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Patrick Sarsfield

c. 1650–1693

 

Patrick Sarsfield, early of Lucan, is one of Ireland's legendary military heroes, whose name was constantly evoked by patriots of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  He was brave and dashing at a time when war seemed a calling still fit for gentlemen.

      He was born, it is thought, about 1650, at Lucan, where his family had an ancient castle (now replaced by a mansion built in 1772).  He was the second son of Sir Patrick Sarsfield, by Anne, daughter of Rory O'Moore, the leader of the Catholic confederacy in 1641.  The estate had been confiscated under Cromwell, but was restored to the Sarsfields in the 1670s.

      His early life is obscure, but he followed a military career from an early age, being educated at a French military academy.  In 1675, following the death of his elder brother, he unexpectedly inherited an estate valued at £2,000.  In 1678 he was a captain in Monmouth's regiment in France.  He returned to England with the regiment and remained there till 1685.

      This was the period, between 1678 and 1681, of the political turmoil that arose from the false allegations of Titus Oates that Catholic conspirators were plotting to overthrow the Protestant regime in England.  It led to some twenty-five executions and continued intolerance and distrust of many Catholics, especially Irish Catholics.  It was difficult being a Catholic officer in the army, especially because one depended on royal patronage.  The accession to the throne of the Catholic king James II improved matters.  Sarsfield was commissioned a captain of dragoons in June 1685, and later a lieutenant in the Horse Guards.  At the battle of Sedgemoor, in July of that year, he was wounded while fighting for the king against Monmouth.

      After this he returned to Ireland, where he served the Catholic viceroy Lord Tyrconnell in reforming the army in Ireland.  He was granted land in Kildare to add to his own estate, and married Honoria de Burgh, the daughter of the early of Clanrickard.

      Promoted to colonel in 1686, he was a strong supporter of the cause of the ousted James II.  In 1688 he was given command of a force of dragoons, which fought William III in England.  Later he joined James in France, returning to Ireland with him in 1689.  It was James who raised him to the title of Lord Lucan in February 1691, and promoted him to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

      Sarsfield drove the Williamites under Lord Kingston out of Sligo, gaining control of Connaught, and he fought in every important engagement of the Williamite wars.  In a more minor role he served in the king's own bodyguard at the battle of the Boyne in 1690.  As deputy military commander in Limerick, he forced the English to raise the siege of the city - his greatest triumph - by destroying the supply train of their army.  With the help of a Catholic bandit named 'Galloping Hogan', he ambushed and blew up the train in August 1690 at Ballyneety.  The siege was raised in September.  He opposed the ageing viceroy Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, who wished to end the war, and secured the line of the Shannon against the Williamites.

      The Irish army, which was poorly paid, were largely Irish and Gaelic speaking.  The Williamite army was largely made up of foreign professional soldiers from Holland, Germany, Denmark, Scotland, and France, along with Irish Protestant and French Huguenots commanded by a Dutchman, Baron von Ginkel.

      The French general St Ruth arrived in May to take overall command.  Through vanity he lost the vital crossing of the Shannon at Athlone, and decided to make his stand at Aughrim on 12th July 1691.  Sarsfield protested.  He did not wish to hazard all on one throw of the dice.  He was sent to the rear of the army and given no hint of St Ruth's plans.  In fact, St Ruth refused to share his plans or intentions with any of his officers, so confusion reigned when a cannonball struck his head.  The Irish army, which had held the high ground until then, broke up.

      'Chance, skill, and treachery all hit the mark,' the Irish poet Richard Murphy said.  'The soldiers panicked, thinking God had struck.'  Colonel Luttrell betrayed the Jacobites to the Williamites and all was lost.  The battle of Aughrim was a bloody disaster in which some nine thousand soldiers died.  The bodies covered four miles of ground, like a flock of sheep.  It was the last decisive battle in Irish history.

      After this catastrophe for the Irish, Sarsfield miraculously led the defeated army back to Limerick, which was finally forced to surrender in 1691.  The Treaty of Limerick was signed in September, Limerick was given up on 3rd October, and Sarsfield went into exile in France with most of the Jacobite army, some twelve thousand soldiers.

      James II had already fled after the Boyne.  Afterwards, Sarsfield reportedly told the English, 'Change kings and we will fight it over with you again'.  But he was never to have that chance.  This was 'the Flight of the Wild Geese', what the poet W.B. YEATS [8] saw, with the flight of the Earls, as the two great disasters of the modern Irish nation.  With the ascendancy of William III, the Protestant conquest of Ireland was now complete.  The terms of the Treaty of Limerick relating to civilians were soon broken.

      The historian Conor Cruise O'Brien has written, 'The tragedy could not have been averted, or even notably softened, by the wisdom or humanity of any ruler.  The people of Ireland had been caught and crushed in the play of international and ideological forces ... English and Irish, pressed into closer contact by these forces, discovered how diversely history had formed them ... The weaker party was doomed to be oppressed, and the weaker party was the native population of the smaller and more remote island.'

      James gave Sarsfield the overall command of the Irish Brigade, which had been granted to him by France for an intended invasion of England in 1692.  But this scheme was abandoned.  Sarsfield continued to serve under the French king, fought at Steinkirk in 1692, and as a maréchal-de-camp was mortally wounded at Neerwinden, the French victory over William of Orange, during the battle of Landen on 19th August 1693.  He died a few days later in the village of Huy, in Liege province, in what is now Belgium.  On seeing his bleeding wounds, he is said to have exclaimed, 'Oh, that this was for Ireland'.

      Patrick Sarsfield was almost the last of a great Irish family.  He left a son, on whose death in 1719 the title became extinct.  The estate at Lucan then passed to a niece, who married a Vesey, and from them it passed by marriage to the Colthurst family.  They were Protestants.

      It was a tragic and pointless end to a man who had been 'the darling of the army' in Ireland.  An officer had exclaimed, 'The king is nothing to me.  I obey Sarsfield'.  It was this almost mythical figure that entered the imagination of later generations of soldiers and poets.  His exploits were the stuff on which the military enthusiasm of young Irish people of previous generations were fed.  He was the last cavalier of the Jacobite cause in Ireland.