A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  The Jacobite assault was a complete failure. As an alternative strategy Hamilton drew the net tighter, cutting the city off from much of its water supply. Just downstream the French constructed a boom, made of fir beams fastened with chains, to stretch across the Foyle. Derry was now completely cut off.

  Episode 109

  THE RELIEF OF DERRY

  Since December 1688 the citizens of Derry, loyal to King William, had been under siege. At the end of May 1689 a train of heavy guns sent by King James arrived to intensify the bombardment of the city which had not ceased since the beginning of the siege. Governor George Walker recorded that the shells from one mortar lobbed into Derry weighed 270 pounds

  and contained several pounds of powder in the shell; they plowed up our streets and broke down our houses, so that there was no passing the streets or staying within doors, but all flock to the Walls and the remotest parts of the Town, where we continued very safe, while many of our sick were killed, not being able to leave their houses.

  Captain George Holmes recalled:

  One bomb slew over seventeen persons. I was in the next room one night at my supper (which was but mean) and seven men were thrown out of the third room next to that we were in, all killed and some of them in pieces.

  The walls were not breached, however, and the French general, the Marquis de Pointis, ruefully concluded that

  The state of affairs is such that attacking must no longer be thought of and it will be well if without raising the siege we shall have to wait on hunger.

  After months of siege the defenders were starving. Walker’s memoir provides a price list for July:

  Horse-flesh 1/8d a pound; a quarter of a dog 5/6d (fattened by eating the bodies of the slain Irish); a dog’s head 2/6d; a cat 4/6d; a rat 1/0d; a mouse 6d; a small flook taken in the river, not to be bought for money ...

  George Holmes observed:

  I believe there died 15,000 men, women and children, many of which died for want of meat. But we had a great fever amongst us and all the children died, almost whole families not one left alive.

  Because of the fever, another survivor wrote,

  [people] died so fast at length as could scarce be found room to interr them, even the backsides and gardens were filled with graves, and some thrown in cellars; some whole families were entirely extinct.

  Major-General Percy Kirke had sailed into Lough Foyle on 11 June with thirty vessels. But for six weeks he waited, unwilling to risk the Jacobite guns at Culmore downstream from Derry. Another deterrent was the floating boom across the Foyle constructed by French engineers. Meanwhile a young boy carried messages from Derry to the fleet concealed in his rectum. Finally, moved by pleas for help and a stern order from his superiors, Kirke made a move on Sunday 28 July. While one warship engaged Culmore, a longboat and three small vessels sailed up the Foyle.

  The wind dropped completely, but the flowing tide pushed the leading vessel, the Mountjoy, against the boom, snapping its chains. The ship’s captain died as he ordered his men to respond to the Jacobite guns, and the Mountjoy, stuck fast in the mud, was freed in the recoil to drift up to the city. To the disgust of an Irish Jacobite officer, the shore gunners were drunk with brandy and fired wildly:

  What shouts of joy the town gave hereat you may easily imagine, and what pangs of heart it gave to the loyal army you may easily conceive.... Lord, who seest the hearts of people, we leave the judgment of this affair to Thy mercy. In the interim those gunners lost Ireland through their neglect of duty.

  Thomas Ash, who had survived the 105 days of siege, recorded in his diary:

  Oh! To hear the loud acclamations of the garrison soldiers round the Walls when the ships came to the quay.... The Lord, who has preserved this City from the Enemy, I hope will always keep it to the Protestants.

  For the Protestants, this epic defence gave inspiration for more than three centuries to come.

  In the meantime large numbers of Jacobites had been tied down for months in a vain attempt to starve Enniskillen into submission. The Protestant garrison, however, had broken out of the island town to rout the Jacobites at the ‘break of Belleek’, relieve Ballyshannon, and bring supplies from Donegal Bay up the Erne to Enniskillen.

