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.”
CHAPTER III
King James’s Imprudent Acts—Witty Retort of a Protestant Peer—Architectural Features of Dublin
OUR last chapter showed that Ireland, although her population was overwhelmingly Catholic, began her struggle for civil liberty by a non-sectarian enactment, which left the exercise of religion free. Yet, strange to say, this wise and liberal policy did not win her the sympathy of Europe, Protestant or Catholic, outside of France, whose king had personal reasons for his friendliness. Louis XIV was both hated and feared by the sovereigns of continental, as well as insular, Europe. A combination, called the League of Augsburg, was formed against him, and of this League the Emperor of Germany was the head and William of Orange an active member. Spain, Savoy, and other Catholic states were as zealous against Louis as the Protestant states of Sweden and North Germany. Even the Pope was on the side of the French king’s foes. In fact, when Duke Schomberg landed, the war had resolved itself into a conflict between the rest of Europe, except Muscovy and Turkey and their dependencies, and France and Ireland. It was a most unequal struggle, but most gallantly maintained, with varying fortune, on Irish soil chiefly, for two long and bloody years.
King James made enemies among his warmest supporters by increasing the subsidy voted him by Parliament to twice the original amount, payable monthly. He also debased the currency, by issuing “brass money,” which led to the demoralization of trade, and Tyrconnel, after James’s departure from Ireland, was compelled to withdraw the whole fraudulent issue in order to stop the popular clamor. Some Protestant writers, notably Dr. Cooke Taylor, have warmly commended the king’s judicial appointments in Ireland, with few exceptions. In short, to sum up this portion of his career, James II acted in Ireland the part of despot benevolently inclined, who thought he was doing a wise thing in giving the people a paternal form of government. But the Irish people can not long endure one-man rule, unless convinced that the one man is much wiser than the whole mass of the nation, which is not often the case. It certainly was not in the case of King James. His establishment of a bank by proclamation and his decree of a bank restriction act annoyed and angered the commercial classes, whose prices for goods he also sought to regulate. But his crowning act of unwisdom was interference with the government of that time-honored educational institution, Trinity College, Dublin, on which, notwithstanding its statutes, he sought to force officers of his own choosing. He also wished to make fellowships and scholarships open to Catholics—a just principle, indeed, but a rash policy, considering that every act of the kind only multiplied his enemies among the Protestants of Ireland, who were already sufficiently hostile. Had King James proceeded slowly in his chosen course, he might have come down to posterity as a successful royal reformer. Unfortunately for his fame, posterity in general regards him as a conspicuous political as well as military failure.