Blood's Campaign

by Angus Donald

  As he approached the inn, he saw that Joseph Murphy, the man who owned the establishment, was already up and about. He was sluicing down the front steps of the Whale and Crow where some reveller had vomited during the night.

  ‘Morning to you, Major Blood,’ said the man cheerily. ‘You enjoyed the governor’s ball to the fullest, I see.’

  Holcroft said nothing. He nodded at the man and made to move past him.

  ‘Hold on just a wee moment, Major,’ said Murphy. ‘I must tell ye that you’ve a visitor this fine summer morning.’

  ‘A visitor?’ Holcroft stopped in surprise.

  ‘Aye, sir, a young lady – unaccompanied, too! She didn’t give a name.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She said she had to see you, sir, most urgent, and when I told her you were not yet returned from the castle, she insisted that she would wait for you. I put her in your room, to keep her from getting under my feet as I get the place ready. Hope that’s satisfactory. I didn’t know what else to do with her.’

  Holcroft bounded up the stairs and threw open the door to his small room, and there, sitting demurely on the large four-poster bed in her sky-blue ball gown, chain of sapphires twinkling around her neck, was Caroline Chichester.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sunday, August 10, 1690

  Hogan stood up in his saddle and looked west where he could see the glint of water in the late afternoon sun – the River Shannon – and the smoke rising from the chimneys of the village of Ballina on the nearer, the eastern bank. To his left were the dark slopes of the Silvermine Mountains, an inhospitable rugged terrain he had known since boyhood.

  Hogan had thought his part in the conflict was over after surviving the carnage at the Boyne. He now realised he had been fooling himself. The irresistible twin forces of Henri d’Erloncourt and Patrick Sarsfield had combined to keep Mick Hogan in arms, and there was not a damn thing he could do about it, save run for the mountains or the bogs and hide until the last echo of the last musket shot had died away – and that was not Hogan’s way. No man would have cause to call him a coward after the war.

  General Sarsfield had offered him a regiment of cavalry of his own to command and, when Hogan had demurred, had repeated his woo-ing words of patriotism, saying Hogan was needed by his country. He had also hinted that if he went back to his old ways – the thieving life of the wild raparee – he would immediately be declared an outlaw. If that was the cudgel that threatened him, Narrey had lured him with a sweetmeat instead. Gold, and plenty of it, ten pounds a week in louis d’or if Hogan would agree to lead raids on the supply lines and foraging parties of the English Army in the mid-lands between Dublin, which Dutch Billy now possessed, and Athlone, on the Shannon, which was still held by the Irish adherents of that cowardly runaway Séamus an Chaca.

  It had been no contest for Mick Hogan. He disliked the pomp and formality of regimental life, and he was sure he would have made a poor lieutenant-colonel of cavalry. Much better to have his own band of loyal ruffians, sleeping under the stars, and causing mayhem whenever and wherever he could. He had enjoyed telling General Sarsfield that he had accepted the nominal rank of major in the royal army of His Majesty Louis XIV, that he was now detached on special operations in Ireland, and therefore must reluctantly decline his offer.

  ‘I’d rather you fought with me, Mick. But I don’t care who you fight with as long as you do fight,’ said Sarsfield. ‘And, laddie, I shall be watching you!’

  The drawback to accepting all that filthy lucre to join the French service was that he was forced to spend a good deal more time in the company of Henri d’Erloncourt – a man for whom he had no respect, indeed an ever-growing dislike. The French colonel seemed to regard him as a ready replacement for his dead henchman Guillaume du Clos, killed by a cannon ball outside Duleek, which meant that a good deal of errand-boy work was expected of him. But Hogan found that, if he concentrated on the little linen bags of gold the man was paying him each week, he could just about stomach his discomfiture.

  Hogan was of a mind to buy himself a small farm when this bloody war was over and the English were expelled from his fine green homeland. He had decided that he would get married to some nice buxom lass and raise sheep and even a few children in a bare but bucolic heaven down by Lough Leane, near Killarney. That was the plan. In truth, he wasn’t much of a farmer and suspected that he would die of boredom, but every man should have a dream, and this was Hogan’s – and if he earned enough of the Frenchman’s gold he might set up as a gentleman and leave all the dirt-grubbing to his tenants.

