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Richard Cameron did not long survive his audacious act. On July i8th, 1680, he preached his last sermon, "upon the Kype-ridge in Clidsdale," choosing for his text Psalm xlvi., verse 10, "Be still, then, and know that I am God." Four days later, Thursday, July 22nd, he and his companions were hiding " in the east end of Airs-moss, a very desert place," when they were surprised by Bruce of Earlshall, with iso men, well-armed and mounted. The Covenanters resisted stoutly. Richard Cameron was killed. His head and hands, " bagged off with a dirk," and thrown into a sack, were carried to Edinburgh to be fixed upon the City Port. They were first shown to Cameron's father, then a prisoner at the Tolbooth, and he was asked if he knew to whom they belonged. The old man, kissing the brow of his fair-haired son, said, "I know them, I know them: they are my son's, my dear son's." Then, with the same submission to God's judgment which, nine cen- turies earlier, was shown by the Emperor Maurice, and in words which recall Psalm xxiii., verse 6, he added, " It is the Lord; good is the will of the Lord, who cannot wrong me nor mine, but has made goodness and mercy to follow us all our days."
Cameron's successor in the leadership of the stricter Cove- nanters, or Cameronians, was Donald Cargill, according to Wodrow, the only remaining preacher at field-conventicles. He had taken part in the Sanquhar Declaration. Now, in September, 1680, at Torwood, he had publicly excommunicated the king, the Duke of York, the Duke of Monmouth, and others. He was a marked man. A reward of 5000 marks was set on his head as "a most seditious preacher," and a "villainous and fanatical conspirator." His escapes were narrow, both on foot and on horse-back. But one of his hearers remarked to him that when his danger was sorest, then he preached and prayed his best. He replied by saying, half to himself, as was his habit, " The Lord is my strength and song, and is become my salvation " (Ps. cxviii., verse 14). At last, July nth, 1681, he was captured, and hurried, his legs tied hard under his horse's belly, to Glasgow, and thence to Edinburgh. While in prison he wrote a letter to James Skene, the closing sentence of which contains a metaphor now familiar to the world through Tennyson's lines. " The God of mercies," he writes, " grant you a full gale and a fair entry into His kingdom, which may carry sweetly and swiftly over the bar, that you find not the rub of death." He was executed at the Cross of Edinburgh, July 27th, 1681. On the scaffold he sang his favourite psalm. Psalm cxviii., from the i6th verse to the end; and his last words were, " Welcome Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! Into Thy hands I commend my spirit."
As, one by one, his companions were killed or captured, Alexander Peden (1626-86) alone seemed to bear a charmed life. He is the Prophet of the Covenant, and, in some respects, its most romantic figure. Ejected in 1663 from his Galloway parish, outlawed for his complicity in the Pentland Rising, imprisoned on the Bass Rock (1673-7), banished to Virginia, and conveyed on the outward voyage to London, where he was for some unknown reason liberated, he spent his remain- ing years in Ireland or Scotland, "going," as he says, " from the one bloody land to the other bloody land." Dogged by spies, and hunted by dragoons, he yet died in his bed. A man of great personal strength and activity, his escapes were so hairbreadth as to seem miraculous. Peden himself would have been at no loss for an explanation. So long as God had work for him, no harm could befall him. Dogs snuffed at the entrance of the cave in which he was hiding, and still he was not discovered. Soldiers stabbed the beds or heaps of un- threshed corn under which he lay concealed; yet they touched him not. Through bogs, in which his pursuers were drowned, he knew and found the path of safety. Once, as he lay under a bank, a dragoon's horse grazed his head with his hoof, pinning his bonnet deep into the clay, and leaving him un- injured. In his mind the words, "Snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling His word " (Ps. cxlviii., verse 8), were ever present; and, again and again, the Lord heard his prayer, and answered him in the day of his distress. Escaping to Scotland from Carrickfergus with a number of fellow- sufferers, his boat was becalmed and in danger of capture. " Waving his hand to the west, from whence he desired the wind, he said, (Lord, give us a loof-fall of wind; fill the sails, Lord, and give us a fresh gale, and let us have a swift and safe passage over to the bloody land, come of us what will.' " Before he ended his prayer, the flapping sails filled like blown bladders, and he and his comrades were saved. More than once a mist, gathering at his prayer, hid him from pursuit. On one occasion, horse and foot chased him so closely that escape seemed hopeless. If God saved them not, he and his companions were dead men. " Then he began and said, ' Lord, it is Thy enemies' day, hour, and power; twine them about the hill. Lord, and cast the lap of Thy cloak o'er old Sandy and thir (these) poor things, and save us this one time; and we'll keep it in remembrance, and tell it to the commendation of thy goodness, pity, and compassion, what Thou didst for us at such a time.'" And, as he prayed, the mist covered the hills and the fugitives.
