The Siege of Derry 1689

by Richard Doherty

  This halt gave opportunity to the rebels to get safe into Londonderry, and hindered the loyal cavalry and dragoons to be in with them pell mell, besides their slaughtering of the runaways in the road, and taking of prisoners, which is looked upon to be the first imprudent mismanagement of the northern enterprise...1

  In doing so, Hamilton ignored that age-old military dictum that the fruits of victory are to be found in the pursuit. Why did he do so? Perhaps he believed that the city would fall anyway and that its defenders were so dispirited that, in common with those at Coleraine, Dromore and elsewhere in Ulster, they would accept defeat. Or had his spies told him that the relief force from England was already in the city? If he believed that two regular infantry regiments were already behind the walls, then he might well have hesitated to send his horsed soldiers off in pursuit and decided that it might be necessary to bring a mixed force of cavalry and infantry to the city to bring about its surrender. Whatever the reason behind Hamilton’s strategy, he lost the best opportunity of capturing Londonderry that ever presented itself to the Jacobites.

  The overall strategic picture had changed with the arrival in Ireland of King James and that monarch’s decision to come north and, specifcally, to the rebel city of Londonderry. James had hoped that his arrival outside the city would bring its citizens to their senses, thereby ending rebellion in Ulster. Thus the force that came north with him was not one that was prepared for a lengthy campaign. In common with Hamilton’s, it was a light force, deficient in all the weaponry and equipment needed for an extended campaign or for a siege. Even when combined, the two forces were still deficient in terms of all that was needed for campaigning or besieging. Nor did they have the numbers considered necessary to mount a siege: as we have already seen, Vauban held that the besieging force should outnumber the besieged by ten to one but that it should not be less than 20,000 strong although Napoleon later recommended that the superiority should be four to one. Even by that latter guideline the Jacobite army should have numbered 30,000 men at least while, by Vauban’s estimate, it should have been over 70,000 strong.

  Neither had the Jacobites made their minds up about whether seizing the city was their army’s primary aim, or whether that city would be but a stepping-stone for a campaign in Scotland. James’ de facto prime minister, Melfort, was among those advocating the use of Derry as a point from which to launch an expedition to Scotland. Once across the sea, the Irish Jacobite army could combine with the Scottish Jacobite army to secure that country for the Stuart cause, after which Scotland could be used as a base for an advance into England. Such a plan appealed to James, but no effort was made to co-ordinate all the elements necessary to launch an expedition. As late as 17 May, James was writing to Viscount Dundee assuring him of support ‘as soon as the siege of Derry is over’.2 Thus he had the Scottish Jacobites continuing to hope that he would cross the North Channel and raise the Stuart flag in Scotland.

  Some years later, after the deaths of both James and William, the author of A Light to the Blind was arguing that the abandoned Scottish strategy was the one that ought to have been followed. He wrote:

  The affirmative opinion says, that (upon a supposition that Londonderry be early taken, as it might have been done) twenty-five thousand Irish along with the king, in the end of May, transported into the highlands of Scotland, would in their marches so increase by the accession of loyal subjects, that at the time they were got into England the rebellious party would be too weak to make head against the loyal army, because their usurpation was not yet settled in the land. The ten thousand remaining in Ireland would be sufficient to preserve that kingdom in duty, after being made quiet by the expugnation of Londonderry. It is certain that celerity in resolving and in executing is the best medium to conquer an enemy.

  As events unfurled, the Jacobite army sat outside Derry for more than three months during which there were times when it seemed uncertain as to whether it was laying siege to the city, conducting a blockade or merely carrying out a pointless exercise. For many of the rank and file the latter might well have appeared to be the case, since there seemed to be little resolution on the part of their commanders. An exception to this latter state of affairs occurred when Conrad de Rosen took charge outside the city for a time.

