"WILLIAM AND MAEY.

143

seem to have generally lived together in friendship, a friendship chap.which is sufficiently explained by their common antipathy to the - ■ ^ —Irish race and to the Popish religion. During the rebellion of1641, Londonderry had resolutely held out against the nativechieftains, and had been repeatedly besieged in vain.* Sincethe Restoration the city had prospered. The Foyle, when thetide was high, brought up ships of large burden to the quay.

The fisheries throve greatly. The nets, it was said, were some-times so full that it was necessary to fling back multitudes of fishinto the waves. The quantity of salmon caught annually wasestimated at eleven hundred thousand pounds’ weight.**

The people of Londonderry shared in the alarm ivhich, closing of

_ A . _ J 7 the gates

towards the close oi the year 1688, was general among theofLon-Protestants settled in Ireland. It was known that the aboriginal don<ie^^ -'•peasantry of the neighbourhood were laying in pikes and knives.

Priests had been haranguing in a style of which, it must heowned, the Puritan part of the Anglosaxon colony had littleright to complain, about the slaughter of the Amalekites, andthe judgments which Saul had brought on himself by sparingone of the proscribed race. Humours from various quartersand anonymous letters in various hands agreed in naming theninth of December as the day fixed for the extirpation of thestrangers. While the minds of the citizens were agitated bythese reports, news came that a regiment of twelve hundredPapists, commanded by a Papist, Alexander Macdonnell, Earlof Antrim, had received orders from the Lord Deputy to occupyLondonderry, and was already on the march from Coleraine.

The consternation was extreme.' Some were for closing the gatesand resisting; some for submitting; some for temporising. Thecorporation had, like the other corporations of Ireland, been* The best account that I have seen of what passed at Londonderryduring the war which began in 1641 is in Dr. Reid’s History of the Pres-byterian Church in Ireland.

** The Interest of England in the Preservation of Ireland; 1669.