The Soldier of the Wild Geese: A Historiographical and Military Biography of Patrick Sarsfield - Paperback

by Gibson Lawlor (Author)

In 1690, a French Huguenot deserter slipped into besieged Limerick carrying a secret that would change the course of Irish history: the exact location of King William III's siege train. What followed-a midnight cavalry raid guided by a chance password and a stranger's careless words-became the single most celebrated tactical achievement of the entire Williamite War.

This is the full biography of Patrick Sarsfield, First Earl of Lucan: soldier, negotiator, and the last great commander of Jacobite Ireland. Drawing on the historiographical record with unflinching honesty, this book traces Sarsfield from his dual inheritance of Old English crown loyalism and Gaelic rebellion, through his continental apprenticeship under history's greatest generals, to the catastrophe of Aughrim and the fatally compromised Treaty of Limerick. It confronts directly the atrocities alleged at Ballyneety, dismantles the nineteenth-century deathbed myth that made him a nationalist icon, and follows the modern forensic investigation now racing to identify his remains beneath a Belgian churchyard.

Three centuries after an unmarked grave swallowed him whole, science may finally be catching up to legend. This is the soldier behind the statue-flawed, formidable, and long overdue a homecoming.