Who won the Battle of Aughrim?
The Williamites won. On 12 July 1691 Baron Ginkel's army attacked St Ruth's Jacobites on Kilcommadan Hill, County Galway. The Irish held until a cannon ball killed St Ruth; then their left gave way. Several thousand Jacobites died (about 7,000 by George Story's count, nearer 4,000 by Robert Parker's), and the war ended at Limerick in October.1
On Sunday 12 July 1691 two armies of roughly 20,000 men each met on a hillside in east County Galway. By nightfall the Jacobite army that had fought on for James II in Ireland since the Battle of the Boyne was broken, its French general was dead and thousands of its soldiers lay on the slopes of Kilcommadan Hill. Aughrim is less famous than the Boyne, yet the historian Jacqueline Hill and the heritage campaigner Maolsheachlainn Ó Caollaí both call it the more decisive of the two. It was the last great field battle of the Williamite War in Ireland, the Irish front of the Nine Years' War, and one of the turning points in the military history of Ireland.2
A note on dates: Ireland and England still used the Old Style calendar, so the battle was fought on 12 July 1691 by their reckoning and on 22 July by the New Style calendar of the Continent. This page uses Old Style dates, as the participants did. Our 12 July page tells the day in brief; this is the full story, from both camps.3
Why was the Battle of Aughrim fought?
The war in Ireland grew out of the revolution of 1688, when William of Orange took the thrones of England and Scotland from his father-in-law, James II. Catholic Ireland, governed for James by the Earl of Tyrconnell, stayed loyal to him, and Louis XIV of France, already at war with William on the Continent, sent help. William beat James at the Boyne on 1 July 1690, but the Jacobite army fell back to Limerick, and William's attack on the city failed that August. When he went back to the Continent he left the war to his Dutch cavalry general, Godard van Reede, Baron Ginkel.4
By 1691 the Jacobites held the line of the River Shannon and the province of Connacht behind it, with Limerick, Galway and Athlone as their strongholds. In May a French fleet reached Limerick carrying Lieutenant-General Charles Chalmont, Marquis de St Ruth, together with arms, clothing and provisions, but no troops and no money. Ginkel's aim for the summer was to force the Shannon at Athlone and march into Connacht. On 30 June his troops stormed across the river and took the Irish town of Athlone, a heavy blow for which St Ruth's biographer, Harman Murtagh, holds the French general partly responsible.5
St Ruth and Ginkel: two commanders, two plans
St Ruth was a professional soldier who had risen to lieutenant-general in Louis XIV's army. He also carried a reputation, recorded both by his modern Irish biographer and by the Williamite chaplain George Story, as a persecutor of French Protestants in the dragonnades. In Ireland he set about re-equipping a hungry, ragged army and restoring its confidence. Murtagh writes that he believed in the fighting quality of Irish soldiers more than any other French officer sent to Ireland, and that his men quickly took to him.6
The loss of Athlone left the Jacobite command with a choice. According to Murtagh, Patrick Sarsfield and most of the Irish generals wanted to put the infantry into Limerick and Galway and send the cavalry across the Shannon to raid Leinster and Munster, forcing Ginkel back to guard his long supply lines. St Ruth preferred a pitched battle on ground of his own choosing; Murtagh sees sound military arguments for it, as well as a wish to redeem his honor after Athlone. The Jacobite leadership was also divided. Tyrconnell's party and the faction around Sarsfield and Henry Luttrell distrusted each other, and St Ruth's relations with both were cool.7
Ginkel was a veteran of William's Dutch army who had served beside the king at the Boyne. His army was a coalition: English, Scottish and Ulster Protestant regiments, Dutch and Danish troops, and French Huguenot units, among them the horse of the Marquis de Ruvigny, an exiled Huguenot whose brother had died at the Boyne. It was better supplied than its opponent and had more artillery; the Irish Times writer Ray Burke counts eighteen guns against nine.8
St Ruth's position at Kilcommadan Hill
St Ruth fell back west of the River Suck and drew up his army along Kilcommadan Hill, a ridge running about a mile and a half to two miles south from the village of Aughrim. In front of it lay a wide bog. Horsemen could cross only at its two ends: in the north by a narrow causeway beside the ruined castle of Aughrim, and in the south by the pass of Urrachree. On the slope between the bog and the Jacobite camp the fields were cut by hedges and ditches, which St Ruth lined with musketeers and linked with gaps so that his men could move from one to the next under cover.9
Story, who walked the ground after the battle, admired the choice. Nature itself, he wrote, could not have furnished St Ruth with a better position. Murtagh agrees that St Ruth believed he had found a position strong enough to ensure victory, and Story records that Ginkel, after viewing it from the hills near Ballinasloe, found it no easy matter to attack.10
How did the Battle of Aughrim unfold?