  Hogan pulled himself back to the present with a start. This was no time for day-dreaming. He reined in his mount. A horseman in a dark blue cloak was riding towards him over the rough sheep pastures from the direction of Ballina, one of his scouts, probably, coming in to report. Hogan raised his hand in the signal for a halt and glanced over his shoulder at the double line of thirty mud-daubed, weapon-draped rascals slouched in their saddles behind him.

  He did not know many of these men well – there were few enough of the old crew who had survived Cavan and the bloodbath of the Boyne – but these new comrades had shaped up well enough in the past few weeks of raiding and robbing around enemy-held Mullingar, fighting hard when called upon to do so, and retreating at speed – never fleeing in panic – when necessary, and grumbling only a reasonable amount at the privations of life on the road.

  He had had no difficulty in recruiting riders. The two armies, both of Irishmen and William’s brutal foreigners, had pillaged the mid-lands again and again as they crossed over them, killing livestock and burning what plunder they could not carry away. With many a Catholic smallholder facing starvation on his torched fields, finding good men to swear a solemn oath to ride with him had been absurdly easy and he had been able to pick and choose the likeliest.

  The scout approached and made his report: the river was low enough to ford at Ballina, and there was no sign of any English soldiers. Hogan muttered some words of praise and sent him back to join the column with a jerk of his head. They would cross here and ride south-west for ten miles – in an hour or two, at around sunset, with the blessing, they would be safely in Limerick.

  He had been summoned. His master – God how he hated that word, for all that it was the truth – had summoned him in from the wilds to a conference in Limerick with, of all people, Patrick Sarsfield. Something was afoot. William’s legions, thousands of the godless Protestant bastards, he had heard, were now outside the decrepit, half-ruined walls of old Limerick. But they had not yet the man-power to surround the whole city – it was still wide open to the north and west across the Shannon on the County Clare side. Hogan’s fear was that d’Erloncourt and Sarsfield between them would make him stay and defend the old town – in some God-damned heroic last stand. If that were the case, he would not countenance it. Fuck them both. He had signed on the ride and raid, not to stand behind a crumbling stone wall with a musket and be blasted by English cannon fire from half a mile away. He would desert, yes he would, if that was what the two madmen asked him. He would hide in the bogs till it was over – and to the Devil with the Frenchman’s gold and Sarsfield’s threats of outlawry. And let any man afterwards dare to say he had not done his part.

  *

  Patrick Sarsfield seemed to have aged several years in the few weeks since Hogan had last seen him. There were fresh lines of worry carved into his strong, handsome face and his hands seemed to tremble slightly as he poured Hogan a large glass of brandy from the small wooden cask. Henri d’Erloncourt, on the other hand, seemed as fresh as a dewy meadow, and splendid this evening in a spotless lavender suit of clothes, with snowy lace at his collar and cuffs, and a shining blond periwig, the heavy curls hanging either side of his foxy little face.

  The city of Limerick was made up of two parts: the ancient English Town to the north was beside the River Shannon, surrounded by water. The second part, the newer although still venerable Irish Town, lay
to the south, across a bridge over the Abbey River, a tributary of the slow Shannon.

  Irish Town, a jumble of workshops and warehouses and mean little houses, was the nearest to the enemy and was mostly surrounded by a wall of decaying stone hundreds of years old, held together by rotting mortar, mould, mud and the constant prayers of the defenders. From the decrepit, half-collapsing walls of Irish Town, the soggy trenches of the besieging English were only seven hundred yards away – and creeping closer as the sappers dug forward each day.

  Hogan, Sarsfield and Henri were alone in a low, circular room at the top of one of the towers of King John’s Castle – a stronghold built by Lackland in the twelfth century on the western side of English Town by the Thomond Bridge. It was about as far from the enemy as it was possible to be and still be in the city. Looking out of a medieval arrow-slit window, Hogan could see the campfires of the horse lines of the Irish cavalry brigades bivouacked on the far side of the river, although he could not locate the billet of his own handful of men, who were located somewhere near Sarsfield’s Regiment of Horse.

  ‘Good of you to come, Mick,’ said Sarsfield passing him the brandy.