  Then, on the day that the Mountjoy was breaking the boom at Derry, Lieutenant-General Justin MacCarthy arrived with a formidable Jacobite army. The men of Enniskillen—soon to be known as Inniskillingers—advanced to Lisnaskea, drove back the Jacobites in confusion, and with the battle-cry ‘No Popery’ closed in on MacCarthy at Newtownbutler. With his much larger army, MacCarthy should have won, but his troops were not ready for the furious onslaught of the Inniskillingers. A merciless slaughter followed.

  Episode 110

  SCHOMBERG

  On Wednesday 31 July 1689, the very day King James II’s army withdrew from Derry, the men of Enniskillen overwhelmed the Jacobite army at Newtownbutler. A confused order caused the Jacobite cavalry to turn tail, and then the foot-soldiers were driven to the marshy shores of Upper Lough Erne. The French ambassador in Dublin reported to his king:

  The cavalry and dragoons fled without firing a pistol, and after some of them had burst their horses with the force of flight, they took to their feet and threw away their weapons, their swords, and jackets, that they might run more swiftly.

  Of 500 men who tried to swim across the lough, only one survived. The rest were hunted down and slain. The victors ruthlessly put over 2,000 Jacobites to the sword.

  For William of Orange, the steadfast refusal of Derry to surrender and the victory of Newtownbutler provided a vital breathing space—they gave him a safe base in Ireland to drive out King James in a campaign which had just begun. The Duke of Schomberg’s Williamite army met no opposition as it came ashore at Ballyholme Bay in north Down on 13 August. A contemporary news-sheet reported:

  The shore was all crowded with Protestants—men, women, and children—old and young, falling on their knees with tears in their eyes thanking God and the English for their deliverance.

  Schomberg first closed in on Carrickfergus Castle. Pounded by cannon from land and sea, the defenders

  judged it safest for them to Capitulate and Surrender; ... the Town has been so miserably defaced, by the continual playing of the Bombs for five Days together, that it looks like a dismal heape of ruine.

  The Jacobites were fortunate not to be lynched as they marched out of the castle, according to George Story, a Williamite army chaplain:

  The Countrey people were so inveterate against them ... that they stript most part of the Women ... and so rude were the Irish Scots, that the Duke was forced to ride in among them, with his Pistol in his hand, to keep the Irish from being murdered.

  Schomberg, an elderly French Huguenot veteran, was over-cautious. As he advanced south the Jacobites were given time to burn Newry to the ground. And when he camped north of Dundalk, he refused action. With their tents pitched by a marsh, Schomberg’s soldiers were ravaged by fever. As George Story tells us, around 1,700 died at Dundalk and another 1,000 in vessels taking the sick back to Belfast:

  Nay, so great was the Mortality, that several ships had all the Men in them dead, and no Body to look after them whilst they lay in the Bay at Carrickfergus. As for the Great Hospital at Belfast, there were 3,762 that died in it from the first of November to the first of May.... There were several that had their limbs so mortified in the Camp, afterwards, that some had their Toes, and some their whole Feet that fell off as the Surgeons were dressing them; so that upon the whole matter, we lost nigh one half of the Men that we took over with us.

  With a heavy heart, William III realised he had no choice but to go to Ireland himself. Early in June 1690 he assembled an army of continental size at Hounslow Heath in London. Then a cavalry detachment went ahead to clear the road to Chester for a train of no fewer than 3,000 ox-carts stretching for more than eighteen miles—and these were carrying just the supplies, tents and ammunition bound for Ireland. Then Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s
squadron of warships escorted William’s fleet of about 300 vessels across the Irish Sea into Belfast Lough on 14 June. The king stepped ashore at Carrickfergus, mounted his horse and

  rode through the main streets of the town, where almost numberless crowds received him with continued shouts and acclamations on till the Whitehouse.

  He drove along the lough shore with Schomberg to Belfast, where, as George Story records, they were met

  by a great concourse of People who at first could do nothing but Stare, never having seen a King before in that part of the World, but after a while some of them began to Huzzah, the rest took it up (as Hounds follow a Scent).

