expecting, as it should seem, the performance of Lundy's promises; and in twenty four hours the arrangements for the defence of Londonderry were complete. On the evening of the nineteenth of April, a trumpeter came to the southern gate, and asked whether the engagements into which the Governor had entered would be fulfilled. The answer was that the men who guarded these walls had nothing to do with the Governor's engagements, and were determined to resist to the last.

Roofs and upper stories of houses fell in, and crushed the inmates. During a short time the garrison, many of whom had never before seen the effect of a cannonade, seemed to be discomposed by the crash of chimneys, and by the heaps of ruin mingled with disfigured corpses. But familiarity with danger and horror produced in a few hours the natural effect. The spirit of the people rose so high that their chiefs thought it safe to act on the offensive. On the twenty-first of April a sally was made under the command of Murray. The On the following day a messenger of Irish stood their ground resolutely; and higher rank was sent, Claude Hamilton, a furious and bloody contest took place. Lord Strabane, one of the few Roman Maumont, at the head of a body of Catholic peers of Ireland. Murray, cavalry, flew to the place where the who had been appointed to the com- fight was raging. He was struck in mand of one of the eight regiments the head by a musket ball, and fell into which the garrison was distributed, a corpse. The besiegers lost several advanced from the gate to meet the other officers, and about two hundred flag of truce; and a short conference men, before the colonists could be was held. Strabane had been autho- driven in. Murray escaped with diffirised to make large promises. The culty. His horse was killed under citizens should have a free pardon for him; and he was beset by enemies: all that was past if they would submit but he was able to defend himself to their lawful Sovereign. Murray till some of his friends made a rush himself should have a colonel's com- from the gate to his rescue, with old mission, and a thousand pounds in Walker at their head.* money. "The men of Londonderry," answered Murray, "have done nothing that requires a pardon, and own no Sovereign but King William and Queen Mary. It will not be safe for your Lordship to stay longer, or to return on the same errand. Let me have the honour of seeing you through the lines."*

James had been assured, and had fully expected, that the city would yield as soon as it was known that he was before the walls. Finding himself mistaken, he broke loose from the control of Melfort, and determined to return instantly to Dublin. Rosen accompanied the King. The direction of the siege was entrusted to Maumont, Richard Hamilton was second, and Pusignan third, in command.

The operations now commenced in

London

sieged.

earnest. The besiegers began derry be- by battering the town. It was soon on fire in several places. * See Walker's True Account and Mackenzie's Narrative.

In consequence of the death of Maumont, Richard Hamilton was once more commander of the Irish army. His exploits in that post did not raise his reputation. He was a fine gentleman and a brave soldier; but he had no pretensions to the character of a great general, and had never, in his life, seen a siege.t Pusignan had more science and energy. But Pusignan survived

April 26.

* Walker; Mackenzie; Avaux, May. 6. 1689. There is a tradition among the Protestants of Ulster that Maumont fell by the sword of Murray: but on this point the report made by the French ambassador to his master is decisive. The truth is that there are almost as many mythical stories about the siege of legend about Murray and Maumont dates from Londonderry as about the siege of Troy. The 1689. In the Royal Voyage, which was acted in that year, the combat between the heroes described in these sonorous lines

is

"They met; and Monsieur at the first encounter
Fell dead, blaspheming, on the dusty plain,
And dying, bit the ground."

"Si c'est celuy qui est sorti de France le dernier, qui s'appelloit Richard, il n'a jamais veu de siège, ayant toujours servi en Rousillon."-Louvois to Avaux, June 1689.

13

Maumont little more than a fortnight. animate the courage of the forlorn At four in the morning of the sixth of hope. Many volunteers bound themMay, the garrison made another sally, selves by oath to make their way into took several flags, and killed many the works or to perish in the attempt. of the besiegers. Pusignan, fighting Captain Butler, son of the Lord Mountgallantly, was shot through the body. garret, undertook to lead the sworn men The wound was one which a skilful to the attack. On the walls the colosurgeon might have cured: but there nists were drawn up in three ranks. The was no such surgeon in the Irish camp, office of those who were behind was to and the communication with Dublin | load the muskets of those who were in was slow and irregular. The poor front. The Irish came on boldly and Frenchman died, complaining bitterly with a fearful uproar, but after long and of the barbarous ignorance and negligence which had shortened his days. A medical man, who had been sent down express from the capital, arrived after the funeral. James, in consequence, as it should seem, of this disaster, established a daily post between Dublin Castle and Hamilton's head quarters. Even by this conveyance letters did not travel very expeditiously for the couriers went on foot, and, from fear probably of the Ennis-be sounded.* killeners, took a circuitous route from military post to military post.*

