King George mobilized the “aggregate” of his imperial subjects against the American rebels. One Continental Army officer worried the King was “arming every hand, Protestant and Catholic, English, Irish, Scotch, Hanoverian, Hessians, Indians, Canadians.”
Most striking is the military contribution of Ireland, Burke’s birthplace and George’s “other kingdom.” A sixth of the King’s soldiers and a third of his officers who fought in America were Irish-born. Three of his four commanders-in-chief were Irish aristocrats. Down the ranks, the best memoir written by an enlisted British soldier comes from Roger Lamb, a Dublin-born sergeant in a Welsh regiment.
The motley assortment of nations that fought for King George is more than a historical curiosity. Following Irishmen in redcoats helps us to grasp the global scale and consequence of the American Revolution, which was in part a struggle for the fate of an empire. The contributions of Irish bases, officers, and troops to King George’s cause helped to ensure the fight for America was long, bitter, and narrowly decided. But the American war also transformed Ireland’s place in the King’s empire. It birthed a radical struggle for Irish independence from Britain, which instead resulted in union with Britain. We should consider, in this year of semiquincentennial commemorations, not only how the Revolution made America but also how America’s fight for freedom swept across the world. Its legacy includes the lost causes it inspired, and nowhere more so than in Ireland.
“We skulk under the protection of England,” complained Wolfe Tone, a Protestant leader of the revolutionary Society of United Irishmen in the 1790s. Tone lamented: “The name of Ireland is never heard; for England and not our country we fight and die.” Tone’s critique was misplaced. The American Revolution exposed England’s dependence on Ireland’s subordinate, but separate, military power. Ireland maintained an army of 15,000 men. They were organized under Ireland’s lord lieutenant (viceroy), who governed from Dublin Castle, funded by Ireland’s Parliament located a mile away at College Green, and mostly quartered in Dublin’s vast barracks complex. The Crown used Ireland as an expeditionary base throughout the eighteenth century. Irish troops deployed to quell Jacobites in Scotland, campaign in India, and fight the French in America. When General Edward Braddock and his young aide George Washington launched their doomed Fort Duquesne expedition in 1755 during the French and Indian War, Irish regiments formed the backbone of their army. Ireland’s military defended both Ireland and the empire.