The Siege of Derry 1689

by Richard Doherty

  As far as the name Doire is concerned, the received wisdom is that it means an oak grove. However, the word can also mean a small hill, as evidenced by the many small hills throughout Ireland that include the anglicized ‘Derry’ in their names; more than a thousand townland names include ‘derry’. In the case of Doire Calgach, or Doire Cholmcille, this alternative translation as a small hill is more logical than oak grove, since it conveys the sense of an island rising from the waters of the river. Brian Lacy notes that the word frequently indicated an island that was totally or partly surrounded by peat bog and this would apply especially to Doire Calgach or Doire Cholmcille.5 The Foyle once flowed around the island of Doire thereby making that feature of high and dry ground an attractive location for settlers who sought some degree of security, which the river would have provided. Even when the Foyle’s westerly branch silted up, it reduced the surrounding ground to marsh or bog – and hence the term ‘bogside’ – which continued to provide some security from the west. In the late-seventeenth century, at the time of the siege, the marshy ground to the west was still a major obstacle to the besieging Jacobite army. One of the best descriptions of the city’s location is provided by Avril Thomas:

  The site is visually striking – a clearly defined, oval-shaped hill of about 80 hectares in area and almost 40 m in height, with slopes that are steep at its broader northern end and more gradual as it narrows to the south in a wedge-like form. It is bounded on the east by the broad, deep and fast-flowing River Foyle, which is tidal at this point, and on the west by a former course of this river. Beyond these the ground rises to over 70 m rapidly on the east and less so on the west.6

  The Foyle is formed at Strabane by the confluence of the Mourne and Finn rivers whence it wends its way northwards to flow into Lough Foyle at Culmore, some eighteen miles to the north-east as the crow flies but a few miles longer by boat due to the river’s meanderings. Just south of the city the Foyle turns more sharply north-eastwards at the beginning of an arc around the one-time island before turning almost directly north whence it flows into Ross’s Bay. From there the river enters a narrow section, some two miles in length, across which the Jacobite army sited its boom in 1689, before flowing into the lough. From Culmore Point to the city’s quay in 1689 was a distance of a little more than four miles. Lough Foyle lies between County Londonderry, which forms its southern and eastern shores, and Inishowen in County Donegal, which forms its western shore. Strictly speaking, in 1689 all the waters of the lough were considered to be in County Londonderry, the western boundary of which was along the high-water mark on the Inishowen shore.7 From Culmore to the mouth of the lough is over eighteen miles, while the maximum distance across the lough is some ten and a half miles. The mouth of the lough, from Magilligan Point in County Londonderry to Greencastle in Inishowen, is about a mile in width.

  We do not know when the settlement at Doire began to attain importance. It was a monastic settlement, with the first monastery, known as the Dub Regles, or Black Church, in the area of the present Saint Augustine’s church inside the city walls1, but the base of local military and political power was then at the settlement on Grianan hill, with its circular dry-stone fort, or cashel, which was the seat of the northern Uí Néill, some five miles to the north-west in the modern County Donegal and overlooking the neck of the Inishowen peninsula8. This ancient fortification, in ruins by the seventeenth century, was to oversee part of the stage on which the drama that was the siege was played out.

  During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, determined efforts were made to bring the province of Ulster under English control, and by the end of that long reign this had largely been achieved. Part of the process of subduing the Ulster clans had been to build a military base at Doire, in 1566, ‘to check the increasing boldness of’ Hugh O’Neill.9 This was seen as a sound operational centre, with a good strategic location, and the new military establishment, under Edward Randolph, included a hospital. Randolph, who bore the title ‘commander of the forces, and provost marshal of and within the province of Ulster’, commanded a force of seven companies of foot and a troop of horse, about a thousand infantrymen and fifty cavalry, and made his camp on the monastery site, expelling the occupants. Defence works were built of earth, the first Derry walls, and the nearby Tempull Mór, the great church or cathedral – from which the modern parish of Templemore takes its name – was taken over to store the force’s gunpowder, ammunition and provisions. Following a victory against the O’Neills some five miles from the city, the garrison appeared to be well established.10

  However, Randolph was killed in another action against the O’Neills in November 1566 and was buried in Derry; he was succeeded as commander by Colonel Edward St Low. Although plagued by illness, which reduced its numbers, the garrison continued mounting expeditions against the local clans until its strength fell to such a point that a proposal was made that it should leave Derry and move to the area of Strangford lough. Before this plan could be executed, however, a fire broke out in the camp and spread to engulf all the buildings. Tongues of flame leapt to the great church which held the powder and ‘the church and town (such as it was) were blown up, the provisions were destroyed, and many lives lost; in consequence of which the place was considered untenable’. The garrison was evacuated, the infantry sailing from the Foyle for Dublin and the cavalry travelling across country through Tyrconnell and Connaught. But the lesson of the value of a military base at Doire had not been lost.11

  It was not long before a further expedition arrived at Doire. A new base was established which was intended to be permanent and it is to this establishment that the modern city owes its origins. At the time of the plantation of Ulster, in the reign of King James I, settlers were brought into the area and the new town of Doire, anglicized to Derry, or Derrie, was surrounded by a defensive wall. Before long, in 1604, the town became a city when James awarded it a royal charter;12 thus it was the first city in the province of Ulster. Life was never secure for the people of the plantation who, it was said, lived with one hand on the plough handle and the other on the sword. And so it proved in May 1608 when Sir Cahir O’Doherty, lord of Inishowen, led his clansmen against the garrison and people of Derry and sacked the town. Having slaughtered the garrison of Culmore fort, Sir Cahir and his men ‘hastened to Derry on the same night, surprised the garrison, slaughtered Paulett [the governor of the city], with his Lieutenant, Cosbie, and put every man to the sword; plundered the town and reduced it to ashes’. Sir Cahir was hunted down into Donegal where he lost his life in battle at Kilmacrenan. His pickled head was taken to Dublin to be displayed on a spike as a lesson to any who might be inclined to follow his example.13

  This time the settlement was not abandoned. It had been recognized as an important military base, pivotal to the control of north-west Ulster, and O’Doherty’s rebellion emphasized that value. Sitting on what was still almost an island, Derry separated the major clans of the region – the O’Cahans, or O’Kanes, to the east of the Foyle in what had been the county of Coleraine,2 their neighbours in Tyrone, the O’Neills, and the O’Donnells to the west in Tyrconnell, with their allies, the O’Dohertys of Inishowen. And so it was decided that the city would be rebuilt but with much better defences than hitherto. The help of the City of London Guilds, or companies, was sought to provide investment capital for the project. Most of the guilds made contributions, albeit unwillingly in many cases, and a special investment body was created to oversee the work; this was to become the Honourable The Irish Society.14

  To mark the role played by the London companies a new charter was granted to the city, combining the ancient name of the settlement with the name of London: London-Derrie.15 Paradoxically, in the light of recent clamour by republicans and nationalists to change the name of Londonderry to Derry, the London prefix has a Celtic origin, and derives from two words meaning the ‘fort of the ships’. The equivalent Gaelic words – dun, or fort, and long, or ship, are recognizable and, to add to the paradox, some
five miles south of the city, beside the Foyle in County Tyrone, is the townland of Dunalong, ‘dún na long’, the ‘fort of the ships’, where, it is believed, Norse raiders came ashore from their longships and set up camp, giving the locality its name. A new coat of arms was granted to the new city; as with the name, this combined the arms of Derry with those of London, although an Irish harp was added to the cross of St George on the latter.

  The city’s new walls were intended to protect its inhabitants against another attack such as that launched by Sir Cahir O’Doherty since the main perceived threat came from local clansmen who would have had no artillery and none of the equipment needed to penetrate a walled city. Thus the walls, which were constructed between 1614 and 1619, included a six-foot-thick outer ‘skin’ of stone against a twelve- foot-thick earth wall although they did conform to contemporary standards of military engineering by being squat and stout, rather than high, with emplacements for cannon instead of the high towers of earlier times. Artillery for the walls was also provided by the City of London Guilds; six culverins, six demi-culverins and eight sakers were emplaced.16 There was no inner stone wall to create a sandwich; the inner stone wall as seen today was a later addition. Four entrances to the city were made in the walls: Water Gate, later Ship Quay Gate, at the quay on the river; New Gate, later the Butcher’s Gate, from which led the road to Inishowen, carried on a causeway or embankment over the bog; Bishop’s Gate, facing towards the south; and the Ferry Gate, or Ferry Port, leading to the cross-river ferry. Each gate had a small fort to protect the gate guard and a drawbridge.