hard fighting were driven back. The women of Londonderry were seen amidst the thickest fire serving out water and ammunition to their husbands and brothers. In one place, where the wall was only seven feet high, Butler and some of his sworn men succeeded in reaching the top; but they were all killed or made prisoners. At length, after four hundred of the Irish had fallen, their chiefs ordered a retreat to

turned

Nothing was left but to try the effect of hunger. It was known that The siege May passed away: June arrived; the stock of food in the city and still Londonderry held out. There was but slender. Indeed it blockade. had been many sallies and skirmishes was thought strange that the supplies with various success: but, on the should have held out so long. Every whole, the advantage had been with the precaution was now taken against the garrison. Several officers of note had introduction of provisions. All the been carried prisoners into the city; avenues leading to the city by land were and two French banners, torn after closely guarded. On the south were hard fighting from the besiegers, had encamped, along the left bank of the been hung as trophies in the chancel of Foyle, the horsemen who had followed the Cathedral. It seemed that the siege Lord Galmoy from the valley of the must be turned into a blockade. But Barrow. Their chief was of all the before the hope of reducing the town Irish captains the most dreaded and by main force was relinquished, it was the most abhorred by the Protestants. determined to make a great effort. The For he had disciplined his men with point selected for assault was an out-rare skill and care; and many frightful work called Windmill Hill, which was not far from the southern gate. Religious stimulants were employed to

May 28.

12.

* Walker; Mackenzie; Avaux to Louvois, May 1689; James to Hamilton, June 8, in the library of the Royal Irish Academy. Louvois wrote to Avaux in great indignation. "La mauvaise conduite que l'on a tenue devant Londondery a cousté la vie à M. de Maumont et à M. de Pusignan. Il ne faut pas que sa Majesté Britannique croye qu'en faisant tuer des officiers generaux comme des soldats, on puisse ne l'en point laisser manquer. Ces sortes de gens sont rares en tout pays, et doivent estre menagez."

VOL. II

stories were told of his barbarity and perfidy. Long lines of tents, occupied by the infantry of Butler and O'Neil, of Lord Slane and Lord Gormanstown, by Nugent's Westmeath men, by Eustace's Kildare men, and by Cavanagh's Kerry men, extended northward till they again approached the water side.t The river was fringed

* Walker; Mackenzie; Avaux, June 16. 1689.

† As to the discipline of Galmoy's Horse, see the letter of Avaux to Louvois, dated Sept. Horrible stories of the cruelty, both of

10

20

with forts and batteries, which no vessel | battle. But the wind was unfavourable could pass without great peril. After to him: his force was greatly inferior some time it was determined to make to that which was opposed to him; and, the security still more complete by after some firing, which caused no serithrowing a barricade across the stream, ous loss to either side, he thought it about a mile and a half below the city. prudent to stand out to sea, while the Several boats full of stones were sunk. French retired into the recesses of the A row of stakes was driven into the harbour. He steered for Scilly, where bottom of the river. Large pieces of he expected to find reinforcements; fir wood, strongly bound together, and Chateau Renaud, content with the formed a boom which was more than a credit which he had acquired, and quarter of a mile in length, and which afraid of losing it if he stayed hastened was firmly fastened to both shores, by back to Brest, though earnestly encables a foot thick.* A huge stone, to treated by James to come round to which the cable on the left bank was Dublin. attached, was removed many years later, for the purpose of being polished and shaped into a column. But the intention was abandoned, and the rugged mass still lies, not many yards from its original site, amidst the shades which surround a pleasant country house named Boom Hall. Hard by is a well from which the besiegers drank. A little further off is a burial ground where they laid their slain, and where even in our own time the spade of the gardener has struck upon many skulls and thighbones at a short distance beneath the turf and flowers.