In all his wanderings and escapes, the Psalms were to him a perennial source of strength. Patrick Walker relates that he had " preached in a shield or sheep-house in a desert-place," upon a Sabbath night. "When ended, he and those that were with him lay down in the sheep-house, and got some sleep: he rose early, and went up to the burn-side and stayed long : when he came in to them, he did sing the 32nd Psalm, from the 7th verse to the end; when ended, he repeated the 8th verse:
' Thou art my hiding-place, thou shalt From trouble keep me free;
Thou with songs of deliverance About shalt compass me ':
l88 COVENANTERS AND THE REVOLUTION OF 1688
"saying, 'These and the following are sweet lines, which I got at the burn-side this morning, and we'll get mo to-morrow, and so we'll get daily provision: He was never behind with any that put their trust in Him, and He will not be in our common, nor none who needily depends on Him; and so we will go on in His strength, making mention of His righteousness and of His only.' "
A deep vein of melancholy traversed Peden's mind. Yet his sympathy, tenderness, and racy humour light up, like glints of sunshine, the gloom of his forebodings of judgment. His pithy sayings bear his own hall-mark; his keen insight into human nature made his nicknames stick like burrs. His intense realisation of God's abiding presence and fatherly care bred in him a filial familiarity; yet never, in its simplest or homeliest expressions, does his language lose a natural dignity. Men so constituted by nature, so moulded by. the circumstances of their times, so fashioned by their own manner of life, have not only the temperament, but the training of the seer. The visions of Peden's fervent faith, painted with all the force of his picture-making imagination, were received with awe by his hearers, who trembled at the strange verifica- tion of his predictions.
Two specimens of his preaching, both given by Walker, may be quoted. In both, the text is taken from the Psalms. The first illustration is from the year 1682, when Peden " was in Kyle, and preaching upon that text, ' The plowers plowed upon my back, and drew long their furrows' (Ps. cxxix., verse 3); where he said, ' Would you know who first yoked this plough ? It was cursed Cain, when he drew his furrows so long and so deep, that he let out the heart-blood of his brother Abel . . . and that plough has and will gang summer and winter, frost and fresh-weather, till the world's end; and at the sound of the last trumpet, when all are in a flame, their theats (traces) will bum, and their swingle-trees will fall to the ground ; the plow-men will lose their grips of the plough, and the gade-men will throw away their gades ; and then, 0 the yelling and skreeching that will be among all his cursed seed, clapping their hands, and crying to hills and mountains to cover them from the face of the Lamb and of Him that sits upon the throne, for their hatred of Him and malice at His people!'"
The second illustration belongs to the year 1685, when he was " preaching in the night-time, in a barn at Carrack, upon that text, Psalm Ixviii., i, 2, 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered; let them also that hate Him flee before Him. As smoke is driven, so drive thou them'; so insisting how the enemies and haters of God and godliness were tossed and driven as smoke or chaff, by the wind of God's vengeance while on earth, and that wind would blow and drive them all to hell in the end; stooping down, there being chaff among his feet, he took a handful of it, and said, (The Duke of York, the Duke of York, and now King of Britain, a known enemy of God and godliness; it was by the vengeance of God that he ever got that name; but as ye see me throw away that chaff, so that the wind of vengeance shall blow and drive him off that throne; and he, nor no other of that name shall ever come on it again.' "
Throughout the last few years of Peden's life the severity of the Government towards the Cameronians increased, till it culminated in the "Killing Times" of 1684-5. Their bold repudiation of the king's authority, coupled with their declara- tion that his throne was forfeited, was a political danger which could not be ignored. Revolution was in the air. A popular party was forming both in England and Scotland, and the Government, making the Rye House Plot their plea, struck hard against its leaders, as well as against the Cameronians.
