James’s appearance in Ireland was hailed with a little deserved burst of enthusiasm.  As a king, as a Catholic, and as a man in deep misfortune, he had a triple claim upon the kindly feeling of a race never slow to respond to such appeals.  All along the road from Cork to Dublin the people ran out out in crowds to greet him with tears, blessings, and cries of welcome.  Women thronged the banks along the roadsides, and held up their children to see him go by.  Flowers—­as to the poor quality of which it was hardly worth Lord Macaulay’s while, by the way, to speak so disparagingly—­were offered for his acceptance, or strewn under his feet.  Every mark of devotion which a desperately poor country could show was shown without stint.  Accompanied by the French ambassador, amid a group of English exiles, and advancing under a waving roof of flags and festoons, hastily improvised in his honour, the least worthy of the Stuarts arrived in Dublin, and took up his residence at the castle.

His sojourn there was certainly no royal bed of roses!  The dissensions between his English and his Irish followers were not only deep, but ineffaceable.  By each the situation was regarded solely from the standpoint of his own country.  Was James to remain in Ireland and to be an Irish king? or was he merely to use Ireland as a stepping-stone to England?  Between two such utterly diverse views no point of union was discoverable.

In the interests of his own master, D’Avaux, the French envoy, strongly supported Tyrconnel and the Irish leaders.  The game of France was less to replace James on the English throne than to make of Ireland a permanent thorn in the side of England.  With this view he urged James to remain in Dublin, where he would necessarily be more under the direct control of the parliament.  James, however declined this advice, and persisted in going north, where he would be within a few hours’ sail of Great Britain.  Once Londonderry had fallen (and it was agreed upon all hands that Londonderry could not hold out much longer), he could at any moment cross to Scotland, where it was believed that his friends would at once rally around him.

But Londonderry showed no symptoms of yielding.  In April, 1689, James appeared before its walls, believing that he had only to do so to receive its submission.  He soon found his mistake.  Lundy, its governor, was ready indeed to surrender it into his hands, but the townsfolk declined the bargain, and shut their gates resolutely in the king’s face.  Lundy escaped for his life over the walls, and James, in disgust, returned to Dublin, leaving the conduct of the siege in the hands of Richard Hamilton, who was afterwards superseded in the command by De Rosen, a Muscovite in the pay of France, who prosecuted it with a barbarity unknown to the annals of civilized warfare.