The last Ironsides: the English expedition to Portugal 1662-1668, by Jonathon Riley, Solihull, Helion & Company Ltd, 2014, xix+ 201 pp., £25.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-909982-20-8

Abstract

The last Ironsides: the expedition to Portugal 1662-1668, by Jonathon Riley, Solihull, Helion & Company Ltd, 2014, xix+ 201 pp., £25.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-909982-20-8When Arthur Wellesley was appointed to command the British army in Portugal in 1809, it is said that he took with him an account of Count Schomberg'scampaigns over the same terrain between 1662 and 1668. This was almost certainly Dumouriez's Campagnes du Marechal de Schomberg en Portugal, which had been published in London in 1807.1 The future Duke of Wellington was therefore better acquainted than most modern readers with this strange episode in military history. Interest in the Restoration period has gone from strength to strength in recent decades, but several topics remain underexplored. One of these concerns the fate of several thousand and Irish soldiers - most of them veterans of the civil wars and Interregnum - who were sent to bolster Portugal's struggle for independence from Spain. Articles on the so-called English have been few and far between, and Jonathon Riley's work is the first full-length study of their exploits.2By far the largest contingent in the Brigade was made up of troops from the old Cromwellian army - the Ironsides of the title. These were mainly to be found in the two foot regiments, but they were also liberally dispersed among the troops of horse and the officer corps. A force consisting of Cromwell'swhelps, Irish Catholics and former royalists was an extremely combustible mixture, but, as ably described in this book, they proved to be a remarkably effective fighting force. The Brigade was shockingly neglected by their Portuguese hosts as regards pay, food, clothing, weapons and ammunition; however, after an initial year of turmoil within their officer corps, the troops did at least have the good fortune to be entrusted to one of the ablest commanders of the age. Riley's work is as much the story of Count Schomberg as it is of the Brigade, but this is entirely appropriate; it is unlikely that the Brigade would have survived under a less talented commander, let alone formed the spearhead for numerous victories and, ultimately, Portuguese independence. Schomberg deserves to be better known, and in describing how he contended with jealous rivals and capricious employers at the same time as defeating some of the best troops in Europe, Riley has done a good job of introducing him to a new generation of readers.Having stressed that this is a very welcome study, it is disappointing to report that the text contains numerous typos and factual errors. The most obvious mistakes are perhaps the least damaging, as any knowledgeable reader will know, for example, that Cardinal Richelieu could not have engaged in political machinations 17 years after his death (p. 33), and that the Battle of Worcester took place in the Third, not the Second Civil War (p. 132). Errors involving less well-known figures are more problematical, as such mistakes are often perpetuated in subsequent studies. The author has a particular blind spot for Lt-Col Guy Molesworth. Much is made of Molesworth being an Irish Protestant (pp. 51, 67) when he was nothing of the sort: although a branch of the Molesworth family was prominent in Ireland, the colonel came from the Northamptonshire line.3 Similarly, Molesworth was never knighted nor was he ever made colonel of the Duchess of York's Regiment, as claimed on pages 68 and 183 (the author has read the wrong footnote in Dalton's Army Lists, and thus confused Molesworth with Edward Villiers). …