Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/267

Sarsfield was a daughter of the rebel, Rory O'Moore. And though he succeeded to an estate of some £2,000 a year in county Dublin (worth at least £5,000 or £6,000 nowadays) which might well have predisposed him to acquiescence in any good composition, he kept a wild trick of his ancestors and was of no stuff to make a helot. Bred to military service, he saw his first campaigning, like most soldiers of that day, in the cockpit of Europe, serving under Luxembourg among the troops lent by Charles the Second to Louis the Fourteenth. Charles gave him a commission in his own guards, and the accession of James had naturally nothing disagreeable for a Catholic who is noted in one of the contemporary lists as having never conformed. He fought at Sedgemoor, and was severely wounded; he took a leading part in a cavalry skirmish on the King's side after the Prince of Orange had landed; and after James's flight he followed his master into France, proceeding thence, with James and the Duke of Berwick, to the landing at Kinsale in March, 1690.

Sarsfield was then in the prime of life, just turned, or turning forty. We know nothing of his employment during the first months of 1690, while the country was really in James's power, resistance only making itself sharply felt at Derry 255