Born Fighting Read online

  “No surrender.”

  The full siege had begun. The surprised James fell back beyond range of the city’s cannons and sat motionless on his horse in a heavy rain for several hours. Back in Dublin, he ordered a trainload of siege guns to Londonderry. By the end of May the city was surrounded by an estimated twenty thousand French and Irish soldiers, and was under a relentless pounding. The siege guns, actually heavy mortars, lofted hundreds of shells above the stone walls, with great impact on the cramped population and the buildings in the city itself. Inside the walls the Protestants chose their leaders, developed military discipline, and began to carefully ration a dwindling supply of food. They also collectively wrote their battle cry in blood, just as the Scottish Covenanters had done fifty years before when Charles I had ordered them to accept the Anglican faith.

  No surrender.

  Londonderry’s defense was not simply a passive affair. In addition to their individual weapons and the artillery that lined the city walls, Protestant ground forces made frequent raids, patrols, and ambushes outside the gates. Col. Adam Murray, a Scot who commanded the military forces, led several successful cavalry campaigns against the French and Irish besiegers. In late April the French general Maumont was killed in one such attack. In another, Murray made a brief, false attack on Jacobite forces (followers of James II) at Pennyburn Mill and then lured French cavalry forces into a deadly ambush set up by his infantry as he retreated. Other battles were fought over key pieces of terrain, including two at Windmill Hill and one at the Butcher’s Gate.

  In an effort symbolic of larger issues between England and the Ulster Protestants, the vaunted English navy did not enshrine itself with honor. On June 8 a British warship, the Greyhound, attempted to run the Jacobite blockade on the River Foyle and was badly damaged by French and Irish gunfire coming from Fort Culmore, a key spot above the river. Initially running aground, the damaged Greyhound soon abandoned the besieged Protestants, limping back to England.

  On June 11 a larger naval relief force along with soldiers and provisions arrived within sight of the city’s towers at the mouth of the Lough Foyle. Seeing the damage done to the Greyhound and learning that the besieging army had laid booms of logs and chains across the mouth of the river, the English commander, Maj. Gen. Percy Kirke, hesitated. The French and Irish guns at Fort Culmore were trained on the booms, prepared for a barrage if the relief ships attempted to break through. As Derry’s defenders watched from above, Kirke turned his task force around and sailed off to the Lough Swilly, on the other side of a peninsula a few miles west of the city. And there he stayed. For six weeks, during the worst part of the siege, the English relief force remained encamped on Inch Island in Lough Swilly while the city’s defenders absorbed a heavy pounding from the siege guns and began dying in droves from starvation.

  Anger and bitterness filled the city. Their only hope for survival rested a few miles away as they continued to die from enemy fire and began eating dogs and rats to survive. This anger was matched by many of the soldiers and sailors in the relief force itself, some of whom were Ulster natives.

  Finally the duke of Schomberg, King William’s military commander in Ireland, sent a harsh note to General Kirke, ordering him to lift the siege. On the evening of July 28 the relief force pushed forward toward the city. Darkness was falling as they entered Lough Foyle. The tide was running with them. Three supply ships, covered by the heavy guns of the British warship HMS Dartmouth, moved against the boom. The lead ship, the Mountjoy, stalled as it tried to ram the booms and was taken under heavy fire by the guns at Fort Culmore. Swaying in the current, the Mountjoy ran aground, but as it returned fire the recoil from its guns dislodged it from the riverbank, floating it again. Its commander, Londonderry native Capt. Michael Browning, was killed while commanding the guns on the main deck. But soon a party of sailors on a longboat cut the chains and broke the booms. And finally, under cover of darkness, the three supply ships made their way to the city’s walls.

  The siege was lifted. Two days later the French and Irish soldiers, themselves exhausted, began to withdraw. James had been defeated in a symbolic standoff that he had personally initiated. But ironically, the victory only widened the rift between the predominantly English Anglicans and the principally Scottish Presbyterians who had fought alongside them.

