The facts of the matter are that there were no local military formations of the type depicted by Nolan in the early 1770'8, nor did the Volunteers of 1782 -as they are called - exist side by side with such formations, as he seems to suggest (though he is vague on this - understandably enough in the context of the book since his hero then was in the American colonies), or continue beyond their demise.  No; to repeat, the yeomanry were not formed until 1796, a year after the beginnings of the Orange Order.

Now it had been the practice to array the militia every time the establishment felt itself at risk.  Threatened Stuart restorations for example in 1708, 1715 and 1745 saw the able bodied members of the Church of Ireland arrayed in the county militias.  So too with the outbreak of the 7 year war, when the protestants were again arrayed. I have not seen lists of the earlier formations but in 1756 the Carlow quota was 887²⁴ - a very large number given the paucity to officers and of corps. The component units must have been very large. They were arrayed as follows:

A Regiment of Dragoons arrayed in 1756:

Coin Sir Richard Wolseley Bart.

Lt Col Henry.Bunbury.

Major Beaumont Astle

Captains John Hardy, William Warren, Thomas Bunbury

Capt Lt William Pendred

Lts Wm Vicars, Wm Bernard, Benjamin Burton Jur,

Walter Bagot, John Vigors

Cornets Henry Astle, Wm Burton? Robt Hewetson,

Richard Scooly, John Drought, Weaver Best

An Independent Company in Carlow Town 1756:

Capt Philip Bernard

Lt Abraham Mitchell

Ensign Wm Brown.25

Almost nothing else is known about this short lived muster - but they cannot have been the model for the yeomanry formations of Bill Nolan's novel.

Now, as I .suggested Bill could not altogether avoid the Volunteers and though the section is grey as to definition, neverthless, - some picture is given, some attempt made to resolve the dichotomy resultant from his invention of a prior existing yeomanry. Ned Hickey returns with the demobbed of the defeated army from the Americas and learns of 1782; of "the proposal of the Irish aristocracy to raise a volunteer force for the defence of the country”, and that The Volunteers were raised by the ruling class.²⁶

At local level he was told

Sir Philip, had taken a commission in a Volunteer corps raised by Mr Bagenal —- Sir Edward Crosby had declined all invitations to join the force.²⁷

The narrative then jumps to 1796 and the dichotomy can be said to have been if not resolved, at least dodged, since that was in fact the year of the formation of the yeomanry.

Nolan then while much more circumspect about the Volunteers, tends to elevate them- as Farrell did also.  But the historian must remain most ill at ease with the novelist.  The Volunteers were the establishment's answer to the failure of a bankrupt government to respond to danger in the standard pattern of embodying the militia, and were in a sense to be seen within that pattern. Being locally raised and neither officially endorsed nor paid for they approximated more in fact to the formation Nolan describes at being raised and maintained by the Butler family²⁸ than could the yeomanry troops and companies - serving as these were under Government commission and, except for the few short lived supplementaries (well attested and reasonably well listed), with Government pay.

Before going on to discuss the actual Volunteers of the county it is as well to mention that not only did Sir Edward Crosby not decline to join the force but that he was not then in Carlow and that he did in fact join that force - in Dublin in the Lawyers Corps. And far from galloping round Myshall then with his corps of terrorisers Robert Cornwall too was not only a volunteer in Dublin with the Union Light Dragoons but was their Captain Commandant.²⁹

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