This brings us to the critical question posed in the opening chapter of this book: was there really a siege of Derry at all? For many the question is redundant, as they have no doubt that there was a siege. They will concur with Macaulay’s comment that the siege was the most memorable in the annals of the British Isles, which is repeated verbatim by at least one writer on the siege.17 Others veer towards the opinion expressed by Hilaire Belloc that the lack of adequate siege equipment in the Jacobite army meant that there was no siege and that Jacobite operations amounted only to a blockade of the city. Sir Charles Petrie expanded this argument, or, as Macrory comments, cantered ‘happily even further down the trail blazed by Belloc’ and claimed that there was not even a blockade. He went on to criticize the commanders of the garrison for allowing themselves to be shut up in the city.18
It is possible to argue that there was no siege in the strict military sense since so many of the identifying aspects of a siege were absent. But that begs the question of what the Jacobite army was doing at all. Did it sit around the city and do nothing? We know that not to be the case. If the requisite amount of artillery was missing, if there were insufficient engineers and engineer supplies, if there were not enough foot soldiers, the Jacobite army and its commanders seem still to have considered that they could carry out a siege of the city and bring about its capitulation. When we look at the events of those 105 days we can see many examples of what can only be described as incidents in siege warfare. What else, for example, was Brigadier Ramsey doing when he led the first attack on Windmill Hill other than trying to seize positions from which his artillery could bombard the south-facing wall? What were Skelton and Clancarty doing at the end of June with the attack on the bastion at the Butcher’s Gate? With all the preparations that had gone on beforehand – the bombardment and the mining – this was a clear attempt to storm the city through a breach in the walls. And why did de Pointis build the boom if not to deny the river passage to the Williamites? Many other examples could be added to this list. If we look at the contemporary sources from the Jacobite side we see writers such as Avaux and other senior French officers refer to the siege of Londonderry (or Derry: they were quite casual in their use of both names) and the same is true of the author of A Light to the Blind.
Those inside the wails had no doubt that they were under siege. Few, if any, of them had any knowledge of what a full-scale siege was like and few would have known what a general would normally have required before sitting down to the business of besieging a city or fortress. But they knew that there was a hostile army outside the walls; they knew that that army’s gunners and mortarmen were bombarding their town, destroying the buildings of the city and creating fear in the population. They had no idea that the bombardment was comparatively light – in 1691 Athlone was besieged by the Williamites and destroyed after a ten-day bombardment that saw 12,000 cannonballs, 600 mortar bombs and many tons of stones or rubble, fired from mortars, fall on it;1 it remains the most bombarded town in the British Isles19 – on the scale of such things; but they could see the destruction that had been wrought in the town. In their minds they were under siege and if the Jacobite army created that state of mind then there could be no doubt that there was a siege of Londonderry. In the psychological respect, at least, the Jacobites triumphed.
The siege was to go down in history as we all now know but even at the time it was considered to be a major event with considerable strategic significance. A medal to commemorate the relief of Londonderry was struck bearing the legend ‘Wilhelm Maximus in Belgica Liberator in Britannia Restaurator’ (William the Most Great, in Holland the Deliverer, in Britain the Restorer). This silver medal bears on its reverse the image of Louis XIV and commemorates the sieges of Mainz and Bonn in Germany, where the French were also defeated in 1689.21 Linking the three events is an indication of the importance of the raising of the siege in European affairs.
All too often the siege is thought of as an event that was confined to Ireland. But that is not the case. We have seen that small numbers of Frenchmen were involved in the Jacobite force and that Louis XIV was the paymaster for James II’s efforts to establish himself in Ireland. However, the French king had no real interest in James being restored to all three kingdoms but rather in James’ presence in Ireland distracting the attention of William III, leader of the forces of the Grand Alliance or the League of Augsburg, from the continent where the main battle for domination of Europe would be fought. In that Louis was successful, for the war in Ireland lasted until the end of 1691 and William was forced to take part in events in Ireland during 1690.
The presence of both James and William at the battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690 tends to focus attention on that encounter since this was the sole occasion on which the two monarchs faced each other in battle. That battle is often seen as the turning point of the war in Ireland, especially as James fled back to France in its aftermath. But the tide of war had already turned inexorably in favour of the Williamites. That turn had happened at Derry, almost a year before the Boyne. Although the Jacobites fought on, and with increasing professionalism, their fate had been decided when the garrison of Derry withstood the siege of 1689. Until that spring day on which King James rode up to the Bishop’s Gate, the tide of war had been flowing with the Jacobites. On that day it began to turn and, although the Jacobites might have caught a favourable tide at some point during the next 105 days, by August it was flowing for the Williamites.
