History: A harrowing and detailed account of an event which set the scene for future Troubles. Polly Devlin reviews The Siege of Derry: A History by Carlo Gébler
On one side, to put it simply, were the Jacobites - followers of James II, mostly native Irish, with their leader and representative Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnell, and some French forces sent by Louis XIV. Tyrconnell was concerned, first and foremost, with old Ireland and her rights while James II looked on Ireland as his stepping stone back into England. On the other side were the followers of William of Orange, mainly settlers and all Protestants, determined that Ireland should be theirs.
Long before the siege of Derry began James II had been warned that "the people of Londonderry were already known as a stubborn people" but the city itself was not looked on as impenetrable. Quite the opposite; a contemporary account reads: "To a military eye the defences of Londonderry appeared contemptible. The fortifications consisted of a simple wall overgrown with grass and weeds. There was no ditch even between the gates. The drawbridges had long been neglected . . . and these feeble defences were on almost every side commanded by heights. Indeed those who had laid out the city had never meant that it should be able to withstand a regular siege and had contented themselves with throwing up works sufficient to protect the inhabitants against a tumultuary attack of the Celtic peasantry."
The city itself was a construct, built in 1618 on the conical hill on the western bank of the Foyle, by a consortium of City of London merchants who had contracted with the English government to build a walled city near the site of Doire or Derry within which beleaguered settlers could live in safety and be defended. The city was re-christened London-Derry which name has been a bone of contention since and is a clear linguistic marker of allegiances. There were so many complaints about the site and the construction that a commission investigated between the Crown and the London companies, as to whether the latter had fulfilled its contract. Its report was damning; Derry had been built in the wrong place and what is more in all probability could not survive an attack. Sixty years later, in 1689, it survived 105 days of attack and in so doing became a Protestant shrine; the siege entered legend as a holy event in the Protestant calendar, though the sectarian celebrations did not take root until much later. The Orange order came into existence in 1795 and the Apprentice Boys of Derry, a political society, was not founded until 1814; but once tradition got invented there was no stopping it and certainly not the annual marches to celebrate it.
How they marched. We, in the Jacobite quarters of the province, stayed out of the way and held our tongues during these unforgiving and horrid displays but even we knew certain emblematic names in the great Derry roll call; the treachery of Governor Lundy for example, whose effigy is burnt on the anniversary of the siege; (an effigy, dressed in a black uniform with gold epaulettes and a cocked hat, and which can be 16ft high and nearly a ton in weight, ) and the Rev George Walker, later Governor Walker, whose Memorial Pillar, built in 1826, towered, a potent emblem, over the Bogside, until it was destroyed by a bomb in the 1970s. Walker sounds the dead spit of Ian Paisley .
I had always thought that the siege had begun with the slamming of the gates of Derry by the 13 apprentice boys (who were mostly grown men in their 20s). In fact the apprentices closed the gates against the Earl of Antrim's regiment (known as Redshanks because of their bare legs) on December 7th, 1688, who had come to replace the garrison who were usually stationed there. But rumour and counter rumour had made the citizens of Derry fearful that they would be massacred if they let them in. The bemused Redshanks withdrew and the siege only began the following April when the Jacobite army surrounded the city. James II himself arrived there to receive the surrender so certain was he of an easy victory.
Gébler's achievement is to present this prime symbolic struggle, muffled in myth and propaganda, in an accessible and lucid narrative. He glancingly rehearses the complicated history which was the fundamental cause of the strife, the impotence of reason in the face of fanaticism, the folly of commanders. He chronicles the heroism of individual men, the appalling cruelties and privations of the whole doomed encounter. It is an even-handed account, trenchant and detailed, trimmed into a cracking but curiously hygienic narrative. It is like a panorama seen from behind glass; the smell and the sounds aren't there. There are infelicities of language, the occasional odd use of the vernacular, but this book isn't about language; Gébler is interpreting the lingua franca of slaughter, belief and violence. Nonetheless he can bring a scene to life: "One captain . . . swiped so hard with his blade at the head of a Jacobite fugitive that the upper skull, complete with brains, was cut off like the top of an egg."
Occasionally he lets us see where his sympathies lie; he is dryly sceptical about George Walker ("a man who held himself in high regard"), who referred to himself in the third person and who in his unreliable account of the siege glorified himself at the expense of all others.
More significantly Gébler unpicks the legend of the treachery of Colonel Lundy - taken as gospel - and presents a different and credible portrait of a beleaguered, haughty, frightened man caught in the unreason of a mob, trying to run a campaign without sufficient arsenal or proper communications and fairly intent on saving his own skin.
The unfolding of the oppressive and harrowing story of the Siege, told almost hour by hour by Gébler, is a chronicle of mismanagement, bravery, the strength of religious faith and that great nourisher, hatred. Both attackers and defenders suffered terribly; the city had been built for 1000 people but 30,000 civilians and refugees crowded in and up to 8000 soldiers; the people slept in shifts, both in the streets and in houses. The garrison held out for 105 days, from April 17th until July 30th, 1689, and by the end was reduced by two thirds. The believers were sustained by seeing "each and every night an angel mounted on a snow white horse and brandishing a sword of a bright colour", not to mention a new star heralding the arrival of the relief fleet from England. Whatever sustained them it wasn't food. They lived on horse flesh, dogs, cats, rats and mice, tallow and starch and dried hides. One certain fat gentleman in the city hid for three days because he fancied that members of the garrison were looking at him in a strange way. The Jacobites, for their part suffered massive losses, as many as 5,000 men.
The siege is one of the great "ifs" of Irish history; if the Jacobites had had proper ammunition; if Louis XIV had supplied more soldiers; if Tyrconnell had not got black jaundice early in the spring of 1689, if James II had not been such a wuss, most of all if the nonconformists inside the walls of Derry had not been made of such stern stuff. Whatever the ifs and the buts it was a catastrophe for Ireland, one that confounded our future and set the scene for future Troubles.
Polly Devlin is a writer and broadcaster. Her first book, All of Us There, was re-published as a Modern Classic by Virago last year
The Siege of Derry: A History. By Carlo Gébler, Little, Brown, 364pp. £18.99