During the winter of 1688-89 Lord Forbes resigned his commission, on the ground that having sworn allegiance to James II. he could bear arms for no other king during his old master’s lifetime.[5] For a few weeks Major Sir John Edgworth replaced him, but owing to financial scandals compromising to himself and several of his subordinates he was obliged to retire,[6] and Edward, Earl of Meath, was appointed to the vacancy on May 1, 1689, when William III. completed his arrangements for re-officering the regiment, which was numbered the Eighteenth of the infantry of the line. He issued forty-one new commissions, some to the seniors who had escaped disbandment at Tyrconnel’s hands, others to officers who had been expelled from the army during James’s reign, others again to young men with no previous military experience. The names of the officers are given in the footnote.[7] One of the results of the revolution by which James II. was deposed and William and Mary placed upon the throne was to plunge England into the vortex of Continental politics. As Prince of Orange, William had been the moving spirit in the coalition of States formed to curb the ambition of the French king, Louis XIV., who throughout his life strove to aggrandise himself at the expense of his neighbours; and when James II. took refuge in France, Louis saw his opportunity to strike a heavy blow at William. By long and careful attention to his navy he had made it superior to the combined fleets of the English and the Dutch--the great naval powers of the time--and, thanks to his command of the sea, was able to land James at Kinsale with five thousand excellent French soldiers to give backbone to the forty thousand men collected by Tyrconnel in anticipation of his Royal master’s arrival. So slow was communication in those days that, though James disembarked at Kinsale in March 1689, the news of the invasion did not reach England for several weeks, when William had already despatched most of his best troops to swell the forces of the Allies facing the French in the Low Countries. William hurriedly raised more regiments, but it was not until August that Marshal Schomberg, the veteran selected for the command of the expedition, landed near Belfast, where in a few days he was joined by Meath’s[8] regiment, which for some months had been quartered in Wales. The army was sent to Ireland utterly unprepared to take the field. There was no transport, the commissariat was wretched, the artillery was short of horses; guns, muskets, and powder, food, clothing, and shoes alike were bad. No wonder, therefore, that after taking the town of Carrickfergus, Schomberg refused to give battle to James, and fell back upon an entrenched camp at Dundalk to await reinforcements of every kind. Before the autumnal rains set in the General ordered his troops to build themselves huts, and the foreigners in William’s pay--old warriors, who had bought their experience in many