  The Reverend George Walker, an Anglican minister widely hailed as one of the heroes of the siege, was, if not the major reason, certainly the flash point of this rupture. Walker was the son of an Anglican minister who had migrated to Ulster from Yorkshire. He had married the daughter of Sir John Stanhope of Melwood and through her influence had been appointed chancellor of the diocese of Armagh, near Londonderry. Following his father into the clergy, Walker himself was seventy years old when the siege began. Despite his age and his being, as the Anglicans put it, “in Holy Orders,” Walker reportedly had raised a regiment in the months before the siege began and was commanding it in the towns of Dungannon and Strabane when the French and Irish forces began surrounding Londonderry. He and other army commanders had briefly fought the advancing soldiers and then retreated to the city in the final days before the deposed King James II arrived at its gates.

  Although accounts vary, Walker was apparently one of two joint governors inside the city during the siege, commanding fifteen companies and also supervising the commissariat, a vital job given the starvation-level rationing that went into effect. He also was known to have given many simply worded but inspirational sermons during the hard days of the siege, Londonderry’s cathedral being divided on Sundays with the Anglicans offering morning services and the Presbyterians using it in the afternoon. Indeed, Walker is said to have given the last of the sermons in the besieged city, on July 30, just before its final relief.

  Within days after the siege ended, Walker was on a ship to England, where he was greeted by the admiring court of William and Mary. William awarded him five thousand pounds for his services, a truly princely sum for the time. Soon thereafter he was named bishop of Londonderry, a position he never actually occupied because he was killed the next year at the Battle of the Boyne. In September he published his narrative A True Account of the Siege of Londonderry, obsequiously dedicated to the king. In October he was granted an honorary degree at Cambridge. A few months after that he was given one by Oxford.

  Walker’s True Account, and the personal glory he brought unto himself in England at the expense of others, created immediate anger in Ulster, particularly among the Scottish Presbyterians. His memoir failed to mention the services of even one Presbyterian minister during the siege. Nor did it credit the audacious combat leadership of such fighters as Col. Adam Murray, who had led so many excursions outside the city walls and had been the first to coin the phrase “No Surrender.” Walker’s book was soon followed by a rebuttal called Narrative, written by John Mackenzie, a Presbyterian minister who also was at the siege. Mackenzie claimed among other things that Walker had exaggerated his military credentials and that he had never even held the post of joint governor at all.

  This rift fell rather cleanly along both ethnic and religious lines. For the Presbyterian Scots who stayed in Ulster, the insults at the hands of the principally English Anglicans would burn for more than a century.62 For those who eventually left Northern Ireland to settle in America, the slighting of their contributions at the Londonderry siege would become simply one more piece of evidence that it was time to move on. And they brought with them a far greater antipathy toward the English hierarchy than they ever could have felt toward the ordinary Irish.

  The reason, in both cases, was the same. Although ethnic labels overlapped here and there, the predominantly English Anglicans in Ireland intended to remain politically and culturally superior, regardless of whether the Irish Catholics and the principally Scottish “dissenters” outnumbered them. As Foster succinctly put it, the Presbyterian position in Ireland “was not much more enviable than that of the Catholics; the Established Church remained the foun
tain of privilege in Ireland, more closely linked than ever to the Church of England and the possessors of land. In return, membership gave exclusive rights to political power.”63

  Although defeated—or, more accurately, outlasted—at Derry, James II continued his campaigns in Ireland. At the same time, William III focused on fighting the French on the European mainland. As winter passed, bickering broke out between James and his French advisers. But in the spring of 1690 the French provided James with significant reinforcements, forcing William to pay closer attention to the Irish flank. Belatedly—and dangerously—William decided to personally face James in Ireland. In a reflection of Europe’s complicated loyalties of this period, William assembled an eclectic army of 36,000 Ulster Scots, Irish, English, Dutch, French Huguenots, Germans, and Danes to fight against James’s equally diverse army of about 30,000 Irish, French Catholics, Germans, and Walloons. William then crossed the Irish Sea with his force, bringing with him forty pieces of heavy artillery, some so large they required a pulling team of a dozen horses. He landed at Carrickfergus, east of Belfast, on June 14, and after a brief ceremony there and another in the Ulster capital, he and his soldiers headed south.

