In 1613 the London Companies were granted land by a royal charter, and the name Derry was changed to Londonderry because, according to John Beresford-Ash, ‘The London companies were keen on the fact that it was their money and their expertise that was being used. And it encouraged the people who came to live here, who were being harassed by the native population. The native population naturally resented these invaders coming – but whether they were invaders or not depends on your point of view.’
Invaders or not, the Protestant settlers lived apprehensive lives, surrounded by Irish Catholics who resented them for taking their land and repressing their religion. In 1641 the Irish rebelled, launching attacks on the settlements. A near-contemporary Protestant account describes the attacks, and blames them on the influence of the Catholic church:
‘The Priests gave the Sacrament unto divers of the Irish, upon condition that they should neither spare man, woman, nor child of the Protestants…One Joan Addis they stabbed, and then put her child of a quarter year old to her breast, and bid it to suck English Bastard, and so left it to perish…They brake the backbone of a youth, and left him in the fields, some days after he was found, having eaten the grass round about him; neither then would they kill him outright, but removed him to better pasture…At Portadown Bridge, there were one thousand men, women, and children, carried in several companies, and all unmercifully drowned in the river…Elizabeth Price testified upon oath, that she and other women, whose husbands and children were drowned in that place, went hither one evening, at which time they saw one like a woman rise out of the river breast-high, her hair hanging down, which with her skin, was as white as snow, often crying out, Revenge, Revenge, Revenge.’
It is estimated that about 12,000 Protestants were killed during the rebellion and, however exaggerated contemporary accounts might have been, they helped to condition attitudes that survive to this day. In the following years Oliver Cromwell came to Ireland and took the revenge called for by the snowwhite apparition. In the wake of a massacre at Drogheda where as many as 3,500 soldiers, civilians and clergymen were killed by his troops, Cromwell wrote, ‘It is right that God alone should have all the glory.’ An Irish Catholic tract composed in 1662 begins presciently, ‘It is a sad and severe position, that this contention between the two parties in Ireland will never have an end.’ The author’s solution is plain: ‘The country must at length give denomination to all that inhabit it: and the posterity of those that proclaim loudly the English interest, must within an age, admit themselves to be called Irish as well as descendants from the first Colony of English planted in Ireland.’ Almost 350 years later John Beresford-Ash describes his identity to me: ‘I’m entirely English. My family came from England and we were there before the Norman conquest. We can prove it.’
An Account of the Publick Affairs in Ireland, published in 1678, lays out English strategy in Ireland: ‘The principal and present security of the Kingdom consists of balancing the numbers of Irish with a superiority of strength, and leaving them naked, and the English in Arms.’ In 1685, however, the policy threatened to unravel. In that year the Catholic King James II came to the English throne. His succession brought hope to Irish Catholics, and he proceeded to grant them patronage, but three years later his Dutch Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, landed in England with an army. He came at the invitation of Protestant nobles who sought to save England from Catholicism. James chose to escape to France rather than fight his rival in England, and in James’s absence Parliament declared that he had abdicated his throne. William was crowned King of England in April 1689, by which time James had gathered an army and landed at Kinsale, on the south coast of Ireland, intending to use that country as a base to reclaim his throne. He marched to Dublin in triumph and continued north. It appeared as though he would take Ireland with ease; only the Protestants of Ulster would resist him. Protestants from across the province flocked to Derry with its strong defences, and James’s army besieged the city. ‘We were in our small house,’ says John Beresford-Ash, ‘and King James came over headed by the French, and all the Protestants emigrated within the walls of Derry. Ashbrook was burnt by James’s troops, and it was rebuilt after the siege. Thomas Ash was the senior member of the family, his father was dead, and he was in the yeomanry. He was obviously a fairly decent character.’
Thomas Ash kept a journal chronicling the siege. ‘Apart from eating rats,’ says his descendant, ‘I don’t suppose there was much else to do.’ At the start of his diary, written while King James was still on the throne, Ash stresses the insecurity felt by Ulster Protestants: ‘We had been alarmed by reports that the Roman Catholics intended to rise in arms against us, and to act over the tragedy of 1641.’ These reports coincided with news reaching Derry that a Catholic army garrison was on its way to the city to relieve the existing Protestant garrison. The Protestants of the city did not know what course to take. To refuse entry to the king’s garrison was treasonable, but they feared that the garrison was being sent to massacre them. Ash wrote: ‘While we were in this confused hesitation, on 7th December 1688, a few resolute Apprentice Boys determined for us: these ran to the Gates and shut them, drew up the bridge, and seized the Magazine. This, like magic, roused an unanimous spirit of defence, we determine to maintain the city at all hazards.’
The true siege began four months later, once William had become king and James had arrived in Ireland to try to win back his throne. On 15 April 1689 Ash writes of his suspicion that the man in charge of the city’s army garrison, Robert Lundy, was a traitor. Days later he records, ‘Colonel Lundy deserted our garrison, and went in disguise to Scotland, and by this, proved the justness of our former suspicions.’ To this day a traitor to the Protestant cause is known as a ‘Lundy’, and the man has become the Ulster Protestant equivalent of Guy Fawkes: his effigy is burned every December in the centre of Derry. Ash’s journal records a steady rain of ‘bombs’ and ‘mortars’ falling on the city from Jacobite guns, killing and injuring his acquaintances. On 10 July he records that inside one bomb there was no gunpowder but rather a ‘written paper’ offering James’s terms for surrender. ‘Be not obstinate against your Prince,’ read the paper, ‘expose yourselves no longer to the miseries you undergo…’ The cannonball that once contained this note is now on display in the vestibule of St Columb’s, Derry’s Anglican cathedral.
By 26 July the miseries of the besieged men, women and children had grown so bitter that ‘an experiment was tried on a cow at Shipquay. She was tied, and smeared with tar, and tow stuck to it, which was set on fire to make her roar, thinking that the enemy’s cows which were grazing in the orchard would come to her.’ The experiment was not a success. The following day Ash writes, ‘God knows, we never stood in so much need of a supply; for now there is not one week’s provision in the garrison: of necessity we must surrender the City, and make the best terms we can for ourselves. Next Wednesday is our last, if relief does not arrive before it.’ The entry also states that horses’ blood was changing hands within the city for two pence per quart, and it ends: ‘There is not a dog to be seen, they are all killed and eaten.’
His entry for the next day begins: ‘A day to be remembered with thanksgiving by the besieged in Derry as long as they live, for on this day we were delivered from famine and slavery.’ Two ships laden with supplies had burst through the boom placed across the river, and sailed into the quay below the city walls, while a third engaged the enemy’s guns. The siege was broken. The captain of the leading ship, the Mountjoy, was Michael Browning, the brother-in-law of Thomas Ash. According to John Beresford-Ash, ‘It was always said that Captain Browning was fanatically Presbyterian and anti-Catholic, but he simply wanted to rescue his wife who was inside the walls, so he persuaded the admiralty to allow him to take a ship up the Foyle. Tragically, he was shot before he got to relieve his wife – who remarried and had a baby about a year later. Pragmatic lady.’ He showed me a delicate tie pin, presented to the family by King William IV almost a hundred and fifty years after the siege, on which miniatures of the three ships are painted, with the words ‘To the memory of the gallant Captain Browning 1689’. Towards the end of his journal Thomas Ash writes: ‘The Lord who has preserved this city from the enemy I hope will always keep it to the Protestants.’
The city’s refusal to surrender ensured that James’s army did not take Ireland, and was not able to mount an attack on England. In June 1690 William landed at Carrickfergus and on 12 July his army defeated James’s troops at the Boyne. The triumph