Both sides claimed the victory. The Commons at Westminster absurdly passed a vote of thanks to Herbert. James, not less absurdly, ordered bonfires to be lighted, and a Te Deum to be sung. But these marks of joy by no means satisfied Avaux, whose national vanity was too strong even for his characteristic prudence and politeness. He complained that James was so unjust and ungrateful as to attribute the result of the late action to the reluctance with which the English seamen fought against their rightful King and their old commander, and that His While these things were passing in Majesty did not seem to be well pleased the North, James was holding by being told that they were flying his court at Dublin. On his over the ocean pursued by the triumphreturn thither from London-ant French. Dover, too, was a bad derry he received intelligence that the Frenchman. He seemed to take no French fleet, commanded by the Count pleasure in the defeat of his countryof Chateau Renaud, had anchored in men, and had been heard to say that Bantry Bay, and had put on shore a the affair in Bantry Bay did not deserve large quantity of military stores and a to be called a battle.* supply of money. Herbert, who had just been sent to those seas with an English squadron for the purpose of intercepting the communications between Britanny and Ireland, learned where the enemy lay, and sailed into the bay with the intention of giving

Naval skirmish

in Bantry Bay.

the colonel and of his men, are told in the Short View, by a Clergyman, printed in 1689, and in several other pamphlets of that year. For the distribution of the Irish forces, see the contemporary maps of the siege. A catalogue of the regiments, meant, I suppose, to rival the catalogue in the Second Book of the Iliad, will be found in the Londeriad.

*Life of Admiral Sir John Leake, by Stephen M. Leake, Clarencieux King at Arms, 1750. Of this book only fifty copies were printed.

moned by

On the day after the Te Deum had been sung at Dublin for this A parliaindecisive skirmish, the Parlia- ment summent convoked by James as- James sits sembled. The number of at Dublin. temporal peers of Ireland, when he arrived in that kingdom, was about a hundred.

Of these only fourteen obeyed his summons. Of the fourteen, ten were Roman Catholics. By the reversing of old attainders, and by new

creations, seventeen more Lords, all | man of business.* Colonel Henry Roman Catholics, were introduced into Luttrell, member for the county of Carthe Upper House. The Protestant low, had served long in France, and had Bishops of Meath, Ossory, Cork, and brought back to his native Ireland a Limerick, whether from a sincere con- sharpened intellect and polished manviction that they could not lawfully ners, a flattering tongue, some skill in withhold their obedience even from a war, and much more skill in intrigue. tyrant, or from a vain hope that the His elder brother, Colonel Simon Lutheart even of a tyrant might be soft-trell, who was member for the county ened by their patience, made their of Dublin, and military governor of appearance in the midst of their mortal the capital, had also resided in France, enemies. and, though inferior to Henry in parts

The House of Commons consisted and activity, made a highly distinalmost exclusively of Irishmen and guished figure among the adherents of Papists. With the writs the returning James. The other member for the officers had received from Tyrconnel county of Dublin was Colonel Patrick letters naming the persons whom he Sarsfield. This gallant officer was rewished to see elected. The largest con-garded by the natives as one of themstituent bodies in the kingdom were at this time very small. For scarcely any but Roman Catholics dared to show their faces; and the Roman Catholic freeholders were then very few, not more, it is said, in some counties, than ten or twelve. Even in cities so considerable as Cork, Limerick, and Galway, the number of persons who, under the new Charters, were entitled to vote did not exceed twenty four. About two hundred and fifty members took their seats. Of these only six were Protestants.* The list of the names sufficiently indicates the religious and political temper of the assembly. Alone among the Irish parliaments of that age, this parliament was filled with Dermots and Geohegans, O'Neils and O'Donovans, Macmahons, Macnamaras, and Macgillicuddies. The lead was taken by a few men whose abilities had been improved by the study of the law, or by experience acquired in foreign countries. The Attorney General, Sir Richard Nagle, who represented the county of Cork, was allowed, even by Protestants, to be an acute and learned jurist. Francis Plowden, the Commissioner of Revenue, who sate for Bannow, and acted as chief minister of finance, was an Englishman, and as he had been a principal agent of the Order of Jesuits in money matters, must be supposed to have been an excellent

*King, iii. 12.; Memoirs of Ireland from the Restoration, 1716. Lists of both Houses will be found in King's Appendix.

