The Treaty of Limerick & the Wild Geese

1691 — The Williamite war ended at Limerick — and with it, thousands of Ireland's Catholic soldiers sailed for Europe, never to return.

After defeat at the Battle of the Boyne (1690) and the bloody Battle of Aughrim (1691), the Jacobite cause in Ireland made its last stand at Limerick. The Treaty of Limerick, signed in October 1691, ended the war on terms that promised Catholics a measure of tolerance. As part of the surrender, around 14,000 Irish soldiers were permitted to leave for France to serve the Catholic King Louis XIV — the great departure remembered as the "Flight of the Wild Geese."

They and generations after them served with distinction in the armies of France, Spain and Austria. The treaty's promises to Catholics at home, however, were swiftly broken: within a few years the Penal Laws would strip away the very rights it had guaranteed, and Limerick earned its bitter nickname, "the City of the Broken Treaty."