CHAPTER II
Jacobites Foiled at Londonderry—Mountcashel Defeated at Newtown Butler—King James’s Irish Parliament
THE siege of Derry was continued under the supervision of Maumont and Hamilton, who had quite a large force at their disposal. It is regrettable to have to state that the Protestant population of Ulster was further inflamed against the Stuart cause by the needless excesses of Galmoy and the barbaric severity of De Rosen, who placed a crowd of helpless women and children between two fires under the ramparts of Derry, in the hope of compelling the garrison to surrender. The brilliant victories obtained over the Williamites at Coleraine and Cladysford, by General Hamilton, in the earlier part of the campaign, were more than offset by the overwhelming defeat inflicted by General Wolseley, at Newtown Butler, on the Jacobite army under Mountcashel. It was Irish against Irish, but the Inniskilleners, who made up the bulk of Wolseley’s force, were seasoned soldiers, well armed and well directed. Mountcashel’s men were chiefly green levies, and the battle was really lost through their faulty manœuvring. One brigade mistook an order to change front, so as to form a new line against a flank attack of the enemy, for an order to retreat, and so spread a panic that proved fatal. Mountcashel himself was dangerously wounded and made prisoner. He lost 2,000 men in killed and wounded, and 400 fugitives, completely surrounded, surrendered at some distance from the field. This battle was fought on July 31, 1689, and, on the same day, Derry was relieved by an English fleet, which succeeded in breaking the boom that had been constructed by the Jacobite engineers across the mouth of the harbor.
It will be remembered that the gates of the city were closed against Lord Antrim on December 7, 1688. Hamilton’s bombardment of the place began on the 17th of April, 1689, and lasted for three months. There was a total blockade for three weeks, and provisions became so scarce that the defenders actually devoured dogs, cats, rats, mice—anything, however revolting, that might satisfy the cravings of absolute hunger. The besiegers also suffered from bad weather and the shots from the hostile batteries. A rough computation places the total loss of the defenders at about 4,000 men, and that of the assailants at 6,000—the latter loss chiefly by disease. The relief of Derry was a mortal blow to the cause of King James, and soon afterward he lost every important post in Ulster, except Carrickfergus and Charlemont. Yet, as an Irish writer has well remarked, Ulster was bestowed by the king’s grandfather “upon the ancestors of those who now unanimously rejected and resisted him.” His cause also received a fatal stroke in Scotland by the death of the brave Dundee, who fell, vainly victorious, over the Williamite general, Mackay, at the battle of Killecrankie, fought July 26, 1689. Duke Schomberg arrived in Belfast Lough with a large fleet and army on August 13th. Count Solmes was his second in command. He laid siege to Carrickfergus, which capitulated on fair terms after eight days’ bombardment. Charlemont, defended by the brave and eccentric Colonel Teague O’Regan, held out till the following May, when it surrendered with the honors of war. It is said that King William, on his arrival in Ireland, knighted O’Regan in recognition of the brilliancy of his defence. The young Duke of Berwick made a gallant stand in the neighborhood, but was finally compelled to yield ground to the superior forces of Schomberg. Critics of the latter’s strategy hold that he committed a grave military error in failing to march on the Irish capital, which was not in a good posture of defence, immediately after landing in Ulster. Had he done so, King James must have had to evacuate Dublin and fall back on the defensive line of the Shannon, as Tyrconnel and Sarsfield did at a later period. Then Schomberg, it is claimed, would not have lost more than half of his army, by dysentery, at his marshy camp near Dundalk, where King James, in the autumn, bearded and defied him to risk battle with the stronger and healthier Jacobite forces. There would have been no occasion for the Battle of the Boyne, the memory of which has divided and distracted Irishmen for more than two centuries, had the challenge been accepted.
The Parliament summoned by James met in the Inn’s Court, Dublin, in the summer of 1689. It was composed of 46 peers and 228 commoners. Of the former body, several were High Church Protestants, but, in the Lower House, there were comparatively few members of the “reformed religion.” This, however, was not the fault of the king or his advisers, as they were sincere in their desire to have a full Protestant representation in that Parliament. But, perhaps naturally, the Protestants were suspicious of the king’s good intentions, and so the majority held aloof from the Parliamentary proceedings. The most important acts passed by that Parliament were one establishing liberty of conscience, which provided, among other things, that Catholics should not be compelled to pay tithes to Protestant clergymen, and vice versa; another act established the judicial independence of Ireland, by abolishing writs of error and appeal to England. The Act of Settlement was repealed, under protest by the Protestant peers, who did not, for obvious reasons, wish the question of land titles obtained by fraud and force opened up. An act of attainder, directed against persons in arms against their sovereign in Ireland, was added to the list of measures. Heedless of the advice of his wisest friends, James vetoed the bill for the repeal of the infamous Poynings’ Law, which made the Irish Parliament dependent upon that of England; and also declined to approve a measure establishing Inns of Court for the education of Irish law students. In the first-mentioned case, James acted from a belief that his own prerogative of vetoing Irish measures in council was attacked, but his hostility to the measure for legal education has never been satisfactorily explained. Taken as a whole, however, King James’s Irish Parliament was a legislative success; and it enabled the Protestant patriot and orator, Henry Grattan, when advocating Catholic claims in the Irish Parliament a hundred years afterward, to say: “Although Papists, the Irish Catholics were not slaves. They wrung a Constitution from King James before they accompanied him to the field.”