https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Christian-Commonly-Campaigns-Personal/dp/1385687029/?tag=2022091-20
Kit Cavanagh was born in Dublin in 1667. Her childhood was spent on the family farm in Leixlip, County Kildare.
Her father served with the Jacobite Army, dying as a result of wounds at the Battle of Aughrim. During her teen years, she was seduced and she fled to her aunt’s pub in Dublin. SHe inherited the pub after her aunt’s death.
When Kit's husband, Richard Welsh, disappeared in 1691, Cavanagh received a letter indicating he had, possibly not by choice, ended up in the British Army and been sent to Holland. Unwilling to lose her husband she left her children with her mother, disguised herself as a man and joined the British Army on a mission to find him.
As an infantryman, she fought at the Battle of Landen, where she was wounded and captured by the French. She was eventually returned to the British but was discharged from the army for killing a sergeant in a duel over a woman. She immediately re-enlisted and joined the Royal Scots Greys Dragoons, with whom she served until the end of the Nine Years’ War. During this time she grew to enjoy the life of a soldier, with a penchant for the looting that followed the battle.
Cavanagh re-enlisted with the Scots Greys when the War of the Spanish Succession began in 1701. She was shot in the thigh during the Battle of Schellenberg but refused to be sidelined and fought in the Battle of Blenheim a month later. After this battle, she was assigned to guard French prisoners, where after 13 years of searching she found her husband. Unfortunately, when she found Richard he was courting a Dutch woman. Having rebuked him fiercely she left and returned to her life with the Scots Greys.
Cavanagh’s identity as a man had never been challenged, despite being known as the 'Pretty Dragoon'. However, when her skull was fractured at the Battle of Ramillies the surgeon treating her discovered she was a woman. She was discharged but carried on with the army as a sutleress, and some accounts claim she continued to fight on the front lines.
On return to Britain Cavanagh was presented to Queen Anne, who granted her a bounty of £50 and a pension for her services.
Kit Cavanagh joined the British Army in 1693 disguised as a man. She fought with the infantry in Flanders during the Nine Years War until 1697. Then she fought with the 4th Dragoons, then with 2nd Royal North British Dragoons and lastly with the Scots Greys in the War of the Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1706.
Quotations: "We spared nothing, killing, burning, and otherwise destroying whatever we could not carry off."
Kit managed to conceal the fact that she was a woman without being discovered: she ate, drank, slept, played cards, even urinated using what she describes as a 'silver tube with leather straps'. No one was ever the wiser." She once passed herself off as a man that a prostitute claimed she was the father of her child. Cavanagh paid child support to the woman to hide that she was a woman further.
When Kit found her husband, he was in the arms of another woman. It was even more unfortunate for the other woman, as Kit attacked her and cut off her nose.
Kit met and married Richard Welsh. They had two children and was pregnant with a third when suddenly Richard disappeared. When she found him was with another woman, she refused to go back to him and remained a dragoon in the Scots Greys. Despite her anger, they remained somewhat close. They agreed to not reveal her identity and pretended to be brothers. Her husband died at the Battle of Malplaquet. The day after the battle she searched for her husband's body, turning over as many as two hundred bodies before finding him so that she could bury him.
Kit married Hugh Jones but he would die at the Siege of Saint-Venant after the Battle of Malplaquet.
Returning to Dublin in 1713, she married her third husband, a soldier named Davies. They ended up moving about England and Ireland, making a living through a variety of jobs as well as her celebrity status among the military.
