The Siege of Cork

Cork was a walled city for five hundred years and it took one week in September 1690 to finish it. A Williamite army landed below the town, dragged its guns up the hills on either side, and fired down into the streets until the medieval wall gave way. The siege was short, loud and final. It left a cannonball lodged in the tower of St Fin Barre's, a king's son dying under the walls, and the old defences so broken that nobody ever bothered to put them back.

Two kings, one city

The war was between two kings. James II, the Catholic, had lost his throne in England and come to Ireland to win it back. William of Orange, the Protestant, had followed him over and beaten him at the Boyne that July. Cork held for James. Behind its walls sat a Jacobite garrison of around four and a half thousand men under Governor Roger MacElligott, and the city was one of the last big ports still open to French help. So in September William sent the Earl of Marlborough, the John Churchill who would later win Blenheim, by sea with an army to shut it. Marlborough landed at Passage West and came up the harbour. A second force of Danish and Dutch troops under the Duke of Württemberg marched down from the north. Cork was caught between them.

Guns on the hills

The wall was tall and thick, but it was built for arrows and ladders, and Cork sits in a bowl. Hills rise close on both sides of the river, and once the attackers had guns on them they could see over the wall and drop shot into a crowded town with nowhere to hide. On the south side the Williamites took the Cat Fort and turned Elizabeth Fort's own ground against the city. On the north they put cannon on the heights under Shandon. From the fort a gunner fired a 24-pound ball across the river at the tower of the old St Fin Barre's, which the defenders were using as a lookout. It hit, stuck, and stayed there. When the cathedral was pulled down and rebuilt in the 1860s the workmen found it still buried in the stone thirty feet up, and it hangs on a chain inside the cathedral today.

Under that bombardment the wall on the east side of the city broke within days. The attackers now had to reach the breach, and between them and it lay the marsh and the tidal channels of the Lee. On 28 September they went in at low water, wading the river under fire with the mud to their waists. Leading one of the columns was Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Grafton, a son of Charles II, twenty-seven years old and fresh from changing sides. He was shot in the assault and died of the wound in Cork eleven days later. Grafton Street in Dublin carries his family name. The men behind him kept coming, and by the time they reached the breach the garrison had seen enough.

The surrender and the sack

MacElligott asked for terms on 28 September and surrendered the next day, the whole business done inside a week. The garrison were promised their lives and marched out as prisoners. The promise to the townspeople held for about as long as it took the soldiers to get through the gate. Cork was looted, its Catholic merchants were stripped of property, and hundreds of the prisoners died of fever in the months that followed, penned up in the churches and on the harbour islands. Marlborough sailed on to take Kinsale and then went home to a grateful king.

The wall was never rebuilt. There was no point. The next century's Cork wanted quays and bridges and open water, and it took the broken stone and put it into cellars and quay walls all over the town. One stretch is left standing in the open, in Bishop Lucey Park off the Grand Parade, and you can put your hand on it. The rest is under your feet. When you walk the flat of the modern centre, along streets that used to be river channels, you are walking through the gap the siege made.

On the walk

We stand below St Fin Barre's and show you where the cannonball hangs, then trace the line of the lost wall through the modern streets, the scar the siege left on the plan of the city.