It is often only in retrospect that the turning point of any war may be identified with certainty. This is the case with the war of the kings in Ireland. Two monarchs may have faced each other in battle at the Boyne in 1690, and the Jacobite army may have suffered its bloodiest day at Aughrim another year on, but the war began to turn in north-west Ulster in the spring and summer of 1689. Derry’s stand gave Dutch William the breathing space he needed to re-organize his forces, to despatch an expeditionary force to Ireland and to deal with the Jacobites of Scotland. In the longer term it also played its part in the checking of Louis XIV’s expansionism. That French hegemony over Europe was not established in the closing decades of the seventeenth century owes at least something to those, probably, frightened men who called ‘No surrender’ to James VII and II in April 1689.
For 105 days in 1689 a small city in the north-west of Ireland, on the very periphery of Europe, became the hinge around which the history of that continent swung. But the siege is more often seen in a narrower historical perspective. William III is remembered as being the sovereign who brought civil and religious liberty to the people of Britain and Ireland but, in the aftermath of the war in Ireland, many in Ireland would not have considered that they enjoyed either form of liberty. While William was no bigot, the political reality was that he, and his queen, reigned at the invitation of parliament. And there were three parliaments to be considered: that at Westminster, the Scottish parliament and the Irish parliament in Dublin. The latter had no desire to see Anglicans, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics all enjoy the same liberties, and it was that Irish parliament that ensured that the civil articles of the treaty of Limerick, which ended the war in Ireland, were overturned and Irish Catholics entered a long period of political and civil limbo. When William died in 1702 – James II had died the previous year – he was succeeded by his late wife’s sister Anne, the last of the Stuarts. And it was under Anne that Presbyterians also found themselves excluded from political life and denied religious liberty. This added to the frustrations and anger felt by many Presbyterians at their treatment in the aftermath of the war in Ireland. Those who had helped defend Derry were especially aggrieved. They had been demeaned by Walker, refused recompense by the government and now were to be treated in the same way as the Roman Catholics who had fought against that government. In some ways the penal laws that applied to Presbyterians were worse, since Presbyterian holy orders were not recognized and so marriages in Presbyterian churches were not valid; nor could a Presbyterian minister conduct a funera
l service. The Presbyterians reacted not by rebelling or by supporting the exiled Stuarts but by leaving Ireland in large numbers for the new world. But this migration did lead eventually to rebellion: the American Rebellion or War of Independence, in which Presbyterians of Irish descent played a major role. And they continued to play such a role in the new United States of America. They have produced the largest proportion of US presidents of all the many groups of peoples that make up that nation. There they found the civil and religious liberty that they had craved and fought for but under a constitution that separated state and church.
So what did William III achieve? His gift to history is the survival of the monarchy in its present constitutional form. It was William’s ability to work in harmony with parliament that allowed the monarchy to survive and ensured that a second British republic was not established. That harmony between monarch and parliament continues to this day and makes the British monarchy the enduring symbol that it is.
The Stuarts continued to claim the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, but there was little Irish involvement in, or support for, the Jacobite risings of the first half of the eighteenth century. Ireland had become disillusioned with the Stuarts, especially with James II, ‘with his one shoe English and one shoe Irish’2 who had no empathy for the country or interest in its people but had tried to use it for his own ends. Not for nothing was he known in Ireland as Séamas an chaca, or James the shit. Over time he was to become a more romanticized figure but that is outside the scope of this work. Today both Anglicans and Presbyterians remember the siege in much the same way. Both faiths are to be found as members of the Apprentice Boys of Derry, although the principal religious services of that organization take place in St Columb’s Cathedral which continues to fly Mitchelburne’s ‘bloody flag’ on the anniversaries of the shutting of the gates and the relief of the city. And it was Mitchelburne who summed up the message of the siege for the Protestant people of Ireland when, in Ireland Preserv‘d, he wrote:
O brave Derry, thou art the [bulwark] of three kingdoms, thou hold’d out still; if ever thou be reduced, and this Irish army land in Scotland, farewell Ireland.23
It was indeed the tenacity of the defenders of Derry who ensured that the Jacobite cause was doomed in Ireland and, therefore, in all three kingdoms. It was that tenacity that ensured that the new succession with its pattern of constitutional monarchy would take root. And it was that tenacity that helped to ensure that the strategic ambitions of France were to be thwarted.