On the purely political side, Baillie of Jerviswood, the "Algernon Sydney of Scotland," was one of the first and most important victims. Condemned to death on December 34th, 1684, he was hanged the same afternoon at the market cross of Edinburgh, with all the attendant barbarities of an execution for high treason. His property was confiscated and forfeited to the Crown. Yet even in his last hours, oppressed by mortal sickness, hourly expecting his sentence, he felt, as he told his son, that God's promises were sure, and that the "testimony of David" would, in his case also, be verified. " I have been young, and now am old, and yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread" (Ps. xxxvii., verse 25).
The last of the Cameronians who suffered on the scaffold was James Renwick, though his sentence was due rather to bis political tenets than to his religious opinions.
Among the crowd who had witnessed Cargill's execution in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh, was a lad of nineteen, the son of a Nithsdale weaver. The lad was James Renwick. So stirred was he by the scene, that he cast in his lot with the persecuted remnant of the Cameronians. Ordained to the ministry after six months study at Groningen, he returned to Scotland, and began to preach in October 1683. On his shoulders, young though he was, rested the burden of the struggle. The spirit which he threw into his work is revealed by a passage from one of his letters from Holland. " Courage yet! " he writes, " for all that is come and gone. The loss of men is not the loss of the cause. What is the matter though we all fall? The cause shall not fall." Thus inspired, Renwick speedily became the soul of the movement among the Cameronian Societies, who disowned the king, and declared war against him as the subverter of the religion and liberty of the nation.
During the " Killing Times " vigorous search was made for Renwick. But he evaded capture, and it was not till January 1688 that he was taken. On him were found the notes of his last two sermons, one of which was on Psalm xlvi., verse 10, " Be still, then, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, and I will be exalted in the earth." He was charged with denying the authority of King James VII., teaching the unlawfulness of paying the tax called " cess," and exhorting the people to carry arms at field-meetings. The charges were admitted, and be was sentenced to death. On February i7th, 1688, he was executed at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh. More than once his words were drowned by drums. But he sang a part of Psalm ciii., the psalm which was always chanted by " the Saints " at the celebration of the Sacrament; and, as he was turned over the ladder, his last words were " Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit;
for Thou hast redeemed me, 0 Lord, Thou God of truth" (Ps. xxxi., verse 6). The same text, in whole or in part, was quoted by more than half of the great army of " witnesses " who suffered on the scaffold, between Hugh M'Kail in 1666 and James Renwick in 1688. Nearly all of them, like John Nisbet, died " protesting against and disowning Popery in all its superstitions and bloody bigotry, and Prelacy the mother of Popery"; and yet, in the moment of their death, they committed their souls to God in the same words which were consecrated by their use on the lips of hundreds of Roman Catholic and Anglican martyrs.
Nor was it only on the scaffold that men died. There were many murders which were not even judicial. On January ist, 1685, for example, Daniel McMichael was led out into the fields to be shot, and died singing part of Psalm xlii. In the following February, Alexander McRobin was hanged upon an oak tree near the Kirk of Irongray. At the tree-foot, a friend asked him if he had any word to send to his wife. <( I leave her and the two babes upon the Lord," answered McRobin, " and to His promise; a father to the fatherless, and a husband to the widow, is the Lord in His holy habita- tion" (Ps. Ixviii., verse 5). And so he died, as Wodrow records, " in much composure and cheerfulness." In the parish of Ingliston was a cave, which had been a place of safety to not a few of the Covenanters. On April agth, 1685, guided by a traitor, the soldiers were brought to the mouth of the cave, where they seized five of the wanderers who had found refuge in its shelter. John Gibson, who alone was permitted to pray before he was shot, sang part of Psalm xvii., telling his mother and sister that it was the joyfullest day of his life. The rest were shot, "without being allowed to pray separately."
THE WIGTOWN MARTYRS 191
Nor were the women spared. In January 1681, two " honest, worthy lasses," as Peden calls them, Isabel Alison and Marion Harvie, were hanged at Edinburgh. On the scaffold they sang together, to the tune of "Martyrs," Psalm Ixxxiv. " Marion," said Bishop Paterson, " you would never hear a curate; now you shall hear one," and he called upon one of his clergy to pray. " Come, Isabel," was the girl's answer- she was but twenty years of age�" let us sing the 23rd Psalm," and thus they drowned the voice of the curate.
No execution of the time was more universally condemned than that of these two women. A roughly-drawn picture of the scene, with the title " Women hanged," is prefixed to the first edition of the Hind Let Loose (1687). By its side is another engraving, which represents "The Wigtown Martyrs, drowned at stakes at sea."