  ‘Not at all. I always come a-running when I’m whistled for,’ said Hogan taking a gulp of the spirit. It was the real stuff, as French as his master – and just as rarefied. ‘A good and faithful hound-dog, Paddy, that’s me.’

  ‘I know you’re not,’ said Sarsfield. ‘I know you can on occasion be a disobedient cur.’ But he laughed a little and raised his own glass in salute.

  ‘Could we get to our business?’ said Henri, looking at the two Irishmen with contempt.

  ‘To business then,’ said Sarsfield, suddenly formal. ‘As you will no doubt have gathered, Major Hogan, the Prince of Orange himself is at our gates with a substantial force – we think about twenty-five thousand foot and horse. We have slightly fewer men to oppose him; inside the walls of Limerick and including our cavalry across the river, we have a total of nineteen thousand. We have sufficient food and fodder, wine and brandy a-plenty, as well as powder, muskets and ball, courtesy of our munificent friends in France and their victorious navy. The magazines are full. And summer is nearly over. The rains of autumn are just around the corner. You follow me so far?’

  It’s not as bad as it might be, Hogan thought, his mood warming with the brandy. ‘Panting hot on your heels, sir,’ he said.

  ‘The enemy is digging his saps, pushing the trenches closer and closer to our walls, and in due course they will make a massed assault on the walls of Irish Town. But they are proceeding slowly. Very slowly. At a snail’s pace, you might say. Can you guess why that might be, Major Hogan?’

  ‘They don’t have sufficient guns,’ said Hogan immediately. One noise had been conspicuous by its absence in the few short hours he had been in the city. The booming of the great wall-breaking cannon, the background music to every modern siege, was absent. There had been sporadic reports from lighter pieces – three-pounders, most likely – but not the big bruisers. It had struck him as odd then, and now, suddenly, he felt a glow of real excitement.

  ‘Very good, Major. Yes, they don’t have their big guns. They can’t make much of a dent, even in our decrepit old stones. At least not yet. Your patron Colonel d’Erloncourt here has had news from his sources that they are hauling up their big Ordnance, the real smashers, as fast as they can from Dublin. But the English Artillery Train moves slowly – it seems that they do not find our narrow, muddy, winding Irish roads congenial for the swift movement of heavy guns.’

  ‘Where is the English Train now?’ said Hogan.

  Sarsfield walked over to a map of southern Ireland that was pinned on a wooden board set up on an artist’s easel against the curved wall of the tower. ‘Here, we think. On the southern road somewhere near . . .’ he squinted at the map, ‘Doon. They could be before our walls in two or three days.’

  Hogan thrust his head forward to see better; he traced the fine country road on the map with a blunt forefinger. ‘So tomorrow morning they’ll be about . . . here.’ He stabbed the board with his less-than-clean digit. ‘Ballyneety.’

  ‘You know this region well, Major Hogan?’ said Henri.

  ‘Like the back of my hand, monsieur. I’ve been riding and hunting over the Silvermine Mountains and down to Tipperary since I was a lad. My father had a farm near Doon, good cattle country, till the landlord, a grasping bastard of an Englishman, threw him out on his ear over a trifle of arrears in the rent.’

  ‘You do fully grasp the vital significance of the arrival of King William’s Train here at Limerick?’ said Henri looking doubtfully at Hogan.

  ‘I’m not a fool, monsieur,’ the Irishman replied, clearly nettled. ‘If the big English guns get here soon, they can make a breach in the walls or, better for them, several breaches, in just a few days. Then they will ram their superior numbers into Limerick and we are lost. Maybe the whole war is lost, if they take Limerick, our last great stronghold. But, if we can capture or destroy their big guns, if we can delay the making of a practicable breach in any way, then maybe we can hold out till the rains come and the bastards must go away into their winter quarters. With the war suspended over the long cold months, well, anything could happen. We saw what sickness did to them at Dundalk – their army was decimated. Thousands dead or too ill to fight. They could all pack up and go home to England, with the blessing – or your master King Louis might send us a proper army, to push them back into the sea. Everything changes if we can hold out till the end of this campaigning season. And that will probably be at the end of this month, or the beginning of September. So, yes, monsieur, I do fully grasp the vital significance of delaying the arrival of the English Train.’

