Who won the Battle of Vinegar Hill?
The Crown forces won. On 21 June 1798 General Gerard Lake's columns bombarded and stormed the United Irish camp on Vinegar Hill above Enniscorthy, County Wexford, while another brigade fought its way into the town. Most of the rebel army escaped toward Wexford through a gap in Lake's ring, but the Wexford rising never recovered.1
Early on the morning of 21 June 1798 the guns of General Gerard Lake opened fire on Vinegar Hill, the hill above the town of Enniscorthy where the United Irishmen of County Wexford had kept their main camp for more than three weeks. By nine o'clock the camp had fallen. Vinegar Hill was the last attempt by the Wexford rebels to hold ground against the army of King George III, one of the largest battles of the 1798 rebellion, and a defining moment in the military history of Ireland.2
The rising belonged to a wider war. The United Irishmen had looked to the French Republic, then fighting Britain in the French Revolutionary Wars, for an army that came too late. The battle was fought in two places at once: on the hill itself and in the streets of Enniscorthy below it. Our 21 June page gives the day in brief; this is the full story, told from both sides.3
Why did the 1798 rebellion break out?
The Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast in October 1791, with Theobald Wolfe Tone among its leading spirits. Its first aim was a reform of the Irish parliament that would represent Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians alike. After Britain went to war with revolutionary France in 1793, contacts with the French were exposed and the society was banned in 1794. Its leaders turned to the idea of an independent republic won with French help.4
In the countryside the United Irishmen drew in the Defenders, a Catholic secret society. The National Army Museum notes that this alliance widened the movement's reach but cut against its hope of leaving religious conflict behind. In December 1796 a French fleet carrying some 14,000 soldiers, with Tone aboard, reached Bantry Bay but could not land in the winter gales.5
The government answered with force. In 1797 General Gerard Lake disarmed Ulster, and his biographer James Quinn describes him as untroubled by legal restraints. In April 1798 he became commander-in-chief in Ireland and used the same methods in Leinster: floggings, house burnings and torture of suspects. The National Army Museum points out that the yeomanry raised to help was overwhelmingly Protestant, which deepened the sectarian divide. Quinn judges that these crude methods probably helped to provoke the rising they were meant to prevent.6
The rebellion began on the night of 23 May 1798. The rising in Dublin was forestalled, and in most counties around the capital the rebels were quickly scattered. Only in County Wexford did the rising gain momentum.7
How did the Wexford rising reach Vinegar Hill?
Older accounts saw the Wexford rising as a spontaneous reaction to government terror. Daniel Gahan, building on the work of Louis Cullen, argues instead that the county had a well organized United Irish network and that the mobilization on the night of 26 to 27 May followed a plan. The best-known leader was a priest, Father John Murphy of Boolavogue, who had preached loyalty until, in his biographer Nicholas Furlong's account, yeomen fired on parishioners who had handed in their arms at Ferns.8
On 27 May the rebels destroyed a detachment of the North Cork Militia on Oulart Hill. The next day they stormed Enniscorthy and pitched their camp on Vinegar Hill, on the far side of the River Slaney. On 30 May the garrison abandoned Wexford town. Within four days, Gahan writes, the insurgents had driven government forces from almost the whole county.9
Breaking out of the county proved harder. Rebel attacks were thrown back at Newtownbarry on 1 June, at New Ross on 5 June after hours of street fighting, and at Arklow on 9 June. Gahan reads the hesitation that followed as the behavior of men who had done their part and were waiting for risings elsewhere, which never came. In James Kelly's summary of Gahan's account, the Wexford leaders realized in early June that they were almost alone.10
Wexford town was run by a rebel committee. Its governor was Matthew Keugh, a Protestant, and the landowner Bagenal Harvey later presided over its council. Both tried to restrain the more radical faction around Captain Thomas Dixon.11
What happened in the rebel camp on Vinegar Hill?
For more than three weeks Vinegar Hill was the rebels' headquarters and their prison. Loyalists taken in the surrounding country were held in the windmill on the summit, and many were tried and killed there. The Rev. James Gordon, a Church of Ireland clergyman who later served the parish of Killegny near Enniscorthy, put the dead at little short of four hundred. Gahan's estimate is lower: two or three executions a day, after a spell in a brewery at the foot of the hill and a trial at the top. Edward Roche's biographer notes that Roche later checked such killings, but that many took place in the camp.12
The deadliest killing of prisoners by the Wexford rebels happened elsewhere. On 5 June, while the battle for New Ross was being fought, the guards at Scullabogue killed well over a hundred loyalist prisoners, most of them Protestants, many of them burned to death in a barn. Gahan links the massacre to news from New Ross, where soldiers had set fire to a house full of wounded rebels that morning. Harvey offered a reward for the killers. Kelly, summing up Gahan, notes that loyalists, yeomen and soldiers were responsible for far more of the killing that summer than the rebels.13
Lake's plan: why did the rebels stand at Vinegar Hill?
