Derry and Limerick
had—at last—and in June came himself to Ireland.
When on the 1st of July the rival Kings met at the Boyne, James was but half-hearted. By nightfall he and his advisers had entirely lost heart. But their Irish troops were no more cowed after that battle than the Ulster Protestants had been after Cladyford. There had been a skirmish, not a general engagement: the raw army had done some gallant fighting at Oldbridge Ford, and their retreat before a superior veteran force, was by no means a rout. Nevertheless, the beaten trio—the English King, his Anglo-Irish viceroy, and his French generalissimo—promptly threw all the discredit upon their Irish troops. William, too, did not doubt: that the game was over. In reality, it had but begun. He had to encounter a new force—the power of the Irish people, resurgent, after forty years' bitter contact with mother earth. For, to the surprise of all the foreigners, who had not gauged the sentiments behind the Irish uprising, the greater part of the Jacobite army had assembled at Limerick a week or two after the defeat. The Old Irish party attributed the pitiable indecision of James to a "wrong maxim of state," an idea "that the only way to recover England was to lose Ireland,"2 as he could not
227