  ‘Very good, Major Hogan,’ said Henri with an arch smile. ‘You are a quick student, I see. I was right to choose you. So, the sooner you depart on your mission the better, I would say. I wish you God-speed, and good luck!’

  Hogan took a deep breath and tried to control his anger. He thought about the gold. Lots of French gold – and a sheep farm on the shores of Lough Leane.

  ‘I don’t have enough men,’ he said, through clenched teeth. ‘The English Train will be guarded – they would be fools not to have a substantial military escort. Fusiliers, cavalry, maybe a regiment of dragoons . . .’

  ‘They are fools,’ said Henri. ‘My information is that the escort for the Train is light, a few cavalry, no more than a squadron or two.’

  ‘I need more men – you said this was of vital significance. And it is.’

  ‘I shall come with you,’ said Patrick Sarsfield. ‘My own regiment should be enough, even if your intelligence of their numbers is inaccurate, monsieur. We may leave Limerick in the tender care of General Lauzun for a day or two.’

  Hogan winked at the Irish general. ‘Anything for a bit of fame and glory, eh, Paddy?’ But he was grateful nonetheless. With Sarsfield’s men they would number a good six hundred cavalry, more than enough to cause some mischief. ‘And would you like to ride along with us, monsieur, purely for the fun of it?’

  Henri held up his pale hands in horror. ‘Alas, Major, I have important business in Cork and it cannot wait. Sadly, I must ride this night for the coast.’

  ‘Very well, Paddy. Just you and me. We ride for Ireland – and for glory!’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Monday, August 11, 1690

  It felt odd to be on campaign again after so many weeks in the relative comforts of the Whale and Crow in Dublin and, for possibly the first time in his military career, Holcroft wished he were not with the guns. The heart of the Train was the great siege cannon: six twenty-four-pounders and two eighteen-pounders that should be powerful enough to blast through the ancient walls of Limerick with ease. As well as the big ‘smashers’, Holcroft had charge of five mortars, which would drop exploding shells into the streets of the old city, and he had sixty wagons of powder and shot, match cord and wadding, tools and equipment, all the necessities to k
eep the guns firing until victory was achieved.

  The Train, which stretched nearly two miles along the narrow road, was hauled by hundreds of heavy draught horses and oxen, and was guarded by two troops of Sir Edward Villiers’s Horse, eighty-two red-coated men armed with sword and carbine, under a languid dandy named Captain Thomas Pulteney. For once, Holcroft was thoroughly exasperated with the snail-like progress of the Train. In normal circumstances, he would have been content with its steady, almost sedate pace – none of the wagons had broken an axle so far on the week-and-a-half long rattling journey from Dublin over the execrable Irish roads – but this afternoon he felt tetchy, deeply irritated and impatient with the bucolic ambling of the oxen teams and their drowsing yokel drivers.

  He wanted to get this business done; get the Train to Limerick, reduce the city walls and allow King William’s infantry to storm the last great bastion of the Jacobite cause; then return to Dublin. He wanted to get back to Caroline.

  *

  When he had got over his shock at seeing Caroline sitting on his bed in the Whale and Crow, and had splashed his face with water and ordered up a pot of strong coffee from Joe Murphy, he asked her what she was doing in his room.

  The tale she related to him made him feel uneasy, indeed it was profoundly disturbing. When she had complained about feeling hot from too much dancing, Lieutenant-Colonel Richards had gallantly taken her for a cooling stroll in the formal gardens at the back of the ballroom. He had led her to a discreet spot, taken her hand, kissed it, declared that he adored her, was passionately in love with her, and proposed marriage there and then.

  Caroline had been totally surprised by this development. She was flattered, of course, by such a declaration but she did not think of Richards in a similar way. He was, she told him, a dear friend but she looked on him more as an elder brother, than a suitor. In any case she could not possibly consider a match without the consent of her older brother and guardian, the Earl of Donegall, who was still in Belfast. Richards had tried to argue with her; he even suggested a swift elopement, and swore that he would leave the Ordnance and run away with her to England or Scotland. She told him he was mad. Then he seized her and tried to kiss her and she slapped him once, very hard, and left him sobbing like a child in the garden while she went back towards the safety of the ballroom. All this had taken place while Holcroft had been passed out behind the shadow of the plant in the corner of the dancing hall.