Sir, - Ian R. Cox's lively letter (August 18th) lacks historicity. He is right, however, in conceding that the very modest Protestant contingent did not win the battle of the Boyne single-handedly, as some of the present-day triumphalist Orange marches seem to suggest.There is no harm nowadays in proposing the old Irish Protestant toast to "the glorious, pious and immortal memory of William III, prince of Orange, who saved us from Popery, brass money, and wooden shoes". Anyway, neither William nor James were concerned with the fate of the native Irish, and the welfare of the Crown was paramount even with Ormond, the Irish viceroy. James's "Catholic design" had the interests of the Old English recusants mainly in mind. If the "Roman Catholic imperialism" referred to by Mr Cox was so monolithic, how does he account for the Te Deum being sung in Vienna in thanksgiving for William's victory?As for Mr Cox's gratuitous comparison between the two monarchs, no-one has a good word to say for the ineffectual James VI of Scotland and II of England, the last Stuart King to rule England (1685-88); but he was the anointed king and the rebels' invitation to William of Orange was treasonable. However as Shakespeare has it: "treason never prospers, for if it does who then darescall it treason?"William could have cut off the Jacobite retreat to Dublin but he did not want the political inconvenience of being lumbered with his fusspot father-in-law as a prisoner-of-war. No one wanted James. His own troops deserted him and he fled to France. He was no good to anyone, least of all to Ireland.The significance of the battle of the Boyne was European. A disproportionate result was that the Protestant minority would subsequently rule Ireland. The Penal Laws were imposed to effect this rule. The siege of Londonderry and Enniskillen were more obviously extensions of the English Civil War. The native Irish did not really figure: in any of the objectives: the "patriotism" of the so-called "Patriot Parliament" was for those old English recusants.Yet, for the best part of three succeeding centuries it was the native Irish who had to bear the brunt of that coercive Protestant Ascendancy. Indeed, residually, up to recent times it was this Protestant incapacity to rule equitably rather than scissoring a synthetic border through backyards that was the root cause of the unrest in the Six Counties. A "Protestant parliament for a Protestant people" was a recipe for self-destruction. With "parity of esteem" now on agendas all round, such dark days are, please God, a think of the past in a happier, agreed Ireland. - Yours, etc.,J.P. DUGGAN,Mount Merrion,Dublin.