In 1684, the Cameronian Societies had answered the renewed violence of the Government by their Apologetical Declaration. In this document, posted on the doors of parish churches and on market crosses, they declared war on the Government and its supporters, "disowned the authority of Charles Stewart and all authority depending upon his," and warned their assailants that they would meet force by force. In reply, the authorities devised an oath of abjuration, which was framed as a test, and imposed on all who were suspected of belonging to the Societies or of hostility to the Government. In April 1685, a commission, sitting at Wigtown, condemned Margaret Maclachlan or McLauchlison, an elderly widow of sixty, and Margaret Wilson, a girl of eighteen, who refused to abjure the Apologetical Declaration. They were sentenced to be "tied to stakes fixed within the flood-mark in the Water of Blednoch, near Wigtown, where the sea flows at high water, there to be drowned." The sentence was carried out, probably not with the sanction of the Government, on May nth, 1685.
Twice a day, up the deep channel of the sluggish Blednoch, fringed by steep and sloping mudbanks, sweeps the yellow tide of the sea. Stakes were set in the ooze of the tideway, to which the two women were bound. The elder woman, Margaret Maclachlan, was set lower down the river, that the younger sufferer might see her struggles, and her course finished, before she herself was reached by the rising sea. Pitying her youth, the executioners tried to save Margaret Wilson. As the water swirled about her body, she was drawn to the edge of the bank, and offered her life, if she would say, <( God save the king," and take the test. She was ready to say, " May God save the king, if He will," for she desired, she said, the salvation of all men: but she v/ould not forswear her faith, or take the test. So she was once more secured to the stake, and left to her fate. With her fresh young voice, as the salt waves curled above her breast and all but touched her lips, she sang the 25th Psalm:
"My sins and faults of youth Do Thou, 0 Lord, forget;
After Thy mercies, think on me, And for Thy goodness great " ;
and so continued singing till her voice was choked in the rising tide.
The political principle, on which the Cameronians founded their resistance to the king, was, that the throne had been forfeited, and was vacant. It was not long before that principle became a corner-stone of the Constitution. On November 5th, 1688, William of Orange cast anchor at Torbay, pledged to support the Protestant faith. He landed exactly a century after the Spanish Armada, and on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. As a sign of his mission, the debarkation of the troops was treated as a religious solemnity. No sooner were the soldiers on shore, than divine service was conducted by William Carstares; and before they encamped, the troops, standing along the beach, sang Psalm cxviii., " 0 give thanks unto the Lord, for He is gracious; because His mercy endureth for ever."
But the success of the Revolution was not assured so long as Ireland was held for King James. " Oh secure Ireland! " cried Alexander Peden in 1685, "a dreadful day is coming upon thee within a few years, so that they shall ride many miles and not see a reeking house in thee: Oh hunger! Hunger in Berry! Many a black and pale face shall be in thee." The defence ofDerry became one of the turning-points in the struggle. It saved Ireland for King William; and it was the prelude to his victory at the Boyne (July ist, 1690).
The importance of the city as a military and naval strong- hold was clearly recognised. In December 1688, Antrim's regiment, described by a contemporary as " a pack of ruffians," many of " whose captains were well known to the citizens, having lain in their jails for thefts and robberies," was sent to garrison Londonderry for King James. On the 7th of the month, the soldiers were seen crossing the river and approach- ing the Ferry Gate of Londonderry. Acting on the impulse of the moment, a number of young men ran to the main guard, sword in hand, seized the keys, drew up the bridge, and locked the gate in the face of the soldiers. When news of this revolt, as it was called, reached Dublin, Lord Mountjoy was sent to reduce the citizens to submission. Without arms, ammunition, or provisions, Londonderry made the best terms it could. Two companies of Protestant soldiers, commanded by Colonel Lundy, himself a Protestant, were admitted as a garrison for King James. So matters rested for some three months. But on March 2oth, 1689, William and Mary were proclaimed king and queen at Londonderry with great joy and solemnity. The city had thrown in its fortunes with the Revolution and the Protestants against James and the Roman Catholics.
Vigorous efforts were at once made by Lord Tyrconnel, the Lord Lieutenant, to regain possession of the city for his master. As James's army approached, the Protestants of the North of Ireland fled to Londonderry for refuge. Within the walls, cowardice and treachery were at work. Lundy and his officers escaped to the ships in Lough Foyle, and left the city to its fate.
