Michael Davitt to Thomas P. Fox and John H. Hutchinson, 12th September 1904. IE TCD MS 9526/6107

IE TCD MS 9526/6107: Letter from Michael Davitt, Dalkey, Co. Dublin, Ireland to Thomas P. Fox and John H. Hutchinson dated 12th September 1904 referencing a proposed visit to the battlefield of Fontenoy, Belgium: "I beg to thank you for your invitation to the proposed meeting on the 22nd inst. at which Mr. Barry O'Brien's suggestion of an Irish visit to Fontenoy is to be considered. I regret that another engagement on that evening will not permit me to attend. As you are good enough to ask for an expression of opinion on the proposed visit to the historic battlefield, I beg to offer my candid views, for what they are worth. I am strongly in favour of Irishmen who have a taste for travel visiting not only Fontenoy but other places known to fame in Europe; whether associated with Irish valour or learning, or identified with names and events not Irish but equally worthy of honour and recognition. Two among other good results are likely to follow from such visits - they tend to improve the visitors in both mind and body; if they are desirous of learning what is instructive and interesting in the places visitied; and they give to the travellers an opportunity of making it better known in France, Belgium, Germany & other countries that Ireland is not part of Gt. Britain, & that Irishmen are not English, in a national or racial sense. I assure you, as one more or less acquainted with most European countries, that there is much missionary work to be done, in this or in some other way, before the people of Europe learn what we would desire them to know about out distinctive racial individuality, and our claims to a nationhood which was not fought for at Fontenoy. On these general grounds I would favour periodical visits by Irishmen to every historic spot in Europe, as well as to the little village in Belgium where the army of the Duke of Cumberland was defeated by Irish & French valour on the memorable 11th of May 1745. Fontenoy was no fought in any sense for Ireland, nor was it the battle of the Irish Brigade at which the highest fighting qualities of the Irish soldier were shown. The men of the Brigade went into this engagement as soliders of an English king, dressed in an English uniform, under an Anglo-Irish flag and with English music (The White Cockade) encouraging them to meet rival English forces; where, as at Ramillies, Irishmen met and killed Irishmen, not for Ireland but for contending British claimants to the British Sovereignty of Ireland and Gt. Britain. In fact so little did the uniforms of the Irish Brigade differ from those of Cumberland's forces that a regiment of French cavalry attacked Count Lally's troops after these had charged up the hill and had broken the lines of the advancing English, believing them to be a part of the enemy's army. The [?] charge which the Irish Jacobites made on this occasion would not have won the day for France had not Count Lally's previous military foresight warned the Duke de Richelieu of the weak & defective position at Saint Antoine, and informed him how to safeguard it. It was Lally, likewise, who suggested the disposition of the artillery in the assault on Cumberland's advancing columns which gave the Brigade and their supporting French comrades the opportunity which was so brilliantly availed of by them. It was he, too, who panned the assault upon the "invincible garrison" of Bergen-op-Zoom, when twenty battalions of Cumberlands forces were cut to pieces, 280 cannon captured, and seventeen ships taken in one haul. Yet the dashing soldier who had fought in fifty victories for the Stuarts & the Bourbons in Europe and in India, was executed in Paris on a false accusation made by envious calumniators, and was gagged on his way to the scaffold to prevent his appealing to the people against the treachery of his accusers. This was thirty years before another Bourbon king was himself treated as Louis XV had treated the heroic Lally. The Irish Brigade gave their swords to two of the worst causes that could enlist the services of great men - the Stuarts and the Bourbons. Forty thousand men in all left Ireland after the treaty of Limerick to spill their blood for the miserable monarch who feld from the Boyne and for his successor in the [?ship] to the English throne. It was this same rotten Stuart cause which brought upon Ireland the scourge and curse of Cromwell, and I have never been able to understand why Irish Nationalists should pay any special homage to the memories associated with the Irish Jacobite Brigades who could fight for King James of England and Louis XV of France, but never for the liberty of their own country. Two expeditions out of several which were panned in France to assist in the freedom of Ireland succeeded in landing on our coasts; that of Thurot which held Carrickfergus for a short time in 1760, and Humberts more noted descent at Killala nearly forty years after. There is no record I think of any of the Irish Jacobite Brigade being in either of these expeditions; but when in 1745, the year of Fontenoy, Prince Charles, the Stuart Pretender, planned a descent upon Scotland, there were scores of Irish Brigade officers who volunteered to join his standard, and his chief military advisers during the brief rebellion of that year were O'Sullivans, Grants, O'Neills and Warrens. I am no admirer of bravery apart from a good cause, nor of soldiering, no matter how dashing it may be, in a bad one. Bunker's Hill is far more sacred to me than Fontenoy. Irishmen fought there and beat England in the cause of liberty. They defeated the Duke of Cumberland at Fontenoy in the service of a Bourbon king and that his ally the ex-king of England; and the end of the famous Irish Jacobite Brigade was the ingenious one of transferring their swords and service from france to England when the French Revolution had upset the Bourbon dynasty and shook the thrones of European despots. The reward of the Brigade for this surrender of both of their Irish and Jacobite principles was to be sent to the fever-ridden military posts of the Indies to die like flies in their new English uniforms. And it seems to me that there is some poetic justice in an English appreciation of this kind of Irish soldiering in an English army; for whether Irishmen who unlist in such a cause die in foreign fever climates or end their days in an Irish workhouse they only meet the fate which they fully deserve."