so, France overtook Spain as the destination for Catholic Irishmen seeking a military career. The reasons for this included the increased overlap between French and Irish interests, and the ease of migration to France and Flanders from Ireland. France recruited many foreign soldiers during various periods; Germans, Italians, Irish, Scottish and Swiss. André Corvisier, the authority on French military archives, estimates that foreigners accounted for around 12% of all French troops in peacetime and 20% of troops during warfare. In common with the other foreign troops the Irish regiments were paid more than their French counterparts. Both Irish and Swiss regiments in French service wore red uniforms, though this had no connection with the redcoats of the British army. The crucial turning point came during the Williamite War in Ireland (1688–91), when Louis XIV gave military and financial aid to the Irish Jacobites. In 1690, in return for 6,000 French troops that were shipped to Ireland, Louis demanded 6,000 Irish recruits for use in the Nine Years' War against the Dutch. Five regiments, led by Justin McCarthy, Viscount Mountcashel formed the nucleus of Mountcashel's French Irish Brigade. A year later, after the Irish Jacobites under Patrick Sarsfield agreed to favorable peace terms and capitulated at the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, the fully armed and equipped Irish Army withdrew to France. Sarsfield sailed to France on 22 December 1691, leading 19,000 of his countrymen and countrywomen to enter the French service in the first phase of the military denuding of Ireland. Sarsfield's exodus included 14,000 soldiers and around 6,000 women and children. This event began what is remembered in Ireland as the Flight of the Wild Geese. In a poem two centuries later, W. B. Yeats would mourn: Was it for this the Wild Geese spread A grey wing on every tide… Sarsfield's Irish army was regrouped and equipped in their red coats, symbolizing their allegiance to the Stuart king. In 1692, a large Franco-Irish army had assembled on the French coast for an invasion of England, but the proposed invasion was scuppered due to the French naval defeat at Battles of Barfleur and La Hogue. Sarsfield's Wild Geese were then re-grouped on the same footing as Mountcashel's Irish Brigade. Up until 1745, the Catholic Irish gentry were allowed to discreetly recruit soldiers for French service. The authorities in Ireland saw this as preferable to the potentially disruptive effects of