  William was taking a great military risk by dividing his forces so completely between Ireland to England’s west and the Continent to its east, placing him at the very strategic disadvantage that Louis XIV had longed for when first deciding to help James. Further, by deploying so much of his army outside of England, William had left the country vulnerable to direct invasion from France. This possibility was not out of the question. On the Continent, the French soon attacked a depleted English army at Fleurus, defeating it. At sea the French navy soundly defeated a combined British and Dutch fleet at Beachy Head, giving the French at least temporary control of the English Channel.

  William needed a quick and decisive battle in his effort to face down James. He would not be disappointed. And he would be heading back to England less than a month after he landed at Carrickfergus.

  From Belfast, William’s army moved southward toward Newry. James, positioned a dozen miles farther south on key terrain at Dundalk, sent a reconnaissance patrol of mounted dragoons forward to gain information on the strength of the English. The patrol clashed with an advance guard of several hundred English infantrymen and dragoons, losing a number of soldiers as well as their commanding officer. The returning soldiers warned the deposed king of the large size of the advancing force. James immediately withdrew from Dundalk and set up defensive positions twenty miles farther south, on the southern bank of the River Boyne near Drogheda. Now William would have to cross the river with an entire army in order to attack.

  William’s forces, hot in pursuit, closed on Drogheda. As they positioned themselves along the northern bank of the Boyne, they learned that James’s army was spread along a front of several miles between Drogheda and Slane Bridge to its west. Surveying their positions, William himself decided on the battle plan, frustrating his field marshal, the vastly experienced, eighty-year-old duke of Schomberg. But the king was also battle tested, having fought many campaigns in Europe. Indeed, although he was known as grim and humorless and had been sickly all his life, William seemed to come alive on the battlefield.

  Never viewed as a battlefield genius, William’s evenness under fire nonetheless inspired loyalty. He was also a man largely without bias. In matters of government he aligned himself with Catholic and Protestant alike, and did not care to dawdle in the usual royal schemes of jealousies and petty revenge. Many of his soldiers, including the crack Dutch Blue Guards, who would carry much of the fight at the Boyne, were Catholic. Other Dutch units were heavily manned by exiled French Huguenots. Their service in the battle would cause William to allow many Huguenots to migrate to Ulster, where in the following decades they became active in the linen industry. His composure in the face of death became apparent soon after arriving at the Boyne, when an Irish marksman saw him riding in front of his men in full regalia and shot him in the shoulder. The undeterred William had his wound treated, then remounted his horse and continued to prepare his battle plan.

  It was historic irony that these two accidental kings would meet in this remote place called the Boyne. James had been crowned because his brother left no direct heirs and was flawed by his obsession with returning all things Catholic to a nation that had abandoned Catholicism. William was a casual Calvinist at best, never very concerned about the domestic politics of the nation he now ruled, who himself would die childless and whose great passion was to deny Louis XIV his dream of French dominance of Europe. And neither of them cared, really, about things Irish—James wishing eventually to do away with Irish traditions and replace them with English teachings, the Dutch-born William obsessed with continental Europe. And yet each of them had bet his right to the throne on this showdown.

  William’s scheme of maneuver was simple. His main forces would pound James’s positions with his heavy artillery, then conduct a frontal assault, crossing the river and marching directly into them. At the same time, a cavalry unit under Marshal Schomberg’s son Meinhard would move upstream to the west and turn the left flank of James’s army at Slane Bridge, creating so much chaos behind James’s front lines that his army would be forced to retreat in disarray.

  Just before dawn the English heavy artillery began firing on James’s positions, and after several barrages the assault began. As the Dutch Blue Guards waded up to their armpits directly into the heart of James’s defenses, an Irish cavalry unit under Richard Hamilton forced them back in some of the heaviest fighting of the day. The battle ebbed and flowed along the riverbank and in the water. The duke of Schomberg, seeing the Blue Guards stagger, decided to rally them. Moving forward from the riverbank, the duke took charge of the assault and was soon killed, later found with a bullet in his throat and two saber gashes on his head.

