Battle of the Boyne

At the River Boyne near Drogheda, on 1 July 1690 by the old Julian calendar (11 July in the modern one), the Protestant King William III defeated his Catholic father-in-law and uncle, the deposed James II, who was trying to regain the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland. Casualties were modest, but James fled to France afterwards and never returned. The victory helped secure the outcome of the Glorious Revolution and Protestant dominance in Ireland, and it remains one of the most politically charged anniversaries in Irish history.

In 1688–89 William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, and his wife Mary, James's daughter, replaced James on the throne after a group of English peers invited William to defend Protestantism. For William the struggle was also one front in a wider war against Louis XIV of France, whose ambitions had united much of Europe, including the Pope, in the Grand Alliance. Louis backed James and sent 6,000 French soldiers to Ireland.

In Ireland the war had its own sectarian and ethnic logic. Most Irish Catholics supported James, hoping to recover land and political rights lost after Oliver Cromwell's conquest and to secure religious toleration. Under Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, they raised an army and by 1690 held almost the whole island except Derry and Enniskillen. Protestants, remembering the killings of the 1641 rebellion, rallied to William; Ulster Protestant irregular cavalry known as Enniskilliners fought on his side.

William's veteran general, the Duke of Schomberg, had landed in Ulster in 1689 with about 20,000 men but achieved little as fever weakened his troops. William himself landed at Carrickfergus on 14 June 1690 and marched south with an army of about 36,000, of whom only around half were British. Its best infantry were Danish and Dutch professionals with modern flintlock muskets. James's army numbered about 23,500. Apart from several French regiments and a capable Irish cavalry drawn from the dispossessed gentry, his foot soldiers were mostly hastily trained peasants, few with working muskets and some armed only with farm tools.

James drew up his defence on the south bank of the Boyne, roughly 30 miles from Dublin. The day before the battle, William was wounded in the shoulder by Jacobite artillery fire while inspecting the fords. On the morning of 1 July he sent about a quarter of his army upstream through the mist to cross at Roughgrange. Fearing he would be outflanked, James shifted many of his best troops and most of his guns to face them, but a deep, marshy ravine kept both forces from engaging.

The real fight came at the main ford near Oldbridge. William's Dutch Blue Guards forced their way across and, firing by platoons from squares, held off repeated charges by the Jacobite cavalry under James's son, the Duke of Berwick. Schomberg was killed in this phase. Only when Williamite cavalry and Danish infantry crossed further downstream did the Irish horse give up. The Jacobites withdrew in good order, their cavalry covering the retreat. Of perhaps 50,000 men engaged, about 2,000 died, roughly three-quarters of them Jacobites.

James abandoned Dublin, which William entered two days later, and sailed back into exile in France. The war continued: the Jacobites held Limerick in 1690, but were broken at Aughrim the next year, and the Treaty of Limerick in October 1691 ended the conflict. Over 14,000 Irish soldiers left for France, and the Protestant-dominated Irish Parliament went on to impose harsh Penal Laws on Catholics. In Europe, the battle was celebrated as the Grand Alliance's first real victory over France, even though an Anglo-Dutch fleet had been beaten at Beachy Head the day before.

Orange Order parades in Northern Ireland mark "the Twelfth" of July, a date that originally commemorated Aughrim but merged with the Boyne in the late eighteenth century. The marches have often caused friction with nationalist communities. In 2007 Ian Paisley and Bertie Ahern visited the battlefield together as a sign of reconciliation.

Our 1700 map shows the Kingdom of Ireland and the Kingdom of England under the Protestant settlement that followed William's victory.