of Drogheda. All the southern
bank of the river was lined by the camp and batteries of the hostile
army. Thousands of armed men were moving about among the tents; and
every one, horse soldier or foot soldier, French or Irish, had a white
badge in his hat. That colour had been chosen in compliment to the House
of Bourbon. "I am glad to see you, gentlemen," said the King, as his
keen eye surveyed the Irish lines. "If you escape me now, the fault will
be mine." [687]

Each of the contending princes had some advantages over his rival.
James, standing on the defensive, behind entrenchments, with a river
before him, had the stronger position; [688] but his troops were inferior
both in number and in quality to those which were opposed to him. He
probably had thirty thousand men. About a third part of this force
consisted of excellent French infantry and excellent Irish cavalry. But
the rest of his army was the scoff of all Europe. The Irish dragoons
were bad; the Irish infantry worse. It was said that their ordinary way
of fighting was to discharge their pieces once, and then to run away
bawling "Quarter" and "Murder." Their inefficiency was, in that age,
commonly imputed, both by their enemies and by their allies, to natural
poltroonery. How little ground there was for such an imputation has
since been signally proved by many heroic achievements in every part of
the globe. It ought, indeed, even in the seventeenth century, to have
occurred to reasonable men, that a race which furnished some of the best
horse soldiers in the world would certainly, with judicious training,
furnish good foot soldiers. But the Irish foot soldiers had not merely
not been well trained; they had been elaborately ill trained. The
greatest of our generals repeatedly and emphatically declared that even
the admirable army which fought its way, under his command, from Torres
Vedras to Toulouse, would, if he had suffered it to contract habits of
pillage, have become, in a few weeks, unfit for all military purposes.
What then was likely to be the character of troops who, from the day on
which they enlisted, were not merely permitted, but invited, to supply
the deficiencies of pay by marauding? They were, as might have been
expected, a mere mob, furious indeed and clamorous in their zeal for
the cause which they had espoused, but incapable of opposing a stedfast
resistance to a well ordered force. In truth, all that the discipline,
if it is to be so called,