could never call such a good day."

The day after the sea fight off Beachy Head, with its great but still
partial results, the cause of James II. was lost ashore in Ireland.
The army which William had been allowed to transport there unmolested
was superior in number and quality to that of James, as William
himself was superior as a leader to the ex-king. The counsel of Louis
XIV. was that James should avoid decisive action, retiring if
necessary to the Shannon, in the midst of a country wholly devoted to
him. It was, however, a good deal to ask, this abandonment of the
capital after more than a year's occupancy, with all the consequent
moral effect; it would have been much more to the purpose to stop
William's landing. James undertook to cover Dublin, taking up the line
of the river Boyne, and there on the 11th of July the two armies met,
with the result that James was wholly defeated. The king himself fled
to Kinsale, where he found ten of those frigates that had been meant
to control St. George's Channel. He embarked, and again took refuge in
France, begging Louis to improve the victory at Beachy Head by landing
him with another French army in England itself. Louis angrily refused,
and directed that the troops still remaining in Ireland should be at
once withdrawn.

The chances of a rising in favor of James, at least upon the shores of
the Channel, if they existed at all, were greatly exaggerated by his
own imagination. After the safe retreat of the allied fleet to the
Thames, Tourville, in accordance with his instructions, made several
demonstrations in the south of England; but they were wholly fruitless
in drawing out any show of attachment to the Stuart cause.

In Ireland it was different. The Irish army with its French contingent
fell back, after the battle of the Boyne, to the Shannon, and there
again made a stand; while Louis, receding from his first angry
impulse, continued to send reinforcements and supplies. But the
increasing urgency of the continental war kept him from affording
enough support, and the war in Ireland came to a close a little over a
year later, by the defeat at Aghrim and capitulation of Limerick. The
battle of the Boyne, which from its peculiar religious coloring has
obtained a somewhat factitious celebrity, may be taken as the date at
which the English crown was firmly fixed on William's head. Yet it
would be more accurate to say that the success of William, and with it
the success o