Feldzeugmeister

Feldzeugmeister: The Forgotten Irish General Who Defied Frederick the Great

In 1645, a Gaelic lord was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, and English law declared his family's noble blood forever "corrupted." A century later, one of his descendants stood inside a burning Saxon palace and told Frederick the Great he would defend it to the last man.

This is the extraordinary true story of Johann Sigismund Graf Macquire von Inniskillen, born under Ireland's Penal Laws in a Kerry farmhouse, barred by statute from ever bearing arms in his own country, who crossed the sea to the Habsburg Empire and rose from frontier ensign to Feldzeugmeister, General of Artillery, decorated by an empress and remembered in German military encyclopedias two centuries after his death. Drawing on Austrian military archives, Bohemian heraldic records, and the scattered genealogies of Ireland's "Wild Geese," this book traces his ascent through the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War to his legendary defense of Dresden, and follows his family's parallel fortunes in Kerry and, astonishingly, on the Virginia frontier.

A sweeping story of dispossession, reinvention, and the making of a Habsburg general from the wreckage of a broken Irish lordship.