sels laden with provisions, and armed with forty musketeers each, he returned to Lough Foyle. At the mouth of the lough he fell in with the Portland frigate, commanded by Captain Lee, by whom he sent orders to Commodore Rooke, then cruising off Carrickfergus, to send him forthwith the Dartmouth frigate, as probably being best adapted for the intended operations in the river. On the 22d the three victuallers anchored off Culmore, but beyond the range of the fort; these vessels were the Mountjoy of Derry, Captain Micaiah Browning; the Phoenix of Coleraine, Captain Andrew Douglas; and the Jerusalem, Captain Reynell. Three days afterwards they were joined by the Dartmouth frigate, commanded by Captain Leake, and immediately after her arrival, Kirk, from on board the Swallow, at length issued his orders to them to attempt the passage of the river the moment that the wind should prove favourable. He | frigate, accompanied by three ves- | reduced, and above one-fourth were rendered unserviceable by the conjoined effects of famine and fatigue. Their hearts were sickened by the oft-deferred hopes of relief. The fleet, from which they expected so much, had indeed again appeared; but they lay inactive, tantalising them with the near approach of ample supplies still unaccountably withheld. At length about six o'clock of the afternoon of Sunday, the 28th of July, a moderate gale springing up from the north-west, the Dartmouth weighed and stood towards Culmore. The fort immediately opened a brisk cannonade; "Captain Leake behaved himself very bravely and prudently in this action, neither firing great or small shot (though he was plied very hard with both) till he came on the wind of the castle, and there beginning to batter, that the victuallers might pass under shelter of his guns, he lay between the castle and them within musket-shot, and came to an anchor." At this critical moment the wind calmed a little and became less favourable, but the Mountjoy succeeded in passing the fort, and, accompanied by the longboat of the Swallow, "well barricadoed and armed with seamen to cut the boom," she sailed onwards in the midst of a sharp and | well-directed fire from both sides of the river, till repelled by her first shock against the boom, she ran aground, and her gallant commander was at the same moment killed by a musket-ball. Favoured, however, by the rising tide, and directed the Dartmouth to engage the fort, that under the cover of her guns the Mountjoy might effect a passage; the Phoenix was then to follow, and the Jerusalem to weigh, so soon as a signal should be made that one or other of her consorts had passed the boom. For several days the wind continued adverse. The garrison were reduced to the last extremity. Nearly all their resources of food, including some of the most nauseous and disgusting substances, had iled; their number was fearfully rebounding from a broadside which she discharged for the purpose, she soon floated again; and the boatswain's mate of the Swallow, who had the command of the longboat, having cut the boom, the vessel by her weight, when once more in motion, broke through that formidable barrier, and no other obstacle remaining, the Phoenix, followed by the Mountjoy, and towed all the way by the Swallow's boats, reached the quay in safety about ten o'clock in the evening, to the inexpressible joy of the famishing garrison, who had observed with intense anxiety every turn in their progress up the river. The two victuallers lost only five or six men, with Lieutenant Seys of Sir John Hammer's regiment, wounded, and the boatswain's mate injured by a splinter. The Dartmouth, having grounded off Culmore at low water, lay exposed to the enemy's fire till the morning tide, when she repassed the fort into Lough Foyle, having had only one soldier killed and another wounded, and the purser, Mr. Lee, having received 66 a slight contusion. Two days afterwards, the Irish army abandoned their trenches, having lost a hundred officers, and between eight and nine thousand men ; and on the last day of July this memorable siege terminated, having continued during the long period of a hundred and five days. "And thus," writes a Presbyterian minister who was in the city during the entire blockade, was the siege of Derry raised, to the admiration of our friends, who had given us over for lost, and to the disappointment of our enemies, who were no less confident they should soon make themselves masters of so weak and indefensible a place; the glory of it being entirely due to the Almighty, who inspired a garrison, for the most part made of a few raw and untrained men, and those labouring under all possible discouragements, with that resolution that enabled them to defeat all the attempts of a numerous army to reduce them, their zeal and affection for the just cause they had undertaken supplying all the defects of military discipline." THE MASSACRE OF GLENCOE. (Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Times.) A.D. 1692. THERE was at this time a very barbarous massacre committed in Scotland, which showed both the cruelty and the treachery of some of those who had unhappily insinuated themselves into the king's confidence. The Earl of Breadalbane formed a scheme of quieting all the Highlanders if the king would give £12,000 or £15,000 for doing it, which was remitted down from England, and this was to be divided among the heads of the tribes or clans of the Highlanders. He employed his emissaries among them, and told them the best service they could do King James was to lie quiet, and reserve themselves to a better time; and if they would take the oaths, the king would be contented with that, and they were to have a share of the sum that was sent down to buy their quiet: but this came to nothing; their demands rose high; they knew this lord had money to distribute among them; they believed he intended to keep the best part of it to himself; so they asked more than he could give. Among the most clamorous and obstinate of these were the Macdonalds of Glencoe, who were believed guilty of much robbery and many murders; and so had gained too much by their pilfering war to be easily brought to give it over. The head of that valley had so particularly provoked Lord Breadalbane, that as his scheme was quite defeated by the opposition that he raised, so he designed a severe revenge. The king had, by a proclamation, offered an indemnity to all the Highlanders that had been in arms against him, upon their coming in, by a prefixed day, to take the oaths. day had been twice or thrice prolonged; and it was at last carried to the end of the year 1691; with a