Deserted by their leaders, the garrison chose the Rev. George Walker and Major Baker to be their governors, and prepared to hold the city against the forces of King James. Surrounded by a numerous army, with no leaders experienced in war, imper- fectly armed, without engineers to instruct them in their defence, without trenching tools, "without Fire Works, not so much as a Hand Granado to annoy the Enemy," with but few guns well mounted in the town, with 30,000 mouths to feed, and, as was estimated, with only ten days' provision for them, the position seemed desperate. There was truth in the comparison which Walker makes in his Diary, when he likens the lot of the citizens of Derry to that of " the Israelites at the Red Sea." But the first care of the defenders was, to quote again his words, " to recommend ourselves and the Cause we undertook to the Protection and Care of the Almighty; for we might then truly say, with the Church in the Liturgy, �There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, 0 God.'"
The siege lasted from April lyth, to July 3ist. Closely pressed by the besiegers, harassed by their continuous fire, threatened by their mines which were pushed close to the walls, the citizens held their ground with singular courage and resolution. Women played their part in the defence by the side of the men. Not only did they bring up the match and ammunition, and serve out bread and drink to the soldiers on the walls, but they beat back an attack of the enemy with the stones which had been torn up from the streets to deaden the effect of the bombs. Treachery and mutiny were Walker's daily dread. His honesty, as matters grew more and more desperate, was called in question. Deserters every day passed into the camp of the enemy, carrying intelligence of the straits to which the garrison was reduced. Provisions ran short. Horses, dogs, cats, rats, and mice were eaten. Except the men, women, and children, hardly a living thing was to be found within the walls. They had no fuel left with which to cook. Their food was tallow, meal, and salted hides, herbs and weeds. Water was their drink, and that was scarce, and only obtained with difficulty and danger. A wet season added to the misery of the citizens, who in their half-starved condition fell easy victims to the diseases that it fostered. As though to mock their hopes with disappointment, a fleet of thirty sail was discovered in the Lough on June i4th. It was the force sent for the relief of the garrison. But across the channel the besiegers had thrown a boom. Major-General Kirke did not attempt to force the passage, but sailed away, sending a messenger to Walker in the beleaguered city, promising succour, and bidding the citizens " Be good husbands of your Victuals."
Yet the resolution of Walker, whose colleague was dead, and of the mass of the citizens, remained firm. When the enemy delivered an assault, the starving soldier, who had fallen under the weight of his musket as he went to the walls, stood gallantly to his post, though his face was blackened with hunger, till the attack was repelled. " I am sure," writes Hunter in his Diary, " it was the Lord that kept the city, and none else, for there were many of us that could hardly stand on our feet before the enemy attacked the walls, who, when they were assaulting the out-trenches, ran out against them most nimbly and with great courage. Indeed, it was never the poor starved men that were in Derry that kept it out, but the mighty God of Jacob, to whom be praise for ever and ever, Amen."
On the 28th of July, the fighting force of the garrison had dwindled from 7361 men to 4300, and of these fully a quarter were unfit for service owing to sickness, famine, or wounds. Still Walker and his officers clung to their post with the tenacity of despair. " The Governor, finding in himself," says Walker in his Diary, " still that confidence, that God would not (after so long and miraculous a Preservation) suffer them to be a Prey to their Enemies, preaches in the Cathedral, and encourages their Constancy, and endeavours to establish them in it, by reminding them of several Instances of Providence given them since they first came into that Place, and of what consideration it was to the Protestant Religion at this time; and that they need not doubt, but that God would at last deliver them from the Difficulties they were under."
The sermon is still in existence. Never were words spoken to people in sorer need of consolation and encouragement, and it is from the Psalms that they are chiefly drawn. With strange power must the verses have come home to the crowd of starving men and women who listened to the preaching of their governor. " Let but the Lord arise," says holy David, "and His enemies shall be scattered." (And again), "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear though the earth be moved, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled" (Ps. xlvi., verses i, 2, 3). ... " Considering the deliverance wrought for the besieged city of Samaria, as for Jerusalem by the destruc- tion of Sennacherib's host, holy David says, to comfort himself and his people, viz.,�The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolation He hath made upon the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; He breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder, and bumeth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of Hosts is with us ; the God of Jacob is our refuge'" (Ps. xlvi., verses 7-11). Gideon, Deborah, and Barach were instruments in the hand of God. " So that we see," continues the preacher, " that God confounds strength with weakness; for when men presume too much on the arm of flesh, they frequently deceive themselves, and in the midst of their security are overthrown. Therefore let a good Christian consider that his strength is in the Lord. And if God hear his side, he need not be afraid though danger beset him round about, but be comforted and made valiant by the words of the kingly prophet, ' The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear ? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid ? When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though a host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war shall arise against me, in this will I be confident'" (Ps. xxvii.).
