Athlone and Aughrim: June – July 1691

Saturday the 30th: in the morning we observed there was great silence in the enemy’s works and day appearing we could not perceive any body in them…Immediately the word was carried… that the rebels had raised the siege and stole away in the dead of night.

So John Stevens, an English Jacobite, described how the ‘rebels’, the Williamites, withdrew from their attempt to seize the city of Limerick in August 1690. King William returned to direct affairs from London. The Jacobites, holding the River Shannon and all the land to the west of it, and delighted by their recent success, refused offers of a compromise peace.

William appointed Godard van Reede, Baron de Ginkel, as his commander in Ireland. It was a wise choice. Campaigning was a miserable affair during the persistent rains of winter. On 27th December Ginkel wrote:

'The enemy are burning all before us, and the Rapparees are so great a number that we can find neither forage nor cover, which hinders much our march.'

Named from their main weapon, a short pike known in Irish as a rapaire, the rapparees were Irish skirmishers. They did much to frustrate Ginkel’s attempts to bring the war in Ireland to a conclusion.

As well as reinforcements and fresh supplies sent by Louis XIV, the Jacobites acquired a new commander, Charles Chaumont, the Marquis de Saint-Ruth. St Ruth had no fewer than 16,000 foot soldiers, 3,000 cavalry and 2,000 dragoons to stop Ginkel – with a smaller force – from taking Athlone, a town at a vital crossing of the Shannon River.

Ginkel launched the heaviest bombardment ever in Irish history on the night of 21st June 1691. For ten days, without let-up, the town and Jacobite fortifications were pounded and reduced to rubble. John Stevens was in the thick of the fighting in defence of the bridge over the Shannon:

'Sunday the 28th: continued playing incessantly…The great and small shot never ceased firing…The enemy bent thirty pieces of cannon and all their mortars in that way, so that what with the fire and what with the balls and bombs flying so thick that spot was a mere Hell on Earth, and so many cannon and mortars incessantly playing on it there seemed to be no likelihood of any man coming off alive…We had very many men killed here…And I think this was the hottest place that ever I saw in my time of service.'

But how was the Shannon, the largest river in these islands, to be crossed? In spite of the artillery barrage, attempts to seize the bridge at Athlone failed, as the Reverend George Story recorded:

'We labour hard to gain the bridge, but what we got there was inch by inch as it were, the enemy sticking very close to it, though great numbers of them were slain by our guns.'

Ginkel decided to test a ford below Athlone. On 7th June he sent three Danes under sentence of death for mutiny to try the crossing in return for their lives. Yes, they reported – after wading across and back – the river was fordable. On 30th June 1691 the assault began. A church bell gave the signal for the grenadiers to enter the water, which came up to their chests. Each man had been given a golden guinea to whet his courage.

The Jacobites, caught from behind, were taken completely by surprise. In less than half an hour Athlone fell to King William’s army. St Ruth pulled back 16 miles to the south-west, near the village of Aughrim. There he prepared a set-piece battle on the limestone Galway plain. His plan was to lure the Williamites into a treacherous bog in front of his line.

At first these tactics seemed to work: thick mist enveloped Ginkel’s army as it moved out of Ballinasloe on Sunday 12th July. Ginkel’s Huguenots were drawn into the bog, cut off and slaughtered, while the Danes strove in vain to relieve them. The Irish pikemen stood firm even when, it was reported…

'the blood flowed into their shewse…'

…and Ulster Jacobites, led by Gordon O’Neill, spiked a battery of Williamite guns. St Ruth cried out:

'Le jour est à nous, the day is ours, mes enfants!'

At that moment a cannon ball, fired at extreme range, took off his head. The result: total confusion in the Jacobite ranks. Guided by members of the Trench family, French Protestants who had settled in Co Galway, Ginkel sent his cavalry by a causeway over the bog.

As these horsemen made a devastating assault over this narrow stretch of dry ground, the Jacobite cavalry – the flower of the Old English gentry of Ireland – turned tail and abandoned their foot soldiers to their fate.