Ronan took the stapled pages of handwriting; the rain began to die, and weak sun filled the fields. He read as he walked.
MY GOOD FRIENDS, TOM AND MARIAN GERAGHTY, live in a house whose name commemorates a very significant event. Not a week goes by without someone stopping at their door and asking questions about the Battle of the Boyne. One night in this house, I told them the story of the famous day, and then they asked me to write it down so that they wouldn’t have to answer any more questions. I have never written a guidebook, I am only a storyteller, so in advance I’ll ask the pardon of everyone who reads this, because I’m going to tell it the way I know, in the form of a tale.
The Battle of the Boyne matters more to twentieth-century Ireland than any battle before or since. It took place along the banks of the river, the Boyne Water, on July 1, 1690, and they say the day has been commemorated by 365 ballads, one for every day of a year’s singing.
As battles go, it didn’t differ greatly from what happened in the warfare of the time—cannon, musketry, bayonets, and cavalry charges. The outcome, however, was more dramatic than anything that happened on the day. And that’s saying a lot, since it was a day of great and lively incident.
Two armies fought here. One was led by a forty-year-old Protestant Dutchman, William of Orange, who had become King William the Third of England in the previous year. His foe was the man he had put off the English throne, James the Second, the Catholic-convert son of King Charles the First, the man who was executed by our great and good friend Oliver Cromwell. I say “great and good friend” with my tongue in my cheek, because whosomever the same Mr. Cromwell was a friend to, it wasn’t the Irish. But that’s for another night.
What happened just before the Boyne was this: The English Protestants were furious at James’s conversion, and they knew the Dutch had steadfast Protestant faith. So they invited William in, an invitation to which the same man responded with an alacrity that many Englishmen thought unseemly. James ran away to France, an old foe of England’s, where he hoped to gather an army.
And indeed he did, though not much of one—a few thousand soldiers—and he landed with it in Ireland on Tuesday, March 12, 1689. They sailed into Kinsale, and all of Catholic Ireland thought James had come to liberate them. As did James.
At the other end of the island, a year and a quarter later, Saturday, June 14, 1690, William of Orange sailed into Belfast leading fifteen thousand troops thought by many to be the best in Europe. They had fought on the continent; they were well disciplined, well equipped, and well fed.
During his Irish stay, James had been receiving much hospitality and enjoying hearty acceptance in such great houses as the Irish Catholics had—and he even scored a few military successes, nothing to write home about. But his jaw dropped a bit when he heard that William, the man he had run away from, was coming to look for him. James tried to raise as many extra men as he could from landowners and the like, but the Irish weren’t nearly as trained as William’s men; many of them were no better than lads with pitchforks, and James’s officers only came across one or two who could handle a musket.
William himself stayed in the north because he was recruiting more men in and around Belfast. And to make certain of success, he sent overseas for even more regiments. When they arrived and he felt his army good and ready, he launched a few local attacks against leaders sympathetic to James. It’ll come as no surprise to you to learn that he won every fight. Time now, he said to himself, to go after James.
So in the month of July, King William of Orange, confident, ready, and spruce as starch, set off on his march south; he had mustered an army of more than 35,000 men, all experienced in soldiery across England and Europe. By comparison, James had a puny spirit and an army to match it; he had fewer than 25,000 men, and of them no more than 5,000 had any military training or discipline or experience of battle. With nothing like the same verve or chirpiness, he began to journey north.
I often wish I had been a man working in the fields in the months of May, June, and July 1690. If I had been anywhere in the counties of Down or Louth, some miles in from the coast, I’d have heard a noise in the distance, and I would not have known what it was—a great rumbling noise, steady and persistent and getting louder. Suppose I was in a hill field; I’d have run up to the crest of the hill and looked north, the direction from which the noise was coming. What would I have seen? First, a cloud of dust, off in the distance; and just ahead of the dust, three men riding prancing horses. They were not galloping—they were reined back, three fine horses, held under control by their riders the way you see in a parade ring.
Next comes a small, gleaming parcel of men, nine of them riding in a tight formation, three abreast. My eye goes to the middle man in the second row—what a figure! He sits his horse with the ease of a jockey—and it’s a big horse for a heavy man. A white diagonal sash goes across his body, and the buttons on his blue coat catch the sunlight. He wears a tricorne hat, beneath which I can see the curls of a white wig.
No prizes for guessing who this is—William of Orange, the dour Hollander whose greatest passion in life was winning battles through excellent military strategy. The men immediately nearest to him are his generals, whom he respects mightily because they are among the most brilliant officers in Europe.
Next comes a wonderful troop—King Billy’s cavalry, a handpicked army in itself, thousands of mounted soldiers. Each horse has been polished to a shine, each cavalryman as correct as a bridegroom, and they keep perfect and respectful time with the pace their king has set.
Behind them, also coming through the dust, onto harder, open ground where I can begin to see them, march steady lines of troops in bright red coats. Six abreast, they travel fast, officers on the flanks barking orders. And behind them rolls a tremendous array of field guns on wagons, and that’s where the rumbling noise is coming from—the big wheels lurch and lumber on the uneven ground, and sweating gunners half-run, half-march at the heads of the horses drawing these cannon.
