The proclamation of William and Mary proved the beginning of new troubles both in England, Scotland, and Ireland. In England things were not serious: a certain portion of the Tory party declined to accept William as king, though they had been ready to take him as regent. For refusing to take the oath of allegiance to him, Archbishop Sancroft—the hero of the trial of the seven bishops—four other prelates, and four hundred clergy had been removed from their preferments. Some Tory laymen of scrupulous conscience gave up their offices. But these "Non-jurors," as they were called, made no open resistance, though many of them began to correspond secretly with the exiled king.
Scotland.—Career of Claverhouse.
In Scotland, the crisis was far more serious. Both Charles II. and James II. had governed that realm with an iron hand. They had placed the rule of the land in the hands of the Scottish Episcopalians, who formed a very small minority of the nation. The Covenanters had been sternly repressed, and their ineffective rising, ending in the fight of Bothwell Brig, had been put down with the most rigorous harshness. [46] When James was overturned, the persecuted Presbyterians rose in high wrath, and swept all his friends out of office. They followed the example of the English in offering the crown to William and Mary, and began to revenge their late oppression by very harsh treatment of their former rulers, the Scottish Episcopalians. But James II. had a following in Scotland; though not a very large one, it had an exceedingly able man at its head—John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, who had commanded the royal forces in the realm for the last ten years. Dundee succeeded in rousing a number of the Highland chiefs to take arms for James II., not so much because they loved the king as because they hated the great clan of the Campbells, now, as always, the mainstay of the Covenanting interest north of Clyde and Forth. The new government collected an army under General Mackay, and sent it against Dundee. But the Jacobite leader retired before it till Mackay's men had pushed up the long and narrow pass of Killiecrankie. When the Lowland troops were just emerging from the northern end of the pass, Dundee fell on from an ambush. The wild rush of his Highlanders swept away the leading battalions, [47] and Mackay's entire force fled in disgraceful rout back to Dunkeld. The Jacobite general, however, fell in the moment of victory, and when his strong and able hand was removed, the rebel clans dropped asunder, and ceased to endanger the stability of William's throne (June 17, 1689). The insurrection, however, continued to linger on in the remoter recesses of the Highlands for two years more.
Ireland.—Tyrconnel and the Catholic army.
In Ireland the struggle was far longer and more bitter than in Scotland. In that country the old quarrel between the natives and the English settlers broke out under the new form of loyalty to James or William. In the time of Charles II., the old Irish or Anglo-Irish proprietors had been restored to about one-third of the lands from which they had been evicted by the Cromwellian settlement of 1652. They hoped, now that they had a king of their own faith, to recover the remaining two-thirds from the English planters. From the moment of his accession, James had done his best for the Irish Romanists. He had decreed the revocation of Cromwell's settlement, he had filled all places of trust and emolument with natives, and had raised an Irish army in which no Protestant was admitted to serve either as soldier or officer. His Lord-Deputy was Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, a violent and unscrupulous man, who was prepared to go even further than his master in the direction of suppressing Protestantism.
When the news of the landing of William of Orange at Torbay reached Ireland, the Lord-Deputy kept faith with James, and began arming the whole nation in his cause, till he is said to have had nearly 100,000 undisciplined levies under his orders. At the same time he summoned all Protestants in Ireland to give up their arms. The English settlers saw that the predominance of Tyrconnel and his hordes meant danger to themselves, and promptly fled by sea, or took refuge in the few towns where the Protestants had a majority, leaving their houses and property to be plundered by the Lord-Deputy's "rapparees." In Ulster, where they mustered most strongly, they shut themselves up in the towns of Derry and Enniskillen, proclaimed William and Mary as king and queen, and sent to implore instant aid from England.
James II. in Dublin.
In March, 1689, James II. landed in Ireland, convoyed by a French fleet, and bringing a body of French officers, 10,000 stand of arms, and a treasure of £112,000 pounds, all given him by Lewis XIV. He found himself master of the whole country except Derry and Enniskillen, and promptly ordered the siege of these places to begin. He summoned a Parliament to meet in Dublin, and there undid, so far as words and acts could do, all the doings of the English in Ireland for the last two centuries. The Irish peers and commons voted the resumption by the old native houses of all the lands confiscated by Elizabeth, James I., and Cromwell. They made Romanism the established religion of the land, and declared Ireland completely independent of the English Parliament. All this was natural and excusable enough; but a bloodthirsty act of attainder followed, condemning to death as traitors no less than 2500 Protestant peers, gentry, and clergy, who had either declared for William, or at least refused to join James.
Siege of Derry and Enniskillen.
This made the civil war an affair of life and death, since the Protestants of Derry and Enniskillen dared not surrender when they knew they would be treated as convicted traitors. Hence it came that both places held out with desperate resolution, though help was long in coming from England. Derry held out unsuccoured for 105 days (April to August, 1689) till it was relieved by a small fleet, which burst the boom that the Irish had thrown across Loch Foyle, and brought food to the starving garrison. The Protestants of Enniskillen saved themselves by an even more desperate exhibition of courage. Sallying out of their town, they beat the force that blockaded them at the battle of Newtown Butler (August 2, 1689), and drove them completely away.