"It was always well," he says, "with the seed of Jacob when they clave fast to the Rock of their Salvation. But when they grew regardless. He gave them up to the oppressing nations, who grieved His chosen Heritage, for it is said (Ps. xviii.), * With the merciful Thou wilt show Thyself merciful. And with an upright man. Thou shalt show Thyself upright; with the pure Thou shalt show Thyself pure; with the forward Thou shalt show Thyself forward. For Thou wilt save the afflicted people, but wilt bring down high looks.'"
"There is nothing," he concludes, "too hard for the Lord, when He designs to bring about His purposes. ' I called upon the Lord in my distress (says holy David.) The Lord answered me, and set me in a large place. The Lord is on my side. I will not fear what man can do unto me. The Lord taketh my part with them that help me, therefore shall I see my desire upon them that hate me. It is better to trust in the Lord, than to put any confidence in princes. All nations compassed me round about, but in the name of the Lord will I destroy them' (Ps. cxviii.). . . . Let us take courage, then, and faint not, but acquit yourselves like men."
Sunday, July a8th, 1689, was a memorable day. "It was," says Ash, " a day to be remembered with thanksgiving by the besieged of Derry as long as they live, for on this day we were delivered from famine and slavery. With the former they were threatened if they staid here, and the latter if they went away or surrendered the garrison."
Ships were seen in the Lough, and were recognised as the vessels which Kirke had promised to send to their relief. A favourable wind blew from the north-east; the Protestant wind, as the Dutch sailors called it, which had wafted William to the English coast and blew in the teeth of James. The flag on the cathedral tower was twice struck, and eight guns were fired, in order that the ships might know that the garrison were at their last gasp, and that " if they came not now, they might stay away for ever." The fleet answered with six guns, which the besieged understood to mean that an attempt would be made that day.
About five o'clock in the afternoon, the wind and tide serving, three ships hoisted sail, and entered the river. The Dartmouth, a frigate commanded by Captain Leake, acted as convoy to the Mount joy of Derry, Captain Micaiah Browning, commander, and the Phoenix of Coleraine, Captain Andrew Douglas, master, both laden with provisions. From each side of the river the besiegers opened a brisk fire upon the advancing vessels. Off Culmore Point, a musket-shot from the fort, the Dartmouth anchored, and cannonaded the castle, diverting its fire from the merchant ships. The Mountjoy, followed by the Phoenix, sailed past the fort, and, proceeding up the river, reached the boom. She struck it with such force as to break it, but the recoil drove her aground, for the wind had dropped, and she had not way enough to carry her past the obstruction. The smoke from the guns was so thick that the garrison, watching anxiously from the walls of Derry, could not see what had happened. But the triumphant shouts of the enemy, "the most dreadful to the besieged that ever we heard," the increased firing, and the preparations to board the grounded vessel, told to the starving citizens the misfortune of the Mountjoy. " Our trouble is not to be expressed at this dismal prospect," says Walker. It " struck," writes Mackenzie, another of the garrison, " such a sudden terror into our hearts, as appeared in the blackness of our countenances." Succour was at their doors, yet could not enter.
But the commander of the Mountjoy, himself a native of
Derry, and carrying help to his fellow-townsmen, was not disheartened. "He stood
upon the deck with his sword drawn, encouraging his men with great
cheerfulness." Load- ing his guns with " partridge shot," he fired a broadside
which scattered his assailants. It did more. The shock loosened his vessel; the
rising tide floated her, and carried her past the boom. At the very moment of
his triumph, he was shot through the head. But Deny was saved. By ten o'clock, both ships were at the
quay, " to the inexpressible joy and transport of our distressed garrison, for
we only reckoned upon two days' life, and had only nine lean horses left, and
among us all one pint of meal to each man." The siege was practically over. On
the 3ist of July 1689, the enemy decamped, and the cause of the Revolution was
saved in Ireland.