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The campaigning season opened with the Jacobites holding the principal crossings and towns west of the Shannon. Their cause remained part of the wider Nine Years’ War: William III’s coalition was fighting Louis XIV across Europe, while French officers, equipment and hopes of relief linked the Irish theatre to continental strategy. The arrival at Limerick in May of the French lieutenant-general Charles Chalmont, marquis de Saint-Ruth, brought weapons and supplies but neither the money nor the additional troops that the hard-pressed Jacobites wanted. He found an army whose morale and material condition were poor after the previous winter.
Henry Ireton, Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law and successor as commander of the parliamentary army in Ireland, began the campaigning season with a formidable military position but demanding tasks. Cromwell had left Ireland in 1650. Ireton now commanded the army as well as helping to shape the new Commonwealth administration. The remaining resistance was fragmented: Catholic confederates, Irish royalists, English royalists and local garrisons could still co-operate, but their political aims, religious commitments and personal rivalries did not always coincide.