By mid-June the rising in Antrim and Down had been put down, and Lake, who had chafed at his desk in Dublin, took charge of the campaign against Wexford himself. His plan was to surround Vinegar Hill and attack it from every side at once. Lake, with Generals Dundas, Duff and Loftus, would close in on the hill from the north, Needham was to come down from Arklow and Gorey to block the road to Wexford, and Johnson and Eustace were to march from New Ross against Enniscorthy itself. Lake set up his headquarters at Solsborough.14
For the rebels the choice was hard. Their northern army had been camped on Kilcavan Hill near the Wicklow border. On 18 June Edward Roche ordered it to concentrate on Vinegar Hill, and it marched south through heavy rain, despite Anthony Perry's doubts. Miles Byrne, who marched with it, later called the move silly and unmilitary. Kelly, summing up Gahan, judges the decision to stake everything on one great battle instead of turning to guerrilla war misconceived; the rebels hoped to hold out until the French came.15
They were also short of almost everything. Byrne counted nearly 20,000 people on the hill but only 3,000 to 4,000 firearms. Edward Hay, a Wexford Catholic whose history of 1803 was sympathetic to the rebels, says the defenders of Enniscorthy had only a few pounds of powder to share out the evening before, and that there were just two charges for the guns on the hill. Thousands of women and children had come to the camp for safety. Roche was sent home on 19 June to raise more men, and his division of several thousand was still on the road when the battle began.16
How was the Battle of Vinegar Hill fought?
The attack began at about seven in the morning with cannon and mortars. General Loftus broke through the stone walls of a park and dragged his guns onto a lower spur of the hill, from which they could fire along the rebel lines. At the same time the columns of Lake, Dundas and Wilford climbed the south-eastern face. The rebels fell back from hedge to hedge under fire.17
The defenders had thirteen guns on the hill but, by Hay's and Byrne's accounts, almost nothing to fire from them; Musgrave thought they must have been well supplied. Hay says the royal artillery fired a great number of shot and shells at the hill. Musgrave, the loyalist historian, claims that 85 rebels were later found dead in their trenches below Loftus's guns.18
Down in Enniscorthy the fighting was harder. Johnson's brigade had skirmished with the rebels outside the town the evening before. At dawn it drove them back and then forced its way in. Hay says the defenders held the streets for two hours; Johnson's own biographer calls it a stout resistance. Byrne names their leaders: William Barker, a veteran of the Irish Brigade in France who lost an arm at the Duffry Gate, and Father Mogue Kearns. The defense of the bridge over the Slaney, according to the Longest Day research project, kept open the road that allowed so many on the hill to escape.19
After about an hour and a half under fire, by Gordon's count, the rebels abandoned the summit. They streamed south down the road to Wexford, the one side of the hill that was still open. Byrne remembered nearly two hours of fighting before the rebels' ammunition ran out, and Gordon says it was all over by nine.20
What was Needham's Gap?
The road to Wexford should have been closed by General Francis Needham's column. It arrived only at about nine, when the fighting was over, and the opening it left became known as Needham's Gap. His fellow officers called him the late General Needham.21
Why he was late is still argued about. Sir Richard Musgrave, a loyalist historian, blamed Lake's orders: Needham was told at half past eight in the evening to march to Lake's headquarters, arrived at half past three in the morning with a long convoy of carts, and was then sent back to his original post. Quinn notes that some of Lake's subordinates complained of his extraordinary and contradictory orders. Gordon reported a different belief, common at the time, that Lake left the gap on purpose to avoid a slaughter or a battle of despair. Byrne thought Needham was simply held back in reserve. A chapter of the Longest Day project's 2021 book tests these theories again.22
Whatever the cause, the result was the same. Gordon wrote that almost all the real rebels escaped. Roche's division, arriving late, covered the retreat and held off the pursuing cavalry.23
How many people died at the Battle of Vinegar Hill?
