The parliament sat in session simultaneous with the siege of Londonderry. More than 30,000 Protestants had taken refuge behind its walls and were defended by a force of 7,500. French engineers allied with the Jacobite army had constructed a boom about two miles north of the city on the river Foyle, which made it impossible for relief troops or supplies to reach the defenders. Soon starvation as well as disease seemed imminent. A French commander among the Jacobites threatened to force other Protestants to seek refuge in the city and thereby increase the risk of starvation. The defenders refused to admit them, but instead indicated that they would begin to hang any prisoners in their control. The French commander relented and abandoned his gesture. However, the siege continued with unrelenting bombardment and thousands of deaths from starvation and disease. Finally, on July 28, two ships with relief supplies were able to break the boom and reach the city. Three days later the Jacobite besiegers withdrew.
On the same day at Newtownbutler, County Fermanagh, a Jacobite army under the command of Justin MacCarthy was decisively defeated by supporters of King William based in Enniskillen. Two thousand of MacCarthy's 5,500 men were killed and another 500 taken prisoner. Two weeks later a large Williamite force under Marshall Schomberg, a French Protestant refugee from Louis XlV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, landed in Bangor, County Down, and soon after captured Carrickfergus. His forward march toward Dublin, however, was stopped by an outbreak of disease, which decimated his army. James led an army of 20,000 toward him at Dundalk, but mysteriously he did not attack, allowing Schomberg to retreat deeper into Ulster for the winter.
The international, often contradictory character of the struggle was obvious the following year when Dutch Protestants arrived in Cork to support the Jacobites, while Danish mercenaries arrived in Belfast to support William. Louis XlV's requirement that James send a comparable number of Irish soldiers under Justin MacCarthy to France a month later revealed that his motives in supporting James were not entirely selfless. William himself arrived in Ireland on June 14 and soon after doubled the regium donum subsidy to the Presbyterian clergy. In command of 37,000 men, William engaged James and his 25,000 men at the famous Battle of the Boyne, where James hoped he held an advantageous position for making a stand against William's march south toward Dublin.
Londonderry is besieged by King James II's forces, 1689. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
However, William's forces triumphed in the battle on July 1.3 Within three days James set sail for France and two days later William entered Dublin. The victory was hailed in the courts of Europe allied with William in the League of Augsberg, including reportedly the papal court in Rome. It was regarded as especially fortuitous in view of the naval triumph of Louis over a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet off Beechy Head the day before the Battle of the Boyne.
After the Boyne the Jacobite forces in Ireland were confined almost entirely west of the Shannon River, where they were able to resist successfully Williamite sieges of Athlone and Limerick in July and August. The following month William himself left Ireland, giving command of his forces to Dutch general Godbert de Ginkel. The Jacobite forces rejected William's demand for unconditional surrender. On the orders of Louis XIV, the French forces under General Lauzun left Galway for France. Tyrconnell accompanied them, leaving Patrick Sarsfield as the leading commander. His role in resisting the siege of Limerick was rewarded by his elevation as earl of Lucan by James. On another Irish front, a Williamite army commanded by Winston Churchill, the earl of Marlborough, captured Cork and Kinsale in October.
Tyrconnell returned to Ireland in January and, in May, a replacement French force under Marquis de Saint-Ruth landed in Limerick. The next month Ginkel's army took Athlone. Two weeks later, on July 12, his forces defeated the Jacobite army at Aughrim, County Galway. Seven thousand Jacobite soldiers, including their commander Saint-Ruth, were killed in contrast to only 700 on the Williamite side. Galway subsequently surrendered. In late August Ginkel began a siege of Limerick, where Tyrconnell had died. At this time, Sligo surrendered to the Williamites. On October 3, after a few day's negotiations, the Treaty of Limerick was signed, allowing the Irish army to depart for France, where they could continue to serve James, and promising Irish Catholics who accepted the rule of William all the privileges they held under Charles II and a guarantee of their property to "all such as are under their protection in these counties" (that is, the counties still under Jacobite control: Limerick, Galway, Mayo, Cork, Kerry, and Clare). In other areas of Ireland, indictment of Jacobites, especially landowners, did take place and resulted in the confiscation of 1,700,000 acres, leaving less than 14 percent of the land in Catholic hands. However, William also granted pardons and restoration of land to 24 other leading Jacobites, including Richard Talbot and the earl of Antrim.
This suggests that William's first impulse on victory was to treat the defeated generously. However, the Protestant population of Ireland, which had seen its position of dominance threatened by the Jacobites, harbored less kindly attitudes toward the Catholics. In the Irish parliament, which had now become exclusively Protestant, legislation was passed of an uncompromising and discriminatory character, to which William had to acquiesce. In a gesture of displeasure at what was happening, William wrote back into the ratifying legislation words in the Treaty of Limerick accommodating to Catholics (quoted in the previous paragraph) that had been omitted. However, political pragmatist that he was, he accepted as part of the price of retaining his kingship in England, and of inhibiting the ambitions of Louis XIV internationally, an assertion of ascendancy by the "New English" Protestants of Ireland over the vast majority of the inhabitants of the island. The situation of the minority was further reduced because so many of the natural leaders, who were Old English and Gaelic aristocrats, went into exile. The new rulers of Ireland, determined that Catholics would never again pose a threat to their property and ascendancy, set out to inhibit their socioeconomic significance and place severe restrictions on their religious observance.
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