Irishmen in the British, French and Spanish armies
Above, ‘Battle of Fontenoy’ 1745, Irish soldiers are seen displaying captured British standards.
The career of General Ross is remarkable for the light it sheds on the Irish military tradition and the manner in which the Irish Diaspora was in some sense framed by it. On the continent, during the Peninsular War, Ross both fought with and against Irishmen or men of Irish descent. Prominent in the Spanish Army, allies of the British, was General O’Donnell. In the long-standing tradition of the Wild Geese, Napoleon’s army included an Irish Brigade owing to the outstanding reputation of Irish soldiers in French service, not least at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, ‘regarded as the greatest of Irish battle honours’.[1] At Fontenoy, ‘the Irish Brigade, composed of the regiments of Clare, Lally, Dillon, Berwick, Ruth and Bulkeley, as well as Fitz-James’ horse, had joined the French army after the British tore up the treaty of Limerick and effected the penal laws. They showed particular bravery in the battle, a sergeant of Bulkeley capturing an English flag, a colour from the Coldstream Guards, driving the British army from the field with the battle-cry, Cuimhnidh ar Luimneach agus ar feall na Sasanach!. Their role in this battle was commemorated on its 250thanniversary by the issue of a common design stamp by the Irish and Belgian post offices. A later battle cry, “Remember Fontenoy!” was used by 69th New York and the Irish Brigadeduring the American Civil War’.[2]
Ian Delahanty of Boston College has detailed how ‘I’ve found that Irish-American leaders (many of whom went on to serve as officers in the Union Army) before the Civil War were obsessed with the story of the Wild Geese and maintaining an Irish military tradition in America. Recruitment posters or advertisements would include phrases like “Remember Fontenoy,” and I know of at least a couple of widely-read Irish immigrant newspapers that ran both fictionalized and non-fiction stories of the Irish Brigade in France. These papers, like the Boston Pilot and New York Irish-American, were hugely influential at the time of the Civil War, and they used the Irish military tradition in America (whether in the Mexican American War, War of 1812, or especially the Revolution) as a way to rally Irish immigrants to the Union’. The most famous of these US Civil War regiments was the New York based ‘Fighting 69th’ with its battlecry of “Faugh a Ballagh;” which is the Gaelic for “Clear the Way.” Interestingly, to this very day the Royal Irish Regiment in the British Army uses the same battlecry , “Faugh a Ballagh”.
As for Napoleon’s Irish Brigade, it saw service in the Walcheren campaign in Holland in 1809 where Robert Ross served with the XXth Regiment. When the Napoleonic wars concluded with Waterloo part of the price of defeat was a British insistence that the Irish Brigade should never be resurrected in the service of France.
Primarily, though, by the early nineteenth century, the degree to which Irishmen contributed leadership and manpower to the British Army was truly remarkable. Figures for 1830 show that at a time when Ireland constituted 32% of the population of the UK, Irishmen accounted for 42% of the British army – ‘there were more Irishmen than Englishmen in the British army’.[3] Irishmen commanded at the very highest levels, not least Lowry Cole who memorably commanded the 4th Division during the Peninsular War in which Ross served. And of course the Iron Duke, Wellington, was an Irishman – and a childhood playmate of Ross.
Above: The Duke of Wellington Monument, Phoenix Park, Dublin. Note the similarity to the Ross Monument in Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland.