The Battle of The Boyne 12 July

On this day, the 12 July, in 1690, the first proper victory for the League of Augsburg, which was the first ever alliance between Catholic and Protestant countries, was won. The opposing armies in the battle were led by King James of England, Scotland and Ireland who had been deposed from his English and Scottish thrones in the previous year and his successor, the co-monarch William III (William reigned jointly with his wife, James's daughter Queen Mary II). Despite being deposed in England and Scotland, James’s supporters still controlled much of Ireland and the Irish Parliament. The battle was the culmination of James's unsuccessful attempt to regain the thrones of England and Scotland. William’s army at the Boyne was about 36000 men and was comprised of mixed religions, the Dutch Blue Guards for example, had the Papal Banner with them on the day, and many of the Guardsmen were Dutch Catholics. The Jacobites were 25,000 strong and James had several regiments of protestant French troops and a number of regiments of German Protestants. The crucial difference between the two sides was not religion but the fact that William’s army was equipped with the new and hugely efficient flintlock musket while James’s men had the obsolete matchlock musket. Over the years, the war metamorphosed into, on the one hand an issue of Irish sovereignty as well as religious toleration and land ownership and on the other about maintaining Protestant and British rule in Ireland. Nowadays, of course it is an occasion for waving orange flags about and being unpleasant to ones neighbours. Which is strange, because originally, Irish Protestants commemorated the Battle of Aughrim on the 12th of July. At Aughrim, which took place a year after the Boyne, virtually all of the old native Irish Catholic and Old English aristocracies were wiped out. What was celebrated on the Twelfth was the extermination of the elite. What happened was that by the time the Orange Order was founded in the 1790s, a new Gregorian calendar had been introduced. A consequence of this was that the date of the Battle of the Boyne was now also on the 12 of July (it had, originally been the First) and the entirely erroneous celebration of William's "victory over popery at the Battle of the Boyne" was born. I shall leave greater minds than mine to decide whether or not this forms the basis for stamping about the "Queen's highway" wearing daft hats to celebrate a spurious identity earned in the not very ‘Glorious Revolution’ settlement or just an excuse for anti social behaviour.