  Never before had Belfast greeted so many men of distinction: Godard van Reede, Baron de Ginkel of Utrecht; Hans Willem Bentinck, the king’s close adviser; the Duke of Würtemberg-Neustadt, the German commander of the Danish force; Count Henry Nassau; Prince Georg of Daamstadt, brother of Christian V of Denmark; the Duke of Ormond; and many others.

  For a brief moment in history Ireland had become the cockpit of Europe.

  Episode 111

  THE BATTLE OF THE BOYNE

  William of Orange stepped ashore at Carrickfergus on 14 June 1690, and a few hours later he was in Belfast. Here he accepted a verse address from Belfast Corporation urging him to ‘pull the stiff neck of every papist down’. Then the pale asthmatic monarch, his face lined with the constant pain of fighting ill-health, told the citizens in halting English that he had come to see that the people of Ireland would be ‘settled in a lasting peace’. William III had with him by far the largest invading force Ireland had yet seen. Some of the Dutch guns required sixteen horses to pull them, and altogether William had more than one thousand horses to draw his artillery and gun equipment. One eyewitness in Belfast described in the scene:

  The Lough between this and Carrickfergus seems like a wood, there being no less than seven hundred sail of ships in it, mostly laden with provisions and ammunition.... The great numbers of coaches, waggons, baggage horses and the like is almost incredible to be supplied from England, or any of the biggest nations in Europe. I cannot think that any army of Christendom hath the like.

  The Jacobites—the forces of King James II—withdrew from Dundalk to take up battle positions on the tidal south bank of the River Boyne, just west of Drogheda. William marched south and by Monday 30 June he had deployed his troops on the north side of the river. The international composition of his army underlined the fact that it represented the Grand Alliance against France, the world’s greatest power. The core of his army was made up of Dutch, Danish, French Huguenot and German veterans of continental campaigns. His English troops were mostly raw recruits, reinforced by Ulster Protestant skirmishers, described by the army chaplain George Story as being ‘half-naked with sabre and pistols hanging from their belts ... like a Horde of Tartars’.

  Numbering 36,000, the Williamites were at least 10,000 stronger than the Jacobites and far superior in firepower. William was superstitiously opposed to doing anything important on a Monday, but according to Sir Robert Southwell:

  His Majesty at his arrival yesterday near the river about 12 of the clock, rode in full view of the Irish army, which are ranged upwards on the other side. The enemy even discovered it must be his Majesty.... They began to fire and presently one of the balls past so close to his Majesty’s back upon the blade of his right shoulder as to take away his outward coat, his chamois waistcoat, shirt and all to draw near half a spoonful of blood.

  That night the bandaged king held a council of war with his generals. A detachment would ride inland to the fords at Slane, to make it look as if this would be where the main attack would be. Meanwhile, when the tide was right, he would direct a frontal assault across the river.

  Sending troops upstream in a feint successfully drew the French away. This advantage having been gained, the ground shook as William’s artillery pounded the Jacobite positions and the Dutch Blue Guards waded up to their armpits across the river at Oldbridge, holding their weapons over their heads. The Irish Jacobite cavalry fought back fiercely, but in the end the Williamites triumphed by superior firepower and weight of numbers. The Duke of Schomberg and the Rev. George Walker, the hero of the Siege of Derry, were killed in the fighting. To Southwell’s alarm, William

  weares his Star and Garter and will not disguise who he is.... His Majesty was here in the crowd of all, drawing his swoard & animating those that fled to follow him, His danger was great among the enemys guns which killed 30 of the Inniskillingers on the spott. Nay one of the Inniskillingers came with a Pistol cockt to his Majesty till he called out; What are you so angry with your friends! The truth is the cloaths of friends and foes are soe much alike.