  This illustrates another failure of the Jacobite hierarchy: the apparent lack of a clear line of command. When James departed for Dublin in late-April there were several generals in the Jacobite camp, including the Frenchmen Maumont and Pusignan as well as Richard Hamilton, but there was an absence of clarity about the chain of command. With the presence of the Duke of Berwick, James’ natural son, this situation would have been exacerbated; and when Rosen returned in late-June the Jacobite army’s chain of command must have been even more smudged. Throughout the siege this absence of a clearly-defined commander-in-chief was a major problem for the besiegers.

  There was one major problem with the Scottish strategy: how to transport an army from Ulster to Scotland? James had no navy, although three fifty-gun French frigates – la Lutine, la Jolie and la Tempête, under command of du Quesne Mosnier – had been lent to him by Louis and he would have had to call on the French to provide both the escorts and the merchant ships to carry his troops. Du Quesne Mosnier’s small squadron proved a considerable nuisance to Rooke and his command and at one time captured the two Scottish ships, Janet and Pelican, taking them as prizes into Dublin. They had also landed a small Jacobite force in Lochaber.4 The achievements of this trio illustrate the difference that more active naval involvement by the French might have made. But the Battle of Bantry Bay had made the French reluctant to risk their ‘great ships’ in action against both the Royal and Dutch Navies in the waters around Ireland. Thus French support was not to be forthcoming. Nor was there much possibility of requisitioning sufficient civilian vessels to transport an army. The Scottish administration passed an Act for Securing Suspected Persons on 22 March which was followed with an embargo on ships sailing to Ireland. This latter measure was intended to forestall the danger of ‘allowing ships and other vessels liberty to pass from this kingdom to Ireland in regard they be made use of in the case of an invasion for transporting forces hither’. Although there is little doubt that James would have gathered considerable support in Scotland and northern England, the difficulty of moving a sizeable Irish Jacobite army across the North Channel without the support of the French navy and without French merchant ships made the Scottish strategy a pipe dream.

  The Jacobites were not alone in their need for a clearly-defined commander in chief. Before the siege even began, Robert Lundy had made clear his desire for a general officer to take command of the Williamite forces in the north-west of Ireland. Twice during March he had written to Lord Shrewsbury stressing, inter alia, the need for generals to take command in the region; even when a council of war in Londonderry was making plans to take the field against the Jacobites at the fords, Lundy was elected to command the field force rather than assuming the appointment as might have been seen to be his right as the senior officer present.6 Why was this? It might be argued that his attitude at the council of war was indicative of a man who was about to betray his comrades and that this was to be expected of ‘Lundy the traitor’. Equally it might be argued that this was the action of a man who knew his own limits as a commander. Taken with his two requests to Shrewsbury for general officers to be sent to Ireland, the latter is the much more likely explanation. Lundy knew that he had reached the limit of his ability as a field commander; he was a man who might be happy and confident commanding a battalion in action but not a force of several battalions. That was a task for a more senior officer, a general with experience in such matters. Lundy did not consider himself to be such a man.

  Lundy’s handling of the battle of the fords supports this argument. One would not expect to see the tactical genius of a Marlborough or a Sarsfield in such an encounter although one would expect to see, at least, the skills of a journeyman commander; but these are
sadly missing from Lundy’s actions that day. This was an officer who had made dispositions as best as he could on the basis of his understanding of battlefield tactics, but that understanding was restricted by Lundy’s own restricted experience of command and of war; the latter was gained mostly in Tangier. He relied on his estimation of the Jacobite army to be as lacking in training, discipline and co-ordination as his own command but in that estimation he had made, as we have seen in Chapter Four, the fundamental error of failing to appreciate that the Jacobite heavy cavalry were trained, disciplined and well led. This error was to be the undoing of Lundy’s force and, in all probability, the point at which his own morale began to collapse. And that morale had already been fragile as we have seen from his requests to Shrewsbury. It would seem that Robert Lundy had been placed in a situation in which he had no wish to be. Those, such as Walker, and the anonymous witness to the House of Lords, who espoused faith in him would not have found that faith reflected in Lundy’s own mind. Far from being a villain, as many would portray him, Robert Lundy was a victim of circumstances.