Last of all there are lines and lines and lines of mule-drawn wagons carrying food and munitions, supported by the people who, according to some generals, matter most in any force—the cooks and the other kitchen staff, who had it drummed into them that a fed soldier is a good soldier. It was Napoleon Bonaparte who said that an army marches on its stomach.
Now: suppose that I, the workman in the fields, saw that remarkable sight around twelve noon. I’d have done little work that day—because it would have taken the English army about four hours to pass me by. And I’d have said to myself, I sure wouldn’t like to be fighting on the other side.
Change the picture now; instead of a field on the east coast, I’m south of Dublin, where I see the Irish army of King James on its way to the Boyne Valley. This is a totally different sight, close enough to a rag, tag, and bobtail.
To begin with, the cloud of dust is not as huge, because not only is the army smaller, it has far fewer pieces of artillery. And the cannon don’t look nearly so polished and ready as the guns of King Billy. In fact the whole army looks much less snappy. Yes, there are cavalrymen, and yes, there is a quick-marching infantry, but there are also undisciplined troops at the back, and they’re singing, some of them, and there are pipers playing, and altogether they seem more relaxed. I think to myself, an army has no business looking that easy—and it doesn’t look anything like a match for the war machine headed by the Dutchman.
Came the day when the forces lined up to face each other on opposite banks of the river; it was the thirtieth of June. Some say that James chose the Boyne as a kind of symbolic battleground, because it lies roughly halfway down the east coast of Ireland, and if you draw a line directly west to the coast, the island will be bisected. As we all know, it has since become a symbolic border between the southern and the northern Irish, even though the actual border as we know it today doesn’t begin for another forty or fifty miles north.
In the middle of the afternoon, as the soldiers were making th
eir preparations—in full view of each other—something happened that might have changed the course of Ireland’s history. King Billy rode the last leg of his journey down from Belfast and said to his officers, “We’ll go and have a look at what the other side is like.”
The Williamite generals didn’t relish the sound of this at all, but if their chief wanted to survey the enemy lines, they thought they’d better go with him. William rode right up close to the river and sat on his horse, looking across at James’s camp on the southern bank. I wonder if he was surprised at how narrow the river is—along there, not far east of the hill of Newgrange, the widest it gets is about thirty yards.
That’s too close for comfort, especially if your guns are big—and one of James’s Irish officers saw the English king. He gave an order to his gunners to open fire, and the cannon must already have been loaded, because William and his officers didn’t have time to get out of the way. The first few cannonballs that whistled across the river killed a handful of English soldiers in front of William. Then the king himself took a six-pound cannonball on the right shoulder. It tore a hole in his coat, ripped into his linen undershirt, scraped the flesh under his arm, and traveled on. As it came down from its arc, it actually broke the butt of a pistol in the holster of an officer riding behind the king.
Now, had that cannonball been six inches to the right, you can only imagine what would have followed. The Irish side, though—they thought they had pulled off a miracle. James’s officers were so certain that they had killed their enemy that the French among them sent a dispatch to Paris, where the news set the city on fire with excitement. But alas, those chickens never hatched.
The incident became so famous that, for weeks after the battle, local people, out from the town of Drogheda, visited the spot where it happened. To this day the place where William of Orange received his flesh wound is still known—King William’s Glen.
Next day, the first of July, brought the battle proper to a head. In the artillery divisions, King Billy and the English brandished five times the strength of King James and the Irish. And as if that weren’t bad enough, his early moves, it was said afterward, were like those of a chess player—he and his generals had everything mapped out in advance.
First of all he set out to secure the river. He sent a large force upstream, past Oldbridge, which only had a house or two in those days—it’s a little bigger now. When they reached the ford at Slane, they had orders to cross the river and outflank King James’s armies; William gave them about an hour and a half to get to this position. Then he tilted full into battle at Oldbridge itself; he rode up there from King William’s Glen.
It was still morning. In the beginning nothing much took place at Oldbridge, just some random shots, mostly from the Jacobites—that’s James’s side; the Williamites were awaiting dispatches from the forces they had sent up to Slane. By the way, the dispatch riders who brought back such news were the finest, bravest riders in any army. Those boys thought nothing of jumping rocks and ditches and hedges at breakneck speed.
But even while King Billy was waiting for the good word, the fighting broke out. Not surprisingly, it happened most fiercely on the shallow river crossings.
Fierce fighting it was, too. The Williamites, with their green sprigs and leaves in their hats, were much more numerous than the Irish, who wore the white cockades of France. The reason for the cockades was to stop gunners and musketeers killing their own men when firing from behind. I’m afraid it didn’t work that well on James’s side—many Irish soldiers were killed by musket balls and cannonballs from their army’s guns.
James’s Irish and French soldiers fought like tigers—in the water, either standing or on horseback. Wave after wave of William’s soldiers poured down off the northern bank into the river, and the Irish lads beat them back with every weapon they could lay their hands on. They shot, they stabbed, they hit them with their fists, they stabbed them with hayforks, they wrestled them into the stream.