The morning of Sunday 12 July was foggy. Ginkel's army crossed the Suck early and stood in line until about noon, then moved forward. The first fighting broke out at the southern pass of Urrachree, where Williamite dragoons and horse skirmished with Jacobite troops for about an hour without a result. According to Story, Ginkel's generals then debated whether to wait until morning, and decided to attack that evening for fear that St Ruth would slip away in the night.11
The plan, which Story credits to the Scottish major-general Hugh Mackay, was to press the Jacobite right at Urrachree first, so that St Ruth would draw troops away from his left near the castle. In the late afternoon the Williamite left attacked the hedges on the Jacobite right, and for about an hour and a half the two sides fired into each other at close range. St Ruth did shift men south to meet the attack, which, as Ó Caollaí notes, thinned the defense around the castle and the causeway.12
Ginkel then sent infantry straight across the bog against the Jacobite center. Four regiments waded through mud and water up to their waists, drove the Irish from the lowest hedges and pushed up the slope from ditch to ditch, until Irish horse and foot fell on them from the flanks. They were driven back into the bog with heavy losses; Story records two of their colonels taken prisoner. For a time, Story admits, onlookers would have given the day to the Irish. Murtagh agrees: the Jacobites had repulsed attacks on their right and across the wetlands of the center, and an Irish victory seemed likely.13
How did St Ruth die at Aughrim?
The breakthrough came on the Jacobite left. Williamite cavalry began to cross the causeway by Aughrim castle, a passage so narrow that, as Story and Ó Caollaí both describe it, the horsemen could ride only two abreast, under fire from the castle and the hedges. The musketeers in the castle had run short of usable ammunition; a local tradition retold by Ray Burke says they had been issued bullets that did not fit their muskets. Ruvigny's Huguenot horse and other squadrons forced the crossing and turned on the Jacobite flank.14
St Ruth had just watched the attack in the center thrown back and was reported to have said that he would now drive the enemy back to the gates of Dublin. Seeing horsemen crossing by the castle, he rode toward them to take charge. As he came down the slope of Kilcommadan Hill a cannon ball struck him in the head and killed him instantly. Story writes that one of his retinue threw a cloak over the body and carried it beyond the hill, and that his guard left the field at the same time.15
His death left the army without direction at the critical moment. Jacobite and Williamite writers agree on what followed: the cavalry on the Jacobite left withdrew, and the infantry in the center fought on, unaware that their general was dead, until they were surrounded and cut down. Brigadier Henry Luttrell's dragoons, posted behind the castle, rode off toward Loughrea by the lane still known as Luttrell's Pass. Irish tradition long held that he betrayed the army; his biographer, Éamonn Ó Ciardha, notes that his men were heavily outnumbered and that his superior, Dominic Sheldon, sent him no support. By nightfall the Jacobite army was in flight, and the dark and a thick misty rain ended the pursuit.16
How many died at the Battle of Aughrim?
Aughrim was the bloodiest battle of the war. Story wrote that about 7,000 Irish were killed on the spot, as was generally believed, and three days later counted the bodies himself: in some small enclosures 150 bodies, in others 120. Murtagh and Ó Caollaí both give about 7,000 Jacobite dead, and Ray Burke a range of 6,000 to 9,000, which he notes is more than the dead of the Boyne and several other famous Irish battles combined. Not every eyewitness agreed. Robert Parker, a Williamite captain who fought there, put the Jacobite dead at near 4,000 and the prisoners at more than 2,000, and the historian Richard Doherty thinks Parker's figures more reliable than Story's. Story also listed more than 450 prisoners, among them two major-generals, and the Jacobite dead included Lord Galway, Lord Kilmallock and many colonels.17
Williamite losses are less certain. The returns sent to the king two days after the battle, which Story printed, give 73 officers and about 600 men killed and 111 officers and 960 men wounded, some 1,750 in all. Story thought the lists, if anything, overstated the dead, because officers used them to account for men already missing. Ó Caollaí, by contrast, puts Ginkel's dead at about 2,000. Parker gives more than 3,000 killed and wounded, and Doherty notes that Story's low count rested on the English dead, while the continental regiments had also suffered heavily.18
The size of the armies is disputed too. Murtagh and Ó Caollaí put each army at about 20,000, and Ginkel's biographer Wout Troost gives Ginkel an army of 20,000 by June. Story claimed the Williamites could not muster 17,000 against nearly 25,000 Irish. Colonel Charles O'Kelly, a Jacobite officer who wrote the war's history in the guise of an ancient chronicle, gave St Ruth only about 10,000 foot and 4,000 horse and dragoons. His 1850 editor, John Cornelius O'Callaghan, set the contemporary figures side by side: Williamite accounts gave the Irish 25,000 to 28,000, Jacobite ones 14,000 to 15,000.19
Who won the Battle of Aughrim, and why?