positive threatening of proceeding to military execution against such as should not come into his obedience by the last day of December. The All were so terrified that they came in, and even that Macdonald went to the governor of Fort-William on the last of December, and offered to take oaths; but he, being only a military man, could not or would not tender them, and Macdonald was forced to seek for some of the legal magistrates to tender them to him: the snows were then fallen, so four or five days passed before he could come to a magistrate; he took the oaths in his presence on the 4th or 5th of January, when, by the strictness of law, he could claim no benefit by it; the matter was signified to the council, and the person had a reprimand for giving him the oaths when the day was passed. This was kept up from the king, and the Earl of Breadalbane came to court to give an account of his diligence, and to bring back the money, since he could not do the service for which he had it. He informed against this Macdonald as the chief person who had defeated that good design; and that he might both gratify his own revenge, and render the king odious to all the Highlanders, he proposed that orders should be sent for a military execution on those of Glencoe. An instruction was drawn by the Secretary of State, the Master of Stair, to be both signed and countersigned by the king (that so he might bear no part of the blame, but that it might be wholly on the king), that such as had not taken the oaths by the time limited should be shut out of the benefit of the indemnity, and be received only upon mercy. But when it was found that this would not authorise what was intended, But all a second order was got to be signed and countersigned, that if the Glencoe men could be separated from the rest of the Highlanders, some examples might be made of them, in order to strike terror into the rest. The king signed this without any inquiry about it, for he was too apt to sign papers in a hurry, without examining the importance of them. This was one effect of his slowness in despatching business; for as he was apt to suffer things to run on till there was a great heap of papers laid before him, so then he signed them a little too precipitately. this while the king knew nothing of Macdonald's offering to take the oaths within the time, nor of his having taken them soon after it was past, when he came to a proper magistrate. As these orders were sent down, the Secretary of State wrote many letters to Levingstoun, who commanded in Scotland, giving him a strict charge and particular directions for the execution of them; and he ordered the passes in the valley to be kept, describing them so minutely that the orders were certainly drawn by one who knew the country well. He gave also a positive direction that no prisoners should be taken, that so the execution might be as terrible as was possible. He pressed this upon Levingstoun, with strains of vehemence, that looked as if there was something more than ordinary in it: he, indeed, grounded it on his zeal for the king's service, adding, that such rebels and murderers should be made examples of. In February a company was sent to Glencoe, who were kindly received and quartered over the valley, the inhabitants thinking themselves safe, and looking for no hostilities after they had stayed a week among them, they took their time in the night, and killed about six-and-thirty of them, the rest taking the alarm and escaping; this raised a mighty outcry, and was published by the French in their gazettes, and by the Jacobites in their libels, to cast a reproach on the king's government as cruel and barbarous, though in all other instances it had appeared that his own inclinations were gentle and mild rather to an excess. The king sent orders to inquire into 1 As a supplement to the above we give an extract from Sir Walter Scott's minute account of the massacre in his Tales of a Grandfather "About four o'clock in the morning of 13th February, the scene of blood began. A party, commanded by one of the Lindsays, came to Maclan's house and knocked for admittance, which was at once given. Lindsay, one of the expected guests at the family meal of the day, commanded this party, who instantly shot MacIan dead by his own bedside, as he was in the act of dressing himself, and giving orders for refreshments to be provided for his fatal visitors. His aged wife was stripped by the savage soldiery, who, at the same time, drew off the gold rings from her fingers with their teeth. She died the next day, distracted with grief and the brutal treatment she had received. Several domestics and clansmen were killed at the same place. The two sons of the aged chieftain had not been altogether so confident as their father respecting the peaceful and friendly purpose of their guests. They observed, on the evening preceding the massacre, that the sentinels were dou the matter; but when the letters written upon this business were all examined, which I myself read, it appeared that so many were involved in the matter, that the king's gentleness prevailed on him to a fault, and he contented himself with dismissing only the Master of Stair from his service. The Highlanders were so inflamed with this, that they were put in as forward a disposition as the Jacobites could wish for, to have rebelled upon the first favourable opportunity; and, indeed, the not punishing this with a due rigour was the greatest blot in this whole reign, and had a very ill effect in alienating that nation from the king and his government.1 bled and the mainguard strengthened. John, the elder brother, had even overheard the soldiers muttering amongst themselves, that they cared not about fighting the men of the glen fairly, but did not like the nature of the service they were engaged in; while others consoled themselves with the military logic, that their officers must be answerable for the orders given, they having no choice save to obey them. Alarmed with what had been thus observed and heard, the young men hastened to Glenlyon's quarters, where they found that officer and his men preparing their arms. On questioning him about these suspicious appearances, Glenlyon accounted for them by a story, that he was bound on an expedition against some of Glengarry's men; and alluding to the circumstance of their alliance, which made his own cruelty more detestable, he added, "If anything evil had been intended, would I not have told Alaster and my niece?" Re-assured by this communication, the young men retired to rest, but were speedily awakened by an old domestic, who called on the two brothers to rise |