Viewed in the light of after events, the Treaty of Limerick, from the Irish standpoint, looks like a huge game of confidence, and is an ineradicable blot on English military and diplomatic honor. The civil articles were ignored, or trampled under foot, almost immediately. The military articles were better observed, except that provision which related to transportation to France, which was grossly violated and led to the drowning in Cork Harbor of a number of the wives of the Irish soldiery, who, unable to find room on board, owing to De Ginkel’s alleged faithlessness, or the perfidy of his lieutenants, clung to the ropes, when the ships set sail, and were dragged beneath the waves to their death. Mitchel, in his able “History of Ireland,” page 3, writing of this painful incident, defends Sarsfield against an imputation cast upon that officer by Lord Macaulay, in his brilliant but unreliable “History of England,” thus: “As to General Sarsfield’s proclamation to the men ‘that they should be permitted to carry their wives and families to France,’ he made the statement on the faith of the First and several succeeding articles of the treaty, not yet being aware of any design to violate it. But this is not all: The historian who could not let the hero go into his sorrowful exile without seeking to plunge his venomous sting into his reputation, had before him the ‘Life of King William,’ by Harris, and also Curry’s ‘Historical Review of the Civil Wars,’ wherein he must have seen that the Lords Justices and General Ginkel are charged with endeavoring to defeat the execution of the First Article. For, says Harris, ‘as great numbers of the officers and soldiers had resolved to enter into the service of France, and to carry their families with them, Ginkel would not suffer their wives and children to be shipped off with the men, not doubting that by detaining the former he would have prevented many of the latter from going into that service. This, I say, was confessedly an infringement of the articles.’ “To this we may add,” continues Mitchel, “that no Irish officer or soldier in France attributed the cruel parting at Cork to any fault of Sarsfield, but always and only to a breach of the Treaty of Limerick. And if he had deluded them in the manner represented by the English historian, they would not have followed him as enthusiastically [as they afterward did] on the fields of Steinkirk and Landen.”