Irish Legion

Jeremiah Fitzhenry, Wexford rebel and commander of the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Legion/Regiment, was captured by Spanish irregulars in 1811. Later it was discovered he had defected to Wellington. Accorded a free pardon by the British Crown, for the second time in his life, he retired to his family lands in County Wexford.

This is a draft introduction to my History of the Irish Legion, which is well under way, and I'm expecting to publish soon. It has already been peer-reviewed favourably, but I decided to rewrite the introduction and would welcome constructive comments.
PLEASE NOTE This quotation is from Henri Clarke, Duke of Feltre and Minister for War rather than Napoleon. The reference is
Matilda Tone, widow of Theobald Wolfe Tone, ’Narrative of my Mother’s Interview with Napoleon, written by Herself’ in Tone, William Theobald Wolfe, The Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Edited by his son William Theobald Wolfe Tone, 2 vols, (Washington, 1886) I, Appx, Part 2, 574.
I am indebted to Guy Dempsey for drawing this to my attention, and I apologize for misleading my readers.

Jeremiah Dowling was born in County Carlow in 1780 and served in the Royal Navy as a seaman after which he immigrated to France where volunteered for la Legion Irlandaise, then forming at Morlaix (Finistere). Rising to captain and participating in many campaigns, he served until the disbandment of that corps in 1815. He later served in la Legion Royale Etrangere, which became la Legion/le Regiment de Hohenlohe. In 1831, this corps metamorphosed into la Legion Etrangere, the illustrious French Foreign Legion, Dowling transferring to the 54th Ligne, having been raised to lieutenant colonel (chef de battalion). He was, however, retired in that year after an incident with a French general. In 1816, Dowling married Lucie Lahanier at Avesnes-sur-Helpe (Nord). He died in 1844.

Thomas Brown, born at Castlehaven, County Cork, in 1786 was the young master of a British merchantman captured by the French warship l'Orest. In a POW depot with a fellow prisoner he applied to join the Irish Legion, going on the serve in the French army until the 1840s.
First published in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society (JCHAS) Volume 122 (2017) 17-31

Spreadsheet showing details of the non-commissioned officers (sous-officiers) of the 1st Battalion, the Irish Regiment in the French service in 1811. At this time, the battalion was inactive while it was being reformed after the loss of the 1st Batalion. It is not clear whether the 27% given as Irish were genuinely Irish-born, which is a subject for investigation.

During the last days of September 1813, about one hundred exhausted men limped into the town of Wesel. They were the debris of the Irish Regiment in the French army, two battalions of which were annihilated having been pinned against the flooded Bober River in Silesia by a Russian force.

This article has been withdrawn from submission.  A copy, is available  on request..

John Milton famously declared: They also served who only stand and wait'.  Not having heard from her brother and having lost two brothers in war, Adelaide de Sainte-Colombe is forced to write to the French Ministry for War to establish whether he is dead or alive.

The appointment of Antoine Petrezzoli as commander of la Légion irlandaise in September 1804 was greeted with howls of protest from among the Irish officers ‘who would accept none at their head but one of their own.’ His predecessor, Irish-born but French-raised Bernard MacSheehy had failed to manage the faction-ridden Irish and the unit was threatened with dissolution in late1805, when it became clear that a French invasion Ireland was no longer a serious option for Napoleon. Apart from being an experienced light-infantry battalion commander, Petrezzoli’s main quality was his ignorance of, and lack of interest in, the politics of Irish nationalism. His orders were to turn the Legion into an effective military force, and to curb the ‘dangerous nationalism’ that threatened to wreck it. That he succeeded magnificently is demonstrated by the unit’s performance during the defence of Flushing in 1809, and in the Iberian Peninsula between 1807 and 1811 under his protégé Jeremiah FitzHenry. In the end, however, Irish politics undid Petrezzoli, and the appointment in 1807 of Franco-Irish Henri Clarke, Duke of Feltre, as Minister for War, marked the beginning of the end of his command. His main opponents, William Lawless and Thomas Markey, though exiled in Brest under the Maritime Prefect, had awakened Clarke’s dormant Irish sentiments by 1809, when he replaced Petrezzoli with Lawless. Petrezzoli’s five-year of effort were wasted: the first Irish battalion went into captivity at the fall of Flushing, and the second disintegrated in Spain after the defection of FitzHenry, who clashed with the meddling Clarke.
This article is under submission to a journal. Should you like to copy for private consultation, please contact me on this site or on [email protected].
Sincerely,
Nicholas Dunne-Lynch

John Allen was a Dublin woollen draper and United Irishman who was arrested for political activity in 1798 at Margate, England. Acquitted, he returned to Ireland and played a leading role in the Rebellion of 1803, after the collapse of which he escaped to France and joined the Irish Legion. As captain of the Voltigeur (light) company, he lead the storming of Astorga, Spain, in 1810, for which he was awarded the Legion of Honour. The paper also examines Irish participation in the Napoleonic Wars.