But his work was only begun.  Between him and the Irish town the Shannon ran fiercely.  The bridge was so narrow that a few resolute men might keep it against an army.  The mills which stood on it were strongly guarded; and it was commanded by the guns of the castle.  That part of the Connaught shore where the river was fordable was defended by works, which the Lord Lieutenant had, in spite of the murmurs of a powerful party, forced Saint Ruth to entrust to the care of Maxwell.  Maxwell had come back from France a more unpopular man than he had been when he went thither.  It was rumoured that he had, at Versailles, spoken opprobriously of the Irish nation; and he had, on this account, been, only a few days before, publicly affronted by Sarsfield.94 On the twenty-first of June the English were busied in flinging up batteries along the Leinster bank.  On the twenty-second, soon after dawn, the cannonade began.  The firing continued all that day and all the following night.  When morning broke again, one whole side of the castle had been beaten down; the thatched lanes of the Celtic town lay in ashes; and one of the mills had been burned with sixty soldiers who defended it.95

Still however the Irish defended the bridge resolutely.  During several days there was sharp fighting hand to hand in the strait passage.  The assailants gained ground, but gained it inch by inch.  The courage of the garrison was sustained by the hope of speedy succour.  Saint Ruth had at length completed his preparations; and the tidings that Athlone was in danger had induced him to take the field in haste at the head of an army, superior in number, though inferior in more important elements of military strength, to the army of Ginkell.  The French general seems to have thought that the bridge and the ford might easily be defended, till the autumnal rains and the pestilence which ordinarily accompanied them should compel the enemy to retire.  He therefore contented himself with sending successive detachments to reinforce the garrison.  The immediate conduct of the defence he entrusted to his second in command, D’Usson, and fixed his own head quarters two or three miles from the town.  He expressed his astonishment that so experienced a commander as Ginkell should persist in a hopeless enterprise.  “His master ought to hang him for trying to take Athlone; and mine ought to hang me if I lose it."96

Saint Ruth, however, was by no means at ease.  He had found, to his great mortification, that he had not the full authority which the promises made to him at Saint Germains had entitled him to expect.  The Lord Lieutenant was in the camp.  His bodily and mental infirmities had perceptibly increased within the last few weeks.  The slow and uncertain step with which he, who had once been renowned for vigour and agility, now tottered from his easy chair to his couch, was no unapt type of the sluggish and wavering movement of that mind which had once pursued its objects