Wauchope insists that histories of Ireland's most famous siege have drawn on two problematic Williamite sources. Carlo Gébler's Siege of Derry (2005) is exceptionally well written and Richard Doherty's Siege of Derry 1689, the military history (2008) shows a keen appreciation for terrain and topography. Even they were taken in. Reverend George Walker, one of the two governors of the besieged city, was a blowhard and a fantasist given to ‘quite shameless self-promotion’ (p. 127) and his True account of the siege of Londonderry (1689) was fiction ‘inspired by a true story’ (p. xvi). Walker's Presbyterian critic, Reverend John Mackenzie, is also shown up to be unreliable, albeit less floridly so.
Two incidents will suffice to illustrate the different ways in which Walker and Mackenzie shape their narratives. One night a company of grenadiers from Clancarty's regiment tore down a barricade to give the siege guns a clear shot at Butcher's Gate. A rather larger party of defenders poured out of the city by another gate and chased the raiders off into the darkness. The Irish lost two officers and fifteen soldiers in a ‘very bold’ (p. 177), if misguided, action. Mackenzie presents this as another routine example of enemy cowardice and ‘great dishonour’. Walker spun an altogether more elaborate yarn. In fulfilment of a prophesy that ‘a Clancarty should knock at the Gates of Derry’, Donough Mac Carthy, earl of Clancarthy, led his regiment against the gate and somehow introduced miners into a nearby cellar before he fled, leaving behind one hundred of his ‘best men’ dead. There was no prophesy, no cellar, no miners, and young Clancarty was back in Dublin. As to the second incident, Wauchope reconstructs a foiled attack on the Jacobite Creggan Fort. Walker ignores this and passes over the month of May as having ‘little of Action, except Skirmishes’. Mackenzie mentions the action but offers a ‘gross underestimate’ (p. 128) of the Derrymen's casualties. Only Captain Thomas Ash's Circumstantial journal comes close to conveying what really happened.
Wauchope has a soft spot for Robert Lundy, personification of treachery, lieutenant colonel of a regular regiment and governor of Derry from December 1688 until he was deposed by an uprising in March 1689 on the eve of the siege. Andrew Robinson's and Billy Kelly's ‘Trial of Lundy’ project in 2014 rehabilitated Lundy's reputation somewhat. In a similar vein, Wauchope is quite right to highlight the sensible and practical steps Lundy took to strengthening Derry, fixing muskets, removing dunghills from outside the walls, removing the big guns from Culmore Fort, erecting a ravelin outside Bishop's Gate and so on. Lundy rightly decided that the Finn-Foyle river line should comprise Derry's outer wall, to be defended at all costs. But Major-General Jean Camus, Marquis de Pusignan, unexpectedly appeared on the riverbank with the Jacobite cavalry vanguard and promptly sent his ‘drenched, sabre-wielding horsemen’ (p. 67) across the Finn to punch a hole in Lundy's defensive line. Protestant Association irregulars fled from the riverside, so the ‘battle of Clady had been lost before Lundie had arrived’ (p. 67). Not Lundy's fault, then. Perhaps Wauchope is being a bit soft on Lundy. Tensions between citizens and garrison in a siege were inevitable, but one wonders could Lundy have done more to head off the suspicions and problems. In describing Clady, Pennyburn and many other actions, Wauchope shows himself adept at building a coherent narrative out of what would otherwise be a chaos of apparently unrelated happenings.
Wauchope crafts memorably vivid pen pictures of key players like William Stewart, first viscount Mountjoy — naïve, honourable and unlucky — or Hugh Montgomery, the earl of Mount-Alexander, a decent, unambitious figure who was too conscious of his shortcomings as leader of the Protestant Association in east Ulster and deferred to those even less qualified. Not to forget that ‘barbarous Muscovite’ — the Baltic German, General Conrad de Rosen — who revelled in his unpopularity with James's inner circle, was popular with the troops and possessed the self-belief of a Patton or Montgomery (of Alamein, not Mount-Alexander): ‘my presence alone has reassured the whole army…’ (p. 155) he told French war minister Louvois.
Wauchope breaks new ground in his chapters on famine and fever. Famously, George Walker included a price list of foodstuffs such as horse, dog, cat and even rat from the days just before the relief and concluded by telling of a ‘fat gentleman’ who went into hiding ‘because he imagined that some of the soldiers, who were perishing by hunger, looked at him with a greedy eye’. To this reviewer's regret, Wauchope debunks the list and the tale of the corpulent gentleman. He accepts the ration strength returns that suggest 36 per cent of the over 7,000 troops in the city died and explains why the mortality rate among civilians, especially children and the poor, would have been much higher. He maintains that the ‘fever’ that killed most of the civilians and soldiers was typhus, but this reviewer is unconvinced and believes that the besieged suffered indistinguishably from typhus and typhoid. The latter is a disease of contaminated water and the nearest clean water sources to the besieged in Derry were St Columb's or Colmcille's wells lying about sixty yards outside the south-western corner of the city. A long way to go while within musket shot of the besieger's trenches.
The siege of Londonderry is written in a lively and engaging style, the research is thorough, and the analysis forensic, especially when Wauchope subjects Walker to a sceptical cross examination, as a barrister would a hostile witness. In sum, Wauchope performs a genuine feat of revisionism in filling out the gaps and silences in triumphalist and mendacious narratives.
