This brilliant little feat delayed the siege.  Nevertheless it was pressed on with great vigour.  Two more guns were obtained, several of the outworks carried, and a breach began to show in the ramparts.  It was now autumn, the rainy season was setting in, and William’s presence was urgently wanted in England.  After another violent attempt, therefore, to take the town, which was resisted with the most desperate valour, the very women joining in the fight, and remaining under the hottest fire, the besiegers drew off, and William shortly afterwards sailed for England, leaving the command in the hands of Ginkel, the ablest of his Dutch generals.

This first siege of Limerick is in many respects a very remarkable one, and bears a close analogy to the yet more famous siege of Londonderry.  To give the parallel in Lord Macaulay’s words—­“The southern city,” he says “was, like the northern city, the last asylum of a Church and of a nation.  Both places were crowded by fugitives from all parts of Ireland.  Both places appeared to men who had made a regular study of the art of war incapable of resisting an enemy....  In both cases, religious and patriotic enthusiasm struggled unassisted against great odds; in both cases, religious and patriotic enthusiasm did what veteran warriors had pronounced it absurd to attempt.”

In Galway, meanwhile, violent quarrels had broken out.  The French troops were sick, naturally enough, of the campaign, and not long afterwards sailed for France.  Their places were taken later on by another body of French soldiers under General St. Ruth.  St. Ruth was a man of cold, disdainful temperament, but a good officer.  He at once set to work at the task of restoring order and getting the army into a condition to take the field.  Early in the spring Ginkel had collected his army in Mullingar ready to march to the assault of Athlone, the ancient Norman fortress, upon the bank of the Shannon, which was here spanned by a single bridge.  Upon Ginkel’s advance this bridge was broken down, and the besieged and besiegers were separated therefore by the breadth of the river.  After an unsuccessful attempt to repair the breach the Dutch general resolved to ford the latter.  As it happened the water was unusually low, and although St. Ruth with a large force was at the time only a mile away, he, unaccountably, made no attempt to defend the ford.  A party of Ginkel’s men waded or swam across in the dark, caught the broken end of the bridge, and held it till it was repaired.  This done, the whole English army poured across the river.

The struggle was now narrowing fast.  Leaving Athlone Ginkel advanced to Ballinasloe, so well-known now from its annual sheep fairs.  The country here is all but a dead flat, but the French general took advantage of some rising ground on the slope of which stood the ruined castle of Aughrim.  Here the Irish were posted by him in force, one of those deep brown bogs which cover so much of the surface of Galway lying at their feet and surrounding them upon two sides.