  Lundy was later exonerated of attempting to betray the city of Londonderry and returned to the military career. (In October 1689 he petitioned the government to allow him to stand trial in London as all the witnesses in his case were then in that city.)7 He served as Adjutant-General of the Portuguese army some years later although he was paid by Britain. Surely this negates the earlier argument by suggesting that Lundy had the qualities needed for a senior commander? That would be a mistaken conclusion to reach. His role as adjutant-general was a staff post with his work being of an administrative nature rather than of a fighting nature; he had no command responsibilities. One can accuse Robert Lundy of being lacking in confidence, of being a defeatist, of being an incompetent commander, and each of these accusations can be supported with firm evidence, but it is much more difficult to find such evidence to substantiate any accusation of treachery against him. Those who have accused him of being a traitor have done so on evidence that is, at best, only circumstantial, and they also forget, conveniently, the basic fact that Londonderry would not have withstood the siege had it not been for the preparations made for a siege by Robert Lundy. Finally, it should be noted that Lundy was among the names attainted for treason by the Irish parliament in May 1689.

  Earlier it was noted that the siege might have had a different ending had it never got underway in the first instance. Since this appears to be a contradictory statement it requires some explanation. The objective of the Jacobite army was to take Londonderry rather than lay siege to it. That army was not prepared for a siege of any duration but was constituted for a campaign of movement in which its opponents would be taken off balance and forced to capitulate. A siege was another matter altogether. Perhaps the best and most succinct description of a siege is that of a prolonged artillery duel. Thus the essence of a siege was something that the Jacobite army lacked: artillery.

  We have already noted that a permanent artillery arm had not been added to the army of Ireland until 1684 although there had already been an Irish Board of Ordnance, albeit subordinated to its English equivalent. Until March 1689 the Irish Master-General of the Ordnance had been Lord Mountjoy who, on being sent to France by Tyrconnel, was succeeded by Lord Mountcashel, a man with little experience of artillery. Nor did he exhibit much interest in his post, of him, Rosen commented that he had still not visited the arsenal in Dublin a month after his appointment.8 The existing disadvantages of the Jacobite artillery, including a considerable shortage of weaponry, was exacerbated by Mountcashel’s apparent indolence.

  The shortage of weapons was not the principal disadvantage suffered by the Jacobite artillery. There was also a great dearth of trained personnel to serve the guns. Gunners have always been recognized as requiring greater skills than other soldiers, a trait they have shared with engineers. In the British Army the training of artillery and engineer officers was even conducted at a different establishment than that of cavalry and infantry officers until the Second World War. This was the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, known as ‘The Shop’, which produced those specialist officers and, from 1922, officers for the Royal Corps of Signals also. To practise the science of gunnery has always required a higher level of education, especially scientific and mathematical, than that required by infantry or cavalry officers. Gunnery was governed by laws that were scientific – although the science of ballistics had yet to be defined – and there were many sets of rules to be learned. Numerous manuals had to be read and understood and thus, although some still considered gunners to be practitioners of black arts, the contemporary gunner was already a member of a military elite.

  The establishment of the Irish Board of Ordnance under Mountjoy had numbered fifty-nine, including that worthy himself, with forty-six of those personnel being gunners or mattrosses, the latter being gunners’ assistants. These men had all been Protestants and had taken ship to England following Tyrconnel’s purging of the army, thus leaving the Irish army without any gunners at all. Within the Irish Catholic community there was virtually no tradition of involvement in artillery and nor was there any grounding in mathematics save for the elite.9 Hence the Jacobite army faced a real predicament: it needed to recruit gunners quickly but there were very few people with the appropriate educational background. Although some personnel were recruited we have no accurate idea of how many and thus the reliance on French artillery. Those Irishmen who became artillery officers made a poor impression on their French allies, being described as indolent, ill-mannered and lacking knowledge. At Coleraine, Hamilton’s Irish gunners were described as being so maladroit that they were incapable of hitting a house.10 Later, as the Mounjoy and the Phoenix were being towed up the Foyle only a single round from the Jacobite shore batteries found its mark in the merchant ships, this being attributed to the gunners being inebriated.11 It is much more a sign of the gunners lacking the basic skills of their profession and suggests that their officers had been negligent in carrying out training. This is the greatest indictment that could be levelled against those officers.