  The Battle of the Boyne was not a rout; the Irish and French retired in good order to fight for more than another year. Yet the battle was decisive. It was a severe blow to Louis XIV’s pretensions to European domination, and it was celebrated by the singing of a Te Deum in thanks to God in Catholic Vienna. James II could no longer think of Ireland as a springboard for recovering his throne. For the English, parliamentary rule was made secure. For the Old English and the Gaelic Irish, the defeat dashed hopes of recovering the lands they had lost in the days of Cromwell. For Ulster Protestants, the battle ensured the survival of their plantation and a victory to be celebrated from year to year.

  Episode 112

  GALLOPING HOGAN, SARSFIELD AND THE WALLS OF LIMERICK

  Here from my hand as from a cup

  I pour this pure libation;

  And ere I drink, I offer up

  One fervent aspiration—

  Let man with man, let kin with kin,

  Contend through fields of slaughter—

  Whoever fights, may freedom win,

  As then, at the Boyne Water.

  Following his rout at the Boyne on 1 July 1690, King James II dashed straight for Dublin. Here he made an ungracious speech to his Privy Council. The Irish soldiers, he said, ‘basely fled the field and left the spoil to the enemies, nor could they be prevailed upon to rally ... so that henceforth I never more determined to head an Irish army and do now resolve to shift for myself and so, gentlemen, must you’.

  And shift for himself he did. Next day he left for Waterford to sail for France, never to return. No wonder the Irish Jacobite commander, Patrick Sarsfield, observed: ‘Change but kings and we will fight you over again.’

  The Jacobite army adopted Sarsfield’s plan to withdraw westwards and hold a line running along the River Shannon. William III made his camp just north of the city at Finglas, and on Sunday 6 July the ‘Deliverer’ entered the city in triumph, listened to a sermon in St Patrick’s Cathedral, and watched the Dublin Protestants run about ‘shouting and embracing one another and blessing God for his wonderful deliverance as if they had been alive from the dead’.

  King William was anxious to move on in pursuit of the Jacobites. He had reason to be worried because he had just received bad news: on the day before his victory at the Boyne the French fleet had inflicted a disastrous defeat on the English navy at Beachy Head. And he had information that Louis XIV was sending to Ireland twenty-four additional vessels with men and munitions.

  During William’s slow progress southwards by Waterford and Carrick-on-Suir the Jacobites worked frantically to improve the defences of Limerick. On 7 August William halted about eight miles south west of the city to await the arrival of his train of heavy guns and carts drawn by no fewer than 400 horses. But at midnight on 9 August Patrick Sarsfield stole out of Limerick with 500 men. Guided by ‘Galloping’ Michael Hogan through the Tipperary mountains, in the following night they surreptitiously drew near to the siege train of 153 wagons which had made camp in a meadow. The password, curiously, was ‘Sarsfield’—this ‘Galloping’ Hogan discovered from an old woman selling apples. So, when challenged in the dark by a sentry, Sarsfield cried out: ‘Sarsfield is the word, and Sarsfield is the man!’

  Carters and horses were ruthlessly cut down; but
the life of one gunner was spared in return for demonstrating how the cannon could be put out of action. Then 800 cannon-balls, 12,000 pounds of gunpowder, 1,600 barrels of match and 500 hand-grenades, along with tin pontoon boats, were heaped in circle and a long powder trail laid. Hogan lit the fuse. The earth shook with the explosion, the loudest man-made sound yet heard in Ireland, and people far away in Co. Clare were wakened from their beds. After a brief silence there followed the crumbling sound of the ruined Ballyneety Castle close by, crashing down from the shock waves. The holes left in the ground by the explosion can still be seen today.

  King William had to wait for heavy guns from Waterford before he could begin to besiege Limerick. Using sacks of wool as protection against bullets and shrapnel, the Dutch got the cannon close to the walls of Limerick and made a breach. On the afternoon of 27 August the Williamites assaulted the breach. John Stevens, an English Jacobite unhesitatingly branding William’s men as ‘rebels’, was one of the defenders and left a record of the events that followed: