Falkineii — The Irish Guards. 27 



of Dublin. On the other hand, the Duke of Eitz James, the descen- 

 dent of the great soldier Berwick, and the principal personage among 

 those to whom the invitation to join the British army had been 

 addressed, was insulted by some observations from Lord Blaney in the 

 Irish House, of Lords, and fought a duel with that nobleman in the 

 Phoenix Park in assertion of the honoui' of his confreres.^ The un- 

 employed officers were treated with so little consideration by the 

 military authorities that some of them were reduced to a half-starving 

 condition, and had to wait several years for arrears of pay : while the 

 Colonels on the final disbandment of the Brigade were refused the 

 rank as half -pay officers for which they had stipulated when entering 

 the British service. Thus the final chapter in a story that had 

 extended over a space of above one hundred and thirty years was one 

 of misfortune and even humiliation. But none the less the record of 

 the Irish Guards, from their formation in 1662 to the final dispersal of 

 the last remnant of the regiment, is one in every respect creditable to 

 the martial traditions of Ireland ; and rooted in the history of its 

 country, whether as Jacobite or "Williamite, as loyalist or rebel, as 

 fighting for or against the Crown to which it owed its origin, its 

 career is one in which were exhibited at every stage the stainless 

 honoiu' of Irish gentlemen, and the indomitable valoiu' of the Irish 

 race. 



l^OTE ADDED IE THE PRESS. 



Mr. Lecky, in his '■'■History of England in the Eighteenth Cen- 

 tury,'''' vol. vii., p. 254, gives some account of that final chapter in the 

 history of the Irish Brigade, to which O'Callaghan in his otherwise 

 exhaustive narrative gives but scant attention. Reference is also made 

 to the episode in Mrs. M . A. O'Connell's Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade. 

 But much the fullest authority for the later history of the Irish Guards 

 is to be found in a volume entitled : ' ' U^ie Famille Royaliste, Irlandaise 

 et Francaise, et Le Prince Charles-Edouard,''^ privately printed at Nantes 

 in 1901 by the Duo de la Tremoille. In this work several documents 

 relating to the regiment under the Colonelcy of Antoine Count "Walsh 

 de Serrant are reproduced. From it are extracted the documents follow- 

 ing, viz. : the letter of the Duke of Portland above referred to, and the 



^ Annual Eegister, 1797. 



