Henry Campsie, only Apprentice boy who helped shut Londonderry gates in 1688 to have an ABOD club named after him

It is generally held that Henry Campsie, a son of John Campsie, who had been mayor of Derry in 1688, was the first man to shed his blood in defence of Londonderry. Campsie was severely wounded while leading his associates to secure the city magazine and armoury.

Campsie is widely credited with being the inspiration behind the shutting of the gates but both John Mackenzie, the contemporary Presbyterian chronicler of the siege, and Thomas Witherow, a 19th-century Presbyterian historian, suggest that Campsie was encouraged to do so by the Rev James Gordon, the Aberdeen-born minister of Glendermott.

When William of Orange landed at Brixham in England, in November 1688, James II fled to France. However, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, James’s Irish viceroy, demonstrating greater resolution than his royal master, was determined to strengthen his grip in Ireland by occupying those places likely to declare for William of Orange and the Protestant cause.

With respect to Londonderry, Tyrconnel ordered the withdrawal of the Earl of Mountjoy’s predominantly Protestant regiment which formed the city’s garrison and its replacement with a reliably Roman Catholic regiment.

On December 7 1688 the 13 Apprentice boys closed the gates of Derry against Lord Antrim’s regiment of Redshanks. In contemporary accounts ‘the apprentices’ were referred to as ‘the mob’, ‘the mobile’, ‘the rabble’ or the ‘younger’ and ‘meaner sort’. At the end of the 17th century the terms ‘apprentices’ and ‘mob’ could be used interchangeably.

There were fears throughout Ulster that Protestants were about to be massacred in a repetition of the 1641 rebellion.

These fears were prompted by widespread circulation of the so-called ‘Comber Letter’ addressed to Hugh Montgomery, the 2nd Earl of Mount Alexander, which warned Protestants that the Gaelic Irish would rise on December 9 and start a general massacre.

Probably a forgery, certainly at best semi-literate, its content chimed perfectly with Protestant fears at the time. This conferred credibility on the document.

Tyrconnel’s proclamation, issued on December 8, promising protection to loyal subjects and denouncing reports of impending massacres, offered only scant reassurance, not least because Tyrconnel was almost universally known as ‘Lying Dick Talbot’.

Even Thomas Sheridan, Tyrconnel’s secretary, described his master as ‘a tall proper handsome man, but publicly known to be insolent in prosperity and most abject in adversity, a cunning dissembling courtier of mean judgement and small understanding, uncertain and unsteady in his resolutions, turning with every wind to bring about his ambitious ends and purposes, on which he was intent that to compass them he would stick at nothing and so false that a most impudent lie was called at Whitehall and St James’s [then the principal London residences of the monarch] one of Dick Talbot’s ordinary truths’.

The 2nd Earl of Clarendon, the lord lieutenant whose authority Tyrconnel had systematically undermined, was equally unflattering about James’s viceroy: ‘I do assure you truth, even in bare matter of fact, will never be known from my Lord Tyrconnel ... It is impossible you can believe, unless you found it as we do here, how wonderfully false he is in almost everything he does. What he desires to be done one day, or avers he has done, he will positively deny another, though witnesses can prove him in the wrong: nay, though sometimes his own hand is shown against him; really his passion and rage (we know not for what) makes him forget what he says and does; and when he is convinced that he is in the wrong he is then in such a fury that the like is not usual’.

Thus, it is not surprising that little credence was attached to Tyrconnel’s promise of protection.

The shutting of the gates did not mark the beginning of the siege proper but the actions of the 13 Apprentice boys made the great siege four months later possible.

What was uppermost in the minds of the Apprentice boys, strictly speaking, remains unclear: did they act out of fear of massacre or was it a declaration of allegiance to William?

It may not have been the latter but it was an overt act of rebellion against royal authority.

Ezekiel Hopkins, the Church of Ireland bishop of Derry, subscribing to the traditional Anglican doctrine of ‘non-resistance to Lord’s anointed’, solemnly lectured the city’s population that resistance to James II and the closing of the gates were ‘sinful acts of disobedience’.

The bishop further warned the citizens of Londonderry that they were bringing misfortune upon themselves and their city. The bishop’s message was not much heeded.

When William King, the new bishop of Derry, travelled to the city to take up residence in his diocese in March 1691, he ‘found the land almost desolate’, and nearly all ‘country houses and dwellings burnt’; whereas ‘before the troubles’ there had been ‘about 250,000 head of cattle’ in the diocese, after the siege there were only about 300 left; out of 460,000 horses, two remained, ‘lame and wounded’, while there were but seven sheep, two pigs and no fowl. If accurate, Bishop King’s observations surely go a long way towards vindicating Bishop Hopkins’ ‘sensible caution’.