the pretext that “the King would have all his men young and of one size”.[19] By the summer of 1686, two-thirds of the army's rank and file and 40% of officers were Catholic.[20] Reports received by the Viceroy, the Earl of Clarendon, of growing friction between Catholic army units and Protestants began to cause concern both in Ireland and England: Clarendon's secretary noted "the Irish talk of nothing now but recovering their lands and bringing the English under their subjection".[21]

James and Tyrconnell's efforts to promote Catholicism alienated large parts of the British political establishment and in 1688 James was deposed by his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband (and James's nephew) William of Orange, ruling as joint monarchs. James had ordered 2,500 troops of the Irish army, including a battalion each of the Foot Guards, Granard's and Hamilton's regiments, transferred to England in late 1688, crippling Tyrconnell's ability to defend the country; all were disarmed on William's landing in England.[22][23] Their Catholic personnel were imprisoned on the Isle of Wight before being shipped to the Continent for service with the Emperor Leopold; the remaining Protestant officers and men were incorporated into Granard's Regiment, which as the regiment with the highest proportion of Protestants became the only regiment of the Irish Army to continue in service with William, as the 18th Foot.[22]

With the implications for Ireland uncertain, Irish Protestants launched a rebellion in 1689, forming the Army of the North and declaring William as king, though Tyrconnell was able to retain control of most towns using the remaining units loyal to James. After initially considering reaching a peace settlement with William, Tyrconnell subsequently resolved to hold Ireland for James; in January 1689 he issued warrants for an enormous expansion of the army.[24] As the Catholic gentry realised the profits that could be made raising men for military service, many of the new regiments initially consisted of 30-45 companies, mostly without uniforms and armed with clubs or rusty muskets; neither Tyrconnell's government nor the Irish economy could afford to properly equip or pay such numbers and a team of inspectors, including Patrick Sarsfield, reduced them to more manageable totals.[25] James's Irish army eventually settled at a total of 45 foot regiments, each of 12 line companies and one grenadier company; 8 dragoon regiments; 7 cavalry regiments and a cavalry Life Guard, about 36,000 men strong.[25]

The Williamite War

Main article: Williamite War in Ireland

James landed in Kinsale on 12 March, accompanied by French regulars under Conrad von Rosen, along with English, Scottish and Irish Jacobite volunteers, in an attempt to use Ireland as a base to regain all three kingdoms.[26] On 13 August, Schomberg, head of William's main invasion force, landed in Belfast Lough; by the end of the month, he had more than 20,000 men.[27] Carrickfergus fell on 27 August, but an opportunity for Schomberg to quickly end the war by taking Dundalk was missed after his army was crippled by poor logistics, exacerbated by disease.[28]

The ensuing Williamite War was to last two years and claim up to 100,000 civilian and military lives by contemporary estimate.[29] William himself landed in June 1690 bringing substantial reinforcements; James's army was defeated at the Boyne in July, leading to the loss of Dublin, but held off William's advance at the Siege of Limerick in September. With the Jacobites retaining much of western Ireland, both James and William left Ireland in 1690, leaving the war to be handled by subordinates.

The Battle of Aughrim (1691) was a defeat for James II's Irish Army. Shortly afterwards much of the Army left for France in the Flight of the Wild Geese.

In July of the following year the bloodiest battle in Irish history was fought at Aughrim in County Galway; the Irish army's senior commander, French officer Charles Chalmot de Saint-Ruhe was killed and many other officers killed or taken prisoner, dealing a decisive blow to the Jacobite effort. Tyrconnell died of a stroke the following month and Patrick Sarsfield took over as the senior Jacobite negotiator.

Through most of the 18th century, parliamentary hostility in England to a large standing army meant that the Irish military establishment continued in use as a means to preserve a cadre of regiments that would otherwise have been disbanded.[37] This was achieved by keeping them at a lower than usual operational strength while in Ireland, then recruiting up to full strength before deployment abroad in times of war.[38] "Irish" regiments could at any time be transferred to another establishment, or transferred abroad while remaining on the Irish establishment, although they then ceased to be a charge on the Irish Exchequer.[38] The anomalous situation was emphasised by the fact that they were technically forbidden from recruiting rank and file in Ireland until 1756, although routinely ignored during manpower crises.[37] The expense and difficulty of recruiting in Britain regularly led to staff officers clandestinely enlisting Irish Catholics, or attempting to pass Irish Protestants off as Scots: the nationality test did not apply to officers, among whom the Anglo-Irish were disproportionately represented in both the Irish and British establishments.[39]

By 1767, British ministers wanted to increase the size of the peacetime army, but faced parliamentary resistance to any attempt to expand the British establishment. The "Augmentation crisis" resulted in an increase in the Irish army being proposed instead; the British parliament accordingly raised the cap on the Irish establishment from 12,000 to 15,235, while in 1769 a statute of the Irish parliament committed to maintaining the "augmentation" of the additional 3,235 troops.[40]

The inequities of the situation were among the main drivers of the early Irish Patriot movement in the mid 18th century; it was pointed out that Ireland was "obliged to support a large [...] military establishment" primarily for the benefit of Great Britain, while still being subject to restrictions on trade.[41]

The Army was amalgamated into the British Army following the Acts of Union 1800. By this stage the traditional ban on Irish Catholics serving in the army had been completely removed, and they began to supply a growing portion of troops.

• Commander-in-Chief, Ireland
• Military history of Ireland

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• Chichester, H.M.; Ferguson, Kenneth (reviser) (2004), "Ingoldsby, Richard (1664/5–1712)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14412 (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
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• Childs, John (1987), The British Army of William III, 1688–1702, Manchester University Press
• Childs, John (2007), The Williamite Wars in Ireland 1688 – 1691, London: Hambledon Continuum Press, ISBN 978-1-85285-573-4
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• Childs, John (2014), General Percy Kirke and the Later Stuart Army
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• Hayes, James (1956), "The military papers of Colonel Samuel Bagshawe (1713-62)", Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 39 (2)
• Hayes-McCoy, G. A. (1942), "The Battle of Aughrim", Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 20 (1)
• Connolly, S.J. (1992), Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760, Oxford University Press
• Lenihan, Padraig (2001), Conquest and Resistance: War in Seventeenth-Century Ireland, Brill, ISBN 978-9004117433
• Manning, Roger (2006), An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army 1585–1702, Oxford University Press
• McGrath, Charles Ivar (1996), "Securing the Protestant Interest: The Origins and Purpose of the Penal Laws of 1695", Irish Historical Studies, 30 (117)
• McGrath, Charles (2015), Ireland and Empire, 1692–1770, Routledge
• McNally, Michael (2017), Fontenoy 1745: Cumberland's bloody defeat, Bloomsbury Publishing
• Morley, Vincent (2002), Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, Cambridge University Press
• Rowlands, Guy (2001), An Army in Exile: Louis XIV and the Irish Forces of James II in France, 1691–1698, Royal Stuart Society
• Ryder, Ian (1987), English Army for Ireland 1642, Partizan Press, ISBN 978-0946525294

• McCavitt, John (2002), The Flight of the Earls, Gill & MacMillan
• Reid, Stuart (2014), Sheriffmuir 1715, Frontline Books