Kingdom Overthrown by Gerard Fitzgibbon

Author:Gerard Fitzgibbon [Fitzgibbon, Gerard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Island

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Fishing with a

Golden Hook

On 2 June 1690 a letter arrived from Rotterdam addressed to Robert Southwell, the Irish diplomat in London who had just been named one of William’s secretaries of state. By now Europe was full of chatter about William’s plan to travel to Ireland, and more than a handful of people were speculating about what might go wrong. Southwell’s correspondent in Rotterdam was one of them. What would happen, he wondered, if William were hit by a cannonball, kidnapped in an ambush or died of fever? How hard would Westminster, Paris and Vienna shake if William did not survive? At this unsure moment in history, the new King of England was the axis on which a great continental struggle was turning. His personal intervention in Ireland, Southwell was warned, could be like ‘fishing with a golden hook, where more is ventured than like to be gotten’.1 As William set sail from Hoylake near Liverpool on 11 June 1690, at the head of a fleet of 300 ships crammed with 15,000 soldiers, siege guns, ammunition, noblemen, officers and £200,000 in silver, he may have been wondering the same thing.

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A few weeks earlier three Protestants from Dublin – a lawyer, an officer and a clergyman – arrived at the Duke of Schomberg’s headquarters in Armagh and requested an audience. It had been an eventful few months in the capital and the three men, who had fled north in secret, had a lot to tell. The winter of 1689 had been a lazy, drunken hiatus for much of the Jacobite army, which was now staggering out the door like a man with a stinking hangover. First, Schomberg was told something he already knew: in March, some 6,000 French troops had arrived in Kinsale under the command of the Count de Lauzun – a short, pompous fifty-eight-year-old black sheep of the Parisian court, whose career had been fast-tracked after he helped smuggle James’s wife and son out of London. The French fleet had then returned home with a cargo of almost 5,500 Irish troops as part of a soldier swap that James had reluctantly agreed to in order to keep Louis and ‘the great and powerful’ minister for war, Louvois, onside.2 Justin MacCarthy, the general who had been shot to pieces at Newtownbutler and then escaped from Enniskillen, had sailed away with them. No one is certain why, but the relationship between Lord Tyrconnell and MacCarthy had soured to the point that both men were happy to put a few hundred miles of sea between them. MacCarthy was not the only man of note to shuffle off to France in the spring of 1690. Rosen and d’Avaux had both been recalled to Paris and were glad to leave Ireland behind. With Melfort, Rosen, MacCarthy and d’Avaux all out of the picture, Tyrconnell and a small cabal of allies, including his personal secretary William Ellis and judges Thomas Nugent and Stephen Rice, now had a firm grip on the Jacobite government. They did not take long to make their presence felt.

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