  The French gunners who arrived with James were too few in number to perform all the tasks required of them during the siege, even if they had had the requisite number of guns. They also appeared to be given to much disagreement among themselves, since one of them, Macary, was killed in a duel with an Italian gunner called Bada.12 Avaux also records this incident in a litany of woes relating to the gunners, including the death of Massé, struck by a cannon ball while siting a battery. Pointis was recovering from his wound at Pennyburn, Dumont was engaged in the field, while Saint Martin, who was later killed at Newtownbutler, was in Dublin. Avaux doubted the ability of Dastier, a fine young man who had done well under Massé’s orders, which he had followed to the letter, to act as the chief gunner since he lacked sufficient experience for such a role.13 The friction between French and Irish soldiers also militated against the latter’s gunners learning much from their allies; one cannot imagine the French officers being inclined to spend time on training Irish gunners.

  As for the gunners, so also for the engineers. There was no strong engineer tradition in the Irish army and those Irishmen who had become engineers had gone to the English army; these included the Richards brothers, Jacob and Michael. Once again, most of the responsibility for engineering fell on the French officers of whom there were too few to be able to provide the full range of skills and knowledge needed by the Jacobite army. Although Irish soldiers might have served as labourers, or pioneers, the lack of trained engineer officers was yet another major drawback for the Jacobites and contributed to their lack of success at Londonderry.

  The Jacobite infantry has come in for much criticism from many writers. While it is true that the army was ill-equipped, poorly-trained and had inadequate leadership in its early days, this did not remain the case, and the army that fought in the later battles of the Irish war showed marked improvements on that which was deployed in the early days of t
he war, including the period of the siege. Because of these shortcomings it would be easy to assume that the Irish army was composed of unsuitable manpower but this could not be further from the truth. As he travelled through Ireland, Avaux noted the fine physiques of the many Irish peasants he saw along the way, and he was later to recruit Irishmen for French service. They were ‘the finest men one could see’ with the shortest of the infantrymen being over 5 foot 10 inches in height and the grenadiers and pikemen being about 6 foot 1 inch;14 this suggests that the Irish peasants were generally well-nourished. While regretting the fact that these men were but half-trained, he recognized their potential, which was to be shown to its full in the Irish Brigade that was formed in the French army. Although the Jacobite infantry at Derry was still in the part-trained phase, it did show signs of the potential that it might have reached: the second attack on Windmill Hill is a good example of this, as is the attack on the Butcher’s Gate and the nearby half-bastion. Thus it is worth considering the training of infantry soldiers at this time.

  As already noted there were no regimental training depots nor any organized system of training and, in time of war, raw recruits generally learned the trade of soldiering with their regiments. This was not usually a problem if the number of recruits was small since they could be placed under the wing of experienced officers and NCOs from whom they could learn the rudiments of soldiering.15 Of course, those officers and NCOs needed to be not only conscientious but men with a flair for the job of training; not every good soldier makes a good trainer. The Jacobite army suffered from the fact that the majority of its soldiers were raw recruits with few sufficiently experienced officers and NCOs to train them. Training was complex: everyone had to master foot drill as the basic building block onto which was added the training of a musketeer, pikeman or grenadier. In his specialist training the musketeer armed with a matchlock had to master between thirty-five and forty-four drill evolutions while his comrade with the more modern flintlock still had twenty-six evolutions to learn. A pikeman was trained in thirty-six evolutions while the grenadier had an additional twelve evolutions to do with his role of throwing grenades; he had also to learn the musketeer’s role.16 As may be imagined, training the bulk of an army was no easy task; the wonder is that the Jacobite army was able to function at all. In the circumstances surrounding its creation and taking the field, its performance was really a creditable achievement. Its failure at Derry was due to a host of problems as we have seen, including the lack of the specialized equipment and tools needed to conduct a siege. But it was the arrival of trained and experienced professional soldiers that finally brought about its downfall.