When Dean Rowland Davies – a chaplain with King William's forces – passed through the Munster town of Clonmel in July 1690, he had his pistol and his boots stolen, he believed ‘by some Danes quartered there’. This, it might be said, is one instance of lawlessness from the margins of history, and yet it is a detail interesting enough to catch the novelistic eye of Elizabeth Bowen, who mentions it in her family chronicle Bowen's Court. It signals a perhaps unconscious tension within the victorious Williamite camp between the Irish Protestant community represented by Davies and those others who have come to Ireland to fight for various reasons – be they personal, political or venal. Dean Davies also talks of having to preach a sermon against swearing to the victors of the Battle of the Boyne. It seems to have been a common complaint among local Anglicans about the Williamite army, who felt that the soldiers seemed

If nothing else, the spoils of war should not be corrupted by immoral behaviour.