selves: for his ancestors on the paternal side, though originally English, were among those early colonists who were proverbially said to have become more Irish than Irishmen. His mother was of noble Celtic blood; and he was firmly attached to the old religion. He had inherited an estate of about two thousand a year, and was therefore one of the wealthiest Roman Catholics in the kingdom. His knowledge of courts and camps was such as few of his countrymen possessed. He had long borne a commission in the English Life Guards, had lived much about Whitehall, and had fought bravely under Monmouth on the Continent, and against Monmouth at Sedgemoor. He had, Avaux wrote, more personal influence than any man in Ireland, and was indeed a gentleman of eminent merit, brave, upright, honourable, careful of his men in quarters, and certain to be always found at their head in the day of battle. His intrepidity, his frankness, his boundless good nature, his stature, which far exceeded that of ordinary men, and the strength which he exerted in personal conflict, gained for him the affectionate admiration of the populace. It is remarkable that the Englishry generally respected him as a valiant, skilful, and generous enemy, and that, even in the most ribald farces which were performed by

* I found proof of Plowden's connection with the Jesuits in a Treasury Letterbook, June 12. 1689.

mountebanks in Smithfield, he was always excepted from the disgraceful imputations which it was then the fashion to throw on the Irish nation.*

palace for their special use. It was not till the Hanoverian dynasty had been long on the throne, that a senate house which sustains a comparison with But men like these were rare in the the finest compositions of Inigo Jones House of Commons which had met at arose between the College and the Dublin. It is no reproach to the Irish Castle. In the seventeenth century nation, a nation which has since fur- there stood, on the spot where the pornished its full proportion of eloquent tico and dome of the Four Courts now and accomplished senators, to say that, overlook the Liffey, an ancient building of all the parliaments which have met which had once been a convent of in the British islands, Barebone's par- Dominican friars, but had, since the liament not excepted, the assembly con- Reformation, been appropriated to the voked by James was the most deficient use of the legal profession, and bore in all the qualities which a legislature the name of the King's Inns. There should possess. The stern domination accommodation had been provided for of a hostile class had blighted the the Parliament. On the seventh of faculties of the Irish gentleman. If May, James, dressed in royal robes and he was so fortunate as to have lands, wearing a crown, took his seat on the he had generally passed his life on throne in the House of Lords, and them, shooting, fishing, carousing, and ordered the Commons to be summaking love among his vassals. moned to the bar.* his estate had been confiscated, he had wandered about from bawn to bawn and from cabin to cabin, levying small contributions, and living at the expense of other men. He had never sate in the House of Commons: he had never even taken an active part at an election: he had never been a magistrate scarcely ever had he been on a grand jury. He had therefore absolutely no experience of public affairs. The English squire of that age, though assuredly not a very profound or enlightened politician, was a statesman and a philosopher when compared with the Roman Catholic squire of Munster or Connaught.

If

The Parliaments of Ireland had then no fixed place of assembling. Indeed they met so seldom and broke up so speedily that it would hardly have been worth while to build and furnish a * "Sarsfield,” Avaux wrote to Louvois, Oct. 1689,"n'est pas un homme de la naissance de mylord Galloway (Galmoy, I suppose) "ny de Makarty: mais c'est un gentilhomme distingué par son mérite qui a plus de crédit dans ce royaume qu'aucun homme que je connoisse. Il a de la valeur, mais surtout de l'honneur et de la probité à toute épreuve.. homme qui sera toujours à la tête de ses troupes, et qui en aura grand soin." Leslie, in his Answer to King, says that the Irish Protestants did justice to Sarsfield's integrity and honour. Indeed justice is done to Sarsfield even in such scurrilous pieces as the Royal Flight.

He then expressed his gratitude to the natives of Ireland for having adhered to his cause when the people of his other kingdoms had deserted him. His resolution to abolish all religious disabilities in all his dominions he declared to be unalterable. He invited the houses to take the Act of Settlement into consideration, and to redress the injuries of which the old proprietors of the soil had reason to complain. He concluded by acknowledging in warm terms his obligations to the King of France.t

When the royal speech had been pronounced, the Chancellor directed the Commons to repair to their chamber and to elect a Speaker. They chose the Attorney General Nagle; and the choice was approved by the King. ‡

The Commons next passed resolutions expressing warm gratitude both to James and to Lewis. Indeed it was proposed to send a deputation with an address to Avaux; but the Speaker pointed out the gross impropriety of such a step; and, on this occasion, his

* Journal of the Parliament in Ireland, 1689. The reader must not imagine that this journal has an official character. It is merely a compilation made by a Protestant pamphleteer, and printed in London. † Life of James, ii. 355.

Journal of the Parliament in Ireland.