  The enigmatic Reverend George Walker, whose presence at the Boyne has never been fully explained—whether soldier, minister, or observer—was also killed during the assault. King William, upon hearing that Walker had fallen, is reported to have asked incredulously, “What took him there?” Others reported that Walker had been coming to the aid of the wounded Schomberg. Some maintained that he had raised troops for the battle, but there are no records supporting that claim.

  As the frontal assault ebbed and flowed, Meinhard Schomberg’s cavalry force managed to turn James’s left flank, guaranteeing William’s victory. James had anticipated the move and sent an Irish regiment of dragoons under Neill O’Neill, a nephew of Tyrconnell, to stop them. But O’Neill was quickly killed, causing the Irish under his command to retreat. Lauzun, the French commander, tried to fill the gap with a fresh contingent of French troops and Irish cavalry, but this left only Irish foot soldiers along the riverbank to defend against William’s persistent frontal assault. The assault broke through the lines, and soon James and his army were in full retreat.

  Victory assured, William made no effort to pursue James’s army or to capture James himself. Instead, he made a triumphal march into Dublin, establishing the validity of his own regency, and then immediately returned to England. James, humiliated, left for France three days after the battle, complaining bitterly of Irish cowardice at the Boyne. He would never return. And although the Irish continued their rebellion for another year, the matter of William III’s succession to the British throne was forever settled.

  In modern-day Ireland, the siege of Londonderry and William’s victory at the Boyne are still well celebrated among the Protestants in ceremonies that never fail to draw bile from the Catholics. But the centuries have brought with them a simplified, two-sided depiction of the fights—a view that did not exist in the decades immediately following these key events.

  Those who choose to remember James’s Irish campaign and William’s response in simple religious terms ignore the complexities of the issues. James was hardly in Ireland as the champion of either Irish or Catholic causes, which is the reason the pope himself cele
brated William’s victory at the Boyne as a repudiation of Louis XIV’s international ambitions.64 And the Orangemen who march in their parades on the anniversary of the Boyne as a celebration of Protestant unity against the Catholics ignore the deep divisions among Protestants themselves during this era. Ulster’s famous Orange Order was not even created until more than a hundred years later, in 1795, after the great Scots-Irish migration to America was completed.65

  Unfortunately for the Ulster Scots, the victory over James did nothing to change Anglican dominance of Irish affairs. As Foster writes, Ireland remained “a kingdom containing a Protestant elite who had intermarried, established dynasties, stored up fortunes, built houses, colonized both the polite society and the political institutions of the capital, and defined themselves against the cultures of Catholicism and Dissent.”66 And the succession of Queen Anne not only continued this preeminence, but also through the Test Acts hardened it.

  The eighteenth century dawned quietly in Europe and America, giving no hint of the political turbulence that would overtake its final twenty-five years. A steady evolution of democratic institutions would mark its decades, led principally by English, French, and colonial American theorists. What no one could have guessed in 1703 as Queen Anne’s government passed her Test Acts was that the hard-nosed, unyielding Presbyterian Scots of Ulster would themselves provide the denouement of this march toward individual freedoms—in America. For by 1828 their culture would have shaped the direction of a unique frontier-style democracy and also have given the new nation its first populist president.

  After a hundred years of struggle, Ulster was no longer the swamp-laden wilderness that had greeted the first settlers when the Irish earls had fled to Spain. But the province still remained the ugly adopted stepchild of the British Isles. Ireland itself did not enjoy Scotland’s legal status as a kingdom and was headed for more turmoil as the Catholic Irish resisted further domination. Ulster had England’s eye, but it was not a formal colony in the sense of those now beginning to flourish in America. Its woolen and linen industries were frequently subjected to tariffs and restrictions placed on them from London. Few Ulster Scots owned land, and a Byzantine policy of “rack-renting” brought exponential increases in their payments to absentee landlords. Rack-renting caused a vicious circle where improvements they themselves made on the land raised the value of the property and thus their own rent. Additionally, a cycle of drought and deadly famine seemed endemic to the island’s geography.