  Within the walls was a thoughtfully-planned geometric city, possibly the first example of such in these islands, with the streets leading from the four gates converging on a central square in which a market house was built. In his book on the city’s walls, Cecil Davis Milligan rejects the theory that there might have been a French influence in the design of the city. More recent research indicates otherwise. Brian Lacy has drawn attention to similarities between Londonderry and the French city of Vitry-le-François on the Marne, some one hundred miles from Paris, a possibility first noted by two American historians of town planning, Anthony Garvan and John Reps, in their research for the origins of plans for the early English settlements in the colonies destined to become the United States.3 Vitry had been designed by an Italian engineer, Hieronimo Marino, for King Francis I; Lacy notes that the resemblance may be due to the fact that Vitry was completed during the reign of Francis II. The second Francis was married to Mary, Queen of Scots who, in turn, was the mother of King James VI of Scotland who became James I of England, the man responsible for the plantation of Ulster and the building of the new city of Londonderry.’ Of course, when Marino was designing Vitry-le-Francois he was not concerned about town planning but in creating a frontier fortress and the inspiration for his design lay in the camps built by the campaigning legions of ancient Rome; he was reproducing their patterns rather than designing a new concept in towns. And whereas a Roman legion, of fewer than 5,000 men, could build its camp in hours, it took years to build the new city of Londonderry, which is probably the last example of a Roman camp to be built in Europe.

  Captain Edward Doddington designed Londonderry’s walls, adapting the Vitry plan to the local topography, and the surveyor was Thomas Raven, while Peter Benson took charge of the building with John Baker overseeing the work in the absence of Doddington.18 At first the streets inside the walls were named Queen’s Street, Silver Street, Gracious Street and the Shambles,19 but these later became, respectively, Bishop’s Street, Shipquay Street, Ferryquay Street and Butcher’s Street. Within the walls a new Anglican cathedral, the first to be built specifically for the Anglican faith, was constructed between 1628 and 1633, and dedicated to St Columb, the same Colmcille so often regarded as the founder of the city. Described as ‘a fair church’, the cathedral was built in Gothic style, known as Planter’s Gothic, at the expense of the Irish Society and cost £4,000. The Society anticipated the building of the cathedral by sending over a silver-gilt chalice and paten for the church; the chalice, referred to as the ‘Promised Chalice’ is still used for the celebration of Holy Communion during special services.20 Another Anglican church, St Augustine’s, was built nearby, on the site of the original monastic settlement, while a Free Grammar School was also to be found.4 A more modern St Augustine’s Church today stands on the site of the original.21

  By 1689 the walls had not been improved in any way but rather had been allowed to deteriorate as the city fathers sought to save money in a manner that continues to be familiar to this day – by reducing the amount spent on defence. This would suggest that the Planter inhabitants of the city and its environs no longer felt it necessary to be ready to meet an armed rebellion at short notice; the days of sword in one hand and plough in the other seemed to be past. In spite of threats in the 1640s, the walls, and the cannon emplaced on them, continued to deteriorate; this lackadaisical attitude to the city’s defences came close to gifting it to King James II’s army in 1689. By another of those paradoxes which enrich history, that this did not happen was due largely to the energy and military skills of a man whose fate it has been to be denounced as a traitor for over 300 years: Colonel Robert Lundy.

  Europe in the late-seventeenth century was in a state of unrest, characterized by a series of wars and alliances in which the principal power was France, whose monarch, Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, was acutely conscious, and jealous, of his nation’s security. Hitherto, Spain had long been the dominant power on the continent, but the French were now in the ascendant and it was Louis XIV who was to be the key figure in the conflict that engulfed Ireland from 1688 to 1691 and brought two armies to the city of Londonderry in 1689. To understand how this occurred we must first take a brief look at developments in Europe in the years before the war in Ireland.