By noon, all along the Boyne, on a battlefront that must have been almost a mile long, the fighting had grown intense, and there were bodies in the water and blood coloring the stream. Most of the conflict seemed to consist of musket fire, and here the Dutchman again had an advantage. His soldiers carried a new kind of gun, the flintlock, which was capable of being reloaded much faster than the older matchlock on the Irish side.
But the Irish gave as good as they got, especially in any hand-to-hand fighting, and at certain moments in the day, the tide of battle could have swung easily in their favor. Again and again they ran or rode into the waters of the river and forced their enemies back onto the bank from which they had just recently attacked.
King William, though, had the resources to stretch the Irish lines thin. James’s generals had not prepared sufficiently; they simply didn’t anticipate every eventuality, which is what constitutes good planning. King Billy spread his troops wider and wider, up-and downstream, until the Irish lines began to thin out and eventually disappear. And William also had the leadership quality; he himself set an example by leading a detachment into the water at Dry-bridge. Everybody who ever told the story of the Battle of the Boyne, every soldier who ever survived it, made two famous observations. They said it was as fierce a combat as was ever fought—and secondly they said no one ever saw a leader as recklessly brave as King Billy himself.
James, I’m afraid, didn’t earn the same praise. While William did what all great leaders do—he led from the front—James spent the day hidden in a small church on the hill of Donore. “Praying for a great victory,” he said afterward, when he should have been out there fighting for it. And if he had been there—who knows? The Irish were out-gunned and outnumbered, but the show of fighting they put up might easily have tipped the balance in their favor if they had only had a leader who inspired them. After all, Julius Caesar used to put on his purple emperor’s robe and make sure he was seen riding among his men in the thick of the fight, urging them on. Praising them. Ordering them. Leading them.
At three o’clock, King Billy began to apply a slow coup de grace. He brought up his main force of artillery, over fifty field guns and twenty mortars, to the hill looking over at Oldbridge on the southern side. William raised his arm; the gunners raised their priming rods. The king dropped his arm; the gunners lit their fuses and set off the decisive barrage. They pounded the Irish lines, and all men of common sense, military or no, will soon understand that such barrages weaken any army; a force that cannot compare can rarely withstand. Under cover of these relentless salvoes, the Williamites now began to cross the Boyne Water successfully, and inch by inch, foot by foot, they forced the Irish ranks to fall back.
Up along the river, the expeditionary force that William had sent to outflank James was scoring a big success, and so the Irish line was first stretched, soon weakened, and finally pierced.
By early evening, everyone knew the outcome. King William the Third, William of Orange, King Billy, representing the Protestant forces of England, had outmastered King James, who represented the Catholic tradition in England and Ireland. James fled to Dublin; local skirmishing continued into the evening and night and even the following day. To the victor the spoils; the Williamite forces showed little mercy to any Irish soldier they found hiding in a wood or bathing his wounds by a stream.
As for the longer outcome—the world knows that Protestantism, already surging, became politically dominant in Ireland after that day. And each year the Orangemen in the north of Ireland celebrate the Battle of the Boyne with triumphal marches in the month of July.
The rain came in again, confirming the morning’s red sky; Ronan had to tuck the papers away quickly. He peered out from under the umbrella and wondered whether he dared walk the battlefield in such weather. But he was already standing in the fields on the northern side. Braving the rain, he trudged through the wet grass until he came to King William’s Glen. From there he looked across the river to imagine where the almost lucky gunner had been wh
en he fired the six-pound cannonball at King Billy.
Poor visibility made Ronan peer, and on the southern bank he saw lights. A car bumped along a lane and stopped. Two men got out briefly, and one pointed along the river. The man who pointed—could it be the Storyteller?
He shouted: “Hey!”
No reaction; Ronan ran forward down to the water’s edge—but that took them out of his sight and, he presumed, took him out of theirs. He ran back up the hill and shouted again. The men seemed not to hear him and climbed into the car, which, surprisingly, did not move off. Again Ronan ran to the river, but he had no chance of crossing; recent rains had brought a muddy spate, and the waters flowed fast and high.
Deciding to keep the car in his sights, he made for the main road. But he knew it would take him at least half an hour to get anywhere near the car. He kept running, and as he clambered out of the field, the car passed. The driver, a young man, waved a salutation—and Ronan could see another person inside. The hat, the hunched shoulders, the pale face—was it he? No doubt about it.
The road at the junction from which the car had emerged led through to Slane, the last known location of the Storyteller. Had he but seen through the rain as he walked, Newgrange would have appeared on the hill, above the road to Ronan’s right. At Slane, two hours later, he stood on the bridge, looking down into the flowing Boyne.
The night had caused him shame; those girls made him wince now. He began to miss Kate dreadfully—and his mission had failed; he had glimpsed but not reached the Storyteller. The priest’s arrival earlier had not been explained, and now hunger attacked, depressing him further. No father to turn to, no close friends—and no assessment that made sense of how his life had begun to hurt so hard so young. He should have stayed with Father Mansfield that morning; maybe a man so sophisticated would understand anything, would condemn nothing, would steer rather than judge.