Battle of the Boyne 1690

by Padraig Lenihan

A startling new history of the largest and most famous battle in Irish history, this book incorporates findings of a series of newly discovered sources. Was the Boyne really as important as William of Orange’s propagandists claimed, or was it, as the losers—the French and many of the Irish—insisted, “only a skirmish”? Pádraig Lenihan reconciles the political potency of the Boyne with its military indecisiveness, challenging the conventional view of this most controversial event.

Genres: Military History, 17th Century, History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Padraig Lenihan lectures in history at the National University of Ireland Galway. Before his academic career, Lenihan served in the army where he attained the rank of captain.

Reviews

[Alex Helling · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Battle of the Boyne is an important battle to know about even today, it is one of the few battles that still resonates, being remembered particularly by unionists and the orange order in Northern Ireland. On the face of it it may not be clear why this is the case, the Boyne was not the last battle in the campaign fought in Ireland as part of the war between William the III/II and James II/VII, Aughrim is. Nor was it a particularly large battle - it was far smaller than its exact contemporary the Battle of Fleurus in the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). Yet in this book Padraig Lenihan makes the case for the strategic importance of the Boyne, both in the Williamite war in Ireland and in the broader Nine Years War.

Lenihan makes a good case; Ireland may be a secondary theatre but there was the potential to trap William, the leader of the Grand Alliance (Britain, the Netherlands, Austria etc) in Ireland, and death or defeat could have fractured the alliance and allowed French victory. On a more local scale it is the last time in the campaign that James II had a real opportunity to win back the throne he had lost, fleeing was fatal to his prestige. And it is in the campaign that I found this book to be at its best; clear and easy to follow with all the movements and tactical decisions explained.

Unfortunately I found this less the case with the battle itself. Lenihan covers all the different sources, and they, as so often the case, don't agree. As a result we get told lots of different things and it sometimes gets difficult to pick out which is the possibility Lenihan thinks most likely. Lenihan uses comparisons with other battles to enlighten on what happened tactically, and illustrate the limitations of the armies, but this does add to the complexity of an already quite difficult to follow situation.

It is a nice small and portable book. But to achieve this I wonder whether the editing may have been too brutal. Right at the end a comparison is brought in with the battle of Aughrim as if it is a last ditch attempt to show the importance of the Boyne. But it is so stripped back that it feels more like a throwaway comment without much backing justification.

There are pictures and maps. The pictures of contemporary illustrations and paintings can be useful to show individual parts of the battle. But some of the maps are remarkably unenlightening with units unmarked. One is even orientated in an unusual manner (with N pointed left (normally west) without any arrow to show this is the case; very confusing!

An interesting book with a good argument about the importance of the battle. But the account of the battle definitely has flaws making understanding more difficult.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impartial analysis of a battle that is among the most remembered conflicts on the island of Ireland. The Battle of the Boyne was one of many European battles fought as part of the Nine Years' War (1688-1697) - not to be confused with Ireland’s Nine Years’ War which had taken place a century earlier, this Nine Years’ War was a European conflict between France and the Grand Alliance. Padraig Lenihan provides the context in which the Battle of the Boyne was fought and its lasting legacy while also working through conflicting accounts of the actual battle. Usually, I avoid military history but I found this book engaging and enlightening. I now have a better understanding of the battle itself but also why it is so pivotal in Irish history when it was actually the Battle of Aughrim a year later that effectively ended James II’s cause in Ireland. Crucially, James II himself saw the Battle of the Boyne as a defeat and fled from Ireland to France where he found Louis XIV had little appetite to mount an invasion of England. Realistically, this was the only way James II could regain his British crown. In Northern Ireland, some communities commemorate the Battle of the Boyne as the victory of a Protestant king over a Catholic king but in reality William III was contesting one of the many battles he fought to thwart the European expansionist policies being pursued by the French king Louis XIV.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1080868.html[return][return]Lenihan takes the 1 July battle and examines it in depth from military, political and above all psychological perspectives. His unpacking of what James II, William III and Louis XIV were really up to is most enlightening - he doesn't believe James had aimed at much more than the restoration of Catholic rights before 1688, which chimes with my instinct, but then goes on to say that in 1690 William's hold on Britain was still far from complete, and the Irish campaign was necessary as much as anything to satisfy the Westminster Parliament.[return][return]Lenihan's dissection of the military styles of the kings on each side of the Boyne and their commanders is even more impressive: William and Schomberg were second-rate (and he gives examples from William's other battles to support this), but James and Lauzun were third-rate - the best evidence of this being that the battle took place at the Boyne at all, rather than the much more strategic Moyry Pass, abandoned by the Jacobites without a fight.[return][return]The description of the Boyne battle itself is a forensic dissection, with Lenihan slightly (and unnecessarily) apologetic for the amount of detail, honest about the gaps and inconsistencies in his sources, and also honest about the fact that the most decisive moment in the battle was something which didn't happen on the previous evening, when William was grazed on the shoulder by a cannon-ball; had he been killed at that stage, his forces would probably still have won the battle (if it went ahead) but certainly lost the war, or at least concluded it on much less favourable terms. But the fact that William, though wounded, carried the field, while James fled despite a surprisingly low number of casualties, was enough to set the mythology of the battle and the reputation of both men.[return][return]Having said up front that I really enjoyed the text, I am sorry to say that there are several aspects of its presentation which fall below the standards I would expect from a responsible publisher. The maps are too few, and are confusingly placed and labelled, which is something you really don't want in a book on military history. The index has serious deficiencies. And James II's own memoirs - a key source!! - are confusingly cited; it is implied that they are reproduced in Clarke's 1816 biography, but it would have been nice to be clear. Despite all this I'd recommend the book unreservedly to anyone who already has a decent idea of the historical and geographical terrain.