Derry and Raphoe have for a century been in the Protestant Church one united see, and in the days before disestablishments, made a princely preferment. You can see the proof of it at Castlerock, where the line from Coleraine strikes out on the shore of Lough Foyle by the long Magilligan strand. Here is Downhill, the seat built in the eighteenth century by that amazing prelate Lord Augustus Adolphus Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, who took a leading and not a very pacific part in organizing the volunteers and in winning Ireland's legislative independence.
"He appeared always", says Sir Jonah Barrington, "dressed with peculiar care and neatness, generally entirely in purple, and he wore diamond knee and shoe buckles; but what I most observed was that he wore white gloves with gold fringe round the wrists and large gold tassels hanging from them." A troop of horse headed by his nephew used to escort him everywhere and to mount guard at his door. Later, growing tired of Ireland, he migrated to Italy on the plea of ill health; and though many of his costly purchases were sent home to Downhill, where unhappily a fire destroyed the most valuable, he never came back, but remained abroad (says the austere Lecky, himself born on the shore of Lough Foyle), "adopting the lax moral habits of Neapolitan society", and in extreme old age writing letters to Emma, Lady Hamilton, "in a strain of most unepiscopal fervour".
There are no such bishops nowadays, but my childhood was familiar with the last of Lord Bristol's successors under the old order—the late Bishop Alexander, most eloquent of divines, afterwards Primate of Ireland. His talents brought him to the episcopate, while still a young man, only a year or two before disestablishment, and the life-interest in his £12,000 a year came to be compounded, not only for his own benefit, but for that of the Church. While the financial negotiation was still in progress, my father, then rector of a parish in Donegal, and financier-in-chief to the diocese, sent his bishop out for a day's driving in charge of a young curate, and trysted to meet them on Mulroy Bay. Arrived there, he saw with dismay the bishop, not on land but afloat, being sculled by the curate through the numberless rocks and swirling currents of Mulroy in a battered curragh—a hundred thousand pounds of ecclesiastical capital divided from submersion by a piece of tarred calico. And the famous orator, even at that period of his life, could not have weighed less than eighteen stone. Long years after, the curate, become venerable in his turn, remembered and recalled for me the rating which he received when at last he landed his passenger.
Another memory from the same source may be worth recalling. Downhill is the house which Charles Lever describes in his novel, The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly, though the story has no historic connection with the house or any of its inmates. But Lever knew this "Bishop's Folly" in the days when he was a dispensary doctor at Portstewart, and my father remembers well how Harry Lorrequer came out by instalments in the Dublin Morning Magazine, with what delight he heard them read aloud, and how sudden was the addition of interest when one day the news came in that the anonymous author was no other than their own dispensary doctor—the brilliant young collegian for whom a place had been suddenly created in this outlying village during one of the visitations of cholera. After that, whenever the doctor came to call, a shy boy used to creep into the drawing-room and ensconce himself, apparently with a book, out of sight behind a sofa, where, undisturbed by apprehensions, he could be all ears for the rattling talk of that wonderful tale-teller.
Lever learnt a good deal in Portstewart from a neighbour, W. H. Maxwell, author of Wild Sport of the West, who lived in those days at Portrush. But it was the west and south of Ireland that always drew Lever—his florid taste in incident and humour found its choice elsewhere than in the discreet greys and browns of Ulster character. And east of Lough Foyle he was still in the Ulster which politicians mean—the country of the plantations. Derry is in reality its frontier town, though the Scotch strain and the Protestant element ramify out from Derry a certain distance into Donegal.
FAIR HEAD, CO. ANTRIM
But the frontier town, like all frontier towns in a country that has been much fought over, keeps an intense, militant, and aggressive character. Derry stands for the extreme type of Protestant assertion—oddly enough, for in the beginning of its history, it was the monastic seat, Doire Coluimchille, "Columba's Oakgrove", to which that great apostle of Christianity looked back from his mission overseas—"thinking long" in Iona for—
"Derry mine, my own oakgrove,
Little cell, my home, my love".