Notes
1: Gilbert, op cit, p. 46
2: NA Scotland, GD26/8/15, letter from James to Dundee, 17 May 1689
3: Gilbert, op cit, p. 53
4: Powley, op cit, p. 215
5: Kelly, op cit, p. 57
6: NA Scotland, GD26/7/37 – 2: Account of Lundy’s proceedings in Ireland since 13 December 1688
7: HLRO, HoCJ, 21 October 1689
8: Murtagh, Jacobite Artillery, 1689–91, IS XXIII, No. 94, p. 384
9: Ibid, p. 385
10: Avaux, op cit, p. 76
11: Murtagh, op cit, p. 385; Gilbert, op cit, p. 84
12: Franco-Irish Correspondence, p. 161; Avaux, op cit, p. 355
13: Avaux, op cit, p. 355
14: Ibid, pp. 8–9
15: Chandler, op cit, p. 102
16: Ibid, pp. 102–3
17: Finlay, The Siege of Londonderry compiled from the best sources, p. 30
18: Macrory, op cit, p. 358
19: Story, A Continuation of the Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland, p. 108
20: Doherty, op cit, p. 166
21: Guy, 1688: Glorious Revolution? The Fall and Rise of the British Army 1660–1704, p. 69
22: Quoted in Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766, p. 83
23: Mitchelburne, op cit
__________
1 One cannon round hit Athlone for every minute of the siege while the number of mortar bombs was much the same as that rained down on Derry over a period that was ten times longer than the Athlone siege.
2 Séamas an chaca, a chaill Éirinn / lena leathbróg ghallda is a leathbróg Ghaelach. James the shit who, with his one shoe English and one shoe Irish, had lost Ireland.22
Epilogue
The physical wounds of the siege took a long time to heal and the scars may be discerned even today in a city that cannot agree on its name. Paradoxically, the combatants of 1689 had no problems with the city’s names and from the surviving documents it seems that the Jacobites favoured Londonderry more than Derry while the Williamites favoured Derry over Londonderry. The loyal order that exists to commemorate the siege is called the Apprentice Boys of Derry rather than Londonderry and that anthem of Ulster loyalism ‘The Sash My Father Wore’ recalls that the eponymous item was worn at Derry. Disputes continue over the Apprentice Boys’ marches in August and December but these lack the bitterness that existed only a decade or so ago. An older generation will recall that those marches occurred without rancour in the years before 1969.
The recent innovation of a ‘Maiden City Festival’ has been a laudable attempt by the Apprentice Boys to try to make commemoration of the siege something that can involve the entire population of the city. And that is how it should be. My memory of being taught about the siege as an eight-year old schoolboy includes the exhortation that it was something that belonged to everyone in the city and there was no sectarian bias, or begrudgery, in the way that the late Danny McLaughlin spoke about the events of 1689 to his pupils of St Eugene’s Boys’ School.
The Apprentice Boys have chosen to call their programme of commemorative events the Maiden City Festival, evoking one of the soubriquets of the city. That title ‘Maiden City’ sprang from a belief that the city’s walls were never breached, but this is a myth that owes nothing to reality. The reader who has persevered thus far will recall the attack on the walls in the area of Butcher’s Gate at the end of June. This was launched only after the walls had been damaged so badly that it would have been possible for a forlorn hope to lead the way through the breach. Accounts from participants of temporary repairs elsewhere – hogsheads filled with earth – also suggest that this may not have been the sole instance of major damage (although both Kirke and Richards commented, caustically, on the relatively undamaged state of the walls following the relief of the city). In spite of all their shortcomings, the Jacobites did come close to bursting into the city, and perhaps the creation of the ‘maiden city’ myth is a backhanded compliment to those Irish and French soldiers.
Had the Jacobite army made its way into the city in that late-June attack, the conventions of siege warfare would have meant that no quarter would have been given to the garrison. Inevitably, many civilians would also have suffered, especially as it would have been difficult, in many cases, to distinguish male civilians from soldiers. But one of the strange aspects of the siege story is the comparative lack of brutality from either side. True, in the heat of battle Hamilton’s soldiers were slaughtering many of the Williamites at the battle of the fords and in the immediate aftermath of that battle while Galmoy’s behaviour at Creggan can only be described as brutal, but neither side seemed capable of carrying out threatened acts of brutality: thus neither the Jacobite threat to Protestants from outside the city nor the garrison’s counter threat to hang all their prisoners was carried out. But Percy Kirke, already known for his brutality, did send troops ashore to carry out a punitive attack in revenge for Jacobite wrongdoing. Although there was much religious and political friction in the Ireland of the time, it seems that deep-rooted hatred was not a feature of the siege.
A Walk on the Walls
The visitor to the city today can still walk the city’s walls which survive as the only intact set of such walls in these islands. Although there have been many alterations since 1689, the walls are still substantially as they were during the siege. The main changes have been the addition of three extra gates: New Gate, Castle Gate and Magazine Gate. A further breach o
f the original walls has been made at Market Street, which is the only point at which the city wall has been removed, although considerable change has also been made at the Water Bastion. Walking around the walls – a distance of just under a mile – gives a good impression of how confined was the area held by the besieged, even when one takes into account the ground outside the walls to the south and within the outworks on Windmill Hill. From various points on the walls it is also possible to see many of the locations that featured in the siege.
The Siege of Derry 1689 Page 31