Ginkel's Williamites won, and decisively. Writers on both sides put much of the explanation down to a single cannon shot. O'Kelly wrote that all agreed the Irish would have won the day had St Ruth lived an hour longer, and the Williamite captain Robert Parker thought that had St Ruth not fallen, it was hard to say how matters would have ended. Murtagh, in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, concludes that had St Ruth survived to win, the war might have ended differently. Even Story, no friend of the Jacobite cause, granted that St Ruth had brought the Irish to fight a better battle than ever before.20
Other causes pointed the same way. The Jacobite left had been weakened to feed the fight on the right; Doherty notes that Major-General William Dorrington moved two battalions from the Aughrim end of the causeway to strengthen the center, the castle garrison lacked usable ammunition, and the cavalry there gave way, whether through confusion or, as tradition alleged, betrayal. Ginkel had more guns and a better supplied army. Liam Irwin, Sarsfield's biographer, adds that Sarsfield, later the great hero of nationalist memory, played only a limited part at Aughrim. Parker, who fought on the other side, explains why: Sarsfield held the larger and better part of the Jacobite cavalry under orders not to move until St Ruth called for him, and the order never came.21
The Jacobite view: a battle nearly won
For the Jacobites, Aughrim was remembered as a battle nearly won. O'Kelly mourned that the flower of the army and the nation fell there, and that from that hour the cause never thrived. Murtagh notes that O'Kelly and another Jacobite writer, Nicholas Plunkett, both paid tribute to St Ruth, while Tyrconnell blamed him for the defeat. The search for someone to blame settled on Luttrell, above all after he was arrested during the siege of Limerick later that year over a letter suggesting secret dealings with Ginkel. A tribunal found the evidence thin, but he later went over to William with his regiment, and Irish poets and ballad makers never forgave him.22
Williamite writers, for all their hostility, paid the Irish soldiers real respect. Parker wrote that the Irish never fought so well in their own country as that day, except, he added, the foot posted in the ditches. Story wrote that the Irish behaved like men of another nation, holding each ditch until the attackers' muskets were thrust over the far side of it, and he repeated the report that St Ruth, watching the horsemen struggle over the causeway, called them brave fellows and said it was a pity they should be so exposed. Ruvigny's biographer calls the flank attack the defining moment of his career, the action that secured the decisive Williamite victory.23
What happened after the Battle of Aughrim?
Galway surrendered on terms later in July, and Ginkel moved on Limerick, the last Jacobite stronghold of any size. In September he crossed the Shannon and cut the city off from County Clare. Sarsfield, now the leading Jacobite commander, asked for terms, and the Treaty of Limerick was signed on 3 October 1691. Its military articles allowed thousands of Jacobite soldiers to leave for France, in ships that, Irwin notes, Ginkel himself provided.24
The consequences reached far beyond the army. Ó Caollaí lists the confiscation of land, the destruction of what he calls the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the Penal Laws among the results of the defeat, and Irwin argues that the vague religious article of the treaty made the penal legislation easier. For Murtagh, the victory copper-fastened Protestant ascendancy for a hundred years. Ginkel was made Baron of Aughrim and Earl of Athlone in 1692 and was granted forfeited Jacobite estates, which he later sold.25
How is the Battle of Aughrim remembered?
Aughrim left a deep mark on Irish memory. The Williamite dead were buried, but Story saw the Irish dead still lying across the hillside three days after the battle, and Ó Caollaí writes that most of them were left unburied for over a year. A verse in Irish quoted by Ó Caollaí laments the dead with the bitter image of O'Kelly's land top-dressed not with sand or dung but with soldiers, and Ray Burke recounts that Lady Gregory heard the same image from her neighbors in south Galway two centuries later. The poet Raftery tied Luttrell's Pass to the selling of the Gaels.26
Among Williamites the victory was celebrated in metal, print and theater. A medal struck in Leiden in 1691 paired the heads of William and Mary with a view of the battle. Robert Ashton's verse tragedy The Battle of Aughrim, or the Fall of Monsieur St Ruth was in print by 1756 and went through several editions, and Ó Caollaí notes that the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray found a Williamite play on the battle still being staged in Galway in 1842.27
The battle may also lie behind the date of the Twelfth. The historian Jacqueline Hill notes that Dublin's Williamite celebrations in the 1780s were held on 1 July, the Boyne's Old Style date. When the Orange Order fixed on 12 July for the Boyne in the 1790s, she suggests, it may have been converting the date to the New Style, and may also have been influenced by Aughrim, the more decisive battle, fought on 12 July 1691.28
In the twentieth century a tall Celtic cross was raised at Aughrim to the memory of St Ruth and those who fell there. Ó Caollaí calls the battlefield the common heritage of nationalists and unionists alike, and warned in 2006 that roads and housing were eating into it.29
Where was the Battle of Aughrim fought?
The battle was fought on and below Kilcommadan Hill, just south of the village of Aughrim in east County Galway, on the old road from Ballinasloe to Loughrea and a few kilometers west of Ballinasloe. The ruined castle, the causeway and Luttrell's Pass lie by the village; the southern pass of Urrachree and the old church of Kilcommadan lie at the other end of the ridge. Burke describes a battlefield trail of just under 10 km that starts at the visitor center in the village.30
