The Confusion

Because of the rapparees there were few places on the island, outside of Ulster, where Englishmen could feel safe in groups of less than an infantry company. But one of those places was the south bank of the river Sha

So he sat under his brooding-tree and gazed across the wide river Sha

When King William had come over before the Battle of the Boyne he had brought fresh recruits to replace the ones who had sickened and died over the winter, but not enough of the sort Bob favored. Bob had however managed to recruit half a dozen English Protestants who had never actually been to England. They had grown up on various farms in Ireland that their fathers or grandfathers, who had been Cromwell-soldiers, had taken away from Gaelic Catholics. But the various revolutions of the last decades had turned their families into Vagabonds of an extraordinarily hard and dour cast, roaming around Eire in search of organized violence. Bob knew how to talk to men like that, and so they had spread the word among themselves and gravitated toward the King's Own Black Torrent Guards, and continued to gravitate still.

After the Battle of the Boyne, a Protestant wool-merchant of Dublin (who had grown wealthy from the fact that the Irish were not allowed to sell their wool overseas except through England) had donated some portion of his lootings to buy these new recruits weapons and uniforms, and they had formed a company. So the Black Torrent Guards were now a slightly oversized regiment, with 14 companies instead of 13, and a nominal strength of 868 men.

One day Bob reached his brooding-tree and turned around to discover that he had been followed out by Tom Allgreave and Oliver Good, two of the original Phanatiques he'd recruited last year in Dundalk. They were a quarter of a mile behind him, exchanging the lead position every few steps, as if egging each other on. Each of them had a sword dangling from his belt, part of the motley collection of brought and stolen weaponry that had been showered upon the Fourteenth Company by that wool-merchant.

To give great long blades to such boys was dangerous. Fortunately the boys knew it, or anyway had found out as much, over the course of the winter, by slashing each other in what were meant to be playful exchanges. By the time Tom and Oliver drew within hailing-distance of Bob, he had guessed why they had come: They required instruction in sword-fighting. Normally this was considered a pastime of effete courtiers, a pointless, useless, out-moded affectation; in a word, idle. But among common folk, especially older ones who remembered Cromwell, the lore of the spadroon continued to circulate. Word had apparently got round to Tom and Oliver that Bob knew something of the practice. Those boys were unreconstructed Puritans who had nothing to do all winter long, as drinking, gambling, and whoring were ruled out on religious grounds. One could pray for only so many hours a day. It was not possible to practice marksmanship because powder and balls were strictly rationed. So it was not clear to Bob whether they had decided to take up the practice of sword-fighting because they genuinely cared about it, or because there was literally nothing else for them to do.

It did not matter either way, as Bob was idle, too. And so as Tom and Oliver got to within a horseshoe-throw of his brooding-tree, Bob knocked the ashes out of his pipe, stood up, reached around himself, and drew out his spadroon. The Puritans were thrilled. "You'll want to stand sideways, as you make a narrower target that way, and it gets your sword-arm that much closer to the other bloke," Bob said. He raised the sword up until its guard was touching his nose, the blade pointing vertically into the air. "This is a sort of salute, and do not on any account mistake it for some foppish affectation, as it says to any man who stands before you, ‘I mean to engage in swordplay with you, do not just stand there and be hit, but either defend yourself, or else retire.' "

Tom and Oliver now nearly killed themselves getting their weapons unsheathed, and then nearly killed each other getting them into the salute position. "Oliver, what you have in your hand is a rapier, and I do not know the method of its use as well as I do that of the spadroon," Bob said, "but anyway we shall try to make shift with the tools at hand."

Thus did Bob open up a new defencing academy on the south bank of the river Sha

OLIVER GOOD'S GRANDFATHER had dwelt for a dozen years on a farm between Athlone and Tullamore, which placed it in Leinster. But it lay not far from the Co

He and his children toiled on the land as only Puritans could toil on the land, and made many improvements, few of which were obvious, none of which produced results quickly. They bore arms all their days and often rode the countryside hunting down "disorderly elements." They did not see those ragged Protestants any more, and forgot about them altogether, except for their surname, which could be read from the odd gravestone: Crackington.

After Charles II restored the monarchy, however, it was learned that the Crackingtons had somehow found their way back to England and made themselves pests and parasites on their relations, who went to the new Parliament (along with thousands of other Anglo-Irish landholders who had been displaced by other Cromwellian soldiers) and demanded that the Phanatiques be cast out of Ireland. As one of the new King's first acts had been to put Cromwell's head up on a stick, their chances of success seemed reasonable enough. In the end, they got only part of what they wanted. Some of the Cromwellian settlers were kicked off their land and some were not. The Goods managed to hang on to theirs, but only because of some obscure and contingent political happenstance at Westminster.