The official return of Crown losses lists two officers and about eighteen men killed, some seventy wounded and six missing. Gordon gives almost the same figures for Johnson's column alone, which suffered most.24
Nobody counted the rebel dead. Gordon wrote of some hundreds killed in the pursuit, and Maxwell in 1845 thought three or four hundred likely. Modern Wexford estimates are far higher: about 1,200 in Deaglán de Bréadún's account, and about 1,500 on the county's tourism site. Many of the dead were not fighters. Byrne recalled that no prisoner was taken around Enniscorthy, and Quinn writes that even Lake was appalled by the carnage.25
In Enniscorthy the troops set fire to the house the rebels had used as a hospital, with the wounded inside. Gordon counted at least fourteen dead; Johnson's biographer gives more than fifty and calls it one of the worst atrocities of the campaign.26
Wexford town saw its own killing the day before the battle. On 20 June, as the troops closed in, men led by Captain Thomas Dixon took loyalist prisoners to the town bridge and piked them to death. Gordon counted 97 victims, while the National Army Museum gives 70. Gordon says the killing stopped only when Father Curran intervened and word came that Vinegar Hill was under attack; Hay and Roche's biographer credit Edward Roche with leading the men out of the town to the camp.27
Who won the Battle of Vinegar Hill, and why?
The Crown won a clear victory. Lake took the camp, its guns and stores, and retook Enniscorthy. On the same day Brigadier-General John Moore's column entered Wexford town. Lake then hanged several leaders of the rebel administration of the town, among them Keugh on 25 June and Bagenal Harvey on 28 June.28
The reasons are plain enough. Lake had more trained men, plenty of artillery and ammunition, and a plan to attack from all sides. The rebels had pikes, few muskets and almost no powder, and by June they knew the rest of the country had not risen with them. Yet the gap mattered too. Thousands escaped, and some fought on. Father John Murphy led one column into Kilkenny and Carlow and was hanged at Tullow on 2 July. Perry led another north, and with Father Mogue Kearns was hanged at Edenderry on 21 July.29
What happened after Vinegar Hill?
On 20 June, the day before the battle, Lord Cornwallis was sworn in as lord lieutenant and commander-in-chief. He was shocked by what he found. A week later he wrote that the reports of rebels killed were exaggerated, but that any man in a brown coat found near a battlefield was killed without discrimination. He pardoned rank-and-file rebels and reviewed courts martial, commuting about a third of the sentences. Quinn notes that many loyalists mocked him as Cropwallis for it.30
The French came at last in August, too late. About 1,100 soldiers under General Humbert landed at Killala in County Mayo, routed Lake's force at Castlebar on 27 August, and surrendered at Ballinamuck on 8 September. Tone was captured at sea that autumn and died in prison in November. The National Army Museum puts the death toll of the whole rebellion in the tens of thousands. In 1801 the Act of Union abolished the Irish parliament.31
How is the Battle of Vinegar Hill remembered?
The fight over the meaning of 1798 began at once. Sir Richard Musgrave's Memoirs of 1801 presented the rising as a sectarian Catholic revolt, and Edward Hay wrote his History of 1803 partly to answer him. James Kelly traces the long-lived view of 1798 as a sectarian peasant revolt back to Musgrave, a view that also shaped Thomas Pakenham's popular history The Year of Liberty. Kevin Whelan, Daniel Gahan and others have since rebuilt the picture of a political, organized rising.32
Images of the battle carry the same arguments. George Cruikshank's illustrations for Maxwell's history of 1845 show the rebels as a savage mob; History Ireland calls them heavily propagandist work. A sketch of the battle by a County Dublin militiaman who was there survives only as it was colored in and embellished by his son in the mid-nineteenth century.33
For Irish nationalists, 1798 became a story of sacrifice. P. J. McCall's ballad Boolavogue, about Father John Murphy, became, in Furlong's words, County Wexford's perennial anthem, and, Furlong notes, statues of Murphy stand in Enniscorthy and Tullow. At the launch of the bicentenary program in 1996 a government minister urged that the Catholic and nationalist version of 1798, which had dominated the centenary and the commemorations of 1938 and 1948, give way to the non-sectarian ideals of the United Irishmen.34
In 2012 the National 1798 Rebellion Centre staged what it billed as the first re-enactment of the battle. Wexford County Council's Longest Day research project has studied the battlefield with archaeologists, historians and folklorists. Its metal-detecting survey in 2017 recovered 578 objects over 14 hectares, among them more than 80 lead shot, the largest such assemblage from a licensed battlefield survey in the Republic.35
Where is Vinegar Hill?
Vinegar Hill rises on the east bank of the River Slaney, in the townland of Templeshannon, directly above the town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford. A paved path leads from a free car park to the ruined stone windmill on the summit, with views over the battlefield and across the river to the town. The National 1798 Rebellion Centre in Enniscorthy tells the story of the battle.36
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