Free Born Fighting by James Webb Page B

heroes of the siege, was, if not the major reason, certainly the flash point of this rupture. Walker was the son of an Anglican minister who had migrated to Ulster from Yorkshire. He had married the daughter of Sir John Stanhope of Melwood and through her influence had been appointed chancellor of the diocese of Armagh, near Londonderry. Following his father into the clergy, Walker himself was seventy years old when the siege began. Despite his age and his being, as the Anglicans put it, “in Holy Orders,” Walker reportedly had raised a regiment in the months before the siege began and was commanding it in the towns of Dungannon and Strabane when the French and Irish forces began surrounding Londonderry. He and other army commanders had briefly fought the advancing soldiers and then retreated to the city in the final days before the deposed King James II arrived at its gates.
    Although accounts vary, Walker was apparently one of two joint governors inside the city during the siege, commanding fifteen companies and also supervising the commissariat, a vital job given the starvation-level rationing that went into effect. He also was known to have given many simply worded but inspirational sermons during the hard days of the siege, Londonderry’s cathedral being divided on Sundays with the Anglicans offering morning services and the Presbyterians using it in the afternoon. Indeed, Walker is said to have given the last of the sermons in the besieged city, on July 30, just before its final relief.
    Within days after the siege ended, Walker was on a ship to England, where he was greeted by the admiring court of William and Mary. William awarded him five thousand pounds for his services, a truly princely sum for the time. Soon thereafter he was named bishop of Londonderry, a position he never actually occupied because he was killed the next year at the Battle of the Boyne. In September he published his narrative
A True Account of the Siege of Londonderry
, obsequiously dedicated to the king. In October he was granted an honorary degree at Cambridge. A few months after that he was given one by Oxford.
    Walker’s
True Account
, and the personal glory he brought unto himself in England at the expense of others, created immediate anger in Ulster, particularly among the Scottish Presbyterians. His memoir failed to mention the services of even one Presbyterian minister during the siege. Nor did it credit the audacious combat leadership of such fighters as Col. Adam Murray, who had led so many excursions outside the city walls and had been the first to coin the phrase “No Surrender.” Walker’s book was soon followed by a rebuttal called
Narrative
, written by John Mackenzie, a Presbyterian minister who also was at the siege. Mackenzie claimed among other things that Walker had exaggerated his military credentials and that he had never even held the post of joint governor at all.
    This rift fell rather cleanly along both ethnic and religious lines. For the Presbyterian Scots who stayed in Ulster, the insults at the hands of the principally English Anglicans would burn for more than a century. 62 For those who eventually left Northern Ireland to settle in America, the slighting of their contributions at the Londonderry siege would become simply one more piece of evidence that it was time to move on. And they brought with them a far greater antipathy toward the English hierarchy than they ever could have felt toward the ordinary Irish.
    The reason, in both cases, was the same. Although ethnic labels overlapped here and there, the predominantly English Anglicans in Ireland intended to remain politically and culturally superior, regardless of whether the Irish Catholics and the principally Scottish “dissenters” outnumbered them. As Foster succinctly put it, the Presbyterian position in Ireland “was not much more enviable than that of the Catholics; the Established Church remained the fountain of privilege in Ireland, more closely