  The son of King Louis XIII and Queen Anne, Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638. By then France had been at war with Spain and Austria for three years and the religious conflict known as the Thirty Years War was entering its final decade. This war led to death and destruction on a huge scale across the mainland of Europe with the misery of war exacerbated by a series of epidemics of plague. As if that were not enough, the continent was emerging from what is now regarded as a mini ice age. Thus the France into which Louis was born was far from being a settled nation and this situation was exacerbated when the young prince was only five years old. It was then that Louis XIII died and Queen Anne became regent of France; she appointed a prime minister in the person of Cardinal Mazarin.

  The Thirty Years War finally came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia which followed the Prince de Condé’s victory at the Battle of Lens in 1648. However, France was not to enjoy peace for, while Condé was battling at Lens, parliament in Paris was rebelling against Mazarin’s rule. Queen Anne and ten-year-old Prince Louis were forced to flee from the city, quitting the Louvre palace on the night of 5–6 January 1649. Civil war, known as the Fronde, followed by the 1650 Revolt of the Princes, reduced Paris to a state of anarchy. By now Condé had gone over to the Spanish and, in July 1652, he captured Paris for his new masters. Outside the capital, most of France remained loyal to the regency, and anarchy was brought to an end quickly, allowing the royal court to return to Paris on 21 October. The experience of this period shaped Louis’ future attitude to the security of the monarchy and of the country, with effects that would be felt as far away as the north-west of Ireland.

  In 1653 France formed an alliance with the exiled British court against Spain. Five years later, Marshal Turenne – with Condé one of France’s greatest generals – defeated Spanish forces in the Battle of the Dunes, near Dunkirk. During this battle a young British prince, James, Duke of York, distinguished himself, drawing Turenne’s praise for his outstanding gallantry. November 1659 saw an end to the conflict with a negotiated peace. Condé was pardoned that same year by Louis who had been crowned as King Louis XIV on 7 June 1654, although Mazarin con
tinued to hold the reins of power. When Mazarin died on 9 March 1661, Louis chose not to appoint a successor and assumed full power for himself. Thus began the process that would make the Sun King the most powerful monarch in Europe.

  Considering that France’s security depended on having defensible borders, Louis embarked on a series of military ventures aimed to create such frontiers. In 1672 his army crossed the Rhine into Holland. Dutch resistance was led by William Henry Nassau, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, who was also known as the Prince of Orange. The tiny principality of Orange, in Provence, was annexed by Louis in the same campaign in an action that was both insult and injury to William since it was the possession of Orange that made him a prince. However, Orange was too isolated and France much too powerful for any possible military action to restore the principality to William’s family. Two years later, Britain, now a monarchy again, made a separate peace with Spain, from which point both France and William of Orange sought to draw Britain into an alliance as part of the European conflict.

  France remained at war for most of the decade that followed. During this period, on 22 October 1685, Louis XIV revoked the edict of Nantes of 1598, which had guaranteed religious freedom to the Protestants of France, the Huguenots.5 French Protestants were ordered to convert to Catholicism, but many refused and were massacred. Others chose exile, fleeing to England and other European countries: their skills in many crafts and their intellectual achievements in many spheres were to benefit the countries that gave them refuge; the Irish linen industry and trade owed much to these refugees from persecution. Among those who sought safety in exile were some of Louis’ generals, including the Duke of Schomberg, who would later command the Williamite army in Ireland. Included in the leaders of the campaign of persecution against the Huguenots was Marshal Conrad de Rosen, who would serve James II in Ireland and, for a time, command the Jacobite forces arrayed against Londonderry. One leading French commander, Marshal Vauban, estimated that some 600 first-class officers and about 12,000 good soldiers were among the Huguenots who fled France. They went to England, Holland and some of the German states, offering their services to their new countries and becoming some of the bitterest foes of Louis XIV.22 Their military skills were also to add to the professionalism of the armies in which they now served.