Two ministers observed the Siege of Derry in 1689 –  but whose account can be trusted?

Mackenzie was born in Co Down in 1649. He graduated from Edinburgh University with an MA in 1669. He was licensed by the Presbytery of Down, ordained by the Rev Thomas Kennedy of Donaghmore, Co Tyrone, and became minister of Derryloran in 1673.

Mackenzie went to London to refute Walker’s account and revisited London in 1694, meeting with King William III to urge him to protect Presbyterian ministers from prosecution in Church courts.

After the relief of Derry he returned to Cookstown where he shared the financial hardships of his people: ‘In September, 1691, the people applied to the Synod for Mr Mackenzie’s continuance with them, though they could not promise him more than £15 per annum of stipend. The Synod recommended Moneymore, then vacant, be joined with them.’ Whether or not the recommendation was heeded, Mackenzie died in Cookstown in 1696 in his 49th year and was buried in an unmarked grave in Derryloran.

W F Marshall’s poem ‘The Twain’ is about the blending and melding of the Ulster-English and Ulster-Scots traditions and their fusion into a new community.

Significantly, the poem deals with the 17th century, ignores the 18th century and then moves on to the late 19th and early 20th century. The first verse deals with the 17th century, the Plantation of Ulster and, even more specifically, with the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne:

‘They were twain when they crossed the sea,

And often their folk had warred;

But side by side on the ramparts wide

They cheered as the gates were barred:

And they cheered their King

To the ford that daunted none,

For, field or wall, it was each for all

When the Lord had made them one.’

They did indeed stand ‘side by side on the ramparts wide’ and they may well have ‘cheered as the gates were barred’ but afterwards things were not quite so harmonious.

The depth of rivalry and hostility between Anglicans and Presbyterians is revealed in Presbyterian reaction to Walker’s account of the siege. Mackenzie offers a radically different account and perspective to Walker’s.

Predictably, Mackenzie’s hero is Adam Murray, the Presbyterian Ulster Scot, and perhaps deservedly so.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Walker and Mackenzie were eyewitnesses to two completely episodes in history. However, in the 1930s William R Young in ‘The Fighters of Derry’ generously regarded Walker and Mackenzie as the ‘standard authorities’ and ‘although differing in detail … complete in all essentials’.

Like many of the city’s Presbyterian defenders, Mackenzie felt that Walker had attempted to claim all the credit for himself and the Anglican community. (Interestingly, Walker impressed those he met in London by his modesty and humility.)

Mackenzie sought to emphasise the role of the Presbyterian clergy and gentry. Mackenzie claimed that Presbyterians outnumbered Anglicans 15 to one.

Walker praised the conduct of the 18 Church of Ireland clergy who had taken part in the siege, five of whom died, and named them all in an appendix. However, Walker professed to be unable to obtain the names of the seven Nonconformist clergy even though Mackenzie was a chaplain in Walker’s own regiment.

Even when Walker did provide a list of the seven Nonconformist clergy in his Vindication, he managed to do so in a manner calculated to antagonise Presbyterians by referring to Rev Mr Gilchrist of Kilrea as ‘Mr W Kil-Christ’.

Mackenzie and his co-religionists may have had a genuine grievance but arguably Mackenzie spoils his case by overstating it. Mackenzie accused Walker of embezzlement, cowardice and treason.

Mackenzie even suggested that Walker was never governor of the city at all and that he was only a kind of quartermaster and a corrupt one at that. He claimed Walker was ‘guilty of shedding no other blood to stain his coat but that of the grape’ and that he was plotting to betray Derry like another Lundy.

Walker was present at the Boyne on July 1 1690 but in what capacity, whether as spectator, as combatant or as minister to tend the wounded, is unclear. He was shot at the passage of the river, according to George Story’s account, while he was going to the aid of the wounded Schomberg, and died almost immediately.

The fact that Walker was killed at the Boyne and, furthermore, that he fell where the fighting was fiercest surely casts doubt on Mackenzie’s contention that Walker had always taken care not to expose himself to physical danger during the great siege.

Mackenzie’s ‘Narrative of the Siege of the Londonderry’ (London, 1690) prompted an anonymous riposte entitled ‘Mr John Mackenzie’s Narrative of the Siege of the Londonderry a false LIBEL’. The author was possibly Dr John Vesey, the Coleraine-born Archbishop of Tuam.

Presbyterian hostility to George Walker, understandable in the 18th century in the wake of the ‘Test Act’ of 1704 and the great exodus to the New World, persisted well into the 19th century. For example, Professor Thomas Witherow, writing in 1876, juxtaposed George Story’s account of Walker’s corpse being stripped by the Ulster-Scots who followed William’s camp with the sour observation: ‘A just visitation, one would think on a man who had dealt such scanty justice to their kindred’.

Even at the end of the 20th century Presbyterian minister, historian and scholar J M Barkley, who grew up in the Maiden City in the 1920s, recalled in his autobiography: ‘I walked the walls. I read Mackenzie’s Siege of Derry, and saw Walker’s account for what it was.’