8 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



most eminent of the distinguislied. corps Tviiicli subsequently consti- 

 tuted the Irish Brigade ahroad. For though disbanded after the 

 Boyne, ihe regiment, taking service ahroad, achieved under a succes- 

 sion of brilliant officers an honourable place in the military history of 

 eighteenth-century France. And preserving in exile that fealty to 

 the principle of hereditary right vrhich, combined ^vith devotion to the 

 Roman Catholic faith, had led its officers to adhere through evil clays 

 to the fallen fortunes of James the Second, it renewed, on the fall of 

 Louis XYI., its allegiance to the Sovereign of the Thi-ee Kingdoms, 

 and Tvas re-enrolled for a brief period in the ranks of the British 

 army. 



The oblivion into which the origin of the regiment has fallen is, 

 however, not very surprising, and is explained in gi'eat part by the 

 circumstance that the compilers of Ii'ish military histoiy have given 

 but scanty attention to the records of Irish regiments at home. For 

 example, O'Conor's "Militaiy Memoii's of the Irish ]!^ation," useful 

 as an account of the exploits of the Irish Brigade abroad, is 

 absolutely silent on the military establishment of Ii-eland at the 

 Restoration. D' Alton, again, in his " Historical and Genealogical 

 Illusti'ations of King .James's Army List," begins, as is natural, only 

 with Tyrconnel's viceroyalty. And though O'Callaghan, in his 

 admirably minute and exhaustive ' ' History of the Irish Brigade in 

 the Service of France," does not omit all notice of the origin of the 

 distinguished regiments whose subsequent careers he traces in so much 

 detail, his references to their pre-Revolution story are brief and paren- 

 thetic. To this explanation of our ignorance of the earliest records 

 of the first regiment of Irish Guards it may be added, that it is only 

 in yeai's comparatively recent that the materials for tracing the origin 

 of the regiment with any semblance of completeness have become avail- 

 able. 1^0 investigator in this field of our seventeenth-centuiy histoiy 

 can fail to acknowledge a large debt to our distinguished and lamented 

 academician, the late Sir John Gilbert, who, by his labours as editor 

 of the Ormonde [Manuscripts and of the Records of the Corporation of 

 Dublin, has thi'own open to the students of seventeenth-century 

 Ireland two splendid treasuries of historical, topogi-aphical, and anti- 

 quarian lore. 



The process by which the regiments raised by various royalist 

 officers became the parents of several of the most distinguished of 

 existing regiments has its best known examples in the Grenadier 

 Guards and the Coldstream Guards, and need not be delineated 

 here. And the circumstances which, immediately following on the 



