The king’s flight was without reason or measure.  As before in England, so now, he seemed to pass in a moment from insane self-confidence to an equally insane panic.  He fled south, ordering the bridges to be broken down behind him; took boat at Waterford, and never rested until he found himself once more safe upon French soil.

His flight at least left the field clear for better men.  Patrick Sarsfield now took the principal command, and prosecuted the campaign with a vigour of which it had hitherto shown no symptoms.  Sarsfield is the one redeeming figure upon the Jacobite side.  His gallant presence sheds a ray of chivalric light upon this otherwise gloomiest and least attractive of campaigns.  He could not turn defeat to victory, but he could, and did succeed in snatching honour out of that pit into which the other leaders, and especially his master, had let it drop.  Brave, honourable, upright, “a gentleman of eminent merit,” is praise which even those least inclined to favour his side of the quarrel bestow upon him without stint.

William, now established in Dublin, issued a proclamation offering full and free pardon to all who would lay down their arms.  He was genuinely anxious to avoid pushing the struggle to the bitter end, and to hinder further bloodshed.  Though deserted by their king, and fresh from overwhelming defeat, the Irish troops showed no disposition, however, of yielding.  Athlone, Galway, Cork, Kinsale, and Limerick still held out, and behind the walls of the last named the remains of James’s broken army was now chiefly collected.  Those walls, however, were miserably weak, and the French generals utterly scouted the possibility of their being held.  Tyrconnel, too, advised a capitulation, but Sarsfield insisted upon holding the town, and the Irish soldiers—­burning to wipe out the shame of the Boyne—­supported him like one man.  William was known, to be moving south to the attack, and accordingly Lauzan and Tyrconnel, with the rest of the French troops moved hastily away to Galway, leaving Sarsfield to defend Limerick as he could.

They had hardly left before William’s army appeared in sight with the king himself at their head, and drew up before the walls.  A formidable siege train, sent after him from Dublin, was to follow in a day or two.  Had it arrived it would have finished the siege at once.  Sarsfield accordingly slipped out of the town under cover of night, fell upon it while it was on its way through the Silvermine Hills in Tipperary, killed some sixty of the men who were in charge, and filling the cannons with powder, burst them with an explosion which startled the country round for miles, and the roar of which